Miscellaneous Monday motorsports mumblings, vol. 13

Carpocalypse or no, this is turning into a fantastic year for racing.

About that Australian GP, then: A 1-2 finish for BrawnGP is a fairy-tale ending to their first race, with Button taking the 200th GP win for a British driver as the icing on the cake.  It’s a bit of a shame how they managed it — with Barrichello taking 2nd only because of the Vettel-Kubica fuckup with three laps to go — but it was definitely well-deserved.  BrawnGP make fast and solid cars, and once their pit crew shakes off the rust I’d be surprised if they aren’t title contenders.

Vettel and Kubica, then.  The story no-one’s really talking about is that both drivers were well on-pace with the “diffuser cars” (about which more anon) throughout the race, which speaks very well for them.  As for their crash at T3 on lap 54, here’s my view (worth what you pay for it) as a spectator having never turned a physical wheel in anger: Vettel realistically stood no chance of keeping Kubica behind him, and should by all rights have backed off and let him through.  On the other hand, Kubica stood no chance of passing Vettel in that corner, and should also by all rights have backed off and taken a run at him somewhere else.  They both earned a full complement of “what the fuck were you thinking?”s on Saturday, and neither — or both — should be punished for the incident.  (That said, Vettel displayed admirable tenacity but abysmal judgement when he tried to lap the track on three wheels, and deserves everything he gets for putting the other drivers and the track marshals in danger.)

We saw quite a bit of passing, and a lot of very close running largely unheard-of in previous years, so I guess the aero changes paid off.  (This has been your official segue, brought to you by the FIA OWG, into the tech-nerd section of the discussion.)  The “diffuser three” — BrawnGP, Toyota, and Williams — ran very fast laps but were unable to outclass the field, so I’m running out of patience with the protesting teams.  (I’m also intrigued that no-one’s officially remarked upon Adrian Newey’s fantastically low rear-wing endplates on the RB5 and STR4; don’t tell me there’s no interaction between those and the diffuser, because I won’t believe you.)  I suppose it’s possible that Albert Park just wasn’t a sufficiently downforce-centric track (hah!) to benefit the more efficient diffusers, but I suspect rather that those teams that protested were looking to manufacture an excuse for themselves.  In any case, look at the running order: Vettel was consistently quick, Kubica was consistently quick; even Hamilton in the drearily slow McLaren MP4-24 was fast.  (To be fair, we are talking about some of the fastest drivers on the GP circuit — but Button and Barrichello aren’t precisely slow, either.)  The Ferraris were fast, until they broke.  Even the Force Indias were fast.  Despite what the less-creative teams had to say before the race, this was not a multi-class event.

I’m not finished with the diffuser subject.  Rubens Barrichello took a hard hit right up his car’s jacksey on the start, which broke the tail section of his diffuser (er… officially, of his crash structure).  A secondary collision knocked his front wing’s left endplate askew.  Regardless, he kept pace with the rest of the field for his rather long first stint.  Is BrawnGP’s pace entirely a factor of the BGP001’s diffuser?  I don’t fuckin’ think so.  Furthermore, Kaz Nakajima developed a terrifying spike of oversteer coming off the kerb at the exit of T4 and did a #3* into the wall where many other drivers — including his teammate — drove indistinguishable lines over the very same kerb and came to no grief whatsoever.  (Well, except for Kubica, but that was after he’d shorn off both his and Vettel’s front wings.)  As we found out in ‘79-’82 and again with the magic flying Mercedes prototypes in ‘99, underbody aero is a fickle and capricious god and will fuck your day up just because it feels like doing so.  (Happily, Nakajima was unhurt by the crash.)  It’ll be fun to watch the development of the diffusters and to see whether effort focuses on absolute downforce or insensitivity to upsets.

Also: KERS.  Some teams ran it, others didn’t.  Notably, Kubica was awfully fast despite not running BMW’s KERS system.  We saw some awfully good racing between Timo Glock’s high-volume diffuser Toyota and Fernando Alonso’s KERS-equipped Renault, as an example.  Part of this is due, I’m sure, to the fact that the 2009 KERS system is regulated to produce pretty much just enough power to pay for its 88lb weight penalty.  Next year, KERS will be more powerful, and any teams not running the system will be SOL.

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So, Formula One is giving us ten drastically different four-wheeled solutions to the same problem — getting around a GP track as quickly as humanly possible.  Some of them run high-volume diffusers; others don’t.  Some run KERS; others don’t.  Regardless, we saw fantastically close racing in Melbourne this last weekend.  Similarly, the Audi R15 and Peugeot 908 are dramatically different solutions to the same problem, but ran a very close and occasionally quite dramatic race at Sebring two weeks ago.  (See also that event’s Ferrari F430GT2, Panoz Esperante GTLM, and Porsche 997 GT3 RSR front-runners.  I imagine the BMWs and the Aston Martin will catch up once they fix their reliability issues.)

I’m beginning to lose patience with the people who insist that only spec series can save racing, and that heterogeneous manufacturer-driven series always devolve into high-dollar arms races where victory is won in the wind tunnel (and occasionally in the pits).

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Speaking of high-dollar arms races, here’s the rather inspiring story of the Highcroft ALMS team.  They’re running one of Acura’s new LMP1 cars this year, so naturally you’d expect a factory-backed works conglomerate more akin to a corporate research lab than a racing team, right?

• How Duncan Dayton created a winning ALMS team (Gordon Kirby)

Many people were surprised when Duncan Dayton’s Highcroft team was selected by Honda/Acura to run one of its LMP2 cars in the American Le Mans Series. There was a similar, if more restrained level of surprise when Acura confirmed in Detroit a few weeks ago that Highcroft will join Gil de Ferran’s new team to race two new Acura ARX-02a P1 cars in next year’s American Le Mans Series.

In the space of three years Highcroft’s owner Duncan Dayton has gone from being a hobbyist vintage racer to a professional team owner involved in one of American racing’s most serious, factory-backed racing and development programs.

Impressive stuff.

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Speaking of the ALMS, this can be nothing but good news:

• ALMS to accept GT3 cars in “Challenge class” (Planet Le Mans)

From the article, this looks like a feeder class for the more established GT2 and (maybe) LMP cars, integrated directly into the main event.  (Alternately, once Corvette retires its C6.Rs and GT1 goes away, ALMS could relabel GT2 to GT1 and “Challenge class” to GT2… which doesn’t strike me as such a hot idea.)

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Finally, here’s something uglier than a Daytona prototype:

• Estoque not dead yet, in Lambo limbo (Jalopnik.com)

That car looks like a Murcielago getting raped by a Porsche Panamera.  (I’m not gonna provide images.  If you want to damage your psyche, you’ll have to click those links yourself.)

Here’s a frightening thought: imagine these things popping up in the WTCC five years hence.

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* I am a sick and twisted individual.  You laughed, though; admit it.

Blogging without (much) text

(Hat tip: The Liberty Papers)

Secession by self-sufficiency

I run into arguments like this with dreary consistency:

Me: I find it offensive that the government takes my money under threat of violence, then spends it on designer clothing for state-employed avocado lobbyists.

They: Oh, you libertarians are so narrow-minded, always complaining about taxes.  Don’t you realize that the government does good things, too?  Like fund fire departments?  You want to ban fire departments because they’re publicly funded, and then who would rescue kittens stuck in trees?  LIBERTARIANS HATE KITTENS!

Yes, it’s a straw-man argument (both my own — “libertarians hate kittens”?  Really? — and the usual “shut down the fire department” or “close down welfare and throw the unemployed into debtor’s prison” or “slash and burn social security and condemn your grandparents to a slow and humiliating death of starvation and neglect” or what have you).  It also carries an important point — well, their argument does; whether I’m making an important point is so far undecided, but bear with me.

Let’s take Social Security as an example — it’s suitably polarizing, named the “third rail” of American politics for good reason.  It’s also a magnet for criticism: even the rosy predictions of the Social Security Administration itself suggest that the programme won’t survive in its current form past 2041 (see also this relevant Google search), and most interested parties are aware that Social Security is being run as a Ponzi scheme: current beneficiaries are being paid from current “contributions” rather than from any plausibly sustainable source.

Entertainingly, the Wikipedia article on Ponzi schemes cited above notes that

Conservative economist Walter Williams adds, “Social Security is unsustainable because it is not meeting the first order condition of a Ponzi scheme, namely expanding the pool of suckers.”

This may be particularly evident once most of the Boomers have retired.

On the other hand, a whole hell of a lot of people are critically dependent upon their Social Security income, and it would be flagrantly immoral to deny people — on the basis of principle, at least — benefits to which they are contractually entitled and for which they have already paid.  So what should libertarians do about Social Security?  We can’t support it, because it’ll collapse as surely as the housing bubble, and we can’t in good conscience yank out the carpet from under our parents’ feet just as they’re retiring on a vulnerable fixed income.

This is, of course, a false dichotomy.  We needn’t choose only between destituting our parents and destituting our children.  We have up to thirty years before Social Security shits the bed: we can provide an alternative.  (Perhaps we should provide several alternatives, since this problem seems too important to trust to a single point of failure.)  Once such things exist — if we have the sisu to make them and to promote them — Social Security will be able to go gently, as plausible alternatives will be close to hand.

Brian Warbiany explains in the general case:

• Building alternative structures to government (The Liberty Papers)

As much as I hate to say it, I truly believe that if the government disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn’t be all wine and roses. Civil society needs institutions to operate, and if you remove all the existing institutions without having alternatives, the result will be the type of “anarchy” feared by most who hear the term: chaos.

But above, I make an error. The answer is not to slowly deconstruct government first and then let the alternatives grow in government’s absence. The answer is to create those alternatives and thereby make government redundant (and unnecessary).

[...]

There are some who believe that working within the system, they can change it. While I think those people should continue their efforts, I don’t have much hope that they can be anything but a brake on the growth and expansion of the State.

Instead, the way to beat the State is to make them irrelevant. The more time we spend working completely outside of the State, the less reason we have to keep it alive at all. The quicker we duplicate the purposes of their coercive institutions with free and voluntary institutions, the sooner we can put an end to their institutions entirely. When they finally wither and rot, our key to ensuring peaceful anarchy rather than chaos is having something that is free to supplant the institutions which have collapsed.

This does, in fact, work.  As I’ve mentioned before, the difference between land-line and cellular telephony is astonishing.  If you want a land-line telephone, you get to deal with a single provider — in western Canada, it’s usually Telus — and without competition they are free to make your life arbitrarily miserable… and generally do.  If you want a cell phone, on the other hand, you have many options from which to choose.  I’ve found that Telus Mobility, a sister company to the almost comically villainous land-line monopoly, has generally courteous, polite, and respectful staff along with good service and decent prices.  They’ve made their share of mistakes, but by virtue of being vulnerable haven’t persisted in the same for long enough to irritate me.

Given realistic alternatives, it was easy for me to switch away from an abusive and monopolistic land-line provider.  (It won’t be as easy to switch away from an abusive and monopolistic retirement-income provider, because the state takes a dim and heavily-armed view of people who don’t pay their taxes.  Nonetheless, my point stands: it will be easier to shut down Social Security when it finally becomes insolvent if there are legitimate alternatives thereto.)

Here’s another example:

• Neighbourhood secession (Stephen Bodio’s Querencia)

The tenets of the [Neighbourhood Secessionist] movement are simple. First: Find some neighbors and share your stuff with them. Decide what goods and entertainments you can provide for yourselves and for each other (with minimal commercial input from outside the neighborhood), and then do some of that. Do more as you get better at it.

The Neighborhood Secessionist Movement as practiced on my street is not motivated by High Principle of any kind; neither altruism, nor patriotism, collectivism, religious charity nor militant Idaho stovepipism. It runs on good humor, good eats, elementary school children, and shared free time and red wine.

Make government irrelevant, and we’ll need less of it.  Metaphorically speaking, every libertarian should be able to climb a tree.

BrawnGP 1-2 at Melbourne qualifying

Holy fucking shit, man.  This isn’t supposed to happen.  It’s as though, say, the new and untested Acura LMP1 car qualified on the pole at its debut race at Sebring or something.  Oh, wait….

Two months ago, I’d have put money on the ex-Honda team never turning another wheel in anger ever again.  Now they’ve not only spanked every other team in winter testing — they’ve put their cars 1-2 on the grid in Melbourne — with a full race load of fuel, so there should be no complaints about either car running unusually light on gas to lay down unrepresentatively low lap times.  Of course, we’ll find out for sure tomorrow (and we all know what happened to Acura at Sebring), but this is nonetheless a pretty mike-foxtrot impressive result.

Jensen Button put down a 1:26.202, better than half a second ahead of Sebastian Vettel in 3rd with a 1:26.830.  This is going to be an interesting season, and I imagine there are a lot of foreheads hitting desks at Honda HQ right now.

On the death of dead-tree news, part i+1

One of my hypotheses for the ongoing death of the newspaper industry — at least in the form we recognize — is that its costs are huge.  It takes a lot of money to lay out, print, and distribute hundreds of thousands or millions of physical newspapers — particularly compared to online news.  But the relative cost of printing and distributing a newspaper pales in comparison to the cost of fixing a mistake once the paper is in distribution.  Case in point:

• blog post subhead large (lies.com)

(Hat tip: Megan McArdle)

When I fuck up a post on Blunt Object, it’s trivially easy for me to go back and fix it.  What’s the L.A. Times going to do about this?  What can they do?

Mid-week misanthropy, vol. 36

We are encouraged to mark Earth Hour 2009 this Saturday by switching off our lights from 20:30 to 21:30.  Their “about” page tells us that

For the first time in history, people of all ages, nationalities, race and background have the opportunity to use their light switch as their vote – Switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, or leaving them on is a vote for global warming. WWF are urging the world to VOTE EARTH and reach the target of 1 billion votes, which will be presented to world leaders at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009.

“[L]eaving them on is a vote for global warming”?  We can project our interpretations onto other people’s actions just by writing stuff on the internet now?  Sweet!  Let me try:

Switching off your lights is an expression of simple-minded smug insufferability, and leaving them on is an expression of common goddamn sense.

Did it work?  Dammit!

I wrote about Earth Hour last year, and it sure looks like the sad farce is degenerating into a gigantic circle-jerk of activism — one billion grass-eaters raising each other’s awareness.  This time around, though, my university has picked up on the notion with enthusiasm, and is encouraging its departments and labs to turn off their lights for Earth Hour.

Now, the only people who are likely to be in the lab at 20:30 on a Saturday night are faculty, post-docs, and grad students doing research.  Many of those will be working on, for lack of a better term, “green” projects — hydrogen fuel-cell design, say, or sustainable forestry studies, to pick a few projects within fifty metres of my lab.  Research time is not fungible: you can’t schedule a good idea, and you can’t break off halfway through its development and pick it up an hour later without losing a great deal of mental context.

And the WWF wants to shut their fucking lights off.  Super.

——

In keeping with the “environmentalism for dipshits” theme, we find this from California:

• California ‘cool’ paints initiative ugly, lazy (WardsAuto.com)

The problem stems from a new “cool paints” initiative from the California Air Resources Board. CARB wants to mandate the phase-in of heat-reflecting paints on vehicle exteriors beginning with the ’12 model year, with all colors meeting a 20% reflectivity requirement by the ’16 model year.

This is what happens when you don’t have a carbon tax, but want to reduce fuel consumption (in this case, dinosaur corpses recycled to power air conditioners) regardless.  It seems like a reasonable idea in principle, but as ever there’s a problem:

Paint suppliers also say heat-reflecting pigments that could be used in automotive applications contain toxic heavy metals that cause environmental damage and create health and safety issues during manufacturing and recycling.

But surely California’s benevolent expert overlords in government made careful studies of the alternatives and found nothing better?

Some California rules are problematic because they are utopian and unworkable. This legislation is flat-out lazy. It’s a cut-and-paste job from the state building code that ignores smarter, more-effective automotive solutions already in production or on the way, such as more efficient AC units and solar-powered ventilation fans that work automatically when a car is parked in the sun.

Dammit!

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And speaking of California and turning off the lights:

• Only the Taggart Building will be spared (Coyote Blog)

Here’s a quotation from sfgate.com:

Turn the lights out — or pay.

That’s the message of legislation being revived by Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, who will introduce a measure Tuesday mandating that skyscrapers turn off all nonemergency lights at night as a way to save energy.

Because, of course, no-one would ever work late in a skyscraper.

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Finally, we note an apparent end to hyperinflation in Zimbabwe:

• The Zimbabwe hyperinflation ends (Greg Mankiw’s Blog)

Prices of goods bought in US dollars, Zimbabwe’s new official currency, fell by up to 3% in January and February. They were the first official figures since the country’s recent adoption of the US dollar.

Well, that’s one way to do it.

This, LabRat believes

(Previously.)

I have an at least glancingly interesting post bubbling away in the back of my mind, in which I condemn the false god of “equality” and propose the modestly less unreachable goal of “impartiality” in its place.  Alas for that post, my capacity for insightful abstraction is being almost entirely consumed by my research lately, and since that justifies my funding (and thus my rent) over the summer it takes priority.

Fortunately, LabRat has just posted this:

• These things I believe (Atomic Nerds)

The word “trenchant” comes to mind.  RTWT.

2009 12 Hours of Sebring in a nutshell

This pretty much sums up what the #2 Audi R15 and the #08 Peugeot 908 were doing for twelve hours straight:

(Hat tip: Jalopnik)

Wow.