A thousand pardons for the snail's pace of this week's posting. The lethargy is at least partially due to the heat, which even central air only barely holds at bay.

The Explorers Club
No. CLXIX - The 1999 24 Heures du Mans, Part I: The B.M.W. V12 L.M.R., overall winner of the 67th running of the "Grand Prix of Endurance."







Bonus: the B.M.W. tradition of the Art Car.

This Week in Motorsport
The second experiment with the Rolex Sports Car Series presented by Crown Royal Cask No. 16 (I'm not joshing you, fair readers, the series has two title sponsors, neatly bracketing the almost forgotten racing part of the enterprise) has proven that it's not for me. Saturday's (3 July) race from the Daytona International Speedway was the first I'd ever seen from that famous raceway, and, if I have any say in the matter, the last. Either the bore that is Daytona or the equally dull "oval" of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is the spiritual home of American motorsport? No wonder I favor the intentionally international flavor of Formula One & the 24 Heures du Mans. My country, right or wrong*, but in racing we've definitely got it wrong.

On Sunday (4 July), I watched my second IZOD IndyCar Series race (Maybe they have only a single title sponsor because they race single-seater cars?), after the '09 Indianapolis 500 proved no match for the excitement and glamour of that year's Grand Prix de Monaco, my introduction to F1. As Herman's Hermits sang, "Second verse, same as the first." No excitement, no allure, and not for me. The IndyCar Series is a "spec" series (as opposed to a "formula" series), meaning all the cars are identical: a common chassis design, by the Italian firm Dallara, is used by all the teams, as is a common engine design, by the Japanese firm Honda. Maybe so much of what I like about F1 is that each team must design its own car from scratch, pit its own technical prowess against its rivals' innovations? Maybe. Also annoying about IndyCar? The constant attention paid to Danica Patrick, even though she's a back of the pack driver, a mediocre talent at best. (F1 pays the same annoying, non-performance-based attention to middle-of-the-pack driver Michael Schumacher, but that's because he's a seven-time World Champion—genuinely comparable to Michael Jordan—returned to the sport after three years in retirement, not just a media darling with a lot of personal sponsorship.) I gave the IndyCar boys & girls a second chance and again they failed to make a favorable impression. I doubt they'll be gifted a third chance to make good.

Science!
Medicine is not a field that lights my fire, but this could not be ignored: the marvel of modern medicinelink. No fire-related pun intended, but holy smoke.

Science!

The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
Jonathan Winters, "Ross Perot Calling Every American" from Crank Calls (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary: Crank Calls is a collection of answering machine messages left by Winters for his friend J. B. "Jim" Smith. It's a fascinating, horrifying study in impromptu comedy.

*"Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!"
—Commodore Stephen Decatur

"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right."
—Senator Carl Schurz