Guest Post: Not Hypocritical, Apolitical, or a Strange Distraction During the Fall

Here’s a guest post from Tony B, who is like me in that he’s been mulling German interwar history lately. – Kay

Gather ’round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown
“Nazi, Schmazi!” says Wernher von Braun.

Don’t say that he’s hypocritical
Say rather that he’s apolitical
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department!” says Wernher von Braun.

1 – I Rarely Do This

It takes a lot for me to miss an IndyCar race. I have long considered it to be a sadly overlooked and often bypassed racing series that is, whether you’re watching or not, producing some of the best racing you’re ever likely to see.

So it usually takes some major exigent circumstances for me to say, “Yeah, I’m gonna skip this one.” Which brings us to the 2026 Freedom 250. Which, as I write this, is about six hours away from starting. Indeed. I should be deep asleep right about now, because in about two hours I’m going to be “waking up” to watch the Dutch GP from Zandvoort. But instead, here I sit, typing at my dining table because these paragraphs keep rattling through my head. They were knocking around for the past three hours or so while I tried to force myself to sleep, but, alas and alack, here I am.

Why? Because someone has to explain just what the hell is going on. Tell why this is happening? Why, no, seriously, why would anyone short of sebaceous grifters and slack-jawed marks have anything to do with a half-distraction/half-propaganda ploy cooked up by Dollar Store white nationalists and sold to semi-adroit businessmen?

Why? Two reasons: 1, there’s racing involved, and 2, it’s happened before.

2 – Panem et Circenses

There’s a fine, millennia-long tradition of corrupt governments distracting the populace with all manner of theater, sport, wars, controversies and such like. It’s a long-held tradition because, sadly, it works. “Step right up! Look over here!” says the barker as the shills, cappers and stooges work through the crowd, picking pockets, riling the rubes, greasing the skids so the cash may more easily flow out of your pockets and into theirs.

The Romans even had a saying for it: Panem et Circenses. Bread and Circuses. We’ll give you cheap food and readily understandable entertainment and you won’t even notice how corrupt and poisonous we are. Hell, most of the time, the populus will cheer the bastards on. “Yeah, yeah, robbing us blind, phony war—did you see that play?!”

And if there’s one thing that the current American administration understands, viscerally, if certainly not cerebrally, it’s entertaining and flashy distractions. They’re clever enough to occasionally make the distractions about their own buffoonishness and venality, figuring we’ll be too stupid to notice the truth under the scandalous jokes — and damn if about 22% of us don’t notice with frightening regularity. Enter the 2026 Freedom 250.

3 – The Fine & Venerable Tradition of Looking the Other Way

There has been a certain amount of hand-wringing going on amongst people about the 2026 Freedom 250 who are that odd combination of politically aware and gearheads. “How dare they,” they lament, “dare they stoop to doing something like this?” Simple: Money.

You might not know it, but literally every racer, racing team and racing organization out there is always looking for and will always take money. It’s baked into the mindset and milieu that is racing. It always has been, and, most likely, always will be. I worked in racing sponsorship for a number of years and the number of teams I know that would say, “No thank you, we have enough sponsorship money,” I can literally count on one hand. There’s four of them.

Racers are like this because they always need more money. Always. Whether you’re a kid starting out in karting or a major team lining up on pole position to start a race, you can always do with a little more cash. Racing is expensive. Frighteningly expensive even at the top echelons and for the top teams. And by the time you have risen from being a 14-year-old kid with a kart and big dreams to a racer with a damn good shot at winning The 500, it is so ingrained in your psyche that you won’t even think twice about who’s offering you the cash.

In the 1980s I knew guys who were literally smuggling drugs into this country to fund their sports car teams. Hell, one of the biggest movers and shakers of worldwide racing was allegedly involved in The Great Train Robbery to finance his early racing ambitions. Take money from modern American Conservatism? I know teams that have done way worse than any of the stuff I just mentioned. Way worse.

Look back to Grand Prix racing in the 1930s. At the time, during the height of The Great Depression, Grand Prix teams were struggling not to fold and go under. As popular as the racing was back then, it was a money-losing proposition on par with lighting the cash on fire. Enter, into the middle of this dire situation, young, aspiring and newly elected politician Adolf Hitler. He had a real bee in his bonnet about showing the world just how great Germany was. Not just great, but better. Demonstrably, incontrovertibly better than anyone else on the planet. In his mind (and a lot of his supporters) Germany was the best at everything. Shoes? Germany. Hats? Germany. The military? Germany. Technology? Germany. Cars? Germany.

Especially the cars (for now). He built the first freeways, the autobahns, both as a bright idea and to show everybody German superiority. And he had to show everybody that the German cars driving on those Autobahns were better than anyone else’s. Better than the Italians, better than the British, better than the French and definitely better than the mongrel Americans. And the best way to show off the superiority of German cars was to race them.

So, one day, the minions of Adolf showed up at the offices of Mercedes and Auto Union and said, “Hey, you think you could kick some ass if we were to give you guys, oh, half a million Reichsmarks?” And Mercedes and Auto Union thought about it for 0.0001 seconds and said a hearty “jawohl!” and off to the races they went. Were some of them queasy? Of course, but others were all for it (being supporters of the new regime), but most of them just shrugged and took the money.

Why? Because racers always take the money. Who cares where it comes from, we want to go racing. We’ll take the money and figure out how it looks later. Oh, you want to put a Swastika on our cars? What the hell, that’s our new flag, might as well put it on there. You want all the mechanics to wear snappy uniforms and literally march the cars onto the grid at each race? Sure, that sounds neat and orderly. You want to make everyone on the team members of the SS? Who are we to say no?

And that last one, no joke, literally happened. The Nazis were big on making whole groups of people into members of the SS, both as a PR exercise, but also as a way to say, “The Germans are the best, and the SS is the best of Germany, and these guys that just won a gold medal or the Coppa Acerbo or an air race? Guess what? They’re all in the SS too!”

To look at how strange, twisted and corrupt this all got, look at the Auto Union team. Auto Union was a company made up of four smaller German car companies who were on the verge of going bankrupt. They banded together to keep from going under, and when Das Reich showed up with a boxcar stuffed with money, they gladly took it. But there were a couple of things that rankled the GP team from the mechanics all the way up to the drivers. A lot of them didn’t like Nazis just on general principles. And one of them, Bernd Rosemeyer, couldn’t stand Adolf. Despite the last name, Rosemeyer wasn’t Jewish. But he thought that Hitler was a clown and blatantly corrupt and bad for the country. Bernd Rosemeyer was also a dyed-in-the-wool wise-ass who would, by all accounts, perform a knock-down hilarious imitation of Hitler using a comb as a mustache. I mean, he had them laughing to tears back at the factory with this schtick. But when the money started rolling in, Rosemeyer had to tone it down a little.

The weirdest bit of all this concerned Audi’s ace driver Hans Stuck. Yes, that would be the father of modern racer and multiple champion Hans-Joachim Stuck. It wasn’t so much the father that was the “problem,” it was the mother. Hans Stuck’s wife was Christa Thielmann and she was Jewish. How they weren’t rounded up and shuffled off to a camp is beyond me. Literally. I’ve never heard an explanation of how one of Germany’s most decorated and respected racers could violate The Nuremberg Laws and get away with it. They went about their lives untouched until September 1939, when they wisely hightailed it to Switzerland. Mach schnell.

So, racers taking money from MAGA? Why not? I’ve seen worse.

4 – O Captain, My Captain

Enter into this historic setting one Roger Searle Penske. President, owner and head cheese not just of Penske Racing Enterprises, but the IndyCar racing league. I’ve known of Roger my entire life and have spent time with him on numerous occasions. Hell, I’m old enough to remember when he was a driver and not just a team owner. Since back then and always, there’s a number of things that are readily apparent about Penske. First off, everyone refers to him as “The Captain.” Both because he is obviously the guy in charge and things get done his way, but also because he makes sure that everything is done shipshape. Neat. Clean. Organized to the nth degree, Roger Penske makes Ron Dennis look like Bootsy Collins.

Penske is also one of those old-school, mid-century conservative guys. Largely nonpartisan, he’s conservative in the mold of the bank vice president your granddad got a house loan from. Penske is also an Air Force veteran so, in times past, when The President says, “Come by the White House,” Roger showed up. Doesn’t matter who the president was, your team just won Indy (and Roger has won Indy a lot), you go to the White House. To Roger, it’s like when you’re in the military. You might hate that sonofabitch like there’s no tomorrow, but if he’s an officer and you see him on base, you salute. No ifs, ands or buts. The guy might be a jerk, but you salute the uniform, not the man. Period.

So when the current President mumbled something about running a race in D.C. “to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary,” you expect Roger to say no?

5 – Skid Marks, Not a High Water Mark

The thing is, anyone with even a passing understanding of history (i.e. most non-Americans) knows what’s going on is bad. Indeed, a lot of very smart people worldwide are watching what America is doing like people seeing a drunk clown on a high wire. The fall is obvious and becoming more imminent with each passing step, so a lot of people are waiting for the “that’s it” moment. The moment when a person’s (or a country’s) talent, luck, hubris and all that has run out and BOOM, down they go! Waterloo or Gettysburg or Watergate. It was just a matter of time, and that time is now.

I’ve long used the analogy that on a societal level, America is like a car that has gone out of control. I use this analogy because every gearhead gets it. We’ve all been there, a lot of times at the wheel ourselves, when things start to go cattywampus. You can sense it, then feel it, then know it. If you’re good, you can counter the bad inputs and straighten things out. If you’re not so good, you might not even notice, or, even worse, notice too late. It’s like when you’re on an icy road and the car starts to oversteer and you think, “Uh-oh, gotta catch it,” but it’s too late. Way too late. The time to catch it was 30 feet ago, but you weren’t paying attention, were you? No, no you weren’t, and now we’re going off that cliff and everyone in this car is going to get hurt.

Is this it? Is the Freedom 250 (Jesus, who came up with that name, Eric Arthur Blair) the skid marks way before our societal point of no return?

Probably not. My fear is that things were unrecoverable from way, way back. I think the Freedom 250 is just the next event lined up at the Circus Maximus.

“… iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli / vendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim / imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se / continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, / panem et circenses. …”*

Juvenal, Saturae, c. 100 AD.

“… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”