“Behind F1′s Velvet Curtain”
This story—nominally about Formula 1 racing—is really an “experience piece” by a relative outsider, Kate Wagner. Wagner is a self-described socialist and usually covers the road cycling world, along with running the famous McMansion Hell Instagram account. The article, commissioned and published by Road & Track magazine, is an extremely well-written, entertaining, engaging piece. In fact, I’d say the piece is almost as much about Wagner as it is about F1. She reminds me of Dooce (RIP) in the way that she is the prominent main character of a story that she’s really supposed to be telling about something else.
The irreverent take didn’t last long: it was pulled almost as soon as it was published (the link here is to the archive.org copy of the article), and the meta story has now become bigger than the original piece probably ever would have been. For instance, here’s Will Sommer, in the Washington Post:
“It’s almost unheard of for a news outlet to retract an article without explanation, especially a story of this size whose accuracy has not been publicly challenged. Neither Wagner nor Road & Track responded to requests for comment.
‘A person familiar with editorial deliberations at Road & Track said the story, which had been in the works for months, was pulled after its publication at the order of Editor in Chief Daniel Pund on the grounds that it didn’t fit with the site’s editorial goals.’
Boy, someone powerful in the car industry must not have liked the unvarnished opinions of an outsider. Which is too bad, honestly. Wagner’s writing was excellent, and really did a good job of painting the action in F1 in pretty amazing light. For instance:
‘I returned to watching the cars as they started up again, knowing that the drivers were pushing them to their limits, engrossed in their personal kaleidoscope of motion and color. Hamilton was in one of them. In the last shootout, he drove differently than before. A great verve frayed the lines he was making, something we can only call effort, push. Watching him, I understood what was so interesting about this sport, even though I was watching it in its most bare-bones form—cars going around in circles. The driver is the apotheosis of quick-moving prowess, total focus and control. The car is both the most studied piece of human engineering, tuned and devised in lab-like environments and at the same time a variable entity, something that must be wrestled with and pushed. The numbers are crunched, the forms wind-tunneled. And yet some spirit escapes their control, and that spirit is known only by the driver.’
There are also scathing, self deprecating, and downright funny takes as well, but that to-and-fro can make for a really interesting story, and I think that was the case here. Too bad it got pulled, but hopefully its notoriety benefits the author in the future moreso than any infamy.
Behind F1′s Velvet Curtain
If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.