A socialist writer skewered the Formula One scene. Then her article vanished.
A socialist writer skewered the Formula One scene. Then her article vanished.
Editors for Road & Track aren’t saying why they yanked Kate Wagner’s Formula One article from the website shortly after it published.
Link to the web archive version of the offending article
Headline might be a bit clickbaity - I thought it was quite interesting from a pov of someone not from outside the circus.
...When we got into the garage, Lewis's car was naked, its insides visible for all to see. I think this was the moment where my respect for the sport as it exists really made itself clear. It is hard to describe what I felt looking at that car. The closest phrase I have at my disposal is the technological sublime.
From the Road and Track article:
People clinked glasses of free champagne in outfits worth more than the market price of all the organs in my body. I stood there among them in a thrift-store blouse and shorts from Target.
Thanks for sharing the R&T link, it is indeed an excellent article. If her mandate was to report her experience, she nailed it absolutely.
(Talking about Lewis Hamilton):
It's reminiscent of the patronage system of precapitalist times, when rulers and nobles with endless riches paid musicians and composers to live in the palace with them.
A great read indeed. I guess some advertiser got angry. Mercedes? Red Bull? We'll never know.
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If her mandate was to report her experience, she nailed it absolutely.
Not only that, but she nails the personalities involved too, I think. From the aloof, regal aura of Hamilton (love or hate him) to the bland straightforwardness of Max, which only makes his dominance more boring somehow.
Great observations and fantastic writing.
Wow that was a good read
Edit: the archive bike article, not the bezos one
Something about this article reminded me of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by DFW.
Truly a great read, thank God for archive.org. I guess INEOS expected a puff piece and complained when their investment produced this instead.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A socialist who’s painfully self-conscious about class differences, Wagner skewers expensive homes on her blog McMansion Hell and writes about architecture for the left-wing magazine the Nation.
Still, Road & Track magazine commissioned Wagner to cover a Formula One race in Austin last fall, sending her on a trip funded by British petrochemicals company INEOS.
In its absence, admirers have resorted to sharing an archived version that seems to have gone viral in media circles — many noting, as did New Yorker food writer Helen Rosner, that it had been “mysteriously removed.”
Pund, who was appointed to the magazine’s top job in January after working as the executive editor, was not aware of the story before it was published, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve confidences.
The author criticized the general state of Formula One, arguing that it has grown boring amid the dominance of Red Bull Racing star Max Verstappen.
Bradley Lord, a spokesman for the Mercedes-AMG Petronas team, told The Washington Post that it was unaware of the story and hadn’t complained to the magazine about it.
The original article contains 637 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Anyone have a link to the original article? I was halfway done reading it and poof it's gone