Wednesday Racing/Open Thread: Justice For Yuki, R&T Was Right To Cancel That Biz

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i was a poor white trash pookie

Good morning ACF! Before we get serious, I want to express my delight at something a reader sent me last week: an extensive discussion of my “sucks and rocks” philosophy in, of all things, a gun-blogger discussion of low-power variable optics on YouTube. I don’t personally write about guns any more, because I deplore violence in all its forms of course, but when I was shooting on a regular basis I was an iron-sights typa guy. Now, in my visually inflexible old age? Maybe the LVPO is right for me. I’ll have to try one in airsoft or something. Alright, let’s continue.

The Netflix effect, in real time

sorry, yuki, it came straight from the producers

The past season of Drive To Survive was, in my opinion at least, the worst of them. The degree to which the show misrepresents qualifying is getting dangerously close to raw fiction. Too much time was spent on the drama at Alpine; yes, Ocon and Gasly had a history, but it’s hard for the viewer to care because these are neither sympathetic nor particularly interesting people. The Alonso/Perez final laps at Sao Paulo never make an appearance. The primary enjoyment I got from the season was watching Hamilton be his unpleasant, spoiled little self on screen.

All of that pales, however, before the ridiculous “Ricciardo redemption arc” in Episode 9 where Danny holds off a threat from the hyper-talented Liam Lawson with an astounding performance at the Mexico GP… at which point they fade to black and give you the impression that Danny is, like, totes back. Alas, it wasn’t the case. Mexico was DR3’s only foray beyond journeyman mediocrity. Tsunoda handled him 15-6 in their seven races together and conclusively demonstrated superiority in a broad variety of conditions and strategies. The right thing to do would have been to put Lawson and Tsunoda together for 2024. Instead, Liam was sent back to the minor leagues and Ricciardo was gifted a seat he hadn’t earned.

Cut to the end of Saturday’s race when Tsunoda was ordered to swap places with Ricciardo for the purpose of… nothing, really, since Ricciardo was no better able to make a desired pass on Kevin Magnussen than Tsunoda had been. At that point the fairest thing to do would have been to re-swap the positions, but Racing Bulls Visa CashApp PlugWeedPay or whatever we’re calling Minardi now declined to do so. At which point Yuki lost his temper and buzzed Ricciardo after the checkered flag.

Your humble author rarely accuses other people of racism, but this was some racist BS. To begin with, Tsunoda is almost always portrayed in the media as something close to a child, which must be infuriating to a man who has risked death hundreds of times to compete at the top level of motorsports and who, on his day, is the equal of nearly anyone else in the world. No matter what he accomplishes, he’s still just “the shortest little guy on the Netflix show”. Who, according to the know-it-alls, only has a job because Honda wants a Japanese driver. No wonder he’s angry.

Much has been written in the past few days about how Tsunoda’s behavior was childish and petty and how he’s endangered his career. As if Ricciardo’s team-hopping underperformance is any more admirable. Let me tell you a secret about racing: men get angry during races. Things happen afterwards; there are at least two readers of this site who in 2015 saw your humble author jump out of the car and square up against three Italian guys from New Jersey immediately after a race at Laguna Seca, all at once. Any one of them could have probably kicked my ass, being younger and fitter. Against all three, my goose was effectively cooked. But we ended up being pals. That’s just the nature of the sport. If you think Senna would have placidly accepted a demand to move aside for Danny Ric, you’re kidding yourself. Tsunoda deserves a lot more respect and understanding than he gets, or has gotten.

“It takes bad art to show us how good art gets done”

unlike don henley, i can tell you why: it sucked balls

Speaking of maturity: Perhaps the hardest lesson any young would-be critic has to learn is that of respecting talent, creativity, and execution regardless of their personal taste. I find the entire “mumble auto-tune rap” genre, also known as “trap music”, to be beneath contempt — but were I to start writing for Pitchfork, it would be my job to discern between the best and worst of it for my readers who do enjoy it. On the flip side, I’m enough of a John Mayer fan to have bought the “Lunar Ice Silver Sky” twice — but I’m also able to put that aside and recognize his astoundingly tepid covers of “Crossroads” and “Call Me The Breeze” as the raw album-filler trash they truly are. The only real difference between a proper critic and a mere consoomer is the ability to make those distinctions. Otherwise you’re just a mook wearing a football jersey with some other man’s name on it.

We have very few trained critics in media now, particularly in the meta-discipline of examining work done by other writers, which is why I’m not surprised to see so much fawning attention paid this week to Kate Wagner’s “Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain”. The story behind it goes like so: The CEO of INEOS, a global chemical company and Mercedes F1 sponsor, didn’t like Land Rover’s decision to cancel the old-style Defender, so he tried to buy the tooling and keep it in production. When Land Rover backed him off, the fellow decided to make his own “Land Rover” anyway. After about seven years of effort, INEOS has unveiled the Grenadier, a deliberately plain-Jane off-roader that recalls the G-Wagen as well as the original Land Rovers.

INEOS, which is also a title sponsor of the Toto Wolff Social Club, paid for two waves of journalists and influencers to attend the 2023 COTA F1 race and experience the Grenadier in pre-arranged conditions. Road&Track was offered a slot in the first group, which would be watching the sprint day instead of the GP race. Whether out of petulance or disinterest, they decided to send my fellow Substacker Kate Wagner, whose work up to this point has consisted largely of midwit architecture dribble and some pro-road-cycling camp-following, to cover the event from a “rebellious perspective”.

This was obviously a stupid thing to do, but it’s very much in keeping with the late-stage R&T and C/D practice of “let’s use the worst person possible for the job, and it’s even better if it’s the worst woman possible.” This is why Elana Scherr still has a career after trying to witch-hunt a younger and drastically more talented female editor out of the business. It’s why R&T readers have repeatedly been forced to sit through stories devoted to “inequality” and other issues that would be far better-suited for intelligent discussion in a different venue. It’s how Silky Sharon Carty was given any job at C/D besides receptionist, for which she also would have been unqualified but where she could have done less harm. And it’s why Kate Wagner, who can usually be relied upon to come up with nothing more intelligent or insightful than the following:

At the end of the day, it’s the sprinters who must face questions of speed and positioning. Questions of precarity, luck, and strength. Unexpected answers in blood and balance. Relief comes bellowing out of the throat of a team that had long searched for a stage victory.

somehow got the gig of taking a five-figure trip to an F1 race, even though she doesn’t watch F1 races, understand F1 races, or hold a driver's license.

The resulting article is rather fascinating to me because it has all the qualities of brilliant writing — except for the brilliant writing. It reminds me of the “AI”-generated images that are so in vogue right now. From a distance, it really looks like real life, but when you get up close you realize that everyone has an improbable number of fingers, there’s an arm coming out of a brick wall, and the “STOP” sign actually shows a snail trail of random curves rather than four conclusive letters.

Similarly, Wagner’s work has the self-conscious, ironically-detached sheen of real sports journalism without its substance. She is not without the ability to turn a memorable phrase, but for every admirable or insightful “To be a have-not and be talked to by the haves has an air of the farcical to it” we get a dozen “It's true when they say live music is the thread that holds Austin together.”

The class-warfare aspects of this article appear to have excited both the media echo chamber and R&T’s web staff — they extracted “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” to head and promote the piece — but it’s less a story about rich people and more a story about how uncomfortable Wagner is around rich people. Because she is poor, which makes her virtuous, and because she is just so much more true to herself than the objects of her fleeting and distracted attention.

my entire experience of journalism is that of a fraught game of cat and mouse, adhering to an ironclad book of ethics where even accepting a pair of socks from a team is considered a faux pas… I had never flown first class before, not even on an upgrade… In first class stewardesses give you warm washcloths for your hands and a real glass for your water instead of a plastic cup. The lady beside me wore a suit and read from a spreadsheet, stopping only for brief pauses during takeoff and landing. I don't think she looked at me once the entire time… 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… Send me on an experience and I'll have an experience. Sadly, I suffer from an unprofitable disease that makes me only ever capable of writing about the experience I'm having. The doctors say it's terminal.

A better writer could have communicated this without resorting to an Ibanez Tube Screamer’s worth of MEEEEMEEEEMEEEEEMEMEMEMEMEEEEE in the signal chain, and a still better one could have let the words of others put it across it subtly, as John McPhee is justly celebrated for doing, but poor Kate can’t quite take her thoughts out of her shorts, which get not one but three mentions, long enough to let anyone else take the microphone. Given unfettered access to every player in the F1 game, we get just two complete and attributed quotes in 3,950 words. The first is from the Grenadier PR person, and the second is from… well, it’s from Kate.

"Jesus Christ," I said to my journalist companion, and headed up the stairs.

Oh, and because she’s a basic white woman who absorbs her entire personality from surrounding media we have to hear endless paeans to Sir Lewis Hamilton, ranging from the embarrassingly ignorant (“a man from some of the humblest beginnings in motorsport, the regal and soft-spoken Lewis Hamilton”) to the entirely imaginary (“Hamilton distinguished himself by the lines he cut along the corner and the loudness of his engine, that pushing”) to the lamentably parasocial (“He appeared perpetually relaxed, controlled and refined, both present with us in the room but on a higher plane within…. I was grateful that I got the opportunity to speak to Lewis Hamilton, someone I am not ashamed to say I admire”). To Wagner, Sir Lewis is just so much more interesting than Max Verstappen, whom she dismisses as a “foil” with few or no human characteristics. The idea that her different perceptions of Hamilton and Verstappen are almost entirely due to this being an INEOS-sponsored event and experience appears to never cross her quiet and incurious mind.

At the end of Kate Wagner’s piece, we have learned three things, listed below in order of increasing importance to Kate Wagner:

0. Lewis Hamilton is, like, super dreamy and has neat pants.

1. There are a lot of rich people at F1 races.

2. A lot of stuff about Kate Wagner.

You could get the first two by watching any seventy-five seconds of F1 TV. The last one I suspect you can get in equine-ketamine doses by hanging around a random Chicago bar in the dead time after the pretty girls leave. This article isn’t even terribly original, as Wagner’s primary media presence — “McMansionHell”, a twitter account devoted to making fun of the homes purchased by successful normies — contains all of the same ERMAGERD LOOK AT TEH STOOPID RICH POEPLE techniques.

Wagner does make one perceptive point, albeit without much punch behind it: automotive journalism is an ethically vacant hothouse of spoiled people with little to no talent. Which explains why, although her overlong article was eventually polished up enough to make the R&T web front page a full four months after the COTA Grand Prix, it was disappeared almost immediately afterwards, with enough force that Wagner’s Hearst bio page also disappeared. This got the attention of a WaPo second-tier writer, who then clutched a few pearls on the topic:

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… 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.

I assume this Deep Throat who has all the inside info on Daniel Pund… was Daniel Pund himself. Who made the decision in the first place to run the long-stale Wagner piece about a race from the previous season? Likely it was Aaron Brown, a total rookie who’s never written anything you’d remember and who now runs R&T web, presumably because he was cheap to hire.

Who killed the piece? Could have been anybody at Hearst who read the thing and thought, “My God, this is completely without merit, and it does no good for our core mission of selling $15,000 vacations to the marks.” The WaPo writer got INEOS PR and Mercedes-AMG F1 PR to deny canceling the article — but because he doesn’t know shit about autowriting, and why should he, there were presumably no inquiries made to the famously fragile and pampering Mercedes-Benz USA PR team. If the article was deleted due to outside influence, they’d be the place at which informed fingers would point.

Unfortunately for R&T, what would otherwise have sank to the bottom of the Web pile as a tl;dr massive web piece about last year’s F1 season now has a bit of momentum, as does Wagner herself. Various autowriters and other nonentities are comparing her to great sports writers throughout history, and to Hunter S. Thompson. This is certainly amusing but it doesn’t shore up my already-collapsed confidence in the critical abilities of my peers. Yes, the article says something you like. Does that mean it’s good?

The Clive James quote above — “It takes bad art to show us how good art gets done” — applies in spades here. Wagner was in the potential vicinity of good art. She had a unique paddock opportunity, no long-term career reason to pamper INEOS or Mercedes, and carte blanche to write 4,000 words about her shorts. In other, more capable hands, we could have gotten something truly memorable from this combination. Instead, we have an article that is most notable for its removal. Which, as little as I respect Daniel Pund and the current staff over at Road&Track track, was entirely justfied. As with John Mayer’s occasional fumblings over classic blues-rock tracks, this was a deep cut for the true fans, nothing more. No doubt Ms. Wagner has a true talent of some sort. This ain’t it.