Road & Track may be an increasingly obscure car-buff magazine these days, but it has elicited headlines in the mainstream media for pulling an F1 story by sportswriter and architectural critic Kate Wagner. The magazine’s editors apparently liked her 5,000-word piece well enough to post on its website, but the first-person dispatch was later removed.
Washington Post media reporter Will Sommer (2024) noted that it is “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 the magazine nor Wagner commented to Sommer (2024), but he speculated that the story “ruffled more feathers in the automotive industry than the typical Road & Track story. (On its website Tuesday, the lead story’s banner headline declares that the new Dodge Charger ‘Does It All.’) Wagner’s is the kind of grand, impolite story that is increasingly rare in the struggling magazine industry, where surviving outlets depend on not offending the advertisers or celebrities they feature.”
Editor breaks silence on story killing
Road & Track Editor-in-Chief Daniel Pund did respond to a query by Patrick Redford (2024): “The story was taken down because I felt it was the wrong story for our publication. No one from the brands or organizations mentioned in the story put any sort of pressure on me or anyone else. In fact, I heard nothing at all from anyone on the story.”
Redford (2024) noted that “Pund’s statement explains some of the process, but not all of it. It’s unclear why there was no explanation to readers as to why a 5,000-word feature suddenly vanished, or how an article of that size went through edits without Pund’s knowledge, even if it were only on the digital side. Presumably this had been cooking for a while, since it was based on a race that happened in October.”
Wagner was not a newbie writer for Road & Track — she had previously produced two pieces on NASCAR (go here). Her trip to the U.S. Grand Prix in Austin, Texas was funded by the British chemical conglomerate INEOS, who was a major sponsor of a Mercedes-Benz racing team (Redford, 2024).
The Bulwark Editor Jonathan V. Last quite rightly argued, “Pulling a piece without explanation isn’t journalism. Pulling a piece because you’re afraid that it threatens your business model really isn’t journalism” (2024, original italics).
Agreed. I would add that it isn’t journalism for a magazine to allow a sponsor to pay for the trip of a writer. Wagner deserves credit for producing an article that displayed an admirable level of journalistic independence despite the incestuous arrangement. The same can’t be said of Pund.
Redford: Article provocative but not worthy of deletion
To be fair, commissioning Wagner to write about F1 was an unorthodox choice because she is a lefty. For example, she writes about architecture for The Nation magazine and critiques expensive homes on her blog McMansion Hell.
Redford (2024) described how her story discussed “the obscene amounts of money flowing through F1 can warp reality, as well as the propagandistic way F1 is covered by subservient press corps.” That said, he concluded that the “article might have been provocative, but nothing stuck out as objectionable, or worthy of deletion.” To give you a flavor for the story, here’s an excerpt:
“I think 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. No need for corny art singing tribute to the worker or even for the Manifesto. Never before had I seen so many wealthy people gathered all in one place. . . . I saw $30,000 Birkin bags and $10,000 Off-White Nikes. I saw people with the kind of Rolexes that make strangers cry on Antiques Roadshow. I saw Ozempic-riddled influencers and fleshy, T-shirt-clad tech bros and people who still talked with Great Gatsby accents as they sweated profusely in Yves Saint Laurent under the unforgiving Texas sun. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever. 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.” (Wagner, 2024)
I would invite you to read the whole piece. As I write this you can still do so here (or if that link disappears, go here). What do you think? If you were the editor, would you have killed the story?
Share your reactions to this post with a comment below or a note to the editor.
RE:SOURCES
- Last, Jonathan V.; 2024. “Journalism.” The Bulwark. Posted March 8.
- Redford, Patrick; 2024. “Road & Track EIC Tries To Explain Why He Deleted An Article About Formula 1 Power Dynamics.” Defector. Posted March 5.
- Sommer, Will; 2024. “A socialist writer skewered the Formula One scene. Then her article vanished.” The Washington Post. Posted March 5.
- Wagner, Kate; 2024. “Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain.” Road & Track. Posted March 1.
PHOTOGRAPHY:
- Banner image of FIA Formula 3 Championship by Lukas Raich drawn from Wikipedia via Creative Commons 4.0.
I read the article full article available at the “Wayback” machine.
The narrative had the feeling of ‘The Great Gatsby’; the writer was an outsider getting a glimpse of how the other 1 percent lives. I suspect R&T may have seen the article as not being enough about F1 as a sport: the machines, and the teams, and a little too much about the wealth and trappings that surround it.
Was the article well written and worth reading? Yes. Was it window into a world with which I was not well acquainted? Yes. Was it an article one might expect from Road & Track? No.
The article seems more Rolling Stone than Road & Track.
I’d agree that the article was off brand. At the same time, a magazine can benefit by including eclectic content, particularly if it is trying to elevate its profile. I think that the new editor overreacted by pulling the story. It would have been better to ride out whatever controversy the story generated — which could have been little to none.
I feel certain that Road & Track is trying to find a space for what is an anachronism. Long gone and forgotten by most are the days when their F1 coverage was by Rob Walker, one of the team entrants. One might even question to what extent the current R&T reader is even an F1 fan.
Speaking to what is left of the R&T readership is social commentary on the social scene of the F1 crowd the right topic? Give what R&T thinks they still are, is denigrating F1 what they should be doing? Would this have been a better article as a more condensed sidebar about the changing crowd and what the race promoters think of as VIPs? Clearly, there are a number of people wandering around as VIPs on the grid that have no business being there with questions if they even know F1; Miami was the worst offender from its Martin Brundle grid walk.
Should this article have been written for R&T? No.
Should it have been taken down? Debateable.
F-1 has become a cartel. They believe they are the pinnacle of motorsports, which they are not, in my opinion. F-1 is only a few years away from becoming an arm of the Saudi government (like professional golf) and what remains will continue to diminish the European circuits to raise more money and become even more exclusive. “Road & Track” does not want their credentials cancelled to F-1 races. “Sports Illustrated” printed a very critical story in May, 1973 by Frank Deford, BEFORE the three-day rain-delayed and rain-shortened 500 that saw Swede Savage fatally injured and a crewman struck and killed by a responding rescue crew. Tony Hulman, to his credit, did not cancel S.I.’s credentials to the 1974 race.