Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain

Most of us have the distinct pleasure of going throughout our lives bereft of the physical presence of those who rule over us. Were we peasants instead of spreadsheet jockeys, warehouse workers, and baristas, we would toil in our fields in the shadow of some overbearing castle from which the lord or his steward would ride down on his thunderous charger demanding our fealty and our tithes. Now, though, the real high end of the income inequality curve—the 0.01 percenters—remains elusive. To their great advantage, they can buy their way out of public life. However, if you want to catch a glimpse of them, all you need to do is attend a single day of Formula 1 racing.

The world of other people’s sports is always an interesting one to the journalist who tends to stick to a single beat. My sports work is primarily in cycling, though I have covered NASCAR in these very pages. NASCAR and cycling share more in common than one might think given the noise differential and average fan profile. Cycling began in the late-19th century as a gimmick to sell newspapers, and the earliest generations of cyclists were no more than farmers trying in desperate economic times to use their toil to hit pay dirt instead of actual dirt. NASCAR, as the story goes, has its origins in bootlegging, running liquor to places it shouldn’t be going. Many of its practitioners, such as Ross Chastain and Joey Logano, continue that same kind of Dukes of Hazzard swagger. Even in our professionalized, PR-besotted world, they retain in spirit their scrappy origins. Both sports share a commonality in weird, fleeting small-fry sponsorships: Dogecoin, sealant companies, and Quick-Step flooring, those kinds of things. NASCAR is still all Southern drawl, bravado, and big sound. Cycling remains a traveling circus that goes by the front lawns of French farmers. As pro sportsmen, their practitioners make money, sure—Tadej Pogačar, two-time Tour de France winner, is estimated to be on a salary of around 6 million euros. In NASCAR, Kyle Busch, the highest-paid driver, is reported to make more than twice that—$16.9 million, though he is an anomaly. Many drivers, even veterans like Brad Keselowski, make much closer to top cycling money, itself an outlier. Many who ride the Tour de France do so on paltry salaries of 50,000 euros or less.

I’ve done a lot of cycling races, and I don’t use the word scrappy lightly. While you see some pretty mountains and get decent but not great access to athletes (prior to COVID you used to be able to interview them one on one in their team buses and sometimes even in their hotel rooms while they got their daily massages), the journalist treatment overall is pretty paltry. The hotels are abysmal and the lunches notoriously lackluster, though in the three-week races, the organizers tend to throw a couple nice ones in there for morale. As for perks, sometimes the town hosting a race will give all the journalists a bottle of wine (if in Bordeaux), a tote bag, or a T-shirt one will only wear once they are near the end of the Tour and are desperate to do laundry. Unlike other sports where sponsors make overtures toward the press, cycling sponsors rarely want anything to do with cycling journalists.

Due to cycling’s less than spotless history, the life of a cycling journalist is more like that of a pesky political correspondent than a beat writer writing up scoreboards in the press box. Notorious cheating, even if it is far less common now, does that to a sport.

Because of this, 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. The relationship of the journalist to the cycling team is one of mutual wariness couched with pleasantries because cycling still needs journalists to make guys going around Europe on bipedal machines interesting to the broader public. The relationship between journalists to the riders is usually distant but pleasant. Hence, when Road & Track forwarded me the opportunity on behalf of a sponsor to go to the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix, I didn’t quite know what to do. Within the framework of a sport like cycling, this was an absolute no-go. Within the framework of motorsport, because it is tied so intimately to the automotive industry as a whole, these paid press trips are pretty normal. Meanwhile, as a writer, a.k.a. someone who decidedly does not make pro sportsman money, this was probably the only opportunity I’d ever get to see F1 this up close and personal. Tickets for grand prix grandstand seats can go for around a thousand per person. Part of me, deep down, wanted to see what press kickbacks could buy. With a bit of the ick still in me, I accepted.

The corporate entity in question was Mercedes-AMG sponsor INEOS, the petrochemical company. Not exactly the kind of institution a bicycle-loving, card-carrying socialist wants to get involved with. But part of the reason I took them up on their offer was because INEOS and its CEO, Jim Ratcliffe, also sponsor cycling—they are the title partner of the INEOS Grenadiers, so named after the off-road vehicle the company is now producing in what was once an ex-Mercedes factory in France. The F1 trip was also organized by the automotive division, arguably to show off its cars to car journalists with a bit of sport mixed in for fun. Regardless of this hand-wringing, it’s still INEOS, just a car-shaped version of it—kind of like how the United Arab Emirates, as in the country itself, sheathes its sponsorship of sports in the scabbard of its airline. Knowing this fully, and having chosen to commit to the dark side, on a Friday afternoon in cold, autumnal Chicago, I packed my shorts and cowboy boots for Austin, Texas. Looking at my ticket, I noticed it was first class. I had never flown first class before, not even on an upgrade. Because I was flying first class, everyone who talked to me did so nicer than usual even though I had adjunct professor eye bags and was wearing sweatpants. 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.

Austin is a weird town. The people there like that about it. Keep Austin Weird, the bumper stickers say. It used to be a kind of Portland of the South, a liberal oasis in a sea of red before the tech industry moved there. That designation has been transferred to Asheville, the North Carolina mountain town that’s now a mecca for people who did the softer drugs in college and like beer that tastes like pine needles. Austin, at present, is a strange mix of only somewhat reconcilable vibes. One the one hand, there’s huge amounts of startup money accompanied by all the dumbest accouterments of San Francisco expat-dom: Twenty-tens minimalist brand aesthetics, self-driving cars, e-scooters littered everywhere, the Tesla headquarters, Patagonia even though it doesn’t even get cold there. On the other, you’ll find a good ol’ fashioned, hootin’ n’ hollerin’ Southern college town. The architecture is definitely Texas. Earthy 19th-century Spanish colonial facades mingle with 1980s black-glassed skyscrapers. The latter characterizes my hotel, whose space-frame atrium is disorientingly inside out. In the lobby, a young guy in cowboy boots plays country music to an audience of the receptionists. It’s true when they say live music is the thread that holds Austin together. They even have it at the airport much to the chagrin of the red-eyed and hungover. Just around the corner, Sixth Street is the must-see party corridor of Austin, and it’s Friday. I think you need to be an Olympic-level drinker to survive there because the one margarita I had at a burger bar just about knocked me out, and I am no lightweight. The Astros were playing the Rangers in the playoffs, and the Rangers were losing. I thought the older gentleman sitting next to me was going to cry.

Later that evening, at a restaurant known for selling stuffed avocado, I met another journalist there along with Colleen, the PR rep for the Grenadier. Colleen wore a billowy paisley-patterned shirt. Her demeanor was outgoing in a charming, folksy way. She had an affectation of earnestness, which is always good for a PR person. She reminded me of my mother, who, coincidentally, did a stint in marketing herself before giving it all up to become a preschool teacher. We talked a bit about our work—our voices small against the volume of a Dixie Chicks cover band—and I explained with some embarrassment why Road & Track sent me there even though I couldn’t drive. I said something along the lines of “People send me places to have experiences and write about them.” Sipping through a tiny bar straw, Colleen laughed and shouted over the music, “Well, you’re definitely about to have an experience.”

INEOS had split the F1 weekend into two groups of trips. I was in the first one, which comprised the sprint and sprint shootout while the other was the race. This went unsaid because we were attending as guests of Mercedes, but no one there thought it made much difference whether we went on qualifying or race day. The results would be the same: Max Verstappen pole, Max Verstappen P1.