The Road & Track Formula One Scandal Makes No Sense

The Streisand effect has done its good work and some actual journalists have dug into the Kate Wagner Road & Track Formula One thing, but what they’ve found so far makes no sense.

Yesterday afternoon, The Washington Post’s Will Sommer, while noting that “neither Wagner nor Road & Track responded to requests for comment,” cited a “person familiar with editorial deliberations at Road & Track” who explained that “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.” Sommer also got on-the-record statements from petrochemical company INEOS and Mercedes-AMG Petronas saying that neither complained about the piece, or had even been aware of its existence. The story was reportedly only on the magazine’s website for an hour, so there’s no good reason not to believe them.

A little more than half an hour after the Post published, Defector’s Patrick Redford got an on-the-record quote from Road & Track’s Editor in Chief Daniel Pund saying the exact same thing that A Person Familiar had told Will Sommer anonymously. Oof, sorry Will. But Pund’s full statement is very interesting. He says:

Oh, it’s just a mundane situation! I guess magazines routinely commission a feature, send a freelance writer first-class on a sponsored junket, spend months gradually shepherding the piece through the writing, editorial, and fact-checking process, only for the Editor in Chief to catch wind of its existence just a moment after someone hits “publish” in the CMS, and who only then has a chance to assess whether it’s “the right story” for the publication, and if they decide it’s not, they would of course routinely delete it with no editorial note and redirect its URL to the motorsports landing page and then refuse to comment on it for several days?

I know not every Tabs reader works in media so let me be clear: that explanation is ridiculous. It’s the furthest imaginable thing from mundane. It also doesn’t make any sense on its own terms.

Daniel Pund is a lifelong automotive journalist who has, according to his Road & Track bio, “toiled away as a feature writer, car reviewer, editor, and columnist for every car magazine that matters (including Car and Driver and Autoweek) and a few that didn’t.” He was Road & Track’s executive editor since 2020, and was appointed EIC on January 16th this year, “effective immediately” according to a Hearst press release. So he has been EIC for more than a month and a half of the roughly five months the Formula One piece was in progress. Those rascals on the digital team must be good at hiding expensive features!

Road & Track’s own somewhat more florid announcement of the EIC appointment explained that:

So was he “dealing almost exclusively with the print magazine” or was he “setting the direction and tone of both the magazine and website?” Doesn’t setting the direction and tone encompass reviewing potential features and deciding whether they’re “right for the magazine?” Or at least being “aware of” them? Does a single sparrow fall to the ground at the New Yorker without David Remnick being aware of it? I doubt it.

“While he has big plans for R&T,” continued the un-bylined Road & Track announcement, “what won’t change is its commitment to authoritative information, genuine passion for the world of cars and motorsport, and dedication to editorial and photographic excellence.” Later, downshifting smoothly from the third person to a rich, Corinthian first person plural, the piece assures the reader that “We will neither shy away from innovation nor betray our high, long-established standards."

“Trade mag gonna trade mag i guess,” was what one journalist told me they thought was going on here. Maybe! But as Tom Scocca wrote today:

Even a trade mag is supposed to be ashamed about getting caught doing something like this. Especially one making lofty promises about “our high, long-established standards.” Maybe those days are over, though?

Scocca’s right about what a scandal this is, but he’s writing from the perspective that someone more powerful than Daniel Pund is actually behind it. What if it’s worse than that? Another journalist proposed an even darker theory to me. What if this is simply (as they put it) “loser shit.” What if Pund recognized that the piece was orders of magnitude better than anything he’s ever produced, and rather than basking in the acclaim of an unusual breakthrough cultural moment, just decided he couldn’t stand to be put in the shade, or risk any possible imagined sponsor blowback? Pund’s own work, by contrast, leans heavily toward the “Cool Car Company Made a Really Cool Car!” school of automotive journalism.

As EIC he’s taken the opportunity to stretch his rhetorical wings a bit. Here’s his introduction to the magazine’s “Air” issue:

What if you took Wallace’s parable and made the metaphorical element of it… non-metaphorical? A thin soup indeed. Loser shit. Maybe it’s true that Wagner’s piece “didn’t fit with the site’s editorial goals” if the goals are this kind of mediocrity.

The fact is that this is a scandal, and the weak outcry reveals the near absence of air remaining in the media industry. As Casey Johnston posted:

Or, as Tom Scocca expanded on that post:

And here we are back on Tabs, still inside that tiny social circle. Pund managed to give the scandal a little bit more air yesterday, but it might finally suffocate here.

But if this is the only place left for it, let’s have an old-fashioned riot. Maybe it’s embarrassing enough now? Maybe there’s a little air left, somewhere, for somebody to yell into.