Renault Gordini — What’s Left of the Sorcerer When the Sorcerer Is Gone A Name on a Hatchback You are standing in a Renault dealership somewhere in Europe around 2011. There is a Clio in the showroom. It is blue — not just any blue, but a deep, specific shade called Malte Blue. Two white … Read more
Amédée Gordini — The Sorcerer Who Took On Ferrari With Nothing A Workshop Against the World There is a man standing in a workshop on Boulevard Victor in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, sometime in the early 1950s. The floor is concrete. The tools are worn. The parts bin is half empty because there is … Read more
Audi 90 quattro IMSA GTO: The Car They Changed the Rules to Stop Most race cars lose because something breaks, or because the driver lifts, or because the thing in front is simply quicker. The 1989 Audi 90 quattro IMSA GTO managed something rarer and far more telling. It lost a championship while being the … Read more
The Engineer Ferrari Tried to Erase There’s a car that regularly sells for over fifty million dollars at auction. It is, by most measures, the most valuable automobile ever made. The man who engineered its engine never saw it win a race. He was fired before it crossed a finish line — handed a sealed … Read more
Alex Zanardi is gone. And we have nothing left to ask of him. The man rebuilt himself twice. Three times if you count the kid in Castel Maggiore who built his first kart out of scrap metal because his parents wouldn’t sign off on what he wanted to do with his life. Alex Zanardi died … Read more
MA-FIA III: The Price of Racing — How the FIA Turned Motorsport into a Billionaire’s Theme Park €50,000 a year for your 8-year-old to race karts. €1.3 million per season in F3. Nearly a million for a rally car you can’t buy. And if you make it to F1, over a million euros just for … Read more
NASCAR: Born From Illegal Whiskey, Dying From Corporate Boredom There’s something deeply, fundamentally American about NASCAR. And I don’t mean the flags, the pre-race anthems, or the sea of RVs surrounding every oval from Daytona to Talladega. I mean something more primal: the idea that any guy with a production car and enough guts could … Read more
