Sport

The Unwatchable Race

I had no use for motor racing. Loud, repetitive, a parade of billboards doing two hundred. Then a friend recommended Drive to Survive and I lost a weekend, and what hooked me had almost nothing to do with cars. It was the people. Who they were, who they couldn’t stand, which garages were quietly at war, the engineering trickery, how a tenth of a second in Bahrain rearranged a friendship by August. In the early seasons, Guenther Steiner dropped lovable f-bombs left and right, and made you dread that post-race call to Gene Haas, the owner, along with him. The speed was the occasion. The story was the reason.