Sponsors And Money 'Have Destroyed The Spirit' Of F1

Welcome to Must Read, where we single out the best stories from around the automotive universe and beyond. Today we've got reports from The Atlantic Cities, The New Yorker, and Petrolicious.

Another gem from Petrolicious from an F1 great who adds a lot of perspective.

Well I'm a very old man, from the era of 1962-1992 Formula One. Part of an era with people like Bruce McLaren and Colin Chapman. F1 was very different then, it wasn't so much about money. Teams were on a much friendlier basis, say for example, if I needed to borrow a tool I could ask Lotus to lend it to me for perhaps six hours and they'd be happy to help—it was very important to everyone involved that come Sunday all teams were ready to race. Again, money was much less important, and what little there was came from the people watching races, and after a race, it was spent by teams on hotels, food, and sometimes girls! It was a different world, very difficult to explain to someone used to how things are run today.

In that era, say from roughly 1962-1980 or 1984, racers had to be men before they were champions, do you understand what I mean? Drivers ate with mechanics and technicians, it helped maintain a friendly, family-like atmosphere. Today, there is too much money involved, and sponsors have destroyed the spirit of the championship.

The roads are lined with food, apparently.

At first, he scanned the canopy for apples to use in his home-brewed beer. But there was more. Hanging in the sidewalk foliage were peaches, apricots, walnuts, mulberries and plums. And so Welty, a PhD student researching glacier movement, began to map the urban orchard. In March, he and Caleb Philips, a professor of computer science at the University of Colorado, expanded that database into Falling Fruit, a website that catalogs more than half a million urban trees with edible products. In the two-dozen cities where Welty and Philips have obtained municipal planting data or teamed up with local foragers, there is something to eat on nearly every corner.

I've been listening to this all day. Still holds up. It got me thinking of 20-year-old cars and how they've aged...

There were still LPs back then, and "Exile" was designed as a double album—it was, the young singer-songwriter claimed, a song-by-song counterpart to the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main St.," designed to be consumed in 5-4-5-4 bursts matching the sides of the original two records of the Stones' dense classic. Thus fortified, the songs jump out at the listener. They are built around Phair's distinctive style, and the guitar lines that mark so many of her compositions display a musicality that is still underappreciated ("Strange Loop," "Explain It to Me," "Gunshy"). One of the unexpected signifiers of "Exile" was the sound of a diminutive woman sometimes straining to accomplish the guitar part that she'd written. This was paralleled by Phair's melody lines, which forced her voice, which was not innately strong, to attempt everything from an almost guttural throatiness to a thin soprano. Part of the point of the record was that Phair (a) had written the songs and (b) was going to sing them, no matter the damage.