Kate Wagner gets to attend a Formula 1 race in Austin and writes about it for Road and Track magazine. Then the magazine deletes the article (and her author profile) from the website. You might know Kate from McMansion Hell, where she got internet-famous in the 2010s snarking about the ostentatious design of big homes.

It’s full of great writing:

Ratcliffe, the INEOS CEO, is a known entity in cycling, about whom one says things usually reserved for supporting characters in James Bond novels. His net worth is reported to be just south of $20 billion. His pleasures, and sponsorships, are many: soccer, cycling, sailing, motorsport. He goes on safari often—hence, the Grenadier—and has purchased swaths of land for animal conservation, which (forgive me, Colleen) strikes me as decidedly British in a Rudyard Kipling kind of way. In Courchevel, a common site for Tour de France stages, he built an INEOS ski center visible from the Gucci-branded ski lifts, and rumor had it that deep in the Alps he retreated to a secret mansion accessible only by helicopter. Even as I write this, he comes off too much like a guy I made up. Well, I didn’t. The driver of the car made a big deal of showing me the special cyclist blinker that has its own button. I wasn’t sure what it did because I was in the car, which is tall enough that if I found myself in its way, its front hood met me at my shoulders. I decided not to mention this.

Years ago I was stuck in Paris for an extra day because my flight was overbooked. I wound up hanging out with a couple who was on their way back from the Monaco Grand Prix. It was a great time, but it was clear that we inhabited different worlds. Kate nails that vibe so extremely well:

I think if you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. No need for corny art singing tribute to the worker or even for the Manifesto. Never before had I seen so many wealthy people gathered all in one place. If a tornado came through and wiped the whole thing out, the stock market would plummet and the net worth of a country the size of Slovenia would vanish from the ledgers in a day. 

The last paragraph of the piece suggests she knew it was doomed (go read it!). It’s saved for posterity on the Internet Archive – here’s hoping Kate got paid before the piece ran.