A Year in Favorites

Self-promotion and all that jazz

Welcome to Formula Flash, where your local sports column meets Cosmo wrapped up in a newsletter delivered to your inbox via the cool girl next door (i.e. motorsport and enviro journo Olivia Hicks). It’s like “Drive to Survive” without the sensationalism!

I'm writing this in the last 48 hours of 2024. By the time this ends up in your inbox, I will likely be in a bar or a pub on the Lower East Side and you, more likely, won't be spending your last spare minutes of the year reading an email newsletter. I hope that you are somewhere watching the ball drop or smacking a kiss on a loved one.

The past 12 months have been a learning curve: I had contract debacles, stories squandered and a communications head dangle access to drivers in front of me in exchange for a “positive story.” Journalists and sources assumed I was an influencer on more than one occasion (because God forbid someone be fashionable in the media center) or that I was working on a school project (ouch). As expected with full-time freelance work, there was near-constant uncertainty — from not knowing if I would be across the globe at a race within the week to my bank account financing that sudden travel in order to stay independent.

But I also had a lot of great experiences — ones that made it on paper and others that didn’t. I reported at two of the most iconic race tracks: the Indianapolis Motor Speedway during the Indy 500 weekend and the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium, and sought out stories trackside at less favored ones. I chatted with Ferrari drivers clad in Rosso corsa red, sat down with baby-faced rookies and embarrassingly teared up the tiniest bit hearing V6 engines in person. Yes, maybe I didn’t get that New York Times byline I yearned for and, yes, there were a whole lot of “No, Thank You”s and “We’ll pass on this one”s in my email inbox. But I also wrote stories, important ones, for top racing publications and regional U.S. magazines, like how a Texas race track aims to undo the effects of historic racist housing policies or whether a nondescript warehouse in the Indianapolis suburbs has the answer to the electric battery waste crisis.

In 2024, I attempted to get better at shameless self-promotion, so I’ve linked my favorite stories I’ve reported on this year. However, because the “shame” in shameless self-promotion still lingers, I’ve cushioned the list with the media I’ve enjoyed consuming most this year: from non-racing news articles and scathing Substacks to Irish Hip-hop documentaries and romance novels.

Articles

Motorsport.com - F1 Academy Driver Chloe Chambers Dreams of Racing as a Reality Show: As the 20-year-old American driver heads to Red Bull’s F1 Academy team for 2025, she’s readying herself for whatever comes next — including the potential for Netflix-induced stardom (Dec 2024)

Texas Monthly - A Pact Between Texas’s Formula 1 Speedway and a Tree-Hugging Nonprofit Is Turning Austin Green: The Circuit of the Americas has sponsored the planting of thousands of saplings to shade its tarmac and boost Austin’s tree canopy cover (Oct 2024)

• Quite possibly my favorite piece of the year. I reported trackside at the United States Grand Prix in October and combined two things I love to write about: environmental justice and motor racing. As low-income, primarily Black and Latino, East Austin residents swelter, a Texas race track is attempting to increase tree cover in neighborhoods that need it most. Not only does more shade improve on-track action, but it also reduces heat-related deaths in historically redlined areas, like the neighborhoods around the track.

Esses Magazine - The Fashion Start-Up Giving F1 Tires a Second Life: A 26-year-old entrepreneur dreams of circularity, sneakers and podium shoeys (May 2024)

Race Tech Magazine - Have We Just Hit The Scientific Jackpot? End-of-life recycling of batteries is a divisive issue for sectors that embraced electrification in the quest to ‘go green.’ Olivia Hicks visits an Indianapolis-based company that claims to have the answer. (Jan 2025)

Substack

I’m a Gen Z Journalist. My Generation Doesn’t Know What That Means: The issue isn’t media mistrust, it’s that no one knows what a journalist is (Dec 2024)

How America’s Latest Sports Obsession Joined the 2024 Presidential Ticket: Forget small-town canvassing and state fair soapboxes, presidential nominees turned to Formula 1 to garner support this election season (Nov 2024)

The 23-Year-Old Law Student Making FIA Documents Trendy: Faith Thiam wants you to know everything about Formula 1, without the legalese (Sept 2024)

One Year of Formula Flash: How Substack launched my career in motorsport and brought me back to journalism (March 2024)

A Year Review in Media

Racing

• Road & Track - Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain: 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. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever. (Kate Wagner)

• The Athletic - Why being Max Verstappen’s Red Bull teammate is Formula One’s hardest job (Luke Smith)

  • Specifically, that last section: “It’s a chance to compete for the sport’s biggest prizes and be part of championship victories. But the higher up the mountain you go, the thinner the air. It’s a pressure and a job that can make or break careers. Whoever’s next will find that out, one way or another.”

• Wall Street Journal - The F1 Offseason Has Spun Out of Control (Joshua Robinson)

• Motorsport.com - A Welder or the New Hamilton? Kevin Magnussen’s Parallel Universes (Oleg Karpov)

• The Cut -

  • Three Days on the Track With the Women of F1 Academy (Emily Leibert)

  • A Non-Driver Walks Into Daytona (Emilia Petrarca)

• Politico - Can This Race Car Save Joe Biden’s Presidency (David Ferris)

• “The Formula: How Rogues, Geniuses, and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World’s Fastest-Growing Sport” (Joshua Robinson, Jonathan Clegg)

• Esses Issue One - A start-up motorsport magazine that launched its print issue in October

• Paddock Project: A Formula 1 Podcast

• Julian Pace’s Art

• Formula 1 cars, explained for rookies (Cleo Abram)

• Some of my favorite racing Substacks include Inboxbox (Sasha Rogelberg), On Motorsport (Sean Broderick), Planet Paddock, Sportscar365+ (John Dagys), Track Limits (Sara Neves), F1 Debrief (Rory Mitchell), Race Day (Ryan ZumMallen)

Non-Racing

Articles

• The New Yorker -

  • Speaking Irish with Kneecap (Robert Sullivan)

    • And everything and anything Kneecap (the film, the music, Irish flag balaclavas…)

  • Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event (Clare Malone)

• The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project - Culiacán Dispatch: The Mexican City Torn Apart By the Sinaloa Cartel’s Bloody Civil War (Silber Meza)

• The Washington Post -

  • How Grievance Splintered American Sports (Jerry Brewer)

  • México’s new leader is a climate expert. Can she save an oil nation? (Mary Beth Sheridan, Dino Grandoni and Lorena Rios)

• The New York Times -

  • How Cheerleading Became So Acrobatic, Dangerous and Popular (David Gauvey Herbert)

  • 200 Years Later, Still Trying to Define the Midwest (Emily Schmall and Sara Ruberg)

  • Wall St. Is Minting Easy Money From Risky Loans. What Could Go Wrong? (Rob Copeland and Maureen Farrell)

• The Atlantic -

  • The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books (Rose Horowitch)

  • You’ll Miss Sports Journalism When It’s Gone (Keith O’Brien)

  • You Think You’re So Heterodox (Hellen Lewis)

  • Why the EPA Backed Down (Vann R. Newkirk II)

  • Trump Has Found the Media’s Biggest Vulnerability (Jonathan Chait)

• Esquire - The World’s Best Athletes Tell Her Everything (Josh Rosenberg)

• Vulture - “Irish Wish” Is a Crypto-Fascist, AI-Generated Harbinger of Doom (Rachel Handler)

  • A hilarious take on the soapy AI-generated, G-rated rom-coms Netflix continues to pump out.

Podcasts, Books, Films, TV

• The Daily - “The Interview:” Sally Rooney Thinks Career Growth Is Overrated

• Serial Productions and The New York Times - The Good Whale (Daniel Alarcón)

• This American Life - Must Be Rats on the Brain

• “Small Things Like These” (Claire Keegan)

• “Big Fan: A Modern Romance” (Alexandra Romanoff)

• “Say Nothing: A true story of murder and memory in Northern Ireland” (Patrick Radden Keefe; Hulu)

• “UNCROPPED” - A documentary about Village Voice photojournalist James Hamilton

• Bloomberg Originals - How Private Equity Ate Britain

Substack

• Sports Politika - When Years of Journalism Disappear in Minutes (Karim Zidan)

  • Anything from Karim is worth your time.

• From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy - What Was ‘Parts Unknown’? (Alicia Kennedy)

• Personal Canon - Research As Leisure Activity (Celine Nguyen)

• Slouching Towards Bethnal Green - In the 2000s, every female rom-com lead was a journo. In 2024, there’s nothing romantic about that (Gillian Orr)

• Neil’s Substack - When Did “The Nerds” Start Ruining Each Sport? (Neil Paine)

• Trying in Public - You Can’t See Me, But I Can Make You Rich (Lexi Merrit)