Your motorsport coverage is only as good as your passion
Plus, questions to help you think about why you want to write
Digital media is experiencing an entropic death at the hands of ever-changing SEO guidelines, shock “journalism,” and AI slop, but despite all of that, people still reach out fairly regularly to ask me how to get a leg up in the world of motorsport journalism. They've seen people writing about race car. They like race car. Elizabeth, how do I also write about race car? And for all of the bullshit that makes the very act of publishing work online a horrifying slog, my answer remains pretty much the same: Find your passion, and master it.
I think people hear that and go, “Well, Elizabeth, I'm passionate about motorsport, so that's pretty easy!” But, respectfully, if that's your mindset then you're never going to create work that people give a damn about with any kind of regularity or intention. You might stumble on a banger every now and then, but you'll spend the rest of your career trying to figure out what clicked.
When I say “find your passion,” I mean really dig in. You like motorsport — but why? You want to write about motorsport — but why? What kind of motorsport? What's your angle? Why should people care what you have to say? You should be able to articulate some kind of answer.
The world of digital racing coverage is vast and seemingly endless, which is the result of our current media environment. Unfortunately, the whole goal of publishing on the internet is to write as much stuff as possible as frequently as possible, to cater your posts or blogs to the latest Google SEO update, to try to beat 500 other publications a piece of breaking news that it feels like everyone learned about before you did, to take a five-word quote and transform it into a full story because it's February and it's the off season and nothing new has happened.
And it's so easy to get swept up in that. If you're writing about motorsport, I think it's really easy to tell yourself, “But this is the coolest job in the world!” — because, yes, it absolutely does rip when you get your first media credentials, when you can talk to the drivers you've admired, and when you can spend your day thinking about a thing you love more than anything in the world. A lot of people get bogged down here. For a lot of people, I'm sure this is more than enough, because it's better than whatever retail job they had before. But you also have to make peace with the fact that you are inevitably one of thousands of similar journalists, and you will always be competing with those others to write what will effectively be the same stories. Over and over and over.
A word of warning before I get further: Not everyone wants to go deeper. Not everyone has something more to say. That's fine, because you can still make a living being one of the thousands of folks writing articles like “2025 Australian Grand Prix: How to Watch.” But if you want to stand out, or do something cool, or talk about the parts of motorsport that you specifically enjoy, then you need to sit down and really ask yourself how you specifically can do that.
A few questions for aspiring motorsport journalists to ask themselves:
Why do you like racing? Be specific. If your answer is something along the lines of “it's cool” or “I like fast cars,” then try again. Dig deeper.
When you first got into racing, what appealed to you? Again, be specific. Did you like the personalities you saw on Drive to Survive? Did you grow up fascinated by tandem drafting in NASCAR? Did you think Rick Mears was the coolest guy in the world?
What appeals to you now? If your answer remains the same, that's fine! If it has evolved, that's fine, too.
What's your favorite discipline? Your favorite team? Who's your favorite driver? What livery do you like best? I don't care if you're trying to be objective as a journalist; objectivity mostly doesn't exist, and also, pinpointing the shit you care about is a great way to find interesting topics to write about.
Outside of motorsport, what do you care about? Did you study business in college? Do you like surrealist literature? Are you a devotee of the Real Housewives franchises?
What do you know more about than anyone else? This can be motorsport related, or it can focus on something else.
If someone asked you to write a 500-word feature, right now, with no prep, what could you write about?
What motorsport topics are ignored? And why do you think that is?
What big questions do you have about motorsport? I don't care if you think you're an expert; there's something you don't know.
What elements of motorsport fascinate you the most? Engineering? Logistics? Interpersonal drama? History? Sponsorships?
What specific examples of motorsport journalism have stuck with you? Why did they stick with you? I'm talking specific stories. Kate Wagner's piece on the excess of the US Grand Prix. An article you read about Stirling Moss. A biography that changed the way you think. A specific edition of Engine Failure by Lily Herman.
What journalists do you admire? And why? I think it can be really easy to say, “Oh, I love Marshall Pruett!” without ever interrogating what you think of his writing. Do you admire the way he puts words on the page — or do you admire the connections he has?
Why should people read what you have to say?
You should be able to answer all of these questions. You probably won't be able to.
During my final months at Jalopnik, I was assigned the role of feature editor. That was low-key a dream come true for me, because that's exactly the kind of work I love to do, and I wanted to see what my colleagues would come up with given the space to open up.
I sent them a questionnaire similar to the one above (albeit a little more general to the automotive world as a whole) and asked them to really take the time to fill it out before I scheduled one-on-one meetings with them to talk about their answers. My hope was that it would jog their memories, revitalize their passions, and encourage them to dream a little bigger than they were able to on the news grind.
Most of my writers could not answer the questions. They didn't think they knew more about a topic than anyone else. They didn't really have hobbies. Their big questions were so general that it would have been impossible to pursue an answer. They didn't admire any other writers, they couldn't pinpoint specific stories that they enjoyed, and they didn't feel like they could write a feature about anything without any research.
The writers that could answer the questions were the ones with compelling, unique ideas that only they could write. They had ideas for features that would have explored a specific way that their identity had intersected with the automotive world, and they were able to draw on their outside interests or previous experiences to pitch me something fantastic.
I think it goes without saying that the writers that couldn't answer the questions had nothing substantial to pitch in our meeting. Some of them pitched stories that other people had already written, and written so well that there wasn't much to add. Some of them pitched ideas so broad that they had no clear entry point into the research, because there was no angle. Some of them pitched stories that depended so heavily on someone else's participation that the whole thing would never get off the ground unless they had a connection to that person, which they didn't. Some of them straight-up admitted that they didn't think they were good for anything but news, and that they were still surprised that they had gotten hired in the first place.
It was an eye opening experience. I kind of took for granted that people got into writing because they had things to say, but in those conversations, I quickly learned that a lot of my coworkers liked the lifestyle. They got paid well to talk shit about a piece of breaking Tesla news, and they got to travel on the dime of automakers, and they could work from home, and they got to tell people that they wrote for a once-edgy publication, thereby making them a Cool And Interesting Person just for working there. They were generally the same folks who didn't bring their laptops on a work trip because they didn't want to, y'know, work.
There are plenty of opportunities out there for people who just want that lifestyle. I will also probably never point to one of their stories and say, “That made me think. That taught me something. That was fascinating.”
If you want to write those thoughtful, informative, fascinating stories, you need to probe deep into your psyche to figure out why you want to do that, and critically, what you want to say, and even more critically, why you are the right person to say it. If that feels self-indulgent, then you're doing something right.
At the risk of being overly self-indulgent: Allow me to use myself as an example.
I'm an American woman who likes Formula 1. I'm a racing fan that likes history, generally. I come from a creative writing background, so I find stories in everything. If I wasn't writing about racing, then I'd still be doing the research I'm already doing, because I inherently find it interesting and valuable. I like to understand why things are the way they are.
Over time, I've experimented with a few different ways to combine all those passions and to turn them into work that I am proud of and that is also fulfilling. “Deadly Passions, Terrible Joys” is kind of the apotheosis of those interests, because:
I love research-intensive, long-form work
I love connecting motorsport history to modern motorsport and showing people why the past matters
I love connecting motorsport history to global history to help explain why, say, American motorsport evolved so differently than European motorsport
I love that I get to talk about the things that interest me most, in ways that I hope will interest other people
I love telling stories
I love doing work that satisfies me
I dedicated a lot of time and energy into researching these topics, and I love that I've been able to integrate them into my career
I won't claim I'm the number-one expert on anything (I am 28 years old with so much to learn and do and see and think about, and many more mistakes to make), but I've been talking about the same things with enough regularity and depth that when someone says, “I don't understand why the Indy 500 was part of the early F1 calendar,” someone else will say, “Ask Elizabeth!” I've told enough interesting stories that someone can look at an episode of my podcast, know absolutely nothing about the topic, and say, “I'll still listen, because I know Elizabeth will teach me something.” That's the most satisfying result I could imagine. That's how I'd define good motorsport journalism.
I didn't get to that point because I only wrote SEO grabs and rehashes of press releases — though I have done, and still do, a lot of that. (I am still trying to make money to pay my bills, after all.) I got there because I regularly ask myself a lot of hard questions about the value of my work and the enjoyment I get from it. When I read a story that blows my mind, I try to figure out how I can elicit that own response in my work. It's an ever-evolving process that I find as much enjoyment in as I do in the act of writing itself. And if you want to do work that matters to you — whether it's focused on motorsport or on wine or on celebrity gossip — then I'd recommend you get comfortable with a little self-interrogation.