Telling It Like It Is

I started in journalism a disturbingly long time ago, when truth and fairness were the ultimate arbiters of what you wrote. Balance was a professional discipline, and so therefore was research.

Years later, after writing advertising features and copy, where the rules were shaped a little differently, I got back into research, which is probably the part of the whole publishing process that I enjoy the most. Looking for incontrovertible truth, empirical facts, became pretty much my thing.

I started writing for car magazines around 25 years ago, and really invested in my research. I bought books by the metre, but even that wasn’t the answer. A lot of them were contradictory. Some of my car stories followed Pebble Beach restorations, and you could be following one of those for literally years, but they were always fascinating, nuanced stories of a time gone by.

The reason I stopped writing for magazines, was literally because of research.

In one instance I was following the restoration of a 1960 Ferrari 250 SWB — one of Ferrari’s greatest competition cars, at least prior to the famous 250 GTO. Only 51 of these magnificent machines were ever made, the last recorded sales was for US$17 million. They’ve been studied and written about from every angle.

Finding “new” material on a 60-year old car, about which entire books have been dedicated, is pretty unlikely. But I had managed it.

In the course of this restoration the first owner, Georges Arents, who'd driven the car to a win in the Grand Prix de Pescara in Italy, wrote a letter to the second Owner, and it came in the documentation with the car. In the letter, Arents related how on the Pescara GP, a 16.4 mile road race through one city, two villages, some delightful bends and more than four miles running adjacent to the Adriatic, the hand of fate single-handedly improved the aerodynamics of his Ferrari.

Despite early problems with the stability of the car, with virtually nowhere else to overtake, Arents settled for passing on one of the long, downhill runs to the coastline, when his hood latch broke. It should have spelled disaster for Arents. High pressure air from the front of the car forced the rear of the open hood up, now being held in place only by small leather belts. In spite of the impending jeopardy, Arents immediately noticed “the rear of the car settled down, and the cross-wind became non-existent.”

At a stop, Arents crudely improvised some air vents, behind the front wheels in the wings of his Ferrari, to relieve the air pressure. That seemed to solve the stability problem, and he promptly won the GT class of the GP di Pescara.

Later, he approached Ferrari engineer Carlo Chiti, and in his faltering Italian, tried to explain the difference that the “broken” hood latch had made to the handling of the car. Back at the factory those improvised vents were tidied up, and started to appear behind the front wheels of not just subsequent 250 SWBs, but also GTOs and countless other Ferraris of the era.? “Cross my heart etc,” wrote Arents, “the shape of the GTO is based on a broken hood latch at il gran premio di Pescara …”

That’s the sort of stuff you couldn’t make up. I didn’t have to.

New information like that was pretty much the whole job to me. If you can’t add anything to the body of knowledge that’s out there, why bother? I had a copy of Arents’ letter ...

The Publisher submitted my story to a self-proclaimed expert to fact-check, who said it couldn’t be published, because he’d been unable to find any reference to Arents’ story elsewhere. Even Arents’ letter did nothing to sway this self-proclaimed “expert.” I followed that job for months, and yet I could have written the story they finally published without leaving my couch. I was furious. One day, I thought, I’ll publish my own stories again.

It was the first time, but by no means the last time I’ve been challenged on my research, and to be honest, I kind of enjoy it. It’s the “make my day” moment my life. The entire point of research is to bring stories, facts, narrative to the fore. If you can’t add anything to the debate, sit back and try and learn something. There’s so much poorly researched and loosely written crap circulating, and some of that quickly becomes folklore. That’s the very reason I restored hundreds of machines in researching “Machines That Count.” There was so much contradictory information out there. Say what you like about Windows 1.0, or BeOs, or NeXTSTEP, but I’ve yet to meet anyone else that’s had them all running on their original hardware.

I’m well into writing and publishing now, and I’m lucky to be able to go wherever the research takes me. I’m writing in an era of unprecedented access to information, and I expect to uncover information for the first time. Research is a bit like Gold mining, as it turns out. When you see a seam, you chase it down with all the resources at your disposal, until you arrive at the truth. One of my pet projects involves a 142-year-old court case, faithfully reported verbatim.

The benefit of being in charge of the entire process, is that in the end, you really can, tell it like it is. That’s what I’m doing for people at NR8Media — narrative. Other people’s stories, the way they want to hear them told. Everyone has a story, and so many of them are really rich narratives you just couldn’t make up. I don’t have to. I can tell it like it is.