Mix brand-nervous Central Europe with motor racing and this is what you get, a young woman with a Ferrari logo tattooed on her back, photographed at the 2008 Hungarian Grand Prix. This has interesting cultural implications for the future of Formula One, which is increasingly the plaything of billionaires and oil countries with no roots in motorsports.
“When deep space exploration ramps up, it’ll be the corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Microsoft Galaxy. Planet Starbucks,” may have been nothing but an ironic line in the 1999 movie Fight Club, but it’s the reality of modern Formula One, where the defending champion is a vanity team named after an Austrian billionaire’s energy drink company.
What’s next for our anonymous heroine’s shoulders if and when she tires of Maranello’s best and brightest? Will it be a Red Bull tattoo? The outlines of Venezuela? Carlos Slim Helú’s mustache?
Photo by Cameron Rogers