Motorsports as Popular Culture as Politics: Le Mans, F1, and Video Games DANIEL S. TRABER C ROSSING THE FINISH LINE FIRST IS ALWAYS THE PRIMARY GOAL OF racing, but motorsports itself consists of a heterogeneous assortment of vehicle types, track designs, and rules particular to a specific professional series, hence Formula One is unlike NAS- CAR which is unlike the World Endurance Championship. This diversity also applies to the forms motorsport-based products can take as popular culture. Yet, short of researching NASCAR fans, scholars have largely passed by racing or racing-themed subjects, including analyzing them as vehicles for political messaging. To counter this, I consider how the ideology of neoliberalism infiltrates three types of racing texts in legible, if indirect, ways. Taking a less direct path, I bookend an actual racing series, Formula One (F1), with the represen- tations of racing found in the film Le Mans and video games. These are distinctly different cultural mediums, arranged to flow topically: first, the film is used to raise the point of examining politics through racing popular culture; next, the issue of globalization is viewed through F1; finally, real racing leads to its simulated form in video games to consider the lesson of social control transmitted through the depiction of driving physics. Much scholarship has been devoted to neoliberalism, yet David Harvey still offers one of the best summaries of the concept: A theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepre- neurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework char- acterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 51, No. 2, 2018 © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 466