BEST OF TIMES, WORST OF TIMES
Motor Trend|March 2021
THAT CRAZY YEAR IN WHICH A SMALLER FIELD MADE THINGS HARDER
JONNY LIEBERMAN
BEST OF TIMES, WORST OF TIMES

Take a moment to realize how fortunate we are to have written this story because there was a very real chance that the 2020 edition of MotorTrend Best Driver’s Car wouldn’t happen.

This year, as you may well have noticed, things are a little different. Even though we started running BDC on October 11, I’m going to back up this narrative by six months to March 11, the day Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19 and the NBA postponed the season. Call it the billion-dollar canary in the coal mine.

If something as massive and all-encompassing as professional basketball could be paused just like that, our little supercar festival was surely doomed. We started hearing murmurs, then reality set in. First BDC was postponed, then budgets were slashed, then we found we had no sponsor. Time was running out. What we’d come to expect from BDC would be no more.

Of course, more important than the financial picture was the safety of our team of road testers, editors, photographers, videographers, track workers, and manufacturers’ support staff in the midst of a pandemic. Could we pull this off even if we wanted to?

This story is from the March 2021 edition of Motor Trend.

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This story is from the March 2021 edition of Motor Trend.

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