“Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. … It’s not going to happen.” That’s what Regina George, the meanest girl in 2004’s Mean Girls, tells a hanger-on who is hoping to gain favor by coining a synonym for “cool.” While “fetch” never happened, the admonishing phrase certainly did, escaping the movie and becoming a meme for all the hoped-for but eventually hopeless things — Google+, Android tablets — that the general public simply doesn’t want. 

In October of 2022, the “W Series,” a free-to-enter, female-only open-wheel racing league using Formula 3 cars two levels below the F1 cars you see on Drive to Survive, canceled the rest of its season and declared bankruptcy. The raison d’etre of the W Series had been somewhere between logically dubious and downright stupid. Its logic had been, in essence, this: The only way to ensure women can compete against men at the highest levels of motorsport is to make sure they don’t have to compete against men on the way there. Much of the racing world looked at its failure and said something along the lines of “Stop trying to make women’s-only pro racing happen. It’s not going to happen.”