Chequered Past

The 17th of June has seen some of the most improbable results in the history of Le Mans.In 1933, Tazio Nuvolari and Raymond Sommer led the race in an Alfa Romeo — until the fuel tank started leaking. What followed involved makeshift repairs, borrowed chewing gum from a rival pit, and one of the most dramatic last laps the circuit had ever seen. In 1939, a single Bugatti Type 57C Tank — one car, entered alone — took on the field in what would prove to be the last Le Mans before the Second World War. Jean-Pierre Wimille and Pierre Veyron drove it to victory. Eight weeks later, Jean Bugatti was dead. The race would not return for a decade.In 1995, McLaren arrived at Le Mans for the first time with a car designed for the road. Seven F1 GTRs entered, one of them a last-minute works entry assembled around a Japanese sponsor nobody else would take. In the rain, against purpose-built prototypes, they were extraordinary. The winning crew of Dalmas, Lehto and Sekiya made history.And in 2017, the number two Porsche 919 Hybrid rejoined the race on Saturday evening from 56th place, eighteen laps behind the leader. By Sunday afternoon, it had won.Cover image: By Martin Lee  - The wining Mclaren F1 GTR #59 of Yannick Dalmas, Masanori Sekiya & J.J.Lehto at Ford Chicane at Le Mans 1995, CC BY-SA 2.0, LinkSend us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

16th June is a date that has delivered some of motorsport's most extraordinary stories. In 1984, Porsche made the remarkable decision to boycott their own sport's most prestigious race — and the privateers they left behind produced one of the great Le Mans comebacks. In 2007, a technological watershed: the first time two diesel prototypes went head to head at La Sarthe, in a battle between Audi and Peugeot that would define a decade of endurance racing. And in 2018, a Japanese manufacturer entered Le Mans for the twentieth time — carrying the weight of two consecutive heartbreaks — and faced the race that had always found a way to deny them.Cover Image: By Fabrice Pluchet, CC BY-SA 4.0, LinkSend us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

Five races. Ninety years. One date.The fifteenth of June has a habit of producing the unexpected at Le Mans. In 1929, Bentley arrived to collect what they’d already won twice before — and they did, but not without being made to work for it. In 1935, Alfa Romeo’s pursuit of a fifth consecutive win ended when their lead driver was given the wrong information by his own pit crew, and a Lagonda running on its last drops of oil took the prize. In 1985, a customer car humiliated the factory, driven in part by a man racing under a false name. In 1996, a car built from a mothballed Jaguar chassis beat the full Porsche works effort, and handed the win to the youngest driver ever to win Le Mans. And in 2019, a wiring error made before the race started determined who finished first.Chequered Past is a podcast about motorsport history. Find us at linktr.ee/chequeredpastpod.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

Four races. Four dates. All June the fourteenth.In 1924, a privately entered Bentley fought three works Lorraine-Dietrichs through brutal heat to give the British marque its first Le Mans victory. In 1952, a Frenchman named Pierre Levegh drove alone for nearly twenty-three hours — and came within one hour of winning the race by himself. In 1969, Jacky Ickx walked to his car in protest, started last, and won the closest finish in the race's history. And in 1980, Jean Rondeau won Le Mans in a car bearing his own nameCover image: By ZANTAFIO56 - 24 heures du MANS 1969, CC BY-SA 2.0, LinkSend us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

Three races share the 13th of June. Three times, the result confounded expectations.In 1953, Tony Rolt and Duncan Hamilton spent the night in a French bar after being disqualified before the race had started. By Sunday afternoon they had won — at the first average speed of over 100 miles per hour in Le Mans history — in a Jaguar C-Type running disc brakes for the first time in competition.In 1970, the dominant JW Automotive Gulf Porsches of Jo Siffert and Pedro Rodriguez were eliminated by driver error and mechanical failure through a rain-soaked night. What was left was a race of survival. Of 51 starters, only seven cars were classified. The winner was a car that had qualified fifteenth, driven by a man who had promised his wife he would retire the moment he won Le Mans.In 1987, a change in fuel specification destroyed most of Porsche's own fleet within the first hour. Jaguar, who had won the four preceding championship rounds, appeared set to end Porsche's six-year winning streak — until a tyre failure at 230 miles per hour changed the course of the race. One Porsche survived. It was enough.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On the twelfth of June, across seventy-three years of motorsport history, Le Mans produced four races that refused to deliver the winner anyone expected. In 1926, Bentley ended up in a sandbank in the final half-hour while their competitor locked out the podium. In 1954, Ferrari held on by less than five kilometres after an engine that wouldn't fire at a pit stop nearly handed the race to Jaguar. In 1971, a car nobody expected to win set a distance record that stood for thirty-nine years — then its driver lost his career to a stone the following season. And in 1999, the most competitive grid Le Mans had ever seen produced one of its most dramatic finishes. Cover image: By Martin Lee - BMW V12 LMR - Pierluigi Martini, Yannick Dalmas & Joachim Winkelhock head towards Dunlop Bridge at the 1999 Le Mans, CC BY-SA 2.0, LinkSend us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

The eleventh of June appears more than once in the history of the twenty-four hours of Le Mans — and the first of those appearances casts a shadow over everything that follows.In 1955, a crash in the third hour of the race killed more than eighty people and changed motorsport forever. This episode examines what happened, why the race continued, and what the disaster set in motion — in the regulations, in the circuit design, and in the sport’s long, slow reckoning with the question of safety.The three races that follow show how Le Mans evolved in the decades after. In 1977, a Porsche that should have been out of contention — damaged, running deep in the field — became the first car shared by three drivers to win Le Mans outright. In 1988, Jaguar ended seven consecutive Porsche victories on a gearbox held together by the torque of its engine and the nerve of its driver — while elsewhere on the same circuit, a Frenchman quietly broke the four hundred kilometre an hour barrier on the Mulsanne Straight, setting a record that can never be beaten. And in 2011, two of the most violent accidents in the modern race’s history produced something the crowd in 1955 could not have imagined: both drivers walked away.Four races. One date. And a thread running through all of them that begins in the worst moment in the sport’s history and ends, fifty-six years later, with two drivers climbing out of cars that had been destroyed at three hundred kilometres an hour.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

Before the races, the circuit. Before the results, the race itself.This opening episode of Chequered Past’s Le Mans series sets the scene for everything that follows — examining what the twenty-four hours of Le Mans actually is, what it has always been, and why it continues to matter in a way that no other race quite does.From its founding in 1923 as a test of reliability rather than outright speed, through the manufacturer battles that brought Ford, Ferrari, Jaguar and Porsche to the Circuit de la Sarthe with reputations and fortunes at stake, to the privateer teams who arrived with neither and occasionally beat everyone anyway — Le Mans has always asked a different question to the rest of motorsport. Not which car is fastest, but which car keeps going.This episode also considers what the race has meant to the drivers who defined it — among them Jacky Ickx, Tom Kristensen and Graham Hill, the only man in history to have won what is informally known as motorsport’s Triple Crown — and what it withheld from those it never quite rewarded, however much their speed deserved it.And it acknowledges, plainly, that this series will not look away from the darker chapters of Le Mans history. That history is part of what the race is. The episodes that follow will show why.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On 31st May 1959, Jo Bonnier won BRM's first Grand Prix at Zandvoort in a car the team had already started replacing. In 1981, Gilles Villeneuve won at Monaco in a turbo that everyone agreed couldn't win there. In 1987, Ayrton Senna won Monaco's first active-suspension Grand Prix in a Lotus that was supposed to be outgunned. And in 1992, Nigel Mansell lost the race he had controlled for seventy laps to a loose wheel nut that Williams had spent five years ensuring could never happen again. Four races. Four dates. Four times the sport was certain — and four times it was wrong. This is also episode 365 of Chequered Past — the last date, and the end of Series 1. Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

The thirtieth of May has appeared on the Formula One World Championship calendar more times than almost any other date — and it has never produced a quiet afternoon.In this episode of Chequered Past, we follow four stories across seven decades. In Monaco in 1965, Graham Hill took to the escape road on lap twenty-five and came back to win his third consecutive Grand Prix at the principality, while Jim Clark was making history at Indianapolis the following day. For eleven years between 1950 and 1960, the Indianapolis 500 sat inside the World Championship as an official round — a strange arrangement that produced Vukovich and Ruttman and Hanks and Pat O’Connor, and ended quietly in 1960 with no Formula One driver present. In Monaco in 1976, Niki Lauda won from pole for his fifth victory of the season and extended a championship lead that looked unassailable — though none of us watching could have known what was coming at the Nürburgring ten weeks later. And in Istanbul in 2010, Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel collided while running first and second for Red Bull, handed McLaren a 1-2, and planted the seed of a bitterness that would take years to fully bloom.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On the twenty-ninth of May, Formula One has been decided in the pit lane more than once. In 1960, Stirling Moss brought a Rob Walker Lotus to the pits in Monaco running on three cylinders — and went on to win, delivering Lotus their first World Championship victory through a private entry in the wrong colours. In 2022, Charles Leclerc qualified on pole for his home race and lost it in two laps of strategic confusion that handed the race to Sergio Pérez and the season to Red Bull. And in 2016, a pit crew who weren’t ready cost Daniel Ricciardo a win he had controlled from the start.Hear all these stories in today’s Chequered Past.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

The 28th of May appears four times in Formula One's history as a date that produced not just results, but questions — the kind that follow drivers and teams for years without ever reaching a clean answer.In Mexico City in 1989, Alain Prost finished fifth, lapped by his McLaren teammate Ayrton Senna, and left the circuit carrying a suspicion about his Honda engine that he would never fully let go of. Whether he was right has never been established. Whether it mattered is a different question entirely.In Monaco in 1995, Michael Schumacher outthought Damon Hill on strategy — a one-stop gamble against a two-stop plan — and won by thirty-four seconds. Hill acknowledged they had got it wrong. The suspicion, in hindsight, was quieter: had Williams ever really given themselves a chance?In Monaco in 2006, Schumacher parked his Ferrari at Rascasse in the final seconds of qualifying, bringing out yellow flags and aborting Fernando Alonso's pole lap. The stewards concluded it was deliberate. Schumacher maintained it was a mistake. The suspicion has never gone away.And in Monaco in 2017, Ferrari kept Sebastian Vettel out five laps longer than his teammate Kimi Räikkönen, and Vettel emerged from his pit stop ahead. Ferrari called it strategy. Räikkönen said second place didn't feel awfully good. The suspicion, as ever, was left to the listener.This is Chequered Past — the podcast about the stories behind the results. The ones the sport never quite explained.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

There are dates in the Formula One calendar that give you one story. And then there are dates that seem to have been waiting — accumulating history across decades, storing it up, until you can’t look at them without seeing everything at once.The 27th of May is one of those dates.This episode of Chequered Past takes three races — separated by nearly thirty years at their extremes — and asks what Monaco does to a driver that no other circuit can. Not what it demands technically, but what it finds. Because Monaco doesn’t just test pace. It tests what you’re carrying. And on the 27th of May, across 1990, 2007, and 2018, three drivers arrived at the Principality with something to prove, something to settle, or something to survive — and the circuit gave each of them exactly what they’d earned.We begin, briefly, in a forest north of Bern. May 27th, 1951. The second season of the Formula One World Championship, and the first wet race it had ever seen.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

Monaco doesn’t simply produce the fastest driver — it produces the one who belongs there. On the twenty-sixth of May, across 1963, 1968, 1974, 2002 and 2024, five races asked that question in five different ways. Graham Hill won here twice on this date, carrying a broken team through grief in 1968. Ronnie Peterson drove a four-year-old Lotus to victory over the finest cars of 1974. David Coulthard held off Michael Schumacher in Ferrari’s most dominant season. And in 2024, Charles Leclerc — Monégasque, haunted by near-misses, carrying the memory of people who never saw it — finally won his home race.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On May the twenty-fifth, across four decades of Formula 1, the world championship changed hands. Four times. Four drivers. One date.In 1975, Niki Lauda drove a controlled, clinical race at Zolder and went to the top of a championship he would never relinquish — while a sport still reeling from the deaths at Montjuïc Park tried to look forward rather than back. In 1986, Nigel Mansell won at Spa and dedicated his victory to Elio de Angelis, killed eleven days earlier in a testing accident that should never have happened. In 1997, Jacques Villeneuve took the championship lead at Barcelona — but the afternoon belonged to a Frenchman on Bridgestone tyres, charging from twelfth, closing a gap that other people kept reopening.And in 2008, Lewis Hamilton turned a puncture at Tabac into the foundation for the most important win of his career. Monaco. Rain. A fuel call that changed everything.Four races. Four new leaders. This is what May the twenty-fifth looked like.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On the 24th of May, three Monaco Grands Prix separated by seventeen years each asked the same question of the teams on the pit wall — and got three very different answers. In 1998, Mika Häkkinen and McLaren answered it perfectly, delivering a grand chelem while the field destroyed itself around them.In 2009, Ross Brawn's improbable championship-leading team answered it with patience and precision, running Jenson Button to a fifth win in six races. In 2015, Mercedes got it wrong — a single miscalculation on lap sixty-five handing Nico Rosberg a race that Lewis Hamilton had led by nineteen seconds.Elsewhere in the episode: Jim Clark's dominant, wire-to-wire victory at the 1964 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, and a birthday tribute to Ivan Capelli — the Italian who stood on the Estoril podium in 1988, discovered he had a retroactive one from Spa he never knew about, and then led forty-five laps of the 1990 French Grand Prix before an oil warning light took it all away. Cover image: By Kd1980 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, LinkSend us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

The 23rd of May has a habit of producing extraordinary racing at Monaco. Three times across three different decades, the same date has delivered three completely different kinds of grand prix.In 1971, Jackie Stewart arrived already leading the championship and proceeded to give a clinic in perfection. He took pole by more than a second, led every one of the eighty laps, set the fastest lap, and won by twenty-five seconds. Around him, a twenty-seven-year-old Ronnie Peterson was making his way through the field in a way that announced he would be a name to watch.In 1982, the Monaco Grand Prix became known as the race nobody wanted to win. Four drivers led in the final three laps. Alain Prost crashed. Riccardo Patrese spun and stalled. Didier Pironi stopped in the tunnel on the last lap. Andrea de Cesaris stopped at Casino Square, out of fuel. Patrese, having bump-started his Brabham, came through to win his first Formula One Grand Prix — without knowing he'd won it.In 1993, Ayrton Senna claimed his sixth Monaco victory, breaking Graham Hill's record that had stood since 1969. Second place went to Damon Hill. The son of the man whose record had just been broken. Same date. Same place. Never the same race twice. Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On 22 May 1955, Maurice Trintignant — a Provençal winegrower's son who had once been declared clinically dead and carried a stuffed teddy bear in the pocket of every racing car he ever drove — became the first Frenchman to win a World Championship Grand Prix. He did it because the Mercedes-Benz juggernaut collapsed, and because Alberto Ascari — the two-time world champion who had been about to inherit the lead — drove into Monaco harbour on lap 81 and sank to the bottom. Ascari walked away. Four days later he was dead.This episode tells the story of that race in full — and three others on the same date: Jackie Stewart winning in 1966 as the new 3-litre formula produced just four finishers; Jody Scheckter and Walter Wolf's five-month-old team beating the world in 1977; Kimi Räikkönen winning wire-to-wire in 2005 while a championship leader burned his tyres to nothing and an Australian finally stood on a Formula One podium for the first time. Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On the 21st of May, Formula One has produced three races that looked, at the time, like any other Sunday — and only revealed their true significance long after the chequered flag.In 1950, at the second round of the very first World Championship, a freak wave of seawater soaked the road at Monaco's Tabac corner and wiped out half the field in an instant. Juan Manuel Fangio survived — not because of luck, but because he noticed something no one else did. In 1978 at Zolder, Mario Andretti took the wheel of a car that would change Formula One forever, and his teammate Ronnie Peterson honoured a contract that would define both their seasons. And in 2000 at the Nürburgring, Michael Schumacher raced in the rain nineteen days after his rival survived a plane crash — and turned a championship on its head.Three dates. Three pivots. One episode.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On 20th May, Formula 1 has a habit of making history. In 1962, Jim Clark arrived at Zandvoort with a car that would change the sport forever — even though it didn't win. In 1973, the drivers arrived at a brand new circuit with a surface that was falling apart, and said: we're not racing. Most of them meant it. In 1984, Niki Lauda started ninth at Dijon and won — which was entirely typical of a season decided by half a point. And on this date in 1975, a boy was born in Norwich whose family name was already woven into the fabric of Formula 1.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On the nineteenth of May, three times across four decades, Monaco did what Monaco does. It destroyed the favourites and handed the race to someone else.Stirling Moss, Peter Collins and Mike Hawthorn — three of the fastest drivers in the world — eliminate each other at the same chicane on the same lap. Juan Manuel Fangio threads through the wreckage at low speed and wins by going slower than everyone else. He is forty-five years old, in his final championship season, and he barely breaks a sweat.Ayrton Senna takes pole position in the Lotus, leads with authority, and retires on lap fourteen when his Renault engine detonates — the victim of an accidental over-rev in Sunday morning warm-up. Alain Prost starts fifth, waits, manages, and inherits the race that should never have been his. He wins with a sticking wastegate and a broken car. He wins because he is still there.Michael Schumacher crashes alone on lap one, from pole position. Damon Hill leads by thirty seconds and retires with a failed oil pump on lap forty-one. Jean Alesi inherits the lead and retires with broken suspension on lap sixty. When the two-hour limit ends the race after seventy-five laps, three cars take the chequered flag. One of them belongs to Olivier Panis, who started fourteenth. He has just won the only Grand Prix of his career, in a Ligier, on fumes, by refusing to stop.Three races. Three dates. One circuit. Monaco doesn't care who qualified fastest, who has the best car, or who leads with twenty laps to go. It has its own ideas about who deserves to win.The race destroys its favourites. The patient, the composed, the ones still moving at the end — those are the ones it crowns.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On 18th May 1952, Piero Taruffi won the Swiss Grand Prix at Bremgarten after a former champion's Ferrari failed — twice. On 18th May 1958, Maurice Trintignant won at Monaco after every faster car in the field broke before half distance. On 18th May 1969, Graham Hill took his record fifth Monaco victory after the championship leader, his own teammate, and the second-place Ferrari all retired mechanical failures within six laps of each other. On 18th May 1980, Carlos Reutemann inherited the Monaco lead when the dominant Didier Pironi clipped a barrier in the rain with twenty-two laps to go.Four races. Four eras. The same result each time.This episode of Chequered Past follows all four afternoons in detail — from the forest circuit at Bremgarten that no longer exists, through the darkest season in Monaco's history, to the regulatory drama of 1969 when a governing body banned an entire category of aerodynamic device mid-weekend, and on to the political turmoil of 1980 when Formula One's off-track war was as fierce as anything happening on it.Along the way: Graham Hill's debut at the circuit he would come to define. Jochen Rindt's open letter to the sport calling for wings to be banned — published five days after Monaco. The last championship race for Cooper. The first podium for Frank Williams as a constructor. And four winners who all shared one thing: they didn't win by being fastest. They won by still being there.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

Three Formula One races share the date of May the seventeenth. Each one is a story in its own right. Together, they trace something larger.In 1981, the Belgian Grand Prix at Zolder was overshadowed before it began — a mechanic killed in practice, another seriously injured at the start, and a race that should never have been run. In 1987, Spa-Francorchamps witnessed the most explosive flashpoint of the Mansell-Senna rivalry, and a paddock confrontation that went far beyond racing. In 1992, Nigel Mansell arrived at Imola needing one more win to make history — and delivered it with the kind of authority that made the outcome feel inevitable.Running through all three races, across eleven years, is a single career. And on this date, that career tells a story of its own.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

Three races. Three decades. Three drivers who were utterly, completely, unreachably dominant on the day — and yet somehow ended up as supporting characters in their own stories.On the sixteenth of May 1976, Niki Lauda produced one of the great forgotten masterclasses of his championship season, leading every lap at Zolder for his only career Grand Chelem. On the sixteenth of May 1999, Michael Schumacher controlled Monaco from the first corner to the last, breaking Niki Lauda’s own Ferrari wins record in the process. And on the sixteenth of May 2010, Mark Webber drove a faultless race from pole to flag in Monaco — and was almost immediately upstaged by a penalty handed down in a stewards’ room.Three winners who couldn’t be touched. Three races where the real drama happened everywhere else. Chris Amon’s wheel departing at Zolder with eighteen laps to go. Mika Häkkinen sliding helplessly down the Mirabeau escape road on someone else’s oil. Jenson Button sitting stranded in a McLaren because of a foam bung the size of your fist. Michael Schumacher going for a gap at the very corner where he’d already written one of the most notorious chapters of his career.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

The fifteenth of May keeps appearing in Formula 1 history, and rarely kindly. This episode traces four events on that date across four decades: Keke Rosberg's audacious tyre gamble at the 1983 Monaco Grand Prix, Ayrton Senna's devastating retirement from a race he had dominated in 1988, Max Verstappen's record-breaking debut victory for Red Bull at the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix And the death of Elio de Angelis on 15 May 1986, thirty-nine days before his twenty-ninth birthday, in an accident that exposed everything wrong with how Formula 1 treated safety away from race weekends. Cover Image: By Lala_77 - Verstappen_Spain_2016, CC BY-SA 2.0, LinkSend us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On the fourteenth of May 1972, a Frenchman in a car nobody expected to win led every lap of the Monaco Grand Prix in continuous heavy rain. Jean-Pierre Beltoise had one Formula One World Championship victory in his career. This was it. It was also the last championship win for BRM — a team that had once been the finest in Formula One.This episode takes that race as its centrepiece and asks a question that three other races on the same calendar date help to answer: what does it actually take, at Monaco, to beat a car that should be faster than yours?Stirling Moss answered it in 1961 with a year-old Lotus against the works Ferrari. Ayrton Senna answered it in 1988 with a qualifying lap he later said he couldn't fully explain. And Michael Schumacher answered it differently in Barcelona in 1995 — not with something beyond conscious understanding, but with the right number of pit stops.Three different answers. One persistent question. This is Chequered Past.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On six different 13ths of May, Formula One revealed six very different versions of itself.This episode of Chequered Past travels from the World Championship’s beginning at Silverstone in 1950 through Monaco politics in 1956, Ferrari’s ground-effect breakthrough at Zolder in 1979, Riccardo Patrese’s long-awaited return to victory at Imola in 1990, Ferrari team orders in Austria in 2001, and Lewis Hamilton’s emergence as a championship contender in Spain in 2007.Along the way, the episode explores how Formula One evolved through engineering battles, team control, championship politics and changing technology — while many of the sport’s defining themes remained remarkably consistent across nearly sixty years.Featuring Giuseppe Farina, Juan Manuel Fangio, Stirling Moss, Jody Scheckter, Riccardo Patrese, Michael Schumacher, Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On the 12th of May 1968, Formula 1 went racing for the first time since Jim Clark died. Five weeks after Hockenheim, five days after losing another driver at Indianapolis, the sport arrived at Jarama in Spain — and Graham Hill won in a red, gold and white Lotus that had never been seen before. The day British Racing Green ended.On the 12th of May 2002, Rubens Barrichello led the Austrian Grand Prix from pole position. He didn’t win it. What happened in the final metres of the main straight that afternoon provoked a crowd to boo, a rulebook to change, and a driver to say, years later, that it made him re-think his life.On the 12th of May 2013, Fernando Alonso won the Spanish Grand Prix at home in Barcelona. Nobody knew it would be his last Formula 1 victory. He hasn’t won since.Three Sundays. One date. This is The Team Order That Changed The Rules.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

What does it mean to build something that lasts? Not a car, not a season, not a dynasty — but an institution. Something that absorbs failure, survives its founders, outlasts its rivals, and keeps coming back.This episode of Chequered Past takes a single date — the 11th of May — and follows it across six decades of Ferrari history. Four races. Four completely different eras. One unbroken thread.It starts in a paddock in Piacenza in 1947, where a brand-new manufacturer is about to enter its first competitive race — and one of the greatest drivers in Italy has just walked out in a dispute over which car he'd been given. From there it moves to the streets of Monaco in 1975, where Niki Lauda is managing a failing car in the closing laps of the race that would start a championship campaign. Then back to Monaco in 1997, where Michael Schumacher makes a tyre call in the rain that exposes the gap between Ferrari's rebuilt organisation and everyone else's. And finally to Istanbul in 2008, where Felipe Massa wins his third consecutive Turkish Grand Prix — the last great morning of Ferrari's last sustained title era.The through-line isn't victory. Ferrari lost its first race on a May 11th. What connects all four stories is something harder to define and more interesting to trace: the institutional character of a team that has entered works cars at every level of motorsport, continuously, for 79 years — longer than any other manufacturer in history.No other team has done that. Not Lotus. Not McLaren. Not Williams. Ferrari never stopped.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

Three Formula One races share an exact date — May the tenth — across eleven years. In 1959, Jack Brabham took his first Monaco victory as Stirling Moss’s transmission failed with nineteen laps to run. In 1964, Jim Clark arrived as world champion, led convincingly, and lost the race twice — first to a broken anti-roll bar requiring a pit stop, then to an oil leak in the closing laps — while Graham Hill took his second consecutive Monaco win. In 1970, Brabham led from the moment Stewart’s engine failed until the very last corner of the very last lap, when he braked too late and slid into the barrier. Jochen Rindt, in an obsolete Lotus, won in the car’s last ever World Championship victory.Chequered Past tells all three stories — and connects them through the man who runs through every one.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On May 9th 1993, at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona, three of the greatest drivers in Formula One history stood on a podium together for the only time. Alain Prost won. Ayrton Senna was second. Michael Schumacher was third. Between them, they would win fourteen world championships. At the time they had six. Within a year, the window had closed — retirement, tragedy, and time ensuring it would never happen again. This episode tells the story of that race, that podium, and why it matters. Plus: two more May 9th stories from Barcelona, in 2004 and 2010.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

We mark the eighth of May with five stories across forty-five years of Formula One.In 1977, Mario Andretti dominated Jarama while Williams Grand Prix Engineering quietly entered its first race. In 1982, Gilles Villeneuve died at Zolder following a qualifying crash with Jochen Mass. In 2005, Kimi Räikkönen won the Spanish Grand Prix at Barcelona in front of a sea of Renault blue, as Fernando Alonso's first championship began to take shape — and a child was born in Havering who would one day drive for Ferrari. In 2022, the inaugural Miami Grand Prix brought Formula One to Hard Rock Stadium with a fake marina and a real winner in Max Verstappen.And today, Oliver Bearman — born May 8th, 2005 — turns twenty-one while competing in the sport that Villeneuve helped, at great cost, to make safer. Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On the seventh of May 1967, Denny Hulme won the Monaco Grand Prix. Not far behind him, Lorenzo Bandini was dying.This episode is built around a date — the seventh of May — and four races across four decades that each forced Formula One to confront something it would rather have avoided. At the centre of it is Monaco 1967: the fire, the cameras, the race that didn't stop, and the sport that could no longer pretend.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

The sixth of May has hosted exactly one Formula One World Championship Grand Prix in the sport’s history — Imola, 1984. It was the day Alain Prost led from the first corner and never looked back, the day Nelson Piquet set the race’s fastest lap and then blew his BMW engine, and the day Ayrton Senna wasn't on the grid after having to walk back from the furthest point on the circuit after his Toleman failed and left him with one timed lap to his name — slower than an Osella. His only DNQ in 161 starts. We tell that story in full, track the Tyrrell ballast scandal that would later rewrite the race results, and take two short detours: to Naples in 1956, where a Gordini ambushed a collapsed Ferrari the day after Vanwall  humiliating the Scuderia at Silverstone; and to Tokyo in 2008, where Aguri Suzuki announced his team was done.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

It's May the fifth, and Chequered Past returns to three Formula One races separated by four decades. In 1985, Elio de Angelis became the winner of the San Marino Grand Prix without leading a single lap — after Ayrton Senna ran out of fuel and Alain Prost's McLaren was disqualified at scrutineering for being underweight. Eleven years later, Damon Hill came to Imola and beat poleman Schumacher to the victory, extending his title lead with clinical authority. And in 2024, with a Safety Car, a damaged Verstappen, and one extraordinary restart, Lando Norris finally won his first Formula One Grand Prix at the Miami International Autodrome.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On a single calendar date — the fourth of May — three remarkable stories from Formula One history converge. In 1969, the Spanish Grand Prix at Montjuïc produced one of the sport's most terrifying afternoons: twin wing failures sent Jochen Rindt and Graham Hill into the barriers at nearly 140 miles per hour. Stewart won, but it was the crashes that changed F1 forever. In 1980, the same date brought the Belgian Grand Prix at Zolder — Didier Pironi's maiden victory, and the first tremors of the FISA–FOCA war. And turning 23 in 1969, and 34 in 1980, was John Watson — Belfast-born, five-time Grand Prix winner, and the man who won an F1 race from 22nd on the grid. This is Chequered PastSend us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On 3rd May 1981, Formula One’s brand new San Marino Grand Prix roared into life at Imola — and a tyre gamble in changing conditions cost Gilles Villeneuve everything. On 3rd May 1987, Nelson Piquet’s Williams hit the wall at Tamburello at close to 180 miles an hour. He walked away. The wall, as history would record, was only getting started. And on 3rd May 1992, Nigel Mansell won the Spanish Grand Prix in the rain at Barcelona, drawing level with Jim Clark’s record of 25 wins — while a future world champion failed to qualify in a Brabham that was barely fit to start. Three races. Three eras. One date. Chequered Past looks at the day the Formula One calendar keeps returning to.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

Alex Zanardi died at home in Bologna on 1 May 2026, aged 59. In this special bonus episode, Chequered Past tells his story from the beginning: the Bologna boyhood shaped by loss, the karting prodigy who swept the 1987 European championship, the Formula 1 career that promised more than it delivered, the two CART titles with Chip Ganassi, the famous Corkscrew pass at Laguna Seca that rewrote the rulebook, the catastrophic accident at Lausitzring in 2001 that should have ended everything, and the extraordinary second and third careers — in adapted touring cars, and then as a four-time Paralympic champion and twelve-time para-cycling world champion — that defined his legacy.He showed the world how to look at what remained rather than what was lost.Cover Image: By Robk23oxf - Alex zanardi brandshatch2014, CC BY-SA 3.0, LinkSend us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

Chequered Past returns to a date that doesn't announce itself — May 2 has never carried a marquee race — but reveals, on close inspection, a remarkable chain of consequential moments. We open in 2000, at Lyon-Satolas airport, where a McLaren driver crawls through wreckage and two young pilots die. We move to 1994, to the morning after Imola — the first day of the sport's modern safety reckoning, told through Max Mosley's press statement, a Williams factory in shock, and a Brazil entering national mourning. We close in 1976, with James Hunt winning a race he would technically lose that evening and technically win again in Paris eight weeks later — a disqualification that, a single point later, defined a world championship. This is not a date of great races. It is a date of great consequence. Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

No circuit in Formula One has accumulated more meaning on a single date than Imola on the first of May. In 1983, Patrick Tambay won there for Ferrari carrying Gilles Villeneuve's number, in one of sport's quiet acts of dedication. In 1988, Ayrton Senna took his first McLaren victory on the same day, opening a season of almost total domination. In 1994, he came back — and didn't leave. This episode traces the arc of May the first through three decades of the sport, from Tambay's tribute lap to the safety revolution that Senna's death made possible, with a coda from a chaotic afternoon in Sochi that set Max Verstappen on his way.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

April 30th is one of the most consequential dates in Formula One history — defined not by a single moment, but by what happened, what followed, and what changed.In 1994, qualifying for the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix was brought to a halt when Roland Ratzenberger was killed after a front wing failure sent his Simtek into the wall at the Villeneuve corner. It was the first fatality at a Formula One race weekend in twelve years — and it happened on the Saturday. This episode reconstructs that session as it unfolded, focusing on what is known, what can be evidenced, and how the sport responded in the immediate aftermath.  One year later, Formula One returned to a reshaped Imola for the 1995 San Marino Grand Prix. The circuit had been altered, procedures had changed, and the sport approached the same date under different conditions. Damon Hill led the race that day, taking victory on a damp, evolving track and moving to the top of the championship for the first time.  In 2017, the 2017 Russian Grand Prix provided a different kind of milestone. Valtteri Bottas claimed his first Formula One victory on his 81st start, taking the lead at the start and holding off Sebastian Vettel to the finish.  Three races. One date. From a qualifying session that exposed the limits of the sport, to the measurable changes that followed, and the modern era that emerged in its wake — this episode traces what happened on April 30th, and what Formula One became afterwards.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On April 29, 1994, Rubens Barrichello's Jordan was launched into the tyre wall at the Variante Bassa chicane in Imola at over 200 kilometres an hour. He survived. The paddock noted it, breathed out, and went back to qualifying. Two days later, Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna were both dead. In this episode of Chequered Past, we explore what April 29 means in Formula 1 history — a date that turns out to be less about triumph or tragedy than about the moments that precede both. From Patrick Depailler's final Grand Prix victory in 1979, five weeks before a hang-gliding accident ended his career, to Mika Häkkinen's last-lap heartbreak in Barcelona in 2001, to the Red Bull debris that shaped Lewis Hamilton's 2018 championship without anyone noticing — April 29 is a date that keeps issuing warnings. The question the sport has never fully answered is whether it was listening. Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

Today we give an entire episode to a single date: the twenty-eighth of April. Across five decades of Formula One, this date has produced five World Championship Grands Prix that each shaped the careers of the drivers involved:Niki Lauda's first win at Jarama in 1974, Ayrton Senna's 55th pole position at Imola in 1991, Jacques Villeneuve's breakthrough victory at the Nürburgring in 1996, Michael Schumacher's Grand Chelem at Catalunya in 2002, and Valtteri Bottas reclaiming the championship lead on the Baku streets in 2019.Along the way we also remember coachbuilder Piero Drogo, revisit the Formula One team that was awarded a grid slot and never raced, and mark the birthday of the man now running Red Bull Racing. Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On April 27th, Formula One has seen races decided in very different ways — but few as stark as the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix.At Montjuïc Park, a weekend marked by concerns over circuit safety led into a race that was stopped early following a fatal accident. With only 29 laps completed, half points were awarded — and Jochen Mass took the only victory of his Formula One career, while Lella Lombardi became the only woman to score World Championship points.We also revisit Imola across two eras. In 1986, fuel limits defined the outcome, as Alain Prost managed his consumption to take victory ahead of Nelson Piquet. And in 1997, the race was decided through pit stop timing, with Heinz-Harald Frentzen securing victory for Williams.Alongside the races, we mark the birthday of Helmut Marko — whose Formula One career ended in 1972, but whose later role in driver development would see him play a part in the careers of champions including Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen.Three races, across three decades — each decided in a different way.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On April 26th, 1998, David Coulthard crossed the finish line at Imola with a 4.5-second lead over Michael Schumacher — and an engine that had been threatening to let go for the final ten laps. It was the fourth win of his career, and one of the most quietly dramatic of his life.To mark that date, this episode tells four stories connected to April 26th. We begin with Jean-Pierre Beltoise — born on this day in 1937 — a Parisian butcher's delivery boy who became a motorcycle champion, survived a crash that everyone assumed had ended his career, raced in Formula 1 with a permanently damaged arm, and won the 1972 Monaco Grand Prix in the rain for a team that never won again. Then we go to Silverstone in 1970, where Chris Amon — widely regarded as the greatest driver never to win a championship Grand Prix — beat reigning World Champion Jackie Stewart in identical machinery on this same date, in a race whose result counted for nothing in the standings. After that, Imola 1998: McLaren dominant, a debris-blocked oil cooler, Ron Dennis sprinting between the pit wall and the garage, and Schumacher closing at a second a lap while Coulthard held his nerve. And finally, Bahrain 2009: Jenson Button winning for a team that had been built from the ruins of Honda's withdrawal just four months earlier.Four stories. One date. All of them true.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

April 25th, 1982. Imola. Fourteen cars on the grid, seventy-five thousand fans in the stands, and two Ferrari teammates about to destroy each other.The 1982 San Marino Grand Prix had no right to happen — most of the field had stayed home in protest. But the race that did take place produced one of Formula 1's most infamous betrayals, a feud that would end only with death, and a footnote result for a young Italian driver that history would later make remarkable.That driver was Michele Alboreto. And April 25th wasn't finished with him yet.Chequered Past travels to Imola for a date that hosted three World Championship Grands Prix, claimed one of the sport's most beloved figures, and connects Gilles Villeneuve, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost across two decades of the most dramatic years Formula 1 has ever seen.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

Only two Formula 1 World Championship races have ever been held on April 24th. Both were at Imola. And both turned out to be defining moments in the championship.In 2005, Fernando Alonso — 23 years old, two wins in three races — held off Michael Schumacher for ten unrelenting laps around the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari. The margin at the flag: 0.215 seconds. The result: the clearest signal yet that Schumacher's era was ending. The race also produced one of the decade's most significant technical controversies, when BAR-Honda were disqualified and banned for two rounds over a hidden fuel system.In 2022, Max Verstappen completed only the second grand slam of his career at the same circuit — pole, win, fastest lap, every lap led — as Ferrari's title challenge began to come apart around him.This episode also takes time with the darker thread running through the date: the deaths of drivers who carried Formula 1 in their backgrounds, including Rolf Stommelen — a man whose career was defined by two catastrophic rear wing failures, eight years apart. And the story of Mike Taylor, the driver who sued Lotus and won.Cover image: By http://formula1photos.tn38.net - GP_Imola2005_SchumiAlonso.jpg, CC BY-SA 2.5, LinkSend us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On 23rd April 1989, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost lined up on the front row at Imola with a gentleman's agreement in place. Whoever led into the first braking zone would not be challenged. It was a simple pact — one they had honoured before. Then Gerhard Berger's Ferrari exploded into the wall at Tamburello, the race was red-flagged, and everything was reset. Everything except the agreement.What happened on the restart — a slipstream, a late braking move, two seconds of racing — lit a fuse that burned for the rest of the 1989 season and beyond. Tears in a team van in Wales. A bombshell interview in a French newspaper. Two world champions who stopped speaking in the same paddock. Alain Prost, asked decades later when it all went wrong, never hesitated: it started at Imola. It started from this point.That's the centrepiece of this episode, but April the 23rd has more to say. In 2000 it gave us the British Grand Prix at Easter — and three days of rain that turned Silverstone into a swamp, sent fans home at the gate, and somehow produced one of the cleanest overtakes the circuit has ever seen. And in 2006 it brought us back to Imola one final time, where Michael Schumacher claimed his 66th career pole position — one more than Senna ever took — at the very circuit where Senna's record had been set twelve years before. Three races. Seventeen years. One date that keeps pulling motorsport history back to the same piece of tarmac.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On April 22nd 1951, Alberto Ascari was untouchable at the San Remo Grand Prix. A spectator was not so fortunate. On April 22nd 1957, a twenty-seven-year-old from Luton won the Glover Trophy at Goodwood in a car nicknamed the Toothpaste Tube, with a young Bernie Ecclestone watching from the pit lane. Eighteen months later, both their lives would be changed forever. And on April 22nd 2012, Formula One drove into Bahrain — a country in the middle of an uprising — and held a grand prix anyway. Sebastian Vettel won. Force India withdrew from practice to keep their mechanics safe. And the paddock argued with itself, in public, about what it means to show up somewhere and call it sport.Three dates. One story about what Formula One has always been.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering

On 21 April 1985, Ayrton Senna arrived at a rain-soaked Estoril circuit for only his second race with Lotus and delivered what many consider the finest wet-weather drive in Formula One history. Keke Rosberg was in the barriers. Alain Prost would aquaplane off at three hundred kilometres an hour. Senna won by over a minute, lapping the entire field except Michele Alboreto. Denis Jenkinson, standing trackside, turned to Nigel Roebuck and said: “It’s Villeneuve all over again.”We also look at the 2013 Bahrain Grand Prix — the day Sebastian Vettel, Kimi Räikkönen and Romain Grosjean produced an identical podium to twelve months earlier, something that had happened only twice in the previous sixty years of the World Championship.Send us Fan MailMusic by #Mubert Music Rendering