The Long Straight: The Stories Behind Formula 1

Enzo Ferrari is one of the most mythologised figures in the history of sport. The red cars, the prancing horse, the tyrant of Maranello; most people know the legend. Far fewer know the man underneath it: the boy who fell in love with racing at ten years old and never stopped chasing it, the father carrying secrets that shaped every decision he made, the obsessive who built a global empire without ever really wanting to be a businessman.In this episode, I’ll explore the life of Enzo. What drove him, what he lost, what he hid, and what it cost him to build something that outlasted everything.In this episode, I cover:The 1908 Bologna race that changed everything and the calling a ten-year-old boy never got overThe founding of Scuderia Ferrari and the bitter split from Alfa RomeoThe prancing horse: a fighter pilot, a grieving countess, and why Ferrari's official colour is yellowThe two operations that defined Ferrari: the racing team he lived for, and the road cars that paid for itThe Ford deal that collapsed in 1963 and the Le Mans revenge it triggeredPiero Ferrari: the secret son hidden for decadesNiki Lauda and Gilles Villeneuve, the last two great chapters of Enzo's Formula 1 storyThe F40 (the last car Enzo approved)About the show Every record has a B-side. The deeper cut. The one that tells you something the hit single never could. B-Side Sports is a narrative podcast about what's really going on behind the games we watch -- the business, the science, the history, the culture. Flip it over. There's always more.New here? Start with Episode 1: The Deal -- the business story of how Formula 1 went from a sport in decline to a $20 billion global entertainment property.Next episode: Blood MoneyFormula 1 races in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan. The host fees run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The sport says it is promoting change from within. The critics say it is providing cover for governments that would rather the world look at a race than at a human rights record. Both sides have a case. That's what I’ll explore next time.

At high enough speed, a Formula 1 car generates so much aerodynamic downforce that it could, in theory, drive upside down on the ceiling of a tunnel. This episode is about the invisible force behind this theory, how engineers learned to weaponise air, how the shape of a car’s underside changed the sport forever, and why the person who understands airflow best has, for fifty years, been the person who wins.In this episode we cover:The physics of downforce and why an F1 car is essentially an upside-down aeroplaneThe first wings in Formula 1 and the 1969 Spanish Grand Prix crash that forced the sport to actHow Colin Chapman and Peter Wright discovered that the floor of a car could generate more downforce than any wingWhy ground effect was banned in 1983, and the danger that made it necessaryAdrian Newey: the most successful designer in F1 history, and why his move to Aston Martin sent shockwaves through the paddockThe return of ground effect in 2022, the porpoising crisis, and what it cost Mercedes a seasonThe 2026 regulations and the end of DRSAbout the showEvery record has a B-side. The deeper cut. The one that tells you something the hit single never could. B-Side Sports is a narrative podcast about what's really going on behind the games we watch — the business, the science, the history, the culture. Flip it over. There's always more.New here? Start with Episode 1: The Deal — the business story of how Formula 1 went from a sport in decline to a $20 billion global entertainment property.Next episode: Enzo. Enzo Ferrari didn’t want to build road cars. He wanted to race. He built one of the most recognisable brands on earth almost by accident — not because he was a businessman, but because selling cars to wealthy clients was the only way to fund the thing he actually cared about. The story of a man whose obsession shaped a company, a mythology, and a sport.

In 1969, a Swiss watchmaker put its logo on a Formula 1 car. No luxury brand had ever done it before. The driver was Jo Siffert. The brand was Heuer. This episode is about what came before and what followed. In this episode, we cover:The very first timed motorsport race and why officials couldn't agree on a winnerHow timing technology evolved from stopwatches to transponder systems accurate to 0.0001 secondsJack Heuer's deal with Jo Siffert and the negotiation with Enzo Ferrari that made Heuer the sport's first team sponsorHow modern F1 timing actually works: transponders, loops buried in the tarmac, and measurement to within the width of a golf ballThe 1971 Italian Grand Prix — still the closest finish in F1 historyThe 1.80-second pit stop and why a single second in the pit lane can decide a raceThe watch landscape in the paddock: TAG Heuer, IWC, Richard Mille, and where Rolex sits nowThe TAG Heuer Monaco, Steve McQueen, Senna's Series 6000, and the collector marketLVMH's ten-year global partnership with Formula 1 and what a decade-long commitment signalsAbout the showEvery record has a B-side. The deeper cut. The one that tells you something the hit single never could. B-Side Sports is a narrative podcast about what's really going on behind the games we watch — the business, the science, the history, the culture. Flip it over. There's always more.New here? Start with Episode 1: The Deal, the business story of how Formula 1 went from a sport in decline to a $20 billion global entertainment property.Next episode: Downforce. An F1 car generates so much aerodynamic downforce that at high speed, it could theoretically drive on the ceiling. I’ll explore how aerodynamics became the defining engineering battleground in Formula 1 and what happens when engineers push physics to the absolute limit.

On the 28th of September, 2008, a Formula 1 car drove into a wall in Singapore.The driver climbed out. He said it was a mistake.It wasn't.This episode is about one of the most audacious acts of deliberate cheating in the history of sport. It’s about what was planned, who planned it, and how it worked. It’s about the nine months of silence that followed, what finally broke it, and what a sport does when the truth it's been avoiding becomes impossible to ignore. And it’s about a world championship that may have been decided not by racing, but by a meeting in a team principal’s office before the race had even begun. In this episode we coverThe pressure inside the Renault team in 2008, and the people at the centre of the conspiracy: Flavio Briatore, Pat Symonds, and Nelson Piquet Jr.How the safety car rules at Singapore’s first ever night race made the plan possible, and how it was drawn up on a circuit map in advanceThe race itself, told in real time: the early pit stop, the crash on lap fourteen, and how Fernando Alonso ended up winningThe nine months of silence — who knew, why they stayed quiet, and what finally made Piquet Jr. talkThe FIA investigation, the leaked transcript, and the moment Symonds was asked directly whether he knew a crash was coming on lap fourteen — and what he saidThe verdict, the legal challenge that overturned it, and the careers both men went on to have inside the sport that banned themFelipe Massa, the driver who was leading that race, the championship he may have lost as a result, and the legal case that is still ongoing About the showEvery record has a B-side. The deeper cut. The one that tells you something the hit single never could. B-Side Sports is a narrative podcast about what's really going on behind the games we watch — the business, the science, the history, the culture. Flip it over. There's always more.New here? Start with Episode 1: The Deal, the business story of how Formula 1 went from a sport in decline to a massive global entertainment property.Next episode: The Millisecond War. In 1969, a Swiss watchmaker put its logo on a Formula 1 car for the first time. No luxury brand had ever done it before. What followed was a fifty-year relationship between two industries built from exactly the same obsession.

On November 29th, 2020, a Formula 1 car hit a metal barrier in Bahrain at 192 kilometres per hour. The car split in half. The driver was on fire for twenty-eight seconds.Then he climbed out.This episode is about how that is possible. It's about what a crash actually does to the human body, the forces involved, the weakest points, and why drivers historically died not from fire or impact, but from a single catastrophic failure at the base of the skull. It's about the decades of deaths that preceded the safety revolution, and the engineers, doctors, and stubborn campaigners who forced a sport that didn't want to change, to change anyway. And it's about the specific devices and clothing that turned one of the most violent-looking events in sport into something a person walked away from.In this episode we cover:The biomechanics of a high-speed crash, and why fifty times the force of gravity is survivable Jackie Stewart, the driver who campaigned for safety in an era that treated caution as cowardice, and what it cost himThe Imola weekend of 1994: three crashes in three days, and the event that finally made safety impossible to ignoreThe engineering of the survival cell, the HANS device, and the Halo, and the resistance each one faced before it was made mandatoryThe FIA Medical Car, the infrastructure built almost from scratch by one man, and why the response after a crash matters as much as the engineering before itThe car is designed to destroy itself so the driver doesn't have to. This is the story of how that idea came to be.About the show:Every record has a B-side. The deeper cut. The one that tells you something the hit single never could. B-Side Sports is a narrative podcast about what's really going on behind the games we watch — the business, the science, the history, the culture. Flip it over. There's always more.New here? Start with Episode 1: The Deal, the business story of how Formula 1 went from a sport in decline to a massive global entertainment property.Next episode: Crashgate. In 2008, a Formula 1 driver was ordered by his own team to deliberately crash his car, to hand victory to his teammate. It worked. And for a year, nobody knew.

In the autumn of 2016, the most valuable private sports contract in the world changed hands. The buyer paid 4.4 billion dollars for a sport with no marketing department, a shrinking audience, and a CEO who thought social media was nonsense. Most people in the paddock thought they'd lost their minds.They hadn't.This is the story of how Formula 1 went from a cash machine being quietly run into the ground by a London private equity firm, to one of the fastest-growing sports properties on the planet. It involves a fisherman's son from Suffolk who built an empire through sheer nerve, a private equity firm that extracted billions while the sport slowly ate its own future, and an American media company from Denver that saw a golden opportunity.In this episode we cover:Who Bernie Ecclestone was, how he built Formula 1, and why his empire had a fatal flawWhat CVC Capital Partners did to Formula 1 during their ownership and what "extraction" really meansHow Liberty Media came to buy the sport, what they found when they got inside the books, and what their plan wasThe resistance from Ferrari, Mercedes, and the paddock establishmentDrive to Survive, the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Brad Pitt movie, and what all of it adds up toThe racing is just the beginning. The real story is what happens off the track.About the show:Every record has a B-side. The deeper cut. The one that tells you something the hit single never could. B-Side Sports is a narrative podcast about what's really going on behind the games we watch — the business, the science, the history, the culture. Flip it over. There's always more.