Michael, So this is the one episode where you didn't come up.
With a really a huge huck.
Okay, do you have any thoughts about history?
I love history. History repeats itself in order to predict the future. Take a look at the history. The thing I love about history is it has a tendency to repeat itself, repeat itself, much like a lap on a race. If history repeats itself, it's really not even history. It's just now over and over. For My Heart podcast one on one studios and Sports Illustrated Studios, this.
Is choosing sides.
If one wow, wow, So today, Tony, you're taking me back.
Absolutely. F one as a sport has such a fascinating and rich history, and for so many Formula One I had Formula one fans. The biggest fan and I'm not even joking here, the biggest fan in the sport is revealing its history. I'm covering and retelling those stories. Sometimes it gets a bit pedantic if they go back of just like remember who beat the fastest lap and who beat who in the nineteen ninety one World Championship. Yah yah, yeah, but there's so many good stories.
Clip Mike, Hello, can you hear us?
And see us.
Okay, I can can you hear and see me.
The miracles of technology that solved it?
That should certainly be quieter if nothing else.
How's it going?
It is another day in paradise.
I'm totally comfortable. Don't worry.
Fantastic well'na, We're gonna ask the first big question, which is, please introduce yourself to our listeners, and how do you fit into the big puzzle of Formula one?
What a big puzzle Formula one is was and always will be. Indeed, my name is Matt Bishop. I've worked in Formula one well for a third of a century. I think we can now say born in nineteen sixty two, and my first memory of Formula one is not watching it on the television because it wasn't on television. You know, I'm one of these people that does love the past. You know, I'm very happy to watch a movie from
the sixties. Reybaby started off as a journalist editor of F one Racing Magazine, which is now called GP Racing Magazine. Fifteen years as a journalist, then was hired to McClaren as communications director, then stepped away from that and was one of the founders with David Coulthard of w series, which thrived for a while but isn't thriving now sadly, but I still think it played its part in driving
forward the effort to incorporate women inside the cockpit. And then I moved to Aston Martin, spent two years there and now in my sixties, I've turned sixty. I'm now running my own comms agency and also turned my hand back to journalism and I'm doing a weekly column for the Most Sport magazine website. So there you are. That's a whistle stop tour. That's and a little bit of racing pride along the way. That's me.
Hi, I'm James Allen. It's a great pleasure to be with you here on choosing sides. I've been in Formula one since nineteen ninety so what's that thirty four to thirty five years, and I guess the bulk of my career was a broadcaster and an announcer. I was with the ESPN, I was with the commercial station in the UK, ITV, and with BBC as well.
Who's this guy, Well, allow me to explain. I'm Sean Kelly. If you've watched a Formula one broadcast anywhere, in the world in the last say, two decades. You won't know me, but you will know my work because I am essentially the chief statistician to the F one Broadcast's all the facts and figures you hear in a Formula one broadcast, whether they be in the graphics, whether they be spoken by the likes of David Croft or Martin brund or Alex Jakes or whomever, I am chiefly responsible for all
of that content. So, depending on where you and on the whole statistics spectrum, either you're welcome or I'm sorry. I left edit points there so you could edit in whichever response you are. I should point out, by the way that Roman Grojan's career nos dived the very moment I asked him on stage on race day in Miami if he thought that breakfast Cereal was just soup with better marketing. He was having a great IndyCar season. Checked the dates from that moment on. I think it was
May eighth, twenty three, twenty three. I literally killed his career. Oh God, put it in the show, get it in the show.
Crashes out of the Indianapolis five hundred, another massive hit.
Either way, I haven't had an answer which means he's still contemplating it in his head.
Amazing.
One thing that you've been telling me in this voice that you use is that so many of the teams are based in the UK. Why is that? And is that your real voice or are you doing like a UK voice for me all of this?
So, the reason why so many of the teams are based in the UK actually goes back to the Second World War.
Yesterday morning at two one am at General Eichena headquartern, General Jodel signed the Act of Unconditional to render all German land, sea and the airportage in Europe, and simultaneously the Soviet High Command.
At the end of the Second World War, you had all these people, these very clever people who had been building spitfires and fighter planes and technology that had been
used during that war time period. And funnily enough, they were flying planes out of an aerodrome just north of London called Silverstone, which had a perimeter road around it that was just an ideal shape for a racetrack, and so they started racing on it, and then they started making the car's lighter, they put bigger engines in, and then they started playing around the materials and all the things they've been doing while fighting a war they converted into a sport.
You kind of have this knowledge base, but there's no more war to fight, but there is this experience, yeah, right.
And use this experience for something different, but also just keep busy, like, let's have a job here. And there was also not many cars left after the war because the automotive industries, both in Europe and in the US had been completely retool to manufacture the likes of tanks, trucks, airplanes,
as we mentioned before. So engineers got creative. They built these really lightweight cars to go racing on these abandoned and empty airfields, which later become actual racetracks and still are some of the tracks where we go racing today.
It's very cool, but airfields are straight, yes, so they added they added just a part of the race. So honestly, we still race on some of these todays.
Comparsions of the racetracks I believe are still part of cal And airfields that we had in World War two.
And basically that whole area around Oxford and Silverstone became a center of excellence for things like carbon fiber and materials and technology and aerodynamics and what have you, and then lots of international people came to work in those environments.
You know, you didn't have what they now call as a headquarters or a facility. They had what they called workshops, little workshops basically lock up garages, and they employed anything between ten and twenty people, and they worked incredibly hard, incredibly hard.
Talent suppliers and mechanics and shops and repair shops which became what we now know as motorsport value. Motorsport value is essentially the biggest hub of motor racing. Most of the teams, if not nearly all of the teams are based in this motorsport value and.
The only other exception to that has been Ferrari really in Italy, where they've been racing since before anybody else even thought about it, and before long before the Second World War had. They did it their way in their country and they've been competing basically against the rest ever since. But that's why the UK as a disproportionate basis because of the sort of handing down through the generations of this sort of technical know how.
And it's not even just the UK. They're in this little vat like they're very close. They're very close.
Hey, can we borrow the five sixteenth ranch for the nut bolt on the coming over the distributor valve?
Michael, you know what a distributor valve is?
Hell?
Yeah, please enrich us.
Next question, Okay, so he built this machine. Great, great, great, But drivers? I mean, were they able to get drivers who were willing to put their life on the line for this machine?
I mean, it's a great question because it both shouldn't surprise us that they didn't have too much of a hard time coming out of World War Two, where I think a lot of the men were still in this heroism and heroic mindset where it was totally normal to put your life on the line for anything that you believed in.
If you've been in the situation, if you've been an aviator, you've been bombed or anything like that. And then suddenly it stops and you're thinking, kind of miss missing the thrill. You know, it's lives of I kind of need another. I need I need to be a bait of a thrill seeker, a race car.
There is an aspect of the psyche, certainly of the male psyche, and there is definitely a desire to feel alive by putting everything on the line.
You know, in those days, if you knew you were likely to die or very possibly were going to die, then it did. It did mean that you were going to approach everything your whole life differently.
Formula one was I guess along with bullfighting. According to having Away the original, the original extreme sport.
I think the whole feeling of death was not quite so remote as it is now. I'm not glorifying it. Sterling Moss used to glorify it. He used to say, I find one of the appeals is that I'm risking my life.
Are you conscious?
Do you think about death while you're driving in races?
No?
Not when I'm driving, but I'm very I am frightened of death. It's something which I think every driver should well. Possibly it helps him to be frightened of it, because if you're not frightened an accident, then what is your limitation? You get a sort of tingling in the hands and feeling as though you'd just eaten a lot of porridge which goes right down, you know, to your feet, And that's the sort of sensation I get. But I wouldn't ponder on the thought.
You know, my dad was a racing driver, and there was always something incredibly exciting about about racers, about the people who sort of commit to this sport with their time back in the day, sadly with their lives.
Formula One the World Championship was actually quite lucky in the early years. I believe the first recorded fatality in a World Championship event was an Offering Marriman at the fifty four German Grand Prix. I'm looking at you as if you're going to correct me, and I don't think you will.
I'm assuming that they were all like dumb eighteen twenty year old No.
Actually, the average age of the Grand Prix field was well over thirty in the early years. I mean Fanjio won the tied to when he was forty six. Luigi Fajoli was I think fifty three when he shared the car with with Andrew at the fifty one French Grand Prix. Luis Chiron was fifty five when he raced at Monica in nineteen fifty five.
But they were still just as skilled, they were not just as fit. You know, look at Freulein Gonzalez. You know, a huge fat man. There are no huge fat men in any sport now, with possible exception of darts, but not most sport and not Formula one, that's for sure.
Baseball.
Are they fat? They're just big on they?
I don't know.
I think some of them are. I could lose a few pounds.
Here's my theory. Tell me, when you have a family and you have responsibilities at home, people that rely on you, that's when you want to do your dared devil activities, because it's like, get me out of the house, I'll do whatever. You know, I just need a couple hours to myself. Let me go with the boys down on the airfield and we'll do some racing.
Yeah.
Now, me and my wife actually fight over who's going to get to go to the supermarket without kids.
I probably much preferred these types of drivers as opposed to like the twenty year old Max who's born in the sport and has seen all of the evolution through his dad. It's like, these were guys who just got done killing Nazis with their bare hands. Give me the fucking steering wheel, let's go, baby.
I just wanted to mention here, like, keep in mind, Michael that in their day, Fanjo, I mean, he he wasn't changing diapers.
That's true. That's true. He wasn't walking a daycare nop.
No, thank god for those days are.
Yeah, well we blew it. I want to talk to Juan and tell him if you guys would have just put in a little more effort, would have been better for men today.
Yeah, they fucked it up for us.
Oh oh, we need it done.
Yes, I'm done. What was the beginning, Like, what was the F one first F one race?
Like?
Was there a shitload of people there? Was it just a couple ragtag guys with helmets in their hands?
Oh no, I mean Formula well not just Formula one motor racing, you know, lamon twenty four hours, things like the mean a Melia that's featured in the Adam Driver film. You know, they would probably over a million people lining the roads in Italy for that thousand mile race back in the day. I mean bear in mind that this was the white heat of technology, the development of the automobile as it got faster and faster and more glamorous
and brands like Ferrari and Mercedes. It was exciting and it was, as I say, it was an extreme sport. People were really excited about it and they could go to these racetracks like Monza in Italy or silver Stone and just just north of London and pack out the grandstands and have a really amazing experience watching these heroes sliding these cars around the racetrack. And so it was exciting. You know, its post war in Europe. You know, it
was pretty gloomy. People that were still rationing. You know, football was back and running and people liked to go to the match and cheer on their team, but go and watch some really powerful, noisy, fast racing cars. You know, it wasn't expensive to attend, and sort of huge crowds at the you know, you know, tens hundreds of thousands of people watching motor races.
How many races did they have that first year? Let me guess, Let me guess, have a guess. They're new, they're not really having their shit together, but they got a little bit of money. They had four before I'd say.
Six races, very close, one more.
Eight races. I've never been go with math. Seven races.
Okay, they deemed that seven races was the suitable number for this championship.
What is it now, like twenty three or something? Too many?
Okay, seven races for the championship. How they guess at how many people participated in this championship because this is kind of cool.
Well, previously we had thirty six drivers, so I would say, let's say the same thirty six.
During that entire year. So during those seven races, we had between fifty and sixty drivers participate in at least one race, which also speaks volume. Remember that concorded agreement. They speaks volume about the amount of people who entered a race and sometimes didn't show up. And some teams had six drivers and some teams had one or two, so it was all over the place.
There was a time where you could buy you know, in the fifties, but if you were someone like Horace Gould, who wasn't particularly quick but had a business wasn't minted. He bought a two fifty f Masa, one of the most beautiful fullball one cars there's ever been, and he went racing in it, not very well, and he didn't
have to do all the races. He didn't have to take it to Argentina if he thought that would be too much of a pain in the bum to do that, So he could take it to the races that he wanted to take it to and race where he wanted to, so that was something you could do.
One of the few female drivers who's raced in Formula one was a lady called Maria to Raise the Philippies, who was very very accomplished equestrian athlete. You a big, big horsewoman, and she was a very good racing driver as well. She loved cars, she loved driving, and she raced in the late nineteen fifties in Formula one but did really well, you know, she was, she was great and so the accessibility I think then probably helped a
little bit. And it's a shame, it's it's we haven't you know, we haven't seen so many female drivers since then.
And they were just what was called disparagingly garage East. In other words, they had a garage and they bought a cost of engine and a human gearbox, knocked it together and got someone to drive it. So they were garage East. It was a disparaging term.
It made for very chaotic racing.
Well, they're figuring they're shut out. Take your Vovo station wagon if you remember, take your kid's car seats out there you go. If not, car seats, definitely didn't exist back then. But it actually leads to my question of what was the sat what were the cars like? Was there a seatbelts? Were there?
Certainly wasn't halos No, no halos no.
And the wheels didn't even detach.
No.
They were bloody dangerous is what they were.
Like.
They're beautiful, you know, really lovely shaped body if you google, like a two fifty f Maserati or you know a
two four six Dino Ferrari. So the fuel tank was in a kind of a behind the driver in a kind of a like a cone at the back, and then the engine was in front of the driver, and the pedals the throttle pedal on the right and the brake and then the clutch on the left, with a massive drive shaft that went between his legs down to the rear wheels which are just basically just by his hips if you want, sort of small leather seat, wooden steering wheel with a very rudimentary four gate metal gear
gear change. Absolutely no seat belts, absolutely no rollcages.
In the fifties, they were racing with cork helmets and polo neck shirts.
Cork helmets literally like a little.
Like you know, like a helmet you would wear if you were playing polo, Like if you're on a horse and playing polo, that kind of helmet is what they were wearing. There was no rollover protection at all. In fact, there was no rollover protection mandated until nineteen sixty one, and even when it was mandated, it was basically a tube, a hollow tube of aluminium which would crush flat as soon as the car rolled over.
Anyway, it was a token gesture.
Really really poor brakes have to start breaking about, you know, three weeks before you reach the corner to sort of go around it. I'm exaggerating, but really really really difficult cars to drive. Those cars like to slide. They didn't go around on rails. They If you google photographs of one Manuel Fangio, there's an amazing picture of him sort of drifting at one hundred and sixty miles an hour through a corner. It's like literally drifting like it's just
insane at that speed. And yeah, they were beautiful cars.
I'm looking at pictures of a nineteen fifties F one car right now, speak to you, and it looks like, sorry to say it, a carrot. It looks like a wide in the back, shallow in the front carrot. You could also say like a missile, you know, I mean.
Which again goes I still look fast. They were building airplanes that it looks probably more like something you'd you know, it's see in the air flying around.
And there's some listener right now saying like, just say it, Michael, say it looks like a penis, and I won't.
Okay, but you just I won't know what I want, but you won't say what.
I won't say that a nineteen fifties F one car kind of looks like a penis, which also lines up with the mentality mentality, the maleness the war. But still, but I will say this, it still looks fast, and it still looks dangerous. Do they have seat belts?
Seatbelts were definitely around, but most drivers, as you can imagine, preferred not to use them.
It's like wimpy if you put a seatbelt on.
It wasn't considered wimpy to wear seatbelts. It was actually considered dangerous to wear seatbelts because there was the omnipresent risk of fire, and it was always felt that if you're gonna have a crash, it better to be thrown out of the car. You can kind of say, well, yeah, I'd rather have a few broken legs than burned to death in a fireball, because eventually drivers did have seatbelts and burned to death in fireballs.
I think if I had the choice of being either catapulted down an asphalt road, getting a concussion, three broken ribs, internal bleeding, two broken legs, a broken arm, and severe facial fracture, or being trapped in a burning car, I'd probably take the first option.
Choices, choices, choices.
My dad does. I mention was a racing driver and the only reason I'm probably here today talking to you is because he didn't have seat belts in his Lotus in nineteen sixty two when he had an enormous accident at SPA and the car didn't have a rollcage, and he would have been killed were it not for the fact that he was thrown clear of the car and landed in a ditch, not on the track, thank god. Otherwise he would have killed him. But he landed in a muddy ditch to the side of the racetrack.
In the late sixties, Sir Jackie Stewart's campaigned to have them introduced in the sport.
He was.
If you retain anything from what sir Jackie Stewart has done for the sport is his endless campaign for safety and security for the drivers.
You know, he was the first true professional, I think in Formula one. He took it. He became like an international icon. He had lots of endorsement deals with lots of sponsors, and he took it. He took the whole thing to a professional level.
I mean, he's very precise, attention to detail, always attention to detail.
Do you have any fun facts about Stewart?
Maybe not so fun. Jackie Stewart deliberately wanted to finish on one hundred World Championship Grand Prix starts, and he did enter a Grand Prix for one hundredth time, which was the United States Grand Prix of nineteen seventy three, But he didn't start it because his teammate France Fois Severt, perhaps the most beautiful Formula One driver facially that there has ever been, who did, by the way, have an affair with Bridget Bardo, So his face took him a
long way. For those who are too young, Bridget Bardo deserves googling. She has good taste in men, and he obviously had good taste of women.
Jackie did all my education, Jackie Stewart, So in fact, I was what you could call a mad driver. I was driving like hell. I was not thinking enough to what I was doing. And Jackie stopped all that and teach me how you must analyze a car, how you must think when you're dying.
Oh, what kind of.
Vision must have?
He did all my education.
He was killed. He was killed in qualifying, and Jackie Stewart withdrew as a mark of respect, but also completely grief stricken, stunned and shattered.
Stuart walks away from drawn prex racing his career over.
And so he stopped on ninety nine.
I think his biggest influence on the sport is the work he did on safety, because Formula one was incredibly dangerous during his period. He lost most of his friends to racing accidents. Partly it was so frightening. He was able to keep his mind under control and not get too worked up. So he was always in control, and that's why he was so successful, three time world champion. But then he just wasn't satisfied with the facilities they had for the medical facilities and all that kind of
thing around Formula one, and he did it basically. He was just a true campaigner, and he pushed and pushed and pushed until the standards were raised, and not just like hospital facilities on track, but making sure that the barriers at the side of the racetrack were safer, making the cars safer. You know, I mentioned that fuel tanks
were really exposed in those days. A lot of drivers died in kind of horrible fiery accidents, and so he played probably a bigger role than anybody in the transformation of Formula one from a killer sport into the safer sport.
You know, there's the James Dean factor when people die young, and of course in those days drivers did die young. We've mentioned France FOI sever very talented driver who died young, and there's far too many. Jackie Stewart, thank goodness, did not die young. He's still alive in his eighties, and I think perhaps for that reason, he's not really given
quite the credit for being such a brilliant driver. People regard him as, you know, terribly professional and awfully organized, but they forget that actually he was as quick as quick. That word, that big word begins with Q gets us all excited if we love this sport. He was as quick as anyone we've ever seen. Nerver Gring nineteen sixty eight.
In unclosures conditions that German Grand Prix got underway.
He won in torrential rain by more than four minutes with a broken wrist. Just think about that for a second.
It's good he's driving.
It is Daddy's Juart number six, and a metropod was piloting his car as oh he hadn't built in radar.
Stewart dominated the race. He was an incredible driver, Jackie Stewart, and where honored still to have him amongst us.
Towards the end of the nineteen sixties and the start of the nineteen seventies was really the most perilous time of war. In nineteen sixty six the regulations were changed. There was the return to power, as called. They moved from one and a half liter engine back to a three liter engine. You were putting this tremendously powerful engine in the back of was basically a canoe filled with gasoline. And yeah, hilarity often ensued.
The seventies was unbelievably glamorous, but also unbelievably dangerous. As the cars started to sprout these wings, the drivers sprouted sideburns, and it was all very rock and roll. But lots of people got killed, you know.
In sixty eight Jim Clark was killed, Mike Spence was killed at Indy, Joe Slessor was killed in the French Grand Prix. You know, in nineteen seventy Pierce Courage, Bruce McLaren, Yoch and Rint All Eyed, seventy three, Roger Williamson, Francois Severe. It just became part of it. I heard Yok and Rint's widow, Nina won't say at the time. This was like in nineteen seventy so we would often buy black dresses if we saw them because we thought, well, we'll
need that for the next funeral. Now can you imagine that in twenty twenty three? Can you imagine that being formula one being allowed to continue thinking well, I'll look great at the next funeral.
You know, could be me looking at it through rose tinted glasses. Because I was a kid in the seventies. I mean, I thought the seventies were very exciting, and it was I remember the seventies in technicolor, you know, really it was vivid, but also when you look back at all the footage, you look at the amazing photographs by people like Ryan schlegel Milch, you know his images of the seventies there, it's just so sexy. It's like that whole steph McQueen, Marie Andretti. It's just everyone was
just kind of cool. It was still sort of edgy and sort of a little bit dangerous and all those sort of things, and it was just it was very glamorous, but it was still a bit of a best kept secret. It was really only with the arrival of satellite TV in the sort of late seventies early eighties that the whole thing kind of really blew up as a global sport.
It seems like F one has come a very long way since the cowboy days is what I'll call them.
Oh absolutely yeah, I mean there's no question it's some people would say it's sort of become a bit more corporate, and it's not the better for that, But then I think that's inescapable really for international sports. Everything is it's a business. But I think Formula One and Tony I hope would agree with me, still retains a feeling of
that vestige of a life lived on the limit. Into the eighties, the car's got a lot safer because they started building them out of carbon instead of bits of aluminium tubes.
After eighty two, when Ricardo Pelleti and Gil Villanov was killed, it was not another fatality at a Grand Prix weekend until nineteen ninety four, and it fostered this sort of mentality that, well, can you really get killed in a Formula one car anymore? Because they've just transitioned from aluminium or aluminum to carbon five and monocoques and no one had been killed in one at a Grand Prix weekend, So it felt like, ah, these things are indestructible, you know,
this is the thing that saves a driver. And we did see some monumental accent where drivers would just jump out and go back and get the spare car.
Is there anything, because again you've seen I think so much of the evolution of this boy. Is there anything that you would want to bring back from the history of the past of Formula one team personality attract a tradition that you're just like, you know what, I want to bring that back.
I'd love to bring back out and Sena and have him racing today against these drivers peak Senna sort of around what would it be, sort of around the age of sort of thirty, that kind of thing, at the absolute height of his powers. I'd love to see him taking on Hamilton and Vastappen and the rest. He was otherworldly. I've never met anybody like it. And Senna it was
a real kind of charismatic presence. You know, when he walked into a room, everybody stopped, all eyes kind of you know, Wow, he carried a presence like I've never met anyone before or since. And God, could he drive a racing car. He was so fast, you know, and he was I think what marked him out was his commitment.
All Grand Prix drivers have a huge level of commitment, but he was absolutely on it the whole time, and nothing, you know, was too much, whether it was in terms of effort that he put into it or trying to find a competitive edge or going over the edge sometimes a roster had.
Taken the advantage. Senna is trying to go through the inside and it's time of the Madialyn.
It is amazing.
The rivalry between Air and Senna and Alain Prost was absolutely lethal and so intense. It really blew the sport up. It was just something that nobody in the world could take their eyes off. I mean, it would be mainstream news.
I think if Prosty wants to be called the Saul champ and three times world champ, and the way he's doing his behavior like a coward and if he wants to be supportive, he must be prepared to raise anybody at any condition.
It was this box office rivalry between these two very very different people for a while in the same team, but then they went their separate ways. Cross went to Ferrari, Sener stayed at McLaren and it was it was just so intense.
Oh my goodness, this is fantastic they meet, This is what we were faring might happen.
During the race.
Schumacher took a lot of his cues from him. You know, I think I don't think Schumacher would have been the way Schumacher was if he hadn't had to compete with Senna at the very beginning of his career and Senna kind of set the tone for that's how Schumacher thought, that's how things were done in Formula One, and obviously then he came a bit of a cropper when he crashed into vel Nerve deliberately trying to win a world championship, got heavily punished for it. Had a bit of a
reset about how to go racing. So Senna, Senna, would I bring Senate back in a heartbeat, good evening.
The former world motor racing champion at and Senna has been pronounced clinically did after a crash at this afternoon San Marino Grand Prix.
Finally our lock ran out at Inmbland ninety four and we were reminded that Isaac Newton does not discriminate based on race color, or creed or career.
Senna suffered serious head injuries when his car left the track and crashed into a concrete wall. He's being kept on a life support machine because of Italian law, but a spokesman for the hospital in Bologna said there was no chance he would survive.
From then on we moved into the era of really accident science, really understanding the physics of the thing, and fortuitously we have only had one more in the nearly thirty years since, which is a phenomenal record. A lot of people think that some of these racetracks are dull, but it beats going to a funeral every other Friday. We have come a long way, luckily.
And what era are we in now? We're in the entertainment era. And you know the page turn here was the takeover of the sport by Liberty Media and American business. It had been run by the same guy for sort of forty years. He was sort of getting older and not innovating anymore. And the Americans came in and said, right, this is an entertainment and a sport and lifestyle and fashion and music, and let's really push this thing and see how far we can take it. And that's where we live today.
Yeah, I think it's safe to say that f one, although it has a lot of rules, they're constantly evolving and changing and for the better. I would argue the FIA, that governing body of motorsports that we've talked about extensively, has extremely detailed guidelines on absolutely every single element of this sport, from the card dimensions to the safety standards, to the sporting regulations, to when you should show up for media and how much time you give to media, etc. Etc.
Which means that this creates a highly regulated but also ever evolving environment. And I think this is one of the things I love about the sport is highly regulated, which pushes people to get really creative.
It feels like the cars today are very similar.
You're absolutely right. I think if you painted all of the Formula one cars the same color, only real experts will be able to tell you which one was the Red Bull, which one was the Mercedes, which one was the Ferrari, which one was the Alpine And hats off to you if you can tell the difference.
Was there some wacky shit in the past though.
Oh yeah, if you go back to the nineteen seventies, the rules were much more loose and you had crazy stuff they.
Developed, like two tier back wings which looked absolutely insane, which if a crash happened, would absolutely decapitate the person behind them without.
A dapt Well, who cares about the person behind him?
Yeah?
Who gets as long as it's behind us?
Yeah, try to pass me.
Someone had the crazy idea of having two sets of front wheels because you get more grip at the front.
So I'm looking at a six wheeled one car right now, what your thoughts? And it looks like one of those toads that has like mutated. You know what I mean, but what's interesting about it is there's four tires up front. I would have thought it'd be like a front middle back. I don't, what do I know about aerodynamics. So it's four up front and then two in the back. It looks like the mama and the papa bear are in the back and their four little cubs are up front.
But then in that metaphor, it's a race car. It's not an animal, yes, and its wheels not bears. Yes, got it?
This is this is not making any sense.
Okay, But the point is either did the six wheel car and he drives.
The car you're referring to is the Tyrell P thirty four. It was designed in a woodshed in the south of England. Tyrrell well, they had it was a problem against Ferrari because Ferrari had their flat twelve engine which had a lot more horsepower, and they thought, was there some way we can claw back this straight line speed deficit against
this flat twel Ferrari. So Derek Gardner, who was the designer for TiAl came up with the idea, why don't we have four small front wheels instead of two large ones, because firstly we can get them lower, which cuts down the cross sectional front area of the car and makes less draggy. And secondly it puts more tire in contact with the road, so therefore you should have more mechanical grip. So this is all designed in CPN. They wheeled it and everyone looked at it and said, guys are on
drugs or something. I don't know what's wrong with you. You've got it all. You got six wheels in that car. What's abe? And I quite far apart from the fact that there's some minor things like, for instance, when the drivers tested the car at first, they couldn't see the front wheels and they literally said, it just doesn't feel right when you can't see any front wheels. So they actually had had to make a crylic inserting the cock pits so the drivers could physically see the wheels in
their eye line. It did work quite well.
You know. They won a Grand Prix, the nineteen seventy six Swedish Grand Prix Jody Scheckter and by the way, his teammate Patrick Depay was second in that race, so it was a one two and they had a load of podiums, seconds and thirds.
But the problem was was tire development it ran Goodyear tires, and Goodyear were really not keen on developing tires for the four small front wheels of one car on the grid, so in seventy seven they fell behind. So the car was never as competitive as it was in seventy six, and by seventy eight they'd abandoned the concept.
And by the way, it wasn't even the clever way of doing six wheels, because the cleverest way of doing six wheels, or the cleverer way was having two steering wheels at the front and four driven wheels at the back. Yes, there would have been a weight penalty because of the transmission complication, but you would have had four wheel drive at the back.
Williams tested a six wheeler I think Ferrari may have done.
I think Ferrari as well, and those cars just would have catapulted out of corners with enormous traction.
But then eventually the FIA said, look, this is barmy. You know you're all to end up with like tractor trailer wheels. From now on, each car must have four wheels.
Then someone come up this crazy idea of putting a fan on the back of the car that would then suck the car down to the ground so it would go quick around the corners.
Sweden seventy eight will be forever remembered as the race that got a car banned. Bernie Ecclestone's Brabham team that introduced the new BT forty six. Nobody remembers the type mark. They just remember it's immediate nickname, the fan Car.
People think of it as a classic. I don't think it was. It was a crude thing, stick a fan at the back and suck it to the ground. That's famously called the Brabham Fan Car. One the Swedish Grand Prix in the hands of Nikki Lauder, and by the way, he won it easily, he didn't even have to push.
But of course it got banned because it was splitting stones out of the cars that was following behind, like some you know, like some Mario cart game or something.
I love when humans go crazy with creativity because it's just so many's failed attempts. But that's what makes us human.
That's what makes us human. And I would argue that all of these creative inventions came out at a time where there were regulations, so they just change and every time they're like woop, can't do that because this, you know, introduces a certain amount of dangers or variables that we can't you know, we can't control, So we're not going
to do that. More regulations come out, more people try and push the boundaries, and it's just an endless cycle of pushing the boundaries of the regulation and coming up with creative and innovative idea.
He's a great example. Nineteen eighty one. It was the skirts era, right, so you had underbody skirts, the first ground effect era, and the FIA mandated, okay, from now on, we're going to do a test in the pit lane. When you come in, the car has to be six centimeters off the ground. And Gordon Murray from Brabham, who's a genius, said, in the rule book it says it has to be in the pits. There's nothing there that says we can't lower it as soon as we go out.
So they made a hydraulic system which had a button push. So as soon as they went out, they pressed the button and it lowered the car to the ground. And then we come back in and he pressed the button, it comes back up and it was literally there's an interview. There was an interview with him, So, what do you you This is ridiculous. It says it has to be six center me. He's like, no, it doesn't, No, it doesn't. It says it only has to be when the test
is happening, you're going to test it. It doesn't say anything about being on the track.
So Paddock is full of kids that always found the way around the homework and that would find of clever way of just saying I did the homework. Technically, I've done it.
Sorry to interrupt, Tony, I'm gonna shift us in a neutral for a second, which means a quick commercial break. One of the things I love about sport is learning who the greats were. Okay, who are some of the greats of F one. We did talk about Urt and Senna. Yeah, Michael Schumacher.
Michael Schumacher is absolutely one of the greats.
Michael Schumacher took everything to a completely another level after Sena in terms of just the level of preparation and his commitment to what he was doing. When he was in his first couple of years of competition, he used to have his blood tested during a pit stop, you know,
during a test session. He'd do like twenty thirty laps come in and then his physio would like draw some blood from his arm in a syringe and take it off, and then Schumacher go back out as if he's doing a race simulation, because he wanted they wanted to analyze what was happening in his blood and in his body during the course of race conditions. I mean, that's the kind of level he was starting to take things too,
in the kind of early nineteen nineties. He wanted to make it as difficult as possible to beat him.
You will hear the names one Min Vanjol as well from and around.
Nurble Green nineteen fifty seven, the.
World's Greatest circuit, Another race for the world's greatest driver. Que Manuel Fanjo. Panko's already won the Argentinian and the Monarco Grand Prix. He's already won four World championships for help Romeo on the snes Pared Ferrari. Now he's out to win his slip World championship in a Mazzarati.
Fanjo was in a maserati miles behind the two Ferraris and drove out of his skin, frightening himself and to pass them, catch them and pass them and drove, I mean, the most dangerous track there's ever been, the Novergreen, and he drove so fast and took so many risks that for the next two weeks he had nightmares, literal nightmarees. He couldn't sleep because he'd gone closer to the edge and remember the danger of going to the edge in those days of death, likely death.
We talked a lot about Sir Jackie Stewart, and a lot of people associate him.
His name comes up a lot. Yeah, yeah, his name.
Up like that.
I don't know if this is true, but I feel like he's a bit like the grandfather of the Godfather, maybe even a Formula one.
The most pure kind of driver, I'm told my dad knew him really well, he was friends with him, but I never obviously saw him. Race was Jim Clark, who was a Scottish driver in the nineteen sixties, two time world champion, who was just beautiful to watch and tended to win races by huge margins just because he's he was just he was just balletic behind the wheel by all accounts, just so smooth and just so fast, and no one could live with him.
Everyone looked up to him, as just Jim.
He won twenty five Grand Prix out of seventy two starts. Guess how many times he came second Once.
He tended to either win or the car broke.
Down when the car hill together, he won. He was as good as that.
And in sixty three and sixty five when he won the championship, he scored the maximum possible score under the rules in both those seasons. Yeah, take that, Maximus Stappen. And in sixty five, get this, in sixty five years called the maximum possible score that season even though he skipped the Monaco Grand Prix, didn't compete in the Monica Grand Prix because he was winning the Indy five hundred. He won the Indy five hundred and the championship in the same year. That's unbelievable.
And one of your food chop plans were you raced at Indianapolis next year where you'll go there again?
Well, everyone in America keeps asking me that, but at the moment, I don't know.
I'm I've come back to carry on with the European season and try and get the championship back.
So well, wait, see how we get on with that.
Clark is to me.
The purest genius we've ever had in the World Championship.
It was in the fifth lap, but something went wrong. Clark's car had not reappeared in front of the timekeeper. The reason was soon clear. Clark had careered off the track at over one hundred and fifty miles an hour. The world the mon's the loss of a likable man who was also one of the greatest Brand Prix drivers of all time.
I think Lewis Hamilton has to be put up there as one of the most significant people in the history of the sport as well. Lewis Hamilton has opened up the sport to a different demographic, you know, the first person of color to race in it, and not only race in it, but become the most successful driver in the history of the sport. I think his impact, which has already been enormous on track, may end up being
even greater off track. If you're a young girl, or a young black boy or girl, or a young LGBTQ plus person, you might think, I wonder whether this sport is for me. I wonder whether it's for me because I can't you know, you can't really see it. That's why I think Lewis Hamilton is so important as a role model obviously visibly the only black driver in Formula One,
but also he's a straight man. But he still wears rainbow helmets where we do race at the beginning of this year, for instance Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and later Qatar and so on and so forth, and he wears those helmets because I think he wants to stick up for human rights wherever he sees it. It needs to be stuck up for if you like.
What I truly believe is that everyone should have equal rights, freedom of speech and freedom of movement. There's places such as here where the LGBT community there's prison time, death penalty and restrictions from people from be in themselves, and I don't believe in that.
People like me obviously a gay man, and I'm one of the founder ambassadors of Racing Pride, which seeks to further and promote the rights of LGBTQ plus people in motor racing generally and globally. So obviously we can do so many things. We can make our effort, but actually what we call allies, you know, straight allies, heterosexual allies, are so valuable. Their voices are so important because it's not just you saying I'm gay. Therefore I want to
say this. It's no, I'm straight, but I want to say this still.
Religions can change, rules can change, rules can change those things.
They have the power too.
So we don't choose where we're going. Others have chosen for us to be here, so we have to make sure that we have to apply the pressure on them to make sure that they are doing.
Right by the people.
He'll be forty when he first races a Ferrari, enormously exciting and by the way, as fit as a butcher's dog now, and he still will be, just as Fernando Alonso, who's four years older than him, is still as fit as a butcher's dog. I mean, personally, I'd absolutely love to see Fernando in a Murk and Lewis in a Ferrari, the two forty year olds duking it out in the two best cars. Wouldn't that be great? That would be fantastic. I mean, red Bull might end up being quicker or
as quick as well. But I'm allow me my fantasy, Allow me my fantasy.
I mean, I just was wondering if, since it also came up for you how it was growing up as a gay boy and then a gay man into the world of f.
One answer, no worries. You know, when I arrived in Formula one, which was a third of a century ago, more or less, I was I think I was called the only gay in the Formula one village, and I can't have been, because, of course there must have been others. But I was the only one who wasn't in hiding, the only one who wasn't closeted. I just decided not
to be. I decided not to be. And I did encounter some homophobia, some of which, of course I may not have known about, because homophobes and like all bullies, often caused trouble behind your back, not in front of you. But I did get some in front of me. I was a driver, funny enough, no longer involved in the sport in any way, not a commentator, not involved in management. But he used to call me the fat faggot. He used to call me that routinely, both behind my back
and to my face. And I've never named him, and I'm not going to, because that isn't the point. The point is that that was a thing that used to be able to happen. I don't think it would happen now. So we are, we have come some way, and things are better than they were. I was a journalist, always had a reasonably confident way with me. It doesn't mean I don't have my own doubts and insecurities, because we all do. But I think I always had a reasonably
confident manner about me. And I was a journalist in the first instance, then comm's man, and then you know all those other jobs. And I think from one grandees understood that such people were not mechanics and were not engineers, and therefore could be maverick in this way, and being gay might be one of those ways in which they could be maverick. If I'd been a mechanic, I think
it would have been more difficult. And I do know mechanics who are still not out, who've been in the sport for donkeys years, some of them, and some of them honestly are out now in every other aspect of their life. They are married to their own same sex partner, married, and they had a wedding which their friends and families all attended. They're out to their neighbours, they're out to all their friends, and they're out to their partners, families
and employers. The one place they're not out is in the factory they work in in England where they put bits of formala one cars together, or they design bits of formal one cars. And one of the reasons we founded Racing Pride, which I still work for as a founder ambassador I'm very proud of, is that we realized it's not just you know, teenagers who are struggling to come out and wondering whether the sport is for them. It's also men. It usually is men, not women, but
it can be women. But the vast majority of the people I'm talking about a men in their thirties, forties and fifties who are upset and depressed by the double life they have to lead. And the story we take to the teams because we go to teams and we do workshops and symposia and lectures and explain to them
why this matters. And what I say to them is, of course it matters because you should do the right thing, but also you should want to do it because they won't give of their best, they won't do their best work. If they're mechanics, they may make mistakes. If they're are dynamesists, they may not come up with the very best innovations. So ultimately, if you can create a situation where they can feel happier and work better, you will make your
cargo faster. That's what you'll do. And when you say that, because of course, nobody is more competitive than a Formula one boss, he says, uh huh, right, because there's lap time there.
That's why any I mean, look the reality with the history, we could I feel like we could do a whole season just on this. But any final thoughts from your end? Would you see yourself as a history buff a history fan.
Yes, it's easy to diminish historical figures because in sport we're always getting better, you know, like you could just go but what do you mean that guy is a great. Look at his lap times. It's so slow, but we forget how pivotal they were. And I find my favorite athletes, world class athletes are the ones that know and respect
the history of their sport. I don't know which F one drivers have that now, but my favorite athletes are the ones that know who those people were, because that's the reason they have and are in the position that they're.
In, they have respect.
Yeah, I just know where the sport came from. So it's important to know the history. Learn it. But life is for the now. We breathe now, we breathe air now, and so it's time to move on past the history into our next episode.
This has been Choosing Sides f one, a production of Sports Illustrated Studios, iHeart Podcast and one oh one Studio podcast. The show is hosted by Michael Costa and Tony Cowen Brown. This episode was edited, scored, and sound designed by Senior producer Johai may Tho. Scott Stone is the executive producer and head of audio, and Danielle Wexman is Director of podcast Development and production manager at one on one Studios.
At iHeart Podcasts, Sean Titone is our executive producer. And a special thank you to Michelle Newman, David Glasser, and David Hootkin from one O one Studios. For more shows from iHeart Podcasts, go visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and whatever you do, don't forget to rate us and tell your friends it really does mean a lot.
So next week on Choosing Side, everyone we are going to be talking about the Brits. Absolutely favorite topic.
American American Revolution.
Nope, No so close though.
Yah.
The weather, weather, Yes, bring it on, it's good.
Get your Sonnaise, gets your umbrella. What's what's an umbrella?
The umbrella?
Umbrella, umbrella?
What accent are you trying to do that, Michael?
It is it is. You guys do love talking about the weather, and you should. It's fun and interesting. Over the nice breaker, Yeah it is.
It's great and it actually plays a huge part in Formula one
That I'm interested to learn about.