298 - Preseason Primer 2025

Welcome to Shift F1, a podcast about speedy race cars. I am Drew Scanlon. Joining me for this preseason primer 2025, we have Danny O'Dwyer. How are you, Danny? Very excited. I love the primers every year. It feels like a clean slate every year, right up until it isn't, which is usually the end of the first or second race. But this year, this year feels like it could be... I don't want to jinx it, but it could be...

a great year to start watching Formula One. So if you are new, welcome. And if you're old, why are you listening to the preseason primer? It's because you missed Formula One, isn't it? Also joining us, Rob Zachney. How are you, Rob?

Not too bad. I think next year is going to be really tricky because everything's going to be different, but this is the last year where we kind of mail it in because the rules have been so stable for a while. Yeah, I'll have to rewrite my entire script next time. Rob had a great idea for like... just recording like a 90% of the episode that we could then reuse every year. But next year basically makes that a moot point almost entirely. I could have done it. Yeah.

And you just insert, like, Mercedes drivers are George Russell and... Yeah. Well, yeah, welcome, everyone, to our annual preseason primer episode. This is where we explain how Formula One... First step one pronounce it correctly how it works who everybody is, and how to fun watching it all while assuming that you, the listener, have no prior knowledge of the sport or indeed any kind of motorsport. So if you are new to Formula One, maybe you are brand new.

to motorsport in general. You've watched some Netflix's Drive to Survive, perhaps. You've come to the right place. And even if you're not new to F1, like Danny said, stick around. Because we're going to cover everything and everyone that is new this season as well. Maybe you'll learn something. That's right. So first, I guess a little bit about this podcast, if this is your first episode. We see it as sort of like a companion piece to the F1 season. We post an episode every week on Wednesdays.

And we talk about the news in the racing world, what to expect from the next race, and if a race just happened. What happened in that race and why? Because there are always incidents to unpack and to armchair quarterback, which is part of the fun. We also take listener questions at shiftf1podcast at gmail.com. And, of course, you can support us on Patreon. Patrons get exclusive ad-free episodes. Discord channel to get access to that and of course our ever-expanding back catalog of

Bonus episodes that cover racing documentaries like Senna and Michael Fassbender's Road to Le Mans. Primers for other racing series like Formula E and IndyCar if you do catch the bug. We got racing animes in there. We got other car-related films like Rush. both italian jobs so if you would like to support the show you can do so over at patreon.com slash shift f1 or click the link in the show notes and get access to all that fun stuff

This is the 12th year, I think, I believe. It is the 12th year. I just found a Reddit post saying, oh, there's a new podcast coming out on Giant Bomb called Alt F1. And that was 11 years ago. So I think this is our 12th season, if I'm right. I thought this was the 11th. But who knows? It's been so long. Yeah. Yeah. You'd think we would have learned something by now. All right. Well, to kick it off, Formula One is the world's fastest.

Arguably the most prestigious and definitely the most watched motor racing championship. It's been around since 1950. And it works a lot like other sports. There are teams that compete at events over the course of a season. And at the end of the season, a champion is crowned. And so to break that down, there are 10 teams with two cars each, meaning that there are 20 cars in every race. And this year there are 24 races.

each at a different track across 21 different countries. And we're going to get to exactly where we're going later in the episode. But that's one of the things that I really love about this. Makes it feel kind of like the Olympics every year. Yeah. The season takes place from March through December. And both teams and drivers earn points for how they finish in each race. And then the driver and the team with the most points at the end of the season win the championship.

Two different championships. That's right, yeah. And often not the same. Sometimes the same. Sometimes you have a dominant driver and a pretty good second driver, and they win both the Constructors' and the Drivers' Championships, but not always, like last year.

Yeah, indeed. The team that won the constructors championship, as it's called, they had the most points from both of their drivers combined. But that is not... the team that the Drivers' Championship... driver was on so yeah and the driver's championship is kind of the one that is like the most important the other one is important for like money and prestige for the teams but largely what we're talking about is the driver's championship

Yes, that's the one everyone is all the fans are watching for. The teams do care about the Constructors Championship because how they finish. has a direct effect on the amount of prize money that they receive from f1 the higher you finish as a team the more money you get and like a lot of sports money is at the heart of formula one and that sort of feedback loop

tends to keep the top teams at the top, which is what makes it all the more exciting when another team does well. I remember having the revelation when I was getting into F1 that it can be really exciting to see someone come in third. Because they're an underdog. Or 10th if they're a real terrible driver or have a real terrible car. Right. And I mentioned that to illustrate that the more you know about a team's capabilities, the more exciting it can be.

when you watch them exceed those capabilities so that's why this whole podcast exists is to like give context to all this stuff and make the whole sport more enjoyable and again last year was a great example because the team that won the constructors championship

hadn't won it since 1998. So that was really exciting to see. But back to the money, the drivers technically don't any... earn any prize money from f1 but they do receive bonuses from their teams based on how they finish in the championship the bonuses are defined by their contracts and so they aren't publicized but

Most F1 drivers are well-paid. Drivers Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton were 17th and 21st on last year's Forbes list of the highest paid athletes at $81 and $69 million, respectively. And that is also included. Including sponsorship, I'm guessing? Yes, it is. Yeah, inside and outside of the actual sport. So that's among people like Tiger Woods and Aaron Rodgers.

F1 is trying to curb that feedback loop with a spending cap for each team at $135 million per year, which does not include driver salaries. And one team actually breached the spending cap in 2020. and was penalized with a fine and a reduction in the amount of wind tunnel time that they could use to develop their next car. That's how you get a slap on the wrist in F1, is you're not allowed to use the wind tunnel as much as other people.

You're also not allowed to use the wind tunnel as much if you've done well. They give more of that time to the teams who are lower in the constructors still, right? Yes, yeah, to try to balance that out.

Okay, so if you were to sit down and watch a race, what are you actually going to see? So for any... Given race weekend, as we call it, there are actually a few more events that happened aside from the race. First, there are the practice sessions, typically two on Friday and one on Saturday that last about an hour each.

Since the cars change every year and the track conditions are never consistent, it's important for the teams to send their cars around and dial in the setups by making all kinds of adjustments to aerodynamic elements and brake bias and all that stuff. Most of that is invisible since teams tend to play their cards pretty close to the chest in practice sessions. But you can usually get a broad sense of how a team might do based on their practice performance. The next event is qualifying.

Which is kind of a misnomer. You can't really fail to qualify in the modern era of F1. You still technically can, but it's never going to happen. Yeah. It's more about determining the order that the cars are going to start the race. Qualifying takes place on Saturday after the third practice session and is divided into three subsessions, each about 15 minutes long. And in the first session, which we call Q1,

All 20 cars go out on track and try to set the fastest lap time that they can. And at the end of that session, the slowest five cars are eliminated. And those are the cars that start at the back of the grid. So positions 20 through 16. In the order in which they were slowest slash fastest. Right, yeah, in time order. In Q2...

The remaining 15 cars go again, and again, it's the slowest five from that group that are knocked out. And in Q3, we've got 10 cars left. They go try to set their best times. And then that just determines the top 10 starting order. So the fastest car in that Q3 session starts the race in front, and we call that pole position. And it's important to know that it is how you do in each session that...

determines your starting place, not your overall best time. So for example, rain could show up in Q3 and make everybody slower than the cars that got knocked out in Q2, but those in Q3 would still start in the top 10. Yeah, you don't carry over your time between the qualifying sessions. Everyone goes back to zero once you go from Q1 to Q2 or Q2 to Q3. It's also important to know that despite being basically a time trial, qualifying is pretty fun to watch.

ticking of the clock really adds to the drama and you can get some pretty amazing moments, especially if rain shows up, which tends to throw everybody's plans into disarray. And the longer the cars are out there, the better the track itself is. accommodating the cars because the driver's line gets warmer and the track conditions get better. So usually it's the last laps that actually are the fastest ones. So it's kind of a, you know, a race to eke out as much as you can. Usually when the...

Timer has gone zero, zero, zero, and they're all finishing their laps is when you sort of really see who gets pole and where everyone else shakes out. Yeah, that phenomenon you'll hear called track evolution. That's what that means. The track is getting faster and faster because more... you know, more rubber is being laid down so it's grippier.

Most importantly, I think, though, qualifying is really kind of the first chapter in the story of the race weekend. I feel sort of incomplete if I didn't watch qualifying. You know, just turn on the race because then you say, well, hey, how's that guy starting in third? F1 does put highlights of every session on YouTube, so if you don't have an hour to devote to qualifying, you can still get the gist of it in about seven minutes. The races are on Sunday.

And they last a maximum of two hours, during which they drive over 190 miles. The number of laps varies because each circuit is a different length. They all feature at least one pit stop, which Rob will get to later. And at the end, the drivers are awarded points that contribute to their championship standing.

Crucially, only the top 10 finishers are awarded points with first place getting 25, second place gets 18, third place gets 15, and so on down to one point for 10th place. It is pretty brutal if you finish. outside the top 10, you know, getting zero points after doing a whole race weekend. But that is just one of many of the stories that you are the viewer are following because sometimes it is a huge achievement if an underdog gets a single championship point.

So now that I've thrown all of that at you, there is one more kind of confusing event that only shows up occasionally. Over the course of the season, there are six sprint events. And the sprint is basically a short race that happens a day before the normal race. It's one third the distance of normal race and there are no pit stops. The top eight finishers in the sprint also earn points.

with eight for first place down to one point for eighth place. On race weekends where there is a sprint, we get one practice session on Friday followed by... It's own sprint specific qualifying session, which works just like regular qualifying, but the sessions are shorter. And on Saturday, the sprint happens.

then we get qualifying for the actual race and the races on Sunday as usual. And this particular little adjunct is also still kind of weird and confusing to people who've been watching Formula One a long time. It's part of a sort of a broader... thing that happens in f1 where they try and mix up

the weekends to basically facilitate more entertainment. Having a second race is actually kind of common in a lot of other types of motor racing, like having a race on a Saturday, like a shorter one on a Saturday, and then the big one on a Sunday.

So it's just like a way that they're trying to do it in Formula One. And like Drew said, there's only six again this year, six places where it'll pop up. And those weekends are fun because there's more racing going on. I think it's a little bit confusing, but it usually means that there's...

kind of more action and more fun highlights. Theoretically. Yeah, I mean... Theoretically, yes, exactly. Theoretically. Yeah. Yeah, and like you said, F1 basically introduced them so that they could sell more tickets and TV time. Yeah.

Sometimes they're fun. Sometimes they're not. You know, they matter a little bit because they get points. But yeah. All right. Well, with that, let's get to the teams and drivers. Like I said, there are two drivers. Per team, 10 teams. The concept of teammates in F1 is a little weird. They do sometimes work together. For instance, the car behind may be ordered to defend against another attacking team. But that's only if the driver listens to their team's orders, which they usually do.

Basically, every driver out there thinks that they are the best, and they all especially want to beat their teammates because they are the only ones with the same machinery. It's a pretty poor reflection of your abilities if your teammate... beats you every time in the same car but before we get to those different teams and their drivers a quick note about how to tell them apart on track each team has a different paint job which we call livery

But at least they are consistent every race, unlike some racing. That is right. Yeah, unlike IndyCar. Yeah, it's tough. So the cars within the same team look practically identical. The major difference between each car... is the color of the camera pods, which is sometimes called a T-bar because it looks like a squat letter T sitting on top of the car just behind the driver's head. One driver has a black T-bar while another has a fluorescent yellow one.

Typically, it's the more senior driver on the team, which will have the black one, but that's not always the case. So be on the lookout for the... We post a spotter's guide on the Shift F1 social accounts as we get closer to the first race. You just have to basically remember which driver has.

Which T-bar? You won't. Nobody does. The commentators on the TV will constantly be like, oh my god, so-and-so just crashed out and it'll be the teammate they're talking about. Like, you try to remember this. But this is frequently, like, people who've watched the sport for like 30 years and call these things professionally. will look at something and be like, we think that it's Charles Leclerc who's gone off, but they're not real sure.

My brain still does the thing where I will look at the cars around them and then glance over to the list of the drivers on the side. Same thing. Yeah. I don't know what it is, but that's I'm never looking at. You lean hard on relative positioning. Yeah. Yeah. Contact. Exactly, yeah.

Yeah, the graphics have gotten much, much better, and they're typically pretty good. Oftentimes now they just straight up show the name of the driver with motion graphics on the main display. So hopefully they'll do a bit more of that this year. Yeah. Before we run down the teams here, one note about engines that can be a little confusing. So a lot of the teams will have names that you've heard of, like Mercedes and Ferrari. And in addition to being F1 teams...

These so-called works teams also make their own engines and then sell those engines to other smaller teams that we call customer teams. So with each team breakdown, we will also mention the engine manufacturer. All right, well, before we get to those, though, let's take our first commercial break, and we'll be right back with our 10 teams and their drivers. All right, Danny, do you want to kick us off with the reigning World Constructors champions?

Yes, let's do it. And it's sort of novel to be talking about this team first. I am talking about McLaren. M-C-L-A-R-E-N. McLaren. Like some sort of weird Scottish surname. They are the constructors champions, which means that they are the one we're talking about first. It means they have the best parking spot in Park Fermi as well. I always forget what to call that area. Oh, yeah. In the pit lane when you've scored first. Last year, you get...

First choosing in the pit lanes. You just get to pull right in. Yes, I forgot about the pits as well. You can go straight in. McLaren are a team that's been around for a long time. They're based out of the UK. They're the orange car. Sorry. The papaya. car is what they like to call it get your branding right exactly um mercedes engine uh based in the uk um and a british team um they are an older name within the sport they've had some years where they had six

in the early aughts, late 90s was kind of when they were doing relatively well. They were kind of a mid-team, mid-pack team for a number of years, but were sort of in the... the latter stages of like a five-year project maybe that they've been having there to really fundamentally change their direction and their competitiveness. And it's largely...

proved very successful. This is all helmed by an American CEO called Zach Brown. The team principal of the team, which is sort of the person who's kind of like the... the equivalent to be like the manager on the sidelines, you know, the coach who's essentially calling the shots on the weekends. That person is called Andrea Stella. Zac Brown, though, is kind of...

they're an interesting situation where the CEO is also kind of there. He's kind of there as a wingman as well, involved in those processes. Like I said, they came first last year. The two drivers they have are quite young. One of them has been with the team for a number of years and is their sort of de facto number one driver. His name is Lando Norris.

get used to very esoteric names in Formula One. Perhaps something to do with the fact that most of these people are from an upper class, maybe. Although also the international nature of this is part of it too. His nationality on his flag is UK. I think he was actually born in Austria or somewhere. I forget, technically. But he's an English guy.

Last year, he placed second. He was kind of fighting in the Drivers' Championship for a while, but ultimately didn't win it. He has never won a Drivers' Championship. He's 25 years old, and he kind of liked the project.

has been getting better every year as well um he was kind of like a jokey young british laddie lad uh for the early years and in the past sort of two years there has been a notable change in tone he's been taking things a bit more seriously he's matured um and also that's been reflected in his race craft uh there is a interesting story that will continue throughout this year which is his uh friendship slash competitiveness with max verstappen who was the uh

multi who won the championship last year and has won it many times um Lando is a big involved in like sim racing and streaming during COVID and stuff like that. He's sort of like part of the younger online generation. And yeah, he's a, he's an affable guy. I think people in general like Lando Norris.

Teammate Oscar Piastri is two years his junior. He's 23, an Australian who joined them last year as their number two driver. And he became in fourth. Wait, was he last year he started? It might have been the year before, actually. I can't remember. I can't remember. Last year, he came in fourth. He had a slower start to the year, but he really...

got hold of the car halfway through the season and was sort of tit for tat with Lando for a decent part of the latter half of last year. So I think there's going to be a very interesting battle between the two of these this year. Piastri is... It might be underselling him to say that he's sort of cold. He's confident. He doesn't come across as like overly emotional.

in either situations where he has done really well or in situations when things have gone badly. And I think if you were to weigh the two of those up, that's probably a net. good for a formula one driver you more often times are in situations where things aren't going well um and being able to keep your cool is a big uh you know feather in your cap if you if you want to be competitive and oscar sometimes does things his racecraft is really good and also he just seems like somebody who's

unshakable. We'll have to see if a battle with his teammate this year is the thing that finally shakes him. Yeah, we'll see. Rob, what can you tell us about the red team?

Yeah, so the red team, Ferrari, they are, of course, one of the storied brands in racing and in, like, exotic sports cars. Ferrari occupies a very special place, NF1. team with the longest history and some of the greatest success in the sport, though, also some of the lowest lows, as you might expect in Italy, support of the Italian team.

is almost a matter of like patriotic fealty. And you can really feel that when they do race in Italy, particularly when they race at Monza, which very much feels like the Ferrari home race. That is their homecoming. And it's always very special if they manage to put on a good showing in front of an Italian crowd. But Ferrari has always... enjoys her the most support internationally because, again...

very strong, recognizable, iconic brand. People buy Ferrari merch around the world and show up in Ferrari kit everywhere F1 goes. Their dominance, I think, among fans has sort of waned a bit as their dominance on the track has waned, but they still remain one of the most popular teams. Their team principal, speaking of popularity, is Fred Vasseur, who is...

is very well regarded up and down the paddock. He is someone with experience running racing teams at multiple levels and is highly regarded by a lot of drivers as he's sort of coached a good number of them. on their way up to the ranks of the sport. And he's also sort of proven himself to be one of those managers who tends to improve whatever team he is a part of. And he appears to be on trajectory to do that with Ferrari after a number of years where the team was...

was sort of struggling. Last year, they placed a very convincing second in the Constructors' Championship, which is, you know, leaps and bounds of where they've been lately. Their driver situations are interesting right now. So some years back, they... Brought on a very talented young driver, Charles Leclerc, and kind of made clear that he was the future of the team. Very early on, they signed him to a very long contract. He is also unusual because he's a Monogast.

which most people are not from. Most people simply go to Monaco to hide their earnings from various tax agencies. He's hid his earnings since he was born. Charles is very unusual that he is actually from the tiny principality of Monaco. Very, very talented driver. Has had a lot of... Bad luck at Ferrari at times. Ferrari is one of those teams sometimes that if something can go wrong to sort of foolishly cost themselves a race, that will happen. And Charles has been the...

beneficiary of that kind of malfeasance more than once. But either way, it was very clear he was going to be sort of the future of the team. But Ferrari has another tradition, which is they also try to hire the biggest names they possibly have. All the greats, they try at least to make sure that just about every great driver of their generation passes through the doors of Ferrari at some point. And so they...

They have brought on a new driver for this season. In keeping with that tradition, they poached Lewis Hamilton, seven-time world champion. Six of those championships won with the Mercedes team. They poached him from Mercedes, where he was sort of synonymous with that program, and I think there was certainly an expectation. maybe only at Mercedes primarily, that he would end his racing career with Mercedes. But Ferrari brought him on. And so it's...

Leaves both drivers in an interesting position. Hamilton is sort of in an elder statesman position in Formula One. He's also in an unusual position in that he is a black English driver in a sport where black drivers... are exceedingly rare. He's kind of one of one. Pascal Verlein, I think, is the last driver that we had who was a driver of color. But he's in an... unusual position from that standpoint. He's also in a position where...

Age catches up with drivers. Reflexes begin to fade a little bit and can sort of sneak up on you. It's hard to assess, but everyone sort of expects that as you approach and then surpass 40, you will lose a bit of your edge. Mercedes was not competitive in his last several seasons. So there's kind of a question is how much of his decline in performance was the car and how much was maybe his advancing years. So he and Leclerc are...

an interesting pairing, both with lots to prove and both with lots to lose, depending on how the season shakes out and how their performances stack up against one another. Yeah, that one's going to be really fun to watch. Danny, what can you tell me about energy drinks? Yeah, so this theme...

Surprising in two ways. Surprising in one way if you are new to F1 and surprising in another if you're not. If you're new to F1, it might be strange that there's a team called Red Bull. Yes, that's right. Taurine filled drink with all those weird cartoon commercials. When they're not throwing people out of...

balloons in the stratosphere or having people jump with makeshift airplanes into the sea. They're also involved in several, many dozens of sports around the world. And one of those is... is motorsport their entry into formula one you know well over a decade ago now at this stage two decades ago uh was was really remarkable they they turned up

Nobody really expected this team named after and owned by an energy drink magnate to do very well. And pretty quickly they became the Yankees of F1. They were... insanely dominant. They had a, you know, a driver in Sebastian Vettel who was one of the best drivers in the world and with a...

car designer Adrian Newey and a great team at Red Bull, they were insanely dominant for a large period of time. They weren't... for a little while there, Mercedes were, but they are once again uh sort of the most uh dominant team or at least they were until last year where as i am talking about them third which is the thing that will surprise you if you're not new to f1 the fact that both ferrari and mclaren managed to pip them and the constructors

regardless of the fact that they have been such a dominant team. This was largely down to a driver that I will not be talking about today, Sergio Perez, who lost his seat after really just not pulling his weight last year in the team. The Rebel car is pretty easy to spot. Looks like a big drinks can. It's dark blue, has a big, you know...

Red Bull logo, you know, bull on the side of it. You'll recognize it pretty quickly and be able to pick it out pretty easily as well. They run a Honda engine, although it's sort of like a Honda slash their own.

own internal engine manufacturing. The team is based in the UK, but they are from Austria. The Red Bull company is from Austria. They actually own their own Formula One racetrack, which we will go to um uh the red bull ring used to be what you said we will not be going well who knows who if this patreon thing really kicks off rob you know maybe we'll find ourselves in the alps in a couple of months time um

Their team principal, Christian Horner, is a divisive figure. I don't know if he's even divisive. Does anyone really like him much? Without getting into the weeds on it too much last year, he was embroiled in a pretty... unimpressive issue last year with regard to how he was treating not just his family I guess but also one of the employees at Red Bull it seemed like he was probably going to lose his job but I think Corporate interests conspired to help him keep it, I would say.

He's also one of the most outspoken people. If you watch Drive to Survive, the Formula One show on Netflix, you probably know Christian Horner quite well. He's been with the team since its inception in Formula One, and he will probably continue to be with them for a long time yet.

They finished in third last year, as I said, and they have won a new driver. But first, I want to talk about Max Verstappen, who is probably the most dominant. I mean, he's definitely the most dominant driver of the past five years. He has won four world championships. He has won four on the track.

Trot, in fact, the past four years. Last year was kind of the first year. No, that's a lie. The first year he won, it came down to the final race. But then the last two were sort of cakewalks. And I think Formula One... in those years was not very interesting. Or at least we found it interesting because we care about what's happening all around the grid. Last year, though, he was involved in a...

in a decent fight. Not one that really went down to the wire or anything like that, but Lando did push him a bit, especially as Red Bull's favor and their performance really dropped off in the latter half of the season. He is 27 years old. He's young, but he's been around F1 for a long time. He was one of the youngest drivers to ever enter the sport. So he's kind of part of the furniture of F1 now at this stage, especially this year as we welcome more rookies.

And yeah, I think he's got a massive fan base of Dutch fans. You'll see them wearing the orange in the crowd. I think he has... He perhaps irked more people when he was younger, but as he has probably won championships, I think that always helps. And obviously gotten a bit older, he's matured and is generally well. I would say, within the paddocks. His teammate this year is a new teammate, Liam Lawson from New Zealand.

Liam has sort of had a weird on-again-off-again relationship with Formula One. He is... This is his first time he's like a... He's not technically a rookie, but this is the first time he has like a... proper seat with this team. He did five races in 2023 with Red Bull's sort of Italian sister. team. We'll talk about them later. Alpha Tauri. And then in 2024, he did six races with...

RB, which is basically what that team ended up getting renamed to. They renamed that second team a million times, it seems like. He has... I would say he is... pressed he hasn't blown anyone away but his racecraft has been largely enjoyed, I think, by the teams he's been with. He's consistent. He doesn't make too many terrible mistakes, which is something which has peppered Red Bull's number two driver position for a while now.

He's young again, 23, but he kind of acts like he's got a bit more maturity, I would say. Himself and Piastri are definitely feel on the older side of 23. And I think it's going to be a very interesting year. I think it'll be the first time since...

you know, in a while since Daniel Ricciardo left Red Bull that Max Verstappen is going to have somebody who's not really... toe-to-toe but at least I suspect there will be some weekends this year where Liam Lawson gets the better of Max in qualifying and slash or in the race and I think

Really what Red Bull need is somebody who can score points consistently, regardless of if it's above max or not, so they can try and get that constructive championship back. All right. Next up, we have Mercedes, who last year placed fourth.

They are a German team, but like many teams, have a headquarters in the UK. Their team principal is an Austrian named Toto Wolf. He sounds exactly like Schwarzenegger. He does. Mercedes makes their own engine, as we mentioned earlier, and their livery is black and teal. They have a teal stripe. Although... You'll also hear them called the silver arrows, which is because as we learned only recently.

At a race in 1934 the car was found to be one kilogram over the weight limit so they stripped off the white paint leaving just the aluminum and then won the race. putting them almost like a century ahead of where formula one efficient like efficiency maxing would eventually end up yeah yeah until 2021 Mercedes had won the previous seven Drivers' and Constructors' Championships. However, they have recently had to take a back seat after...

pursuing a car design that really did not pan out. But they are slowly building their way back up and have an exciting rookie driver this year. So we will see whether they can put it all together. First, though, they're... I guess, veteran driver now, George Russell. He's 27 years old from the UK. Last year, placed six in the driver's championship. This will be his seventh year in the sport and his fourth at Mercedes.

He apparently made the case for Toto Wolff to sign him to the Mercedes program with a PowerPoint presentation. Yep, that's on brand. Which should give you some indication about his personality. He's very much the British gentleman. Although he has lost his cool at times. He's been relatively consistent, but has developed a reputation recently for buckling under pressure with a few...

last lap crashes. He also, unfortunately for him, came in first last year in Belgium, only to be disqualified for a technical infringement. So, not his fault. He still managed to fare... pretty well against his former teammate, the aforementioned seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton. So he's definitely a solid driver. His teammate for this year is a rookie named Andrea... Kimi Antonelli. He'll probably be called Kimi, his middle name in broadcast and stuff. He is 18 years old. Wow. From Italy.

He's moving up from Formula 2, where he placed sixth in his rookie season alongside teammate Oliver Behrman, who is also a rookie this year. And before that, he racked up six championships in four years across karting. Formula 4 and Formula Regional. He actually skipped Formula 3 and jumped right into Formula 2. During all of that, he learned English during his downtime on race weekends.

and has been a part of the Mercedes Junior Academy since 2019 and was fast-tracked to the team after Lewis Hamilton defected to Ferrari. Let's see, he first tested an F1 car in April 2024, later crashing in a practice session at the Italian Grand Prix, but like... other rookie drivers he has since had running time in the postseason test in Abu Dhabi and the preseason test in Bahrain.

On debut, he will be the third youngest driver in F1 history behind Max Verstappen and Lance Stroll. And in fact, he only passed his driver's test in January. A lot of hype for him, but he is young, so his main job will just be to keep it out of the wall. Max Verstappen joined the sport at 17 and was crashing into everyone so much that they made 18 the limit.

I think it'll be a good pairing. You know, Kimmy will be learning from George and George will have someone to push him. It is remarkable that there is nine years between the two of them. Yeah. It doesn't feel like it at all. Yeah. He is racing with number 12, the same as his idol. Say it with me, Ayrton Senna. And also not named after the former F1 champion, Kimi Räikkönen. It's just a coincidence.

Next up, Rob. Aston Martin. What do you say about Aston Martin? Aston Martin would like you to know that James Bond drives an Aston Martin, and that's pretty cool, they think. All the kids love James Bond. They do. They do. And nothing's cooler than doing constant homages to James Bond in various publicity materials you put out. So Aston Martin, things that are notable about them.

They are storied British brand, like, you know, history of making really stylish, sleek, you know, luxury sports cars sort of in the Jaguar vein. Also, like, have sort of fallen on hard times a little bit and were rescued effectively by Lawrence Stroll, a... Canadian billionaire who got involved in racing in first by sort of supporting his son Lance's career as a racer who is their number two driver at Aston Martin.

What a coincidence. It is an unusual situation where the person who owns the team got... arrived in F1 mostly to support his son's ambitions to be an F1 racing driver, and now appears to have his own ambitions to create a motorsports empire based out of Aston Martin. Lawrence is sort of a big blustering... If you sort of think like bullying billionaire asshole, like...

Imagine that character. Lawrence Stroll kind of gives that in various appearances he makes. And they've burned through some executive talent over at that team. And right now they've got a sort of unusual situation in which the person who was running the team is now in a new role chief track side officer, which is sort of a new one to me. I feel like that feels like a demotion that they haven't quite made up their mind on. And the team is now led by a longtime Mercedes engineer, Andy Cowell.

The team is led on the track by Fernando Alonso, the oldest driver on the grid, you know, sort of a legendarily talented. legendarily prickly character uh if you follow american football the analogy might be an Aaron Rodgers type but like probably believes in vaccines probably significantly less of a dick than Aaron Rodgers but

Similar sort of arrogance that I'm good enough that I should be winning championships every year. If that's not happening, that is someone else's fault. And so he's also left a few programs and a few bridges. burning behind him over the years. He is at Aston Martin. This might be his last stop. He might be waiting for... He might be waiting to see how it turns out now that Aston Martin... gave a king's ransom to Adrian Newey, who was sort of an aerodynamicist who's been around F1 for decades.

and was the big brain behind the two eras of Red Bull dominance in the sport. And so the bet that Aston Martin has made is that with all the investment that Stroll has made in the team and then investing in its future by hiring someone who's widely regarded as the greatest engineering mind in... in the sport, maybe in the sport's history, the team's fortunes will improve. Whether they'll improve that much, you know, with sort of aging prickly driver in one car and the boss's son in the other.

following sort of a run of poor form last year. That remains to be seen, but these things do unfold over a time span of years. Everyone programs don't turn around on a dime, especially because there's sort of a cool down. on new new hires so like if you hire somebody in one year they often can't even start working for you until the next year

And you won't see the fruits of their labor until a year after that. So everything happens on delay. Aston Martin, like a lot of teams, I think has his eyes set on the 2026 cars when a lot of new things enter the sport and there's a lot of revamps.

And this year, they're just trying to put some points on the board. Just like Alpine, the next team here. Last year, they placed sixth. They are a French team. They also have headquarters in the UK. Their team principal is a guy named Oliver Oakes. He is new to the team because they also go through team principals like Nobody's Business. He joined in August of last year. They run the Renault engine. Although come 2026, there will be zero teams.

Running it because Alpine will become a Mercedes customer team from then on Alpine is the racing brand for the French car company right now which is itself partially owned by France. It's spelled Alpine, by the way, but it's pronounced Alpine. Everyone hates the name. They used to just be called Renault. It made more sense. It's silly.

The team has taken many forms over the years, but the recent incarnation has been going since 2021. And in that time, they haven't really managed to gain much of a foothold. By many accounts, the leadership has been, shall we say, chaotic. And true to form, they've got a new team principal. They did somehow manage a double podium in Brazil last year, which was a huge upset and kept them from sliding further than sixth in the Constructors' Championship.

They have one French driver, Pierre Gasly. He is 29 years old. He last year placed 10th in the Drivers' Championship. This will be his eighth year in F1 and his third at Alpine. And despite finishing no higher than seventh in his career, in the championship, that is, he has won a race, the 2020 Italian Grand Prix, which was a spectacular coup. He does have the unfortunate decision to have been part of the Red Bull Driver Academy during the tumultuous years where they would promote a driver.

with little experience to the senior team fry them in the pressure cooker and then kick them out when they failed to perform he lasted 12 races although I will say that he has steadily earned himself a reputation for getting on top of subpar cars, and that is a skill he will need at Alpine. His teammate is a rookie named Jack Doohan. He did race one time for Alpine at the very end of 2024 because he was their reserve driver. He's 22. He's from Australia.

and was a part of the Red Bull Junior team, but switched to the Alpine Academy in 2022. And before that, he spent two full years in Formula 2, getting third place in 2023. And he got second place in Formula 3 in 2021. He's the son of Mick Doohan. Five-time MotoGP champion, so look out for the commentators to accidentally call him Mick. Apparently... His dad Mick and seven-time F1 champion Michael Schumacher were friends and neighbors in Monaco. Yes, all the drivers live in Monaco.

so much show that schumacher gave jack a go-kart and after jack broke his leg on a bike when he was five years old the cart is what he gravitated toward oh wow he then went on to win the australian uh karting championship twice And he has gone with seven for his driver number, the same as Schumacher. Oh, nice. Yeah. Might be all the racing he gets, too, if the rumors would be believed.

Haas is next. The Haas team placed seventh last year. They are owned by American businessman Gene Haas, but they have a base in the UK. Their team principal is named Ayo Kamatsu. They run a Ferrari engine, and their livery is black, white, and red all over. They are the newest team on the grid, having started from scratch in 2016.

Haas, by the way, is a company that makes CNC machines, which are basically factory robots. And ironically, from the beginning, this team has farmed out the design and manufacturing of many of its parts. to keep costs down, but has been slowly bringing more of that in-house. If you watched any of the early seasons of Drive to Survive, you are likely familiar with their old team principal, Gunther Steiner, who oversaw a real rollercoaster of a team.

Since last year, however, they have been headed by their former trackside engineering director, who led the team to seventh place in the Constructors' Championship, which was their best finish in six years. They have an all-new driver lineup for this year, an old hand and an impressive rookie. Esteban Ocon is new to the team. He is 28 from France, last year placed 14th in the Drivers' Championship. He's been racing full-time in F1 since 2017, although he did have to sit out.

2019 when Lance Stroll's dad bought the team out from under him and installed his son as a driver. Which must have been particularly tough given that Ocon is one of the few F1 drivers from a more humble background. Yeah. His parents famously sold their house and lived in a motor home so that they could bring him to all of his racing events.

But it worked out because he beat Max Verstappen to the F3 championship in 2014. When he got back into the sport in 2020, he joined the Renault slash Alpine outfit. which I would claim, like Gasly, masked his abilities somewhat. He has shown real talent, like when he outscored his two-time champion teammate Alonso and won the 2021... hungarian grand prix but he has earned a reputation for clashing with his teammates uh his teammate this year is oliver bearman uh a rookie although he was a um

a reserve driver for both Haas and Ferrari. He raced for Let's see. His debut was in Saudi Arabia when Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz had emergency surgery for appendicitis. Oh, yeah. He then went on to qualify 11th and finish 7th, becoming the youngest driver to ever score points on debut and the youngest to ever drive for Ferrari.

Later that season, he filled in for Haas' Kevin Magnuson twice, once when he was ill and once when he earned a race ban. So maybe you can see why Kevin Magnuson is no longer here. And aside from that, Behrman got third in Formula 3 in 2022, first in 2021 across two different Formula 4 championships, and has a host of first places in multiple karting championships.

And his driver number is 87, because that's what he used in karting. Gosh, the Druid train continues. I was about to say, you're just going first, yeah. Yeah, Racing Bulls, they placed eighth last year.

They're an Italian team. Their team principal is a guy named Laurent Mechies. They race the Red Bull Honda derivative engine. They have a white livery this year with a Red Bull. on the side and as you might be able to tell from its name this is the sister team to red ball there are limits about how much technical information you can share with another team but um in the past red bull has basically used this team as a

sort of farm system for its younger drivers. But that slowly I think is changing as there's talk of the team wanting to assert themselves more as a stronger force. But the Red Bull connection is still very strong. Their drivers are Yuki Tsunoda. He is 24 from Japan. Last year, placed 12th in the Drivers' Championship. This will be his fifth season in F1, all of which have been with this team. And despite that, he is not.

yet been called up to the big team. He has a reputation for being a hothead on the radio. And while he did have a crashy first few seasons, he has turned into a pretty solid racer, successfully outshining some impressive teammates like former Red Bull driver Daniel Ricciardo and Formula 2 champion Nick DeVries. When he first got to F1, he was asked what his favorite thing about it was, and he said the food. It's a great answer. It's very understandable.

relatable answer, I think. Yeah. He's very direct. I bet the food is great. Yeah. Especially in those motorhomes. That was when the Honda had a hospitality van. He memorably posted my last racing weekend at this heaven, and it was a picture of a food court at the Honda Pavilion. So it might have just literally been that Honda was there like making Japanese convenience food. Right. Yeah, exactly. Awesome. Egg sandwiches. He will be...

Paired with Isaac Hajar, a rookie, he's 20 years old, born in France to an Algerian family of doctors and physicists. Oh my gosh. Wait, how many doctors and physicists? I think it's like grandfathers. You've got enough physicists in your family. So many parents. He only got interested in motorsports after watching Pixar's Cars.

You're kidding. Yep. That just legitimized the patron-exclusive podcast we did on cars. Now it feels completely legitimate. Now, if you've seen the original Doc Hollywood, he might have become a plastic surgeon. Now we just need to find a driver who got into it because of the stuntman. His parents got him a go-kart at age seven. He's been a part of the Red Bull Junior team since 2022, and last year was a reserve driver for Red Bull.

uh the sister team the same year he placed second in f2 which was his second year in formula two and in 2022 placed fourth in formula three and third in the Formula Regional Asian Championship. There's a ton of racing championships out there, and these guys are driving multiple ones at the same time. It's crazy. His nickname in the French media is Le Petit Prost.

Oh my God, the little Prost. Yes, in reference to the French four-time F1 champion Alain Prost. He himself a diminutive figure, so. That's right. Even more petit. Exactly. All right, Danny.

I'm back. I'm back in the saddle. Eight teams. I had to wait there to talk to you about Williams. Okay. So Williams is another one of these. old heads, I guess, in Formula One. It's nowhere near as old as Ferrari or Mercedes, but they've been around since the mid-70s, and they were founded by Frank Williams, Sir Frank Williams, who passed away a number of years ago, who loomed large over the history of British...

motorsports. It was a family-owned company, a family-owned outfit up until fairly recently. It was bought by this venture capital firm. Is it Dorrington Capital, I think they're called? Something like that? Doralton. Doralton Capital. At the end of a fairly tumultuous decade for the team of various attempts to, you know, push themselves back up into the midfield.

It's fair to say that they didn't have the capital to really fight with the big boys at that stage, which is a big shame because they were also run by... the only female team principal in the sport for a long time, and that continues to be. You'll recognize this. If you haven't already, all of the names that we've mentioned so far are men, and you tend to not get that much... and women really succeeding in and outside of the cars in Formula One. The...

Team since then has had a sort of a stop-start rebirth. The current iteration does seem to be doing well, not to get ahead of ourselves here with practice. this year, what we've seen so far. The team principal at the moment is James Vows. He worked at Mercedes for a long time. Williams is a customer team of Mercedes. They run a Mercedes engine. They're also based in the UK.

obvious enough and their car is blue it's like a sort of a sleek sort of a sophisticated looking looking beast and again and kind of relatively easy one to pick out I think like most most of them are vows has sort of he came over and realized that they were you know ordering parts using yahoo and and had you know were doing their hr using google spreadsheets or excel literally all of their parts of their car were in a single Microsoft Excel document.

Absolutely fantastic. Control F, where are the wheels? And that was sort of the, that's how deep the rot was, I guess, there. So it's taken a couple of years, but in relatively short order. He has done two things that seem interesting. One...

They placed ninth last year. I want to qualify this. It does seem that hopefully this year they might have actually, some of the investments into this car that they were making for the past few years, maybe... turning good or maybe or rather the investments into the team um an interesting thing to do right before we're going to have a bunch of new rule or changes to the cars next year but um it seems to be the case and then secondly they've

managed to grab one of the best drivers on the grid. When Lewis Hamilton went to Ferrari, it sort of... I mean, 3-2 doesn't go. So their second driver, Carlos Sainz Jr., who is the son of a very famous rally driver, he got kicked out, even though he's like...

a very accomplished driver. He's kind of in the wrong team at Williams. And he's also technically the second driver because their number one driver, Alexander Albon, who races under the Thai flag. I think he was technically born in the UK and he was... brought up there predominantly. His family is Thai. He placed 16th last year. He's 28. He bounced around a bunch of teams. He went through the Red Bull meat grinder as well.

I think one of the most likable drivers on the grid is a very... nice down-to-earth guy and wears his heart on his sleeve um and i think i would like to see them do well this year because i think albon had a you know a lot of people think he had a rough time about a red bull a couple of crashes with lewis hamilton because sort of where the

reason why he ultimately got kicked out of that team and he's done well to fight for his position in Formula One ever since and then like I said the second driver Carlos Sainz Jr. is a Spanish national he's getting on too he's 30 he's one of the older guys on the grid here And he's kind of in a different world, in a different universe, maybe driving for a different team. He has championship winning potential in him.

But we're entering the put up or shut up years of his career. He came fifth last year in a Ferrari, which came second in the Constructors. So he did decent. But we'll see how he does this year in the Williams. When you're in one of these cars, so much of... What people think about you comes down to the car. And I guess this year we'll find out if Carlos Sainz is a great potential championship winning driver or if he was in just some good cars there for a while. We'll have to wait and see.

Yeah. One thing we have been saying, number one driver, number two driver, that is not like a... Rarely is that an official thing within a team. All the teams will say, we treat our drivers equally. Sometimes one... it's more better dreaming than the other uh all right final team here rob close it out oh boy uh yeah the the sauber team uh so

Sauber are in an interesting place, and I feel like you can see that every year. Sauber are currently... Basically holding a place that is going to be taken over by Audi, a major auto manufacturer that's going to be coming in with the new regulations next year. A few things have happened. Audi sort of announced they were committing to F1 with a lot of fanfare, but there's some rumors that the corporate enthusiasm for joining F1 began to wane.

And then the fact that they were just like, they told Sauber, which has always sort of been a... bottom of the barrel F1 program in a lot of ways, which is why they were able to sort of pick them up. They kind of told Sauper, like, you know, just keep doing your thing.

for the couple years it's going to take us to spin up our program. And what they discovered is that when people know they're no longer going to be around to be held accountable for anything they do, they don't put their best work into it. And so Sauber kind of really... sucked there for a couple years and Audi had to sort of intervene and start trying to put their own people in place and actually turn this into a viable racing program rather than kicking every single can down the road to 2026.

However, that also meant they got into bed with some weird sponsorships for these waning years of the Sauber years. They partnered with, well, everyone's partnered with some kind of crypto scheme. That's just that. goes with the territory in f1 uh but they also they also partner with like a crypto casino uh brand uh so it's uh they still kick sauber i think they are

And then there's the sketchy streaming platform. That's what it is. Crypto Casino and then the sketchy streaming platform that, you know, when YouTube. And Twitch won't even have anything to do with you. You can always go on this platform. However, the plan is they're going to be quite a respectable program. uh you know next year which is why when it came time to clean up this program they hired former ferrari team principal mattia bonato

to become interim team principal. And he's a very highly regarded engineer, very serious person, and sort of put him in charge of cleaning up the program and getting it set up for success once it becomes. Once it becomes Audi. His role as his role as team principal Sauber was sort of the day to day head of the operation will give way when Jonathan Wheatley.

who was the longtime Red Bull sporting director, takes over as team principal there. That's one of the things that happens in F1 is that success... means a lot of your talent gets poached by other programs as people try to steal bits of your secret sauce and uncover the secrets to your success. Sauber has an interesting lineup. Nico Hulkenberg is a veteran and a very highly regarded driver. He's a German driver who's always like...

He's been one of the stronger parts of any car he's been a part of. He never feels like a guy who makes your team worse. He's also never been the guy who has, like, the race day magic to really justify keeping him around in the hopes of, like, a lot of upside. So he's always sort of had this, like, work-a-day journeyman career in F1. It almost appeared to be...

done in the sport until he was tapped to join the Haas team and immediately showed up his, you know, the team's longtime incumbent veteran, Kevin Magnussen. So Hulkenberg was brought in. He had previous... connections with with audi and they're kind of making it putting him at the front of this thing and also trying to pay giving him one shot uh to sort of see what he can do with a theoretically sort of a first rate uh you know works program

He's partnered with Gabriel Bortoleto, a Brazilian rookie who is actually one of the few rookies or young drivers who follows sort of the classic template for people entering F1, which is... Uh... You know, one and done championship winning seasons in lower formula promoted immediately. And you just try to ride that wave into F1. That sort of used to be the path that people took in F1. Now you're seeing a little more willingness to.

experiment with people whose results maybe weren't there in lower formula, but there's some sort of X factor the teams are hoping to get. With Bartoletto, what you're hoping is that when he has shown up in... The feeder series to F1, he has been excellent in them, and they're kind of hoping that he will have a rapid acclimation to Formula One. But...

Sauber history is never promising about these things. And so we're hoping for a new chapter for Sauber, but especially with this one last year as Sauber before the Audi takeover, you'll never go wrong betting. On some classic, like, Sauber. What are y'all doing over there? Things happening. Might be a follow year for them. We'll see. We will. All right.

Those are your teams and drivers. We are going to take another quick break, and we'll be back with details about the car, strategy, rules and regulations, weird lingo, and where we are going. to race this year. I'll be back in just a second. All right. Rob, tell us about these chariots.

heroes will be taking around the coliseums of the world. Well, they're complicated. They're big. They're heavy. And it's an odd moment in the sports surf technical history because this is... you know the last we're going to see of let's start with the power units uh this is the last we're going to see these power units that have been sort of in place for the sport in the sport for a number of years

Next year, a lot of new things are changing. The big one being the teams are introducing new power units. And some of the specifications they've been building to for years will be changed. So one last time. These are turbo hybrid engines. And...

The reason we call them power units is because the engine part is only one part of the thing that's producing horsepower for the car. So in addition to a V6 engine... in there you also have uh two energy recovery systems uh they're sort of charging up a battery one uh is just like the sort of kinetic energy recovery systems you see in just about any ev or hybrid uh

It captures kinetic energy, waste energy from the car braking, from the car slowing down, from just the motion of the car. It sort of winds up a battery. The other part of it... captures waste heat off the car, and also uses that to turn into energy. That part has always been really, really fussy. And then on top of that, you have a turbocharger, just like you have in...

a lot of sports cars. It's a lot of components pushed to some real extremes. The engine for example revs up to 15,000 revs. If you look at your car and the tachometer in there. you will not see 15 on the tachometer. You might see eight, and that will be past the red line. So these things, these engines are pushed quite a bit further, even by sports cars. They're pushed quite a bit further.

than most engines you can imagine. And that also means these things have to pull, they're pushed very hard, they pull very hard duty. And one of the things that F1 has done to theoretically help control costs and make the thing less wasteful, has been to force the teams to get through more and more races. using these various components. Theoretically, you're supposed to be able to do the entire season, for instance, on...

three of the internal combustion engines running the thing. The transmissions, I think, you get four for the season, five? I can't quite remember what the exact number is, but the point is... these things are supposed to survive a fair bit of wear and tear. So while they're also optimized for like peak performance...

They need to be optimized for durability as well, and that gives the teams a lot of fits. And at a certain point in the season, you'll kind of see everyone give up the ghost on actually trying to make it on their allocation for these parts, and everyone will kind of choose. is a race where they absorb all the penalties at once for changing components and using more transmissions and more engines than they're supposedly allowed. People try to...

eat all those penalties in one go so that they're not carrying those penalties through the season. It's very rare someone makes it through on their, you know, the allocation of these parts they're supposed to. So the suppliers of these power units and the power units have been frozen for a number of years So no longer is the power unit

really a place where you're supposed to see any competitive activity happening. In preparation for the unveiling of the 2026 units, what all the manufacturers kind of demanded was you can't ask us to develop a new engine. while also continuing to do development we currently have and so what they did was they froze power unit development and tried to get everyone Roughly in the same pretty much exactly matched in terms of what the power units can do

They almost all made it. We'll get to that. So the power unit suppliers are Ferrari, Mercedes, Honda slash Red Bull powertrains. And then there's Alpine, who only make their own engine for their own car, but as Drew alluded to, that program is being wound down, in part because the Renault engine... kind of sucked and for a number of years they couldn't quite match the other teams in terms of power units even after the

cutoff came where they were all supposed to be equivalent. Alpine was still down on horsepower by a significant degree, and that's one reason the program got shut down. I hope that that is handled for this year, but... It's a deficit they've struggled to make up. One of the other things that is just a wrinkle to keep track of. So...

The cars are capable. The cars could use battery power much more aggressively than they do. They're limited to how much energy they can harvest each lap. And so one of the things you'll see on track is... They have the option of using all their battery for max power over the course of like one lap. And you can pick up quite a boost doing that. But the trade-off for that is you can't recharge that energy.

in the space of a lap that's going to take you several laps of racing to rebuild that charge.

A lot of times in qualifying, what you'll do is you'll see cars enter like a hot lap mode, a qualifying mode where they do burn through all that battery. But in terms of racing... it becomes sort of a game of cat and mouse how much do you use it to attack how much do you use it to defend how much do you use it just to sort of maintain your pace around the track that always has to be done with an eye toward uh making sure your your your energy deficit your energy balance is in the correct place.

Drivers often also get antsy about this. You'll constantly hear people on the radio being like, no power, or it's not deploying right. And that's usually something glitchy happening with these systems. And often the answer is... try rebooting it. Shocking how often that works. Yeah. Hey, I worked with your microphone at the start of this podcast, so don't knock it. I mean, look, anything electronic tends to be the solve. Okay, so... It's not much for the engine, but...

In terms of a lot of the performance for the cars, it comes down to how much grip they can generate around the track. And sort of the story of modern F1 is seeing these things, the cars themselves, go... from being kind of like in the old days like tubes that people started experimenting with like bolting wings to to generate downforce as the sort of inverted airplane wing where it's like the faster you go the more pushing down in the car and creating grip.

Now the entire car is almost conceived of as like a giant aerodynamic piece that they sort of sculpt the air around. And that is sort of one of the main determinants of how a car is going to perform in F. one drew alluded earlier to the fact that uh like this is so important that it's significant that they don't let the teams that are doing the best

have the most wind tunnel time, nor do they let them have the most time to run aerodynamic simulations for their cars. The way they sort of hobble a program that's been too successful is they just make it hard. to gather data on upgrades you're thinking of doing. There's been some indication that was one of the things that hurt Red Bull last year was that they didn't have the testing.

bandwidth they needed to maintain their competitive edge so aerodynamics are are absolutely critical in how these cars perform That is sort of one of the major differences between how these teams operate. Air dynamics are also very fussy. They're fluid dynamics. And so these things cause turbulence and leave... leave wakes behind them, and that disturbs the performance of all those aerodynamic elements. And so what you will encounter a lot in racing is this notion of dirty air.

uh where the cars are built and tuned and optimized for functioning uh in almost like a laboratory environment you know cars and the fastest lap possible uh on an empty track But in the chaos of like pack racing, nobody's getting... sort of that undisturbed air that they get in the lab environment, what you're getting is the wash coming off other people's cars, their own aerodynamic components, and everything's very chaotic. And so how cars tolerate that is also very key.

There's another wrinkle in this insofar as, and this is, you know, if you follow NASCAR at all, but it's in every motorsport. Drafting is a very powerful way to gain a bit of efficiency because as you get behind something that's breaking the air up in front of you, you can sort of draft up behind it and enjoy the reduced... reduced wind resistance to sort of close up as you get on their tail. F1 also tried to sort of create some other overtake dynamics.

by having the draggiest part of a car's aerodynamic package, the rear wing, the big rear wing, they added something called the drag reduction system, the DRS. And the idea there was... uh because overtaking was so hard in the sport because your aerodynamic efficiency falls off so badly as you're pursuing another car, they created a bit of a boost as best they could for if you get within one second of...

of the car ahead of you. If when you go through a certain detection point, you are within one second of the car ahead, when you enter an appointed section of the track, the DRS zone, you will be able to cause your rear wing, which is usually set in a place where it's going to generate a lot of drag but also a lot of grip, you'll be able to sort of have it snap.

into a position where it's just edge onto the air and suddenly it's uh you know goes from being a wing to like a very thin line almost invisible to the air and that is usually good for a lot less wind resistance and a lot more speed Sometimes that works out and it becomes the only way people can overtake. Sometimes you run into something called the DRS train. where you'll see lots of cars all getting that same bonus, and the entire thing is kind of mooted.

They also, you know, amidst all these other aerodynamic innovations, they started channeling, they started playing around more with air passing under the car. what's called ground effect aerodynamics, where sort of the interface between the track surface and the contours on the side of the car can create sort of a negative pressure situation that's sort of like...

a bit like a vacuum, sort of schlorps the car down to the track. But this is a very tricky form of aerodynamics to work with. And when you get it wrong, sometimes you get some really rough rides and a certain... signature problem in F1 called porpoising where you have those aerodynamic elements on the car creating repeated stalls a bit like when you're on the highway when you have a window open and you hear that like noise that's really annoying

That's the air repeatedly stalling as it passes over the aerodynamic surface. And when that's happening under your car as you're driving high speed, the car begins to bounce in a way that... You know, you pay a lot of money for it. If you were sort of modifying it, it was sort of a cool thing you were going for to make your car look like that, a little more swag.

But it's apparently really lousy if you're trying to drive it competitively. You're losing grip, and also it just rattles the drivers around like coins in a can. Not what you want. The other...

uh part of the way f1 cars sort of interface with the tracks you might expect is the tires the tires and the suspension what we call the mechanical grip and f1 is really a sport All about tires and tire management and being good on tires, being kind to tires, not using them up, and mastering tire strategy. So, what's up with these F1 tires? Well... They were all made by Pirelli, and Pirelli was given a brief to make F1 more interesting via formulating its tire compounds.

Tire technology is in place where you could have a tire that could go from start to finish a race basically and still be perfectly functional. But that's not fun. And what F1 kind of wants to introduce is a notion of there being a lot of variance, a lot of competitive advantage or disadvantage you have with tires. And so... Pirelli were given a brief to formulate different tire compounds that would generate different performance profiles on various track surfaces. And also...

wearing different rates that would promote a diversity of race strategies. The easiest way to do this is you sort of control how hard or soft the tire is. As you might imagine, a really soft tire is very grippy. but also wears down really quickly. And so when you have a soft tire, it's usually what drivers will choose for the qualifying laps.

But it is not necessarily what they want to use during a race because it simply won't survive long enough for them to get enough of the race done for that to be viable. The way this is handled... Every track they have a hard soft and medium compound tire Those are all selected from five compounds that probably makes per year The C1 compound being the hardest

The C5 being the softest. They used to tell you which exact compound they were bringing. Now it's just per race. Hard, soft, medium. And then you kind of have to just... know or keep track of what that translates to in terms of the compound range. The hard tires are white striped on the side. The yellows are medium and the reds are softs. And it really depends a lot on how drivers use them to make sure they last as long as possible and they wear correctly.

The way you sort of make sure that your tire is not being abused too badly is you track tire temperatures. You do not want the surface getting too ridiculously out of whack with what they call the carcass temperature of the tire. So it's like the skin and then the flesh of the tire, basically. You want those things. Roughly in line. And so you will constantly have drivers being told.

ease off or go faster as engineers see that the compound is either becoming too hot which usually means it begins to wear down very fast or getting too cold in which case it's probably not generating enough grip uh every tire sort of has a goldilocks zone of tire temperature and that can be easier harder to hit based on is it a sunny day What's the air temperature? How hot is the track? How cool is the track? A lot of times...

Very interesting things happen when track gets cool because usually that means the track gets very cold and you start seeing cars slipping and sliding around because these things are all tuned to work with some pretty high temperatures. You have to use two tire compounds in the course of a race. Unless it rains. Rain is our friend. Rain makes F1 good. Almost always. But not too much. F1 is at its best when it rains a little, and might rain a lot, or might stop raining.

The more uncertainty you can introduce with rain in F1, the more entertaining the racing can be because it imposes a lot of decisions on the drivers and the teams. Usually in these cases... If it begins to rain enough that they don't think they can be safely out there on slick tires with no tread, maximizing contact surface with the road, they'll want something with a little tread. They will go to the intermediate tires, which have a green sidewall.

Those are sort of tuned to deal with a track that is like damp but not soaked. And those, you know, the penalty there is they are slower tires. And if the track is not sufficiently wet, they wear down faster. If the track gets very, very wet, like there's heavy rain, you might see the blue sidewalled wet tires come out. You see them in less and less these days. F1 used to kind of not stop racing if they could avoid it at all.

A couple things have changed. One, there's just more, it's a more safety conscious sport and drivers are more sensitive to the fact that they... You know, if they literally can't see through the spray, they don't want to continue racing because you can't see. It might be hurtling toward a stranded car, which could be a really deadly collision. But the other thing is that as these things have gotten more efficient. The wet tires are able to clear tons of water off the track.

But that water tends to just hang as a vapor over the track. And so what you get is situations where it might have stopped raining, but the cars can't... stop creating an impenetrable fog bank of water vapor using these wet tires that make racing unviable. This happened famously at the Belgian Grand Prix a few years ago where

It stopped raining. They couldn't run a race because every time you put the cars on the track, immediately nobody could see anything. And so usually when it gets really rainy, you'll see them run lots of laps behind the safety car. Or they will just red flag the race and wait for the rain to clear. When it comes to tire wear, in normal conditions...

The tires will leave what they call like marble deposits off the racing line. Just little bits of rubber that abrade off and they sort of form and they sort of roll into the places where cars are not going. The start of the race, that's not a big deal because the whole track is pretty clean. But as the race goes on, those deposits build up and these are just like little tiny little ball bearings of like discarded rubber.

that are sitting there and so as the race goes on if someone goes off the racing line hits that marble patch uh it is a bit like you're running and then suddenly are running across a field of ball bearings uh not good And they will stick to the tire and they will cost you a lot of grip. And it's just a whole bad scene. But you might have to go there if you're trying to pass somebody.

So that is one dynamic that comes into play with the tires. You'll also hear a term, graining. This is where, you know, this is... Basically, you want the tire to sort of abrade down very evenly as it runs. Graining is where you're not in the right temperature range and rather than slowly wearing down evenly, what you're seeing is...

the tire kind of flaking apart. And usually that is associated with, again, that nice smooth surface that you want for your tire is starting to get broken up. And that translates to worse grip. which can sometimes mean that will worsen the problem of graining, but sometimes a little bit of graining is just a phase that a tire has to pass through, and if a driver can keep their cool, they'll come out the other side.

Just fine. They don't keep their cool, or sometimes stuff just happens, and you have to make a panic stop, and you have to nail the brakes really hard, and these don't have anti-lock brakes, so you can lock up the brakes. That'll cause the wheel to stop spinning. And the car will just skid on one side of the rubber. And what you get is a flat spot. You just sort of planed off a bit of a round tire. And...

There's no cure for that. That is just your tire was round. Now it has a bit of a squared off patch. And if you do that early after getting a new tire, that just means that you're going to have a big squared off patch for the entire time you're on that tire. Do it badly enough, they might just call you in and put you on a new tire. If they keep you out there.

The thing they're going to be flirting with is called the tire cliff. And that is, tires do get slower. You can't push them as hard as they wear down. And that usually happens pretty linearly.

A tenth of a second here. You know, it gets slower, but it's very gradual. The cliff is where that graduation stops and it becomes... a sharp plummet in terms of performance and you hit that that is like um yeah the quotes the closest equivalent is like almost like being out of gas But it's like the car is just sort of skating around out there and can be multiple seconds slower than other cars on a lap.

Sometimes people will be in a position where they think that even if they are like 10 seconds slower than their opponents, they might still finish in an advantageous position if they can just tough that out. But sometimes that doesn't work. So that is a thing you will see the teams flirt with. But they are going to want to minimize their pit stops because pitting has some huge penalties. The pit stops themselves are very, very fast in F1.

Two seconds is about like that is your gold standard. Like cars come in and out. And there's times where these things are so beautifully rehearsed that you will kind of wonder, do they ever fully stop? That is how quick they can change all four tires. Three seconds, though. And this is the margins we're talking about in F1. Three seconds is fine. That's good. Pedestrian, but good. Four seconds is slow. Five seconds is glacial. Unacceptable. Anything beyond that.

Oh, my God, what happened? Did someone die? What's going on down there? So those are the kind of margins you're dealing with. But that's not the real crappy part about the pit stop. The pit lane has a speed limit. and the pit lane is very long and so and furthermore when a lot of people are pitting and usually because everyone's dealing with these same variables

A lot of people will probably decide to pit around the same time you do because there's only so many ways you can slice up a race in terms of like making these tires last. You can, one, you get caught with the pit. pit lane speed limit so you're going very slow while everyone's still out on the track is going very fast

But you can also get caught in traffic in pit lane. You'll hear a lot about unsafe releases over the course of this year, where basically if you are released from a pit box after a tire change... and someone else has to slam on their brakes to avoid hitting you as you sort of merge back into the pit lane, that's going to be a penalty. So a lot of times what teams will do is they'll just hold you in the pit box rather than risk that, which can further compound the problem.

of the pit stop. To try to advantage themselves, there's sort of two major strategies for how you approach planning your pit stop. The most common one is the undercut. That is where you're looking at the car ahead of you. You think you've both seen the best of your tires. You make the decision to pit first. You get on fresher tires first. And then when they come in for the pit stop, you'll have had a lap.

or two on much faster tires and so even if you have equivalent pit stops you will have gained an advantage by running on that new tire earlier and them having been stuck out there on a worn down tire and so while they're pitting you overtake them and they come out behind you even though when the pit stop cycle started they were ahead of you that's the undercut

more rarely, but we always love to see it, is when it turns out, for whatever reason, it's a little tricky to get the new tire up to performance. And you might actually be better off staying out as long as possible. And someone else comes in. And now you were able to stay out longer and turn faster laps. You know, using the tail end of the performance on your warmed up and high performing tire while they come out and are sort of struggling to.

you know, bring their tire to life. You see that less often because usually the dynamic is you just want to be on a newer tire sooner to get the most out of things. But usually it's just a combination of the tire comp on that weekend and conditions can sometimes make it so that the overcut is the strategy. And that is why these things are so sensitive to weather and also time of day.

F1 is racing a lot more night races now. And so you're going to see a lot of night races in the desert, which looks spectacular, but also change the dynamics of what track temperature is like because there's no sun beating down on it. And then you go to places like Vegas. toward the end of the year. That's nighttime in Las Vegas, and it's one of the coldest races they run. And then you'll have various places where you might always encounter like...

monsoon rains. We encountered sort of a North Sea squall at the Dutch Grand Prix a few years ago. Good times. All sorts of chaos can unfold due to weather. And that always impacts tire strategy and pit strategy in ways that are hard to foresee.

well when the chaos happens danny what do we see rules drew there can only be fun with rules And those rules start with flags. Flags. Who doesn't love flags? Every country's got one. Can you burn them? I don't know. Let's have a conversation. No, that's not the podcast we're having here. We're going to talk about the flags which are used to communicate with the drivers because the drivers are, you know, they're on the blower with their engineer. They can hear them.

talk back on the radio and all that sort of stuff. But there's lots of information that they need to gleam from not just what they're doing lap by lap, but turn by turn. And the way in which the sort of third party of the racetrack, the... the stewards and the marshals, the people responsible for making sure that the competition is fair and safe for everyone. And the way in which they generally communicate with the drivers is through the means of flags. So there are a number of flags.

Some of these flags you might never see. Some of these flags you might see once in a blue moon. Other ones you're going to see all the time. So the normal one is green. Green flag means we are resuming normal racing conditions. This happens after another flag has... come out to stop things and then we're green flag again basically means back to normal get back racing

The yellow flag is predominantly, is one you're going to see a lot whenever there is an incident. Whenever a yellow flag gets taken out, in general, you want to sort of, it'll pique your interest to be like, oh, what's happened? Essentially yellow flag means there is no overtaking and because there is some sort of issue at the track, either something on the track or near the track. If there's a double waved yellow situation where basically one of the...

Trackside Marshalls is waving two different yellow flags. This means that the track is blocked. So it happens in the case where a... car crashes and comes to rest somewhere in the in the track um if there's a single stationary yellow that's sort of a particular signal to say that there's a danger near the tracks and to also slow down and there's no overtaking

A red flag is taken out when the session is stopped. So whenever... something happens to either a car or to the track itself like if somebody crashes into a barrier and that barrier needs to be replaced so we can safely race again a red flag will happen and also as rob mentioned uh acclimate weather will also pull out a red flag

The yellow and red striped flag means that there is debris or oil on the track. This one doesn't tend to get used all that much in F1. If there's... oil or debris on a track they'll usually try and want to get rid of us pretty quickly so they'll do something else which we'll talk about in a second um although they they do have the option to rock this flag gently back and forth, which does the super specific signal of saying that there is an animal.

Is it alive? Is it dead? I don't know. But that's what happens. There are animals. Animals happen on the tracks more often than you would think. We had a... like a fast lizard on there. Which one was the last? It was a Baku or somewhere. We've had all manners of animals. Singapore always has some stuff coming out of the trees under the track. Yes, like weird huge geckos and stuff. Yeah, like lizards and stuff like that. Canada. What did Canada have? A bunch of... What is this? It's like a...

Did beavers get on track? Yeah, I think so. Beavers, wow. And with the speeds we're talking about here, you don't want to be hitting a beaver. You don't want to be hitting editing, but you definitely don't want to be hitting like a deer or something. That's a bad time for drivers. and Fawn. So the blue flag then is one that you're going to see a lot of. And it might be a little bit confusing when you first see it, but it's fairly...

Common and fairly simple. Basically, blue flag is used when there is a car that is approaching... another car that they are not racing because they are essentially lapping that car so with the length of the races and the speed of these cars if one car is one second faster than the car

in last, then after a number of laps, you are going to catch up to that car at the back. And then you are going to overtake that car. Or if you're on different tire strategies, you might often come out and be overtaking someone. Or one of the drivers might be getting overtaken by somebody who's in first place or second place or whatever. When that happens, they're basically told, don't race that car. You're not racing that car. Don't get in that car's way.

let them go the the driver who's in front in in in terms of the grid in terms of their position gets the the benefit of the doubt and is allowed through so the blue flag is there to basically tell the car who's a back marker who's further back yo there's someone coming up who's fast who you're not racing they're way ahead of you buddy

Just move over to the side a little bit. So that's why the blue flags are used. And you'll see them a lot. This is largely what marshals are doing a lot during those races is trying to adjudicate the blue flags. It's one of the trickier ones. There is a half black, half white flag, which is used for unsportsmanlike conduct. This gets upgraded to a full black flag when somebody is disqualified.

Sometimes they will have a number on this as well. It doesn't happen very often in F1. The only times I've seen it, it's never had one. And it doesn't happen... I can't remember it happening in a long, long time. I think it happened a few years ago. It'll sometime happen with... Like if a piece of your car is hanging off and the team doesn't want to pit you because they'll lose time, they might black flag you.

Yeah, the flag that they're supposed to put out for that, known as the meatball flag, is a black flag with an orange circle in the middle of it, which is basically... a signal that you have a mechanical issue with your car and you are compelled to come into the pits immediately to fix it. So yes, as you said, Drew, if somebody was to not follow that, for instance, they would definitely get a black flag.

The checkered flag, which is that beautiful black and white squares all over it flag, is used at the end of the race to signal that the session is complete. Driver in first crosses through, crosses over the line and passes the checkered flag. That signals the end of the race. So if you were a lap behind when that happened, your next lap is the last lap. You don't get to like...

catch up with everyone and do your last lap or two. Everyone finishes their lap. Exactly. Yeah. Which is why at the end on the timing screens, you'll often see plus one lap written on it, meaning that they were pretty far back. Outside of the flags are two other very, very important mechanisms used by the folks on the track. One is the safety car and one is a virtual safety car, which is a...

relatively newer edition. Safety cars are very common across motorsports, essentially a way for them to keep the cars out on the track while they resolve some sort of issue on the track.

Most of the time, this is going to be because someone's crashed and they are trying to remove their cars from... the track and instead of bringing everybody into the pits and then having to cycle them all back out again and wasting all this time and making it complicated like are we allowed to refuel or go for the toilet or

change our tires or anything like this. It's just like, no, we'll just keep the cars out there. We'll drive them slowly, well, relatively slowly. Safety cars still drive pretty fast in comparison to road cars. But essentially, the cars will just kind of cycle in behind the safety car like a little procession, like a Pied Piper situation.

until such a case as the issue with the track is resolved, and then that green flag comes out, green flag conditions, safety car disappears off the track, gets out of the way, and they go again. In the case where... That in and of itself is too much. That is too much of an obstruction to the race that there is an issue on the track, but we know we're going to clear it fairly quickly. Like...

you know, maybe some debris is on the track or maybe a car is crashed, but they're in a position that like we can, we'll get them out off the track pretty quick. They do a virtual safety car, which is essentially a digital. version of a safety car that is used to slow everybody down on the track. When the safety car comes out, everyone catches up so that the...

you know, by the time the safety cars ended, all of the cars are bunched up again. So even if you were, you know, 50 seconds behind the car in front of you, you would all be compressed again by the time the green flag came out. In a virtual safety car... Because there is a sort of an unsportsman aspect to that problem, the VSC also solves that issue somewhat by essentially making it so instead of everyone getting bunched up, it just slows everyone down and says, just keep to this relative speed.

the gap between you and the car in front and the car behind the same. within this window and you're good. So it requires the drivers to sort of manage their speed in a way where they're not giving up too much time, but they're sort of staying within that window. But at this stage, they're all very good at it. When it first came in, it was a little bit trickier. And those are the basic rules, I guess. Or not rules, but the ways in which rules are enforced within.

Formula One. If you do not follow those rules, though, you will be penalized. And there are many different types of penalties you can get for the many different types of infractions there are in Formula One. As you can imagine, like any sport, these infractions are so...

Somewhat fluid. They're somewhat in the eye of the beholder and much of the discourse around Formula One after a race weekend will be taken up by... Oh, was that really that? That was a bit too much. That penalty was a bit harsh. So...

Please do not take these penalty explanations as a sacrosanct. They will change somewhat, and often mid-season or at the start of a new season, they'll impose different ways of enforcing them. But in general, the local... lowest, I guess... penalty that you can get is a drive-through penalty which essentially is you have to drive through the pit lane which has a speed limit on it and then drive out of the pit lane.

to basically give you a time penalty without slowing you down on a part of the track that might actually impede another car. Yeah, that's a rough one because like Rob said, the pit has a speed limit, so that's the equivalent of like a 20-second penalty. More, maybe, depending on the length of the pit lane or when in the race you are, what position you're in. Yeah, it's a fairly...

serious penalty. The least serious we have here, but still fairly serious. And it tends to happen once you have sort of been habitually breaking the rules. Things that get you in trouble are things like not skipping overturns like the the racetrack has got you know curbs and edges on it you're supposed to stay within those as much as you can um There's a white line that is on the racetrack if both of your wheels cross over that, because oftentimes...

Right, the cars are going so fast that, like, half the car will go off the track as it's making a turn and then come back on. That's fine, but if you extend too much outside of that to gain an advantage... you basically start getting in trouble. If you do it three times, more or less, they will give you a penalty for it. So a lot of the time you'll hear about drivers getting...

warnings about track limits, which is essentially, you know, they have over, they've gone past the limit of what we have decided is the racetrack. So cutting corners. Yeah, curb hopping over chicanes, things like that. If you do that habitually, you're going to get warnings ahead of time. And if you do it again, then they're going to give you a drive-through penalty. It should also be noticed if you do any of these during qualifying.

your lap is negated if you cut any corners and things like that. So if you keep doing that stuff or if you get involved in, they've sort of extended this to some incidents where you come in contact with other cars, you can get a stop-go penalty within the drive-through. So instead of just driving through the pit lane, you also have to go into your pit.

box and stop for a few seconds um there are five seconds stop go penalties there are 10 second ones as well um five seconds is again for sort of stuff that's a bit more egregious or habitually still doing you know cutting track limits A 10-second stop go you'd get for things like jumping the start of the race, speeding in the pit lane, ignoring the aforementioned blue flags, unsportsmanlike conduct, like blocking people. We'll probably get it. I'll get into the...

defending stuff in a little bit. They've changed this stuff a bit. Results may vary on this season by season. We'll see what they do this year. But last year, it seemed like they were trying to add in more of the less serious penalties with regard to this. Those are sort of the big ones you can get mid-race. There are other things that can happen to you that are more seasonal or season affecting.

You can get docked a grid position, which means like, oh, I qualified in fifth, but I have a 10 place grid penalty. So actually when the race starts, instead of starting in fifth, I'm going to be in 15th. This happens, you know, because either you have done something near the end of a race where if they...

give you a stop-go penalty or something, it kind of doesn't fit, like the punishment doesn't fit the crime. So they'll sort of say, okay, actually what's going to happen is you're going to take this penalty into the next race. And the other reason you might get it is if you've done something to your car, like there are rules around how much work you can do to the car between qualification and the race, or if you were to change, you know, a pit.

or a transmission or something like that. There are certain instances where you sort of... Teams will do it knowing that they're going to get a 10-place grid penalty. So they'll sort of tactically do it, like if they need to replace a part of the car that they know is some sort of infringement because they've used too many of those parts or they're doing it mid-weekend.

they'll do it on a weekend where they think they can maybe get those places back. This sort of stuff, you'll, you know, that's sort of like, that's level two F1. Don't worry about that right at the start if you're just getting into it. The... Otherwise, you can get a race bands, which are super, super rare. At least in...

In one case, they're super aware. There are bans for doing something like extremely unsportsmanlike, extremely dangerous. We're talking about, you know, essentially driving another car off the track. And that... doesn't really happen like it happens in battling but it doesn't happen in terms of somebody really just like doing something egregious and that said there is a penalty point system and last year we did have a driver

get a race band, Kevin Magnuson, who's not around this year. He accumulated 12 penalty points over the course of a 12-month period. So this isn't season by season. They don't all get a free, you know, a clean slate. At the start of the season, if you were to accumulate 12 penalty points within any 12-month period, you get a race ban. Those penalty points are sort of on top of the penalty system, where if you were to, generally it's if you were responsible.

for a crash of some description, you will often get two penalty points or more if it's particularly egregious, similar to road penalty points you get in, they don't have penalty points here, do they? Do you have them in the States? On your own driver license? I don't think so. So they have them in the UK and Ireland. You get penalty points and if you get enough of them you lose your license for a time. We mostly, it's just like, attend a seminar to be like, hey, you shouldn't have...

Been drinking, buddy, and then you're good to go. Pay a fine. I watched one of those cop videos on YouTube last night where a guy was driving down the wrong side of the motorway while Kamala Harris's motorcade was going past, and he had like a... $500 cash bond when it was all done. He was tanked. So, cool. But in the UK, you can, yeah, in Ireland, they take that stuff. So penalty points are very normal if you're used to it in the UK.

Yeah, and then there's also this sort of reprimand thing, and this is kind of used so that the governing body and Formula One and the FIA can sort of also police drivers, because the stuff that happens on track... is largely done by boards of stewards, which are sort of independent of any one organization.

Reprimands can be given for on-track and off-track incidents. And yeah, if you accumulate five of these reprimands over the course of a season, I think they're done by, then you can get a 10 place. penalty um yeah some of the rules that are coming into f1 are very silly especially with the off-track antics where if you accidentally curse you can be given um

penalties and fines and reprimands. They also get fined a bunch, but these people are so rich, who cares about fines? Doesn't matter. So in terms of, I guess, overtaking and defending a position, This again is something that is kind of like the whole like...

pornography i i can't explain it but i know it when i see it kind of thing like you will you will develop a sort of an eye for what is fair defending of somebody trying to overtake you um There's a sort of a general rule that if you were to move as two cars, one of the places that were...

folks overtake a lot is on the entrance to a corner because it's after a straight generally where both cars are going top speed and then essentially what you're doing is playing a game of chicken for who can break the last and if you are behind a car and you're able to break slightly later you can maybe get in front of them

as they get up to the turn. And then it doesn't matter if you're both slow because then you're ahead of them and they can't drive through your car and then you get past. So a lot of the time, if you're the car in front, you don't want somebody to overtake you going into a turn. And so what usually happens is... you decide to block the inside of the turn or the outside of the turn. In general, if you're not allowed to do like...

really late moves, like abnormal moves, like that are clear, like you're waiting to see which direction they go and then you block them. You're also not allowed... do double moves so if you were to go in one direction and then realize uh or the driver is and then you real they realize that oh the driver's overtaking on the other side they sort of move twice

Because all these things are essentially, they're unsporting and also they increase the chance of a crash happening as well. So that type of thing you're not allowed to do. And then also there is a general rule that you are to leave space for a car.

alongside you in all situations where it's possible to do so. So if you are overtaking somebody and then... uh you're taking a turn you can't just take that turn super wide to force them onto the grass so that they can't get you on the next turn that would be um against the rules again this is something that is sometimes difficult to spot you know we're not

Formula One race car drivers. We don't know exactly how much grip a car has. Could it have taken that turn slightly sharper? Was that done on purpose? The more you watch the sport, the more you'll get an eye for it. The commentators are usually ex-drivers, and they can give you an idea as well. And I think in general, there is a gray area, and there are some drivers who really dance in that gray area, for sure.

But in general, it's easy enough to see if somebody intentionally forced somebody off the track or not. One thing I will say about the double movement is that it sometimes will look like they've moved twice, but really what they're doing is they're moving once. to defend their position and then they'll move again to get back on the racing line which is the most optimal way through your corner that is allowed yes and you will know those corner by corner almost because the

Except the optimal racing line through certain corners are fairly consistent, and you'll be able to get an eye for that. So sometimes that can be a bit confusing, but listen to the commentators and stuff like that.

Not that many changes coming in this year in terms of the rule sets. I think it makes sense. And with the calendar, honestly. I think a lot of that has to do with some of the changes that are coming in next year that Rob was talking about. The one big change this year is that the fastest lap point has been removed. There used to be an extra point you got in a race if you had the fastest lap, as long as you were in the top, was it 10 or 8? 10, it was 10.

That ended up largely being sort of game-theoried into oblivion, so they kind of got rid of it. There was a lot of negging, like people getting the fastest lap with their second driver to stop another team from getting the point. Kind of didn't really work. They tried it out. F1 tries things, and this really didn't work out, so they got rid of it. And the only other change is that there will also be...

More first practice running for rookie drivers. There's going to be four spots this year up from, I think, two where rookie drivers will have a chance to do some running in free practice one, which is something just to kind of... help them get their sea legs. We're not talking about this year's rookies, we're talking about drivers that may be on a path to Formula One in the future. And that's generally the rules and regulations, but we're not here to talk.

about the rules. The rules are fine. The circus is what it's all about. The world tour. And Formula One, as Drew said earlier, is all about the world tour. Pack your bags. We're going to go all over the world and in probably not the most efficient way you would go around the world, but don't worry about it. It's a little better this year, but yeah. It's a smidge better. That's true. F1 is a global sport, but there are big parts of the globe it does not go to.

A clear and obvious one is the continent of Africa. We have lots of races in the Middle East, but none on the other side of the... How much oil they got down there? Of the Nile. Well, there you go. They got a lot of rare earth minerals, but I guess that's the wrong... It's the wrong... wrong industry for this particular sport um south america has always had a a pretty decent fandom and and love of motorsporting as well um so we go there quite a lot and we also go to uh oceana

asia as well um there are 24 races this year there was last year too that was a record we've that's up from you know back in the back in the day in the 50s they did like 10 then they did like 16 and then it was kind of swimming around 20 for i feel like most of modern formula one and they've added a bunch over the years uh tracks come and go there are some tracks we've had for the longest time that are sort of staples of the the calendar they're

ones that come in and maybe don't make it and there are ones they try out in new places but yes as drew alluded to predominantly a lot of the new ones have been in petrochem states who've been able to fund this type of thing or a lobby to get people to put races in their locales and historically a lot of the other ones are in Europe as well which again kind of makes sense with the post-World War II history of

this particular sport. Slightly different schedule this year. Australia is now back to the opening... uh race it was in the last time we opened here technically was 2019 we did go there in 2020 but then covid had that race called off um that race weekend called off the last minute

Right at the last minute, the day of practice, Chase Carey got out there and said, there's this COVID thing. We're going to stop for a while. Tom Hanks is sick, everyone. Oh, yeah. He was sick in Australia as well, wasn't he? Yeah.

The main reason for them shifting it back, though, mostly seems to be the fact that Bahrain and Saudi are... Ramadan is in March, so they're pushing them into April. So it's kind of made this space. Rob mentioned... the fact that Vegas is you know they do that night race and it's super super cold perhaps too cold because they're running it two hours early this year which is great news for folks in Vegas terrible news if you live in the UK because it now means that that race is 4am

Greenwich Mean Time. Hey, welcome to our world. Exactly. Good point. That's good cackling from Rob there. This may be the last year we have Barcelona as well because, I mean, it probably is because Madrid is going to be taking over from Spain, which I'm sure the Catalonians are absolutely delighted about in 2026. The sprint races, which Drew mentioned earlier,

on. There are six of them. They are in China, Miami, Belgium, USA, Brazil, and Qatar. It's been in Brazil every year. They shake these around every year, but Brazil's had it every single year since they started doing these sprint races. I think I want to say four years ago? Sounds right. SPA didn't do it last year, but did the previous year. So it's back to SPA, which is pretty cool. Anyway.

That's the general thing. Let's close your eyes. Imagine your passport in your hand. You're at the airport and there's 24 different gates and you're going to go to all of them one by one and visit all these beautiful places on your television in your underpants with a big bucket of popcorn. So let's go through them all. When, where? We're going to start at the Australian Grand Prix, which takes place in Albert Park in Melbourne, right in the middle of the city. That's the 16th of March.

A week later, we're off to China to the Shanghai International Circuit. on the 23rd. Then we are to Japan a couple of weeks later in Suzuka, which is a terrific track that has a figure of eight style crossover in it. um a classic track then to bahrain once ramadan is over a week later on the 13th of april the week after that we are in saudi arabia not too far from there at the jenna corniche circuit which is a pretty new one

Bahrain's relatively new as well. A lot of those Middle Eastern ones are. Then we're to the first one in America, the Miami Grand Prix on the 4th of May, which takes place in a car park outside the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami. has given a surprisingly good race is the fact that it's in a car park surprising people. It also has the funniest trackside amenity of a fake marina where you can get drunk surrounded by cardboard.

water and real boats, as it turns out. One of the most American things possible. It's beautifully American. Absolutely love it.

Then we're at the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix, which takes place in Imola in northern Italy, close to San Marino, on the 18th of May. Then we go to the Principality of Monaco a week later for the Circuit to Monaco, which is, if you have... never seen it before um you've never seen a james bond move because i forget which was it it was in iron man it was it's in a lot of stuff um

It's an absolutely insane place that they should not race these cars in. It's too tight. The walls are right there. The cars go so fast. It's insane. There's hardly any overtaking, but it's a wonder to watch. And I love it. Yeah, it's great. I hate it. I love it. June 1st, we're off to Spain for the Spanish Grand Prix at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalonia for the final time, which I'm quite heartbroken about. I love that circuit.

I guess I'll have to watch more MotoGP. And then we're off to Canada after that for the Montreal Grand Prix, or Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal, the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, another great track in the middle of a city. The Austrian Grand Prix then at the aforementioned Red Bull Ring in Spielberg takes place at the end of June, June 29th.

A week later, we're in Silverstone for the British Grand Prix, which is one of the oldest circuits. I think it was the place where the first ever Grand Prix took place in 1950. Like many of these European circuits, it is an old Air Force base. had a bunch of uh runways in a triangle formation it was not that difficult to turn them into racetracks um although it has a long been a racetrack much much longer than it was ever uh an air force base at the belgian grand prix happens a few weeks

After that, we have kind of a bit of a break here in the summer between the 6th and the 27th. And then we're off to Spa-Francorchamps, which is, speaking of World War II, takes place in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium. Not Brazil, as I was going to say. It's been a long podcast. The Belgian Grand Prix, another absolute classic circus spa is. Then we're off to Hungary.

On the 3rd of August for the Hungaroring, the Hungarian Grand Prix. Then the Dutch Grand Prix in Zandvoort, which is just west of Amsterdam. Is it the second last year we're in Zandvoort, I think? I think it might be the last. It might be the last? Okay. That's at the end of August the 31st. That's when we have a big gap between the 3rd of August and the 31st. That's the proper summer gap. Then we're back to Italy.

For Monza, which is the sort of home race Rob was talking about for the Ferrari team. Then we're to Baku, which is the capital city of Azerbaijan. If you knew that before watching Formula One, you were smarter. me uh on the 21st of december for a great city street circuit the singapore grand prix is another street circuit after that that means a circuit that takes place on streets on a you know um at least part of the track at least is a

It takes place on streets. Singapore takes place on city streets, right in the middle of Singapore. The Marina Berry street circuit, absolutely fantastic at the start of October. Then we're to America, to Austin again. Back to America, but this time in Texas for the United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas, which is the name of the track. Great track. Fun one to go to as well on the 19th of October.

Then we're down to Mexico. Our neighbors down south at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez. The Rodriguez brothers, it's named after, and others. It's a good circuit, but it's in the middle of a city. It's not a street circuit, though, although it does go through a baseball stadium. It's very confusing. 26th of October. Then we're at Interlagos, which is the Sao Paulo Grand Prix, which itself was...

risk of being replaced but thankfully has not been on the night of November and then the final three races of the year the Las Vegas Grand Prix which takes place on the strip in Las Vegas Nevada on the 22nd of November then we are off to the Middle East again for the final two races, the Qatar Grand Prix at La Salle International Circuit on the 30th of November. Get your turkey ready and...

Prepare your fixings for that one. And then the F1 season 24 races will finish at the track that has been the... Final track for Formula One for, since its introduction, I want to say 15 or so years ago at this stage, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix at Yas Marina on the 7th of December. If we hadn't crowned a champion before then, we will that day.

All right. Well, if you are in the U.S., you have two ways to watch all of that. Either ESPN or F1 TV. If you already have ESPN, your best bet. I'm sorry, if you don't already have ESPN, your best bet is F1 TV, which is F1's subscription service. There are two tiers. The pro tier is $11 a month or 85 bucks for the year and allows you to watch every session live and on demand.

If you don't care about watching in a timely manner, the access tier is cheaper at $3.50 a month or $30 a year. But you do have to wait a couple days to watch on-demand replays of the sessions. Both tiers also provide access. to the historic F1 archive. So if you want to go back and watch the entire 2024 season, which was a banger, you can do that. If you don't feel like watching entire races just yet, F1 TV...

Does offer 30-minute edits of the races, which basically just take out the downtime. It's kind of nice. There's also the official F1 YouTube channel. which provides highlights of each session with the races being edited down to about seven minutes. YouTube's usually how I consume practice sessions, though I know that many of our listeners just watch the YouTube highlights and then listen to our podcast to get the full picture of the race.

weekend. It is up to you. A few other things here that you will see and hear during a broadcast. Rob mentioned that the cars will harvest energy for their batteries. You can tell a car is doing that by flashing red light at the back. So that's what that means. It'll also flash a lot when it is a wet race. You will also see the drivers being weighed on scales after each session.

Per the rules, the car has to be a minimum weight, and that includes the driver. So they weigh the driver and the car separately just because it's logically easier rather than making them all stay in their cars and queue up at the weighbridge after. The race, for example. It's also useful for the driver's physical trainers to know how much weight that they've lost during a race, which in a hot race like Singapore can be up to eight pounds. Wow, that's crazy.

Yeah, worth remembering. These guys are athletes. Thankfully, they do have a drink system. Oh, and we forgot to mention this year, they're getting cooling vests. Oh, they are. That's right. Still suits. Yeah. Because, you know, the world's getting hotter, folks. That tends to have an impact on these folks as well. Yeah. One driver. Last year or the year before had to stop during the session because he was too hot. He's going to pass out.

Which you don't want to do when you're driving 200 miles in the air. And he's like in his mid-20s, right? This guy has like the peak physical shape and he just can't do it anymore. The Williams YouTube channel is very good. They're one of the better YouTube channels, but they did a thing about prep for some of these races. Williams, at least, before Singapore specifically, puts their drivers in an ice bath.

for like two hours. Oh, wow, really? To lower their core body temperature to try to get ahead of what's going to happen to them during the race. That's crazy. Another phrase you're going to hear a lot is park ferme, which means... closed park in french park for me is both an area and a designated time of the weekend

where technical checks are done by the officials to make sure that the cars are within the regulations. For example, after qualifying, the cars go into Park Fermi, and during that time, the teams are not allowed to make any performance adjustments. on the car. Some lingo here. I'll kind of run down these. Feel free to jump in, you guys. A lockup.

Just some stuff you're going to hear on the broadcast. A lockup is like when a driver hits the brakes and their tires freeze and they skid. You'll see big puffs of smoke. The F1 word for pit is... Box. So you'll hear the race engineer tell the driver box, box. And that means come into the pit. Presumably because it's easier to hear the word box over the radio.

Yeah, I haven't really heard a definitive reason why, but that's what they say. Speed trap, you'll often see that in the diagram of the... The racetrack and I've gotten questions about this before that's not like You'll get a ticket going through there. There's a guy in a white van with a camera sticking out the back of it. That's just the broadcast letting you know that that's the fastest part of the track and where they're going to be clocking the cars. The cars do good up.

past 220 miles an hour so um rob mentioned the word back marker that just means that uh it's a car that's being passed um being lapped um Let's see. Purple. Yeah, go ahead. I got a couple as well. I'll give you a little break here. Please. Bottoming. That's a favorite of mine. Yeah, that's right. Power bottoming. Bottoming is when the bottom of the car sort of like contacts the track. They actually put these like skid plates underneath.

the cars to make sparks, which is purely for our entertainment purposes. There is no use for this at all. Except maybe to signal that the car is bottoming, which I guess is also helpful. I think they do need to have something there. but it doesn't need to spark. That's just cool. We remember when they added the sparks. It was only like...

10 or 11 years ago or something, where they made these skid blocks part of it. It was 2015, actually. Yeah, so bottoming out, it happens when the suspension on the car pulls them down, and then this sort of...

ground effect error, it happens a lot more. Another one that's important you'll hear after a while is break bias. Essentially, when you... pull when you push the brake pad on i mean if you put if you press the brakes on a normal car there's actually lots of sort of middleware between you and the brakes that decides, you know, it doesn't want you to lock the brakes and, you know, ABS and things like that, that essentially make sure that the car slows down.

You don't have this on a Formula One car. The brakes are, you know, sort of, you can easily lock your wheels and stuff. Brake bias essentially is a thing that allows you to... bias the amount of braking that's happening with the front and rear wheels. So sort of by default, they will brake at the same amount, but you can change the brake bias so that the front wheels maybe brake a bit more than the rear and vice versa.

help with how you're entering corners and the driver if you look at their like onboard cameras you can see them adjusting that stuff turn by turn they're the steering wheels if you haven't seen one you should look at a picture they are insane they're like a

There's like five video game controllers welded together. There are so many dials and switches and screens. They're basically programming their car while they are driving it around. Yeah, imagine trying to like order DoorDash on your Apple CarPlay. while overtaking people on a highway. That's kind of what they're doing. Yeah. Some other lingo here, purple sector or going purple as refers to.

um the colors that they use to indicate the fastest times in a particular track or a particular section of the track so on in qualifying if you see a time show up and it's yellow that means the driver has improved if it's green that means they improved on their last lap and if it's purple it means they're the best of everyone for that session chicane

This is a, it means a quick back and forth turn on a track. So often like just a little kink. Yeah, like the other turn starts before the apex of the first turn has ended.

yeah it's just a real quick right left or left right um and another kind of confusing one pit window you'll often see graphics that are like pit window open that's not like a regulation thing that's just them estimating that like we think they're gonna pit in this time so as a viewer be ready and another track one is hairpin turn which oh sure i guess the american equivalent would be a bobby pin turn uh which is essentially a turn that um

It looks kind of like a hairpin where the track essentially almost does an entire 180. It's a very tight turn that happens usually at the end of a straight. Yeah.

All right, well, we're getting toward the end of it here. I finally just want to thank and welcome. The F1 newcomers here. I know it can be intimidating to jump into something like this, and the more annoying F1 fans can be... Pretty protective of their precious sport. But listen, we've been doing this for over a decade. We welcome you. And sorry to assault you with so much information if you need to go back and listen to it again. You know what? Just...

Go watch a race. You'll remember stuff like, oh, that's right. They were talking about DRS. That's what that is. That's what it looks like. Racing's for everyone. That's what we believe. We love it and we want more people to be excited about it. Our goal is to keep.

the show accessible so that more people can learn it too and that's not to say that we dumbed down anything but we do try to assume you know you don't know necessarily what an over cut is for instance so if you do have questions even if you think that we may have answered them before do write in at shift f1 podcast at gmail.com or you can go to our website f1.cool slash emails

Because we love hearing, you know, what's difficult to grasp. And chances are, if you have that question, then others do too. Yeah. When we started this podcast, it was F1 Media is like really... big and popular now which is amazing there's been this great resurgence of new people getting into f1 when we started this That was not the case. It was, you know, a... Oh, they shut down anything on YouTube that was about F1. Yeah, they were very protective of their...

their trademark and their brand and stuff like that. And it just wasn't popular. Like pre-Dried to Survive, it wasn't having, at least here in the States, it wasn't having much of a resurgence. It was a sport that was quite popular.

certain countries in europe but but even so was kind of out of touch with with younger people and and certainly women as well like i there's been such a demographic change within the sport which has been fantastic to see and when we started it was very much a how do you get into f1 was the way we started it, and it's largely the ethos we have carried. These days, there are a lot of podcasts that are done by people who are much more technically minded than I am, for sure, or extra.

drivers and stuff like that. And there's lots of different types of F1 media out there. We have always tried to stay to the whole, you know... Sort of enjoying the soap opera of the whole thing, enjoying the characters, the incidents that happen in the races, the storylines that are going on. And yeah, to make it sure that the podcast remains accessible. There are a lot of people... people.

A lot of people listen to our podcast these days. There are also a lot of people who have listened in the past and perhaps have, I don't know if graduated is the word to say, but have definitely wanted to get something a bit more in the weeds and things like that. But we sort of pride ourselves on being.

like a fun recap chat about it. Also, we added Rob, who's really actually smart and technical. So that helps us a lot. Yeah, I mean, our Discord is full of people who, you know... came to our podcast not knowing anything and now are like world endurance championship sickos so exactly you'd love to see it we've also got an f1 fantasy league

So once that gets started, you can join. Yes, F1 has fantasy sports. You'll be able to join that using a link that we'll put in the show notes. And if you want, you can ask other listeners of Shift F1. any questions by joining our discord channel. It is an amazing discord, very newbie friendly, and you can do that via Patreon, Danny.

Yes, patreon.com slash shift F1. We've been on Patreon for a number of years now. It is the main reason through which we fund this work. If you are a member of Patreon, for five bucks a month, you get every episode with us. without ads in it, which is definitely something a lot of our listeners really appreciate. You also get access to monthly bonus podcasts, which range from lots of reviews of

Motorsport adjacent films, shall we say. We're really stretching the viability of that at this stage. We've also reviewed or done primers for other racing series over the years. There's a... pretty big library of bonus podcasts on that feed now as well. So if you're interested at all, you join up for five bucks a month, you'll get access to dozens and dozens and dozens of bonus pods. And most of them are evergreen because they're sort of...

designed in that way um for 10 bucks a month you also get a video version of the podcast of those exclusive podcasts as well and the video library we've done a bunch of weird stuff over the years and some esoteric videos where we um reviewed various This... alcoholic beverages that F1 drivers got involved in, which seems sort of like maybe not the thing you'd do if your main job was driving, but it seems to happen all the time. And loads of other bits and bobs over there.

also do this podcast. It's not just on audio. We actually have it on YouTube as well. You might be watching this on YouTube. If for some reason you want to listen to this and also stare at the three of our faces, you can do that over on youtube.com slash shift F1. And then if you are a... total sicko and that's what f1 is about it's about total sickos who love racing and people who spend too much money then you can become a title sponsor

which is the F1, Shift F1 version of sticking your name on our race car. And you can do that for the low, low price of $50 a month. And we have people who I swear to- god when i'm just about to go sleep at night this is where these people's names dance around just on the veil between between awake and asleep Deanj. It's a me, Ferrario. Get rich or die, Ryan. Cyphus Training. Turf SES. Agave ATX. At Team Blackjack. Michael Mabes. Cigarettes. Olivia Evans.

Telemetrydeck.com, FTC, Drew Stewart, Bailey Foote. Always amazed at what Patreon considers a name, Abraham Getchel. Bunny Crimes, Snigs, Alex Couchet, Max Foltar, Jeff Foster, Troy Starmer, William Romph, Lachlan the Madden Man, Samurai Love Story, and Jason Kelly. It's get rich, or die, Ryan. Oh, die, Ryan. Oh, die. Well, you know.

The hallucinated oar. Yeah, it's right there. Yeah, it's the Bernstein bears all over again. His name is O'Dwyer. Exactly. Get rich or die Dwyer. I don't know. It's been a long podcast. They're not usually this long as well, we should mention. No. This is long. We will be back next week, though, with a more normal length pre-show for the Australia race. We'll also be covering from what we can tell of...

Preseason testing. Yeah, yeah. Again, we know that teams like to play it a little underhand, a little cool. Sandbag. I guess our car isn't that good. Surprise! But that's the fun part about the beginning. Preseason testing is a week of call an ambulance memes from the F1 teams. Yeah.

But yeah, like Danny mentioned, if you'd like to support the show and get access to all of our bonus episodes, the ad-free version of the podcast, and the official Shift F1 Discord, you can do so over at Patreon.com slash Shift F1. Have a good race weekend, everyone. We will see you all next week.