Be Differential

Want to work in motorsport but you’re not a driver or engineer? Here are the 5 side doors into a racing career, and how to start this year. F1 hits Austin for the US Grand Prix, and Kimi Antonelli could clinch the title. But the cameras follow 20 drivers while thousands of people run the weekend. Eva Gregory breaks down the jobs behind a race weekend: operations, media, business, technical, and of...

Meet Helen — a classic VW Beetle owned, driven, wrenched on, and genuinely loved by Annie Van Orman, the enthusiast behind @annies_vw. In this episode of BeDifferential, Annie talks about how she fell into the world of air-cooled cars, what she saw in Helen when she found her, and what years of hands-on ownership have taught her that no manual ever could. We get into the Hemmings Great Race, the b...

Eva Gregory gets asked this question more than almost anything else: how do I actually get a job in motorsports? This week she answers it — for real, without the motivational speech. She started as a cashier at a karting facility. She ended up as Director of Operations at Road Atlanta. The path wasn't linear, wasn't glamorous at the start, and didn't come from a motorsports degree or a...

James Dornor looked around the motorsport industry and couldn't find a community that felt like his, so he built one. In this episode of BeDifferential, the founder of Driven By Us traces the full journey from that personal experience of isolation to an organization that has directly impacted over 4,600 students and reached nearly 19,000 more through workshops, conferences and academia events....

The SRO Indianapolis 8 Hour is happening this weekend at one of the most iconic motorsports venues in the world — and most American motorsports fans couldn't tell you what series it's part of. Eva Gregory wants to change that. This week she makes the case for SRO GT racing and the Intercontinental GT Challenge: what it is, what makes it distinctive, why Indianapolis Motor Speedway's ro...

SimCraft co-founder Sean Patrick MacDonald joins the BeDifferential Podcast to talk motion simulation, racing technology, and what it really took to build one of the most advanced simulator platforms in the world. From the center of mass architecture SimCraft shares with NASA to six degrees of freedom, 90% real-world fidelity, and translational seat time, Sean breaks down the science behind why Si...

I spent years working inside Road Atlanta — and this week, I'm going back. 🏁 The Motul Petit Le Mans is the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season finale: ten hours, or 1,000 miles, at one of the most storied road racing facilities in the country. But this week isn't just a race preview. Eva Gregory breaks down what makes IMSA multi-class endurance racing one of the most under-app...

Ava Hanssen started racing at four years old in Elkhorn, Wisconsin — and she hasn't slowed down since. In this episode, the 16-year-old Formula Four Junior Formula Championship driver talks about what it actually felt like to grow up racing, what 20+ championships across 11 years of competition really cost, and why winning her very first open wheel race at Circuit of the Americas is the moment...

F1's newest circuit couldn't produce a race. Three days later, F1 gave Monaco a sprint. Is that fixing the racing, or just adding more TV? This week on the Thursday Pit Stop, Eva Gregory breaks down the Madring's F1 debut at the Spanish Grand Prix. Norris lost the race to an ill-timed Virtual Safety Car, and the 57 laps that followed had fewer than ten overtakes. The circuit's desi...

Nathan Lyons was 12 years old when he left Fort Worth, Texas and moved to North Carolina to chase a career in racing full-time. In this episode, the AK Performance driver backed by Ally Racing talks about what that decision actually felt like for him and his family, what it meant to be the kid who'd already made a bet on a career while everyone else was figuring out middle school, and what rac...

IMSA just shortened its Indianapolis race back to 2 hours and 40 minutes, after two years as a six-hour endurance race. This Sunday, the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship returns to Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the Battle on the Bricks — now a sprint again, after Road America took over as the six-hour endurance round. Eva Gregory draws on her years running motorsports facility operations to ma...

Sam Russo didn't plan to compete in the Rebelle Rally. Then she turned to a friend at a conference and said "we should do this" — and the rest, as they say, was chaos in the best possible way. In this episode of BeDifferential, Sam talks about how a moment of "say yes to the crazy" energy led her to prep a high-mileage 4Runner, build navigation skills from scratch, and so m...

Formula 1 opens a brand-new circuit in a European capital this weekend, which is a thing that basically never happens. The Spanish Grand Prix moves to Madrid — the Madring — and it's the first F1 race in the Spanish capital since Jarama in 1981. Forty-five years. But the part I can't stop thinking about isn't the track. It's the contract. Three weeks ago Zandvoort hosted its last G...

Charlie Wiggins was a four-time Gold & Glory Sweepstakes champion who built his own race car, ran a thriving mechanic shop on Indiana Avenue in Indianapolis, and achieved things that should have made him a household name in American motorsports. Instead, his story was nearly lost entirely. In this episode of BeDifferential, former GM Vice President of Global Design Ed Welburn — the man who has...

NASCAR quietly rebuilt its entire playoff format for 2026 and almost nobody covered it. Then on Saturday night at Daytona, it produced the exact result it was designed to prevent. Here's the change: the knockout rounds are gone. No more three rounds of three and a winner-take-all Championship 4. It's a ten-race Chase — the first since 2013 — with one points reset and no eliminations. And &...

Christian Valverde grew up with Silverstone as a backdrop — and at 18, he's already closer to that world than most people ever get. In this episode, Christian talks about nearly a decade of competitive karting across four countries, four championship titles, and what it actually felt like to finish school without a clear path but with an unshakeable ambition. Now competing in the 750 Motor Clu...

GT3 is the most successful form of sports car racing in the world, and most people have never had it explained to them. So this week I'm doing that — and then telling you about the strangest, best idea in racing right now. GT3 turned 20 this year. To mark it, SRO and Peter Auto launched the GT3 Revival Series: a historic championship for GT3 cars built between 2006 and 2013. Real Balance of Pe...

What does it take to build a car event so good that people fly across the world to attend it? Jeff Swoboda, commercial development lead and key figure behind Luftgekühlt, joins BeDifferential to pull back the curtain on one of the most beloved gatherings in automotive culture. We trace the journey from Luft's origins as an air-cooled Porsche happening in Los Angeles to its expansion into Tokyo...

The last Dutch Grand Prix runs this weekend at Circuit Zandvoort — and almost everyone has the story backwards. Formula 1 didn't drop Zandvoort. Zandvoort dropped Formula 1. The Dutch GP is privately funded, it sold out five months early, and its director says the business case is still healthy. They chose not to renew anyway. This week I get into why a promoter walks away from a sold-out race...

Ella White didn't come up through the traditional karting ladder — and that might be exactly what makes her one of the most compelling young drivers to watch. In this episode, the Berg Racing Ligier JFC driver talks about what it felt like to go from her first ever formula car experience to signing for a full season with one of America's most respected racing programs. We get into her firs...

On August 22–23, the NTT INDYCAR Series runs the Freedom 250 Grand Prix on the streets of Washington, D.C. — the first INDYCAR race ever held on the National Mall, with free general admission and IROC returning after years dormant. Back in July, Eva Gregory questioned whether Formula 1's American expansion was built too heavily on spectacle. Now American open-wheel racing is doing something ar...

Cristian Garling grew up watching people hustle and survive through the window of his mother's hair salon on Beach Boulevard. By his junior year at Rancho Alamitos High School, he was lost — until an automotive classroom became the first thing that made school matter. Today he teaches in that same classroom. Eva Gregory sits down with Cristian, CTE Automotive Instructor and founder of the Unde...

Monterey Car Week 2026 runs August 7–16, and every year the same argument shows up online: that it's become less accessible, more corporate, less about the cars. In this Thursday Pit Stop, Eva opens up about being given a lot of access she didn't pay for, why she's making the accessibility argument anyway, and what she got completely wrong on her first trip to the Monterey Peninsula. P...

Ian Koenig — the man behind KoenigSlides and over a billion views across social media — joins BeDifferential to talk about what it actually takes to chase a dream in motorsport, one sideways mile at a time. We get into his first memory of cars, the moment drifting clicked as more than a hobby, and what separates someone who can slide a car from someone who can truly compete. Ian breaks down his cu...

No industry trends. No race previews. No big structural question about the future of car culture. This week it's just Eva Gregory, pulling back the curtain on the career advice she's received over a path that took her from cashier at a karting facility to Director of Operations at Road Atlanta to marketing partnerships at Hagerty — and being completely honest about what helped, what hurt,...