B-Side Sports: The Stories Behind The Game.

Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost drove for the same team, in the same cars, in what became one of the most intense and controversial rivalries in sporting history. This episode is about what happens when two people are so evenly matched, so psychologically incompatible, and so completely defined by winning that competition stops being a sport and becomes the entire architecture of an identity. It&apos...

Formula 1 has spent years defending its presence in the Gulf. The host fees run into the tens of millions of dollars. The sport says it's a force for engagement and openness. The critics say it's providing cover for governments with serious human rights records. But in the spring of 2026, a war cancelled two of those races overnight — not because anyone drew a moral line, but because the...

Enzo Ferrari is one of the most mythologised figures in the history of sport. The red cars, the prancing horse, the tyrant of Maranello; most people know the legend. Far fewer know the man underneath it: the boy who fell in love with racing at ten years old and never stopped chasing it, the father carrying secrets that shaped every decision he made, the obsessive who built a global empire without...

At high enough speed, a Formula 1 car generates so much aerodynamic downforce that it could, in theory, drive upside down on the ceiling of a tunnel.  This episode is about the invisible force behind this theory, how engineers learned to weaponise air, how the shape of a car’s underside changed the sport forever, and why the person who understands airflow best has, for fifty years, been the person...

In 1969, a Swiss watchmaker put its logo on a Formula 1 car. No luxury brand had ever done it before. The driver was Jo Siffert. The brand was Heuer.  This episode is about what came before and what followed.  In this episode, we cover: The very first timed motorsport race and why officials couldn't agree on a winner How timing technology evolved from stopwatches to transponder systems accura...

On the 28th of September, 2008, a Formula 1 car drove into a wall in Singapore. The driver climbed out. He said it was a mistake. It wasn't. This episode is about one of the most audacious acts of deliberate cheating in the history of sport. It’s about what was planned, who planned it, and how it worked. It’s about the nine months of silence that followed, what finally broke it, and what a sp...

On November 29th, 2020, a Formula 1 car hit a metal barrier in Bahrain at 192 kilometres per hour. The car split in half. The driver was on fire for twenty-eight seconds. Then he climbed out. This episode is about how that is possible. It's about what a crash actually does to the human body, the forces involved, the weakest points, and why drivers historically died not from fire or impact, bu...

In the autumn of 2016, the most valuable private sports contract in the world changed hands. The buyer paid 4.4 billion dollars for a sport with no marketing department, a shrinking audience, and a CEO who thought social media was nonsense. Most people in the paddock thought they'd lost their minds. They hadn't. This is the story of how Formula 1 went from a cash machine being quietly ru...