Chequered Past

The fifteenth of May keeps appearing in Formula 1 history, and rarely kindly.  This episode traces four events on that date across four decades:  Keke Rosberg's audacious tyre gamble at the 1983 Monaco Grand Prix,  Ayrton Senna's devastating retirement from a race he had dominated in 1988,  Max Verstappen's record-breaking debut victory for Red Bull at the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix  A...

On the fourteenth of May 1972, a Frenchman in a car nobody expected to win led every lap of the Monaco Grand Prix in continuous heavy rain. Jean-Pierre Beltoise had one Formula One World Championship victory in his career. This was it. It was also the last championship win for BRM — a team that had once been the finest in Formula One. This episode takes that race as its centrepiece and asks a ques...

On six different 13ths of May, Formula One revealed six very different versions of itself. This episode of Chequered Past travels from the World Championship’s beginning at Silverstone in 1950 through Monaco politics in 1956, Ferrari’s ground-effect breakthrough at Zolder in 1979, Riccardo Patrese’s long-awaited return to victory at Imola in 1990, Ferrari team orders in Austria in 2001, and Lewis...

On the 12th of May 1968, Formula 1 went racing for the first time since Jim Clark died. Five weeks after Hockenheim, five days after losing another driver at Indianapolis, the sport arrived at Jarama in Spain — and Graham Hill won in a red, gold and white Lotus that had never been seen before. The day British Racing Green ended. On the 12th of May 2002, Rubens Barrichello led the Austrian Grand Pr...

What does it mean to build something that lasts? Not a car, not a season, not a dynasty — but an institution. Something that absorbs failure, survives its founders, outlasts its rivals, and keeps coming back. This episode of Chequered Past takes a single date — the 11th of May — and follows it across six decades of Ferrari history. Four races. Four completely different eras. One unbroken thread. I...

Three Formula One races share an exact date — May the tenth — across eleven years.  In 1959, Jack Brabham took his first Monaco victory as Stirling Moss’s transmission failed with nineteen laps to run.  In 1964, Jim Clark arrived as world champion, led convincingly, and lost the race twice — first to a broken anti-roll bar requiring a pit stop, then to an oil leak in the closing laps — while Graha...

On May 9th 1993, at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona, three of the greatest drivers in Formula One history stood on a podium together for the only time. Alain Prost won. Ayrton Senna was second. Michael Schumacher was third. Between them, they would win fourteen world championships. At the time they had six. Within a year, the window had closed — retirement, tragedy, and time ensuring it woul...

We mark the eighth of May with five stories across forty-five years of Formula One. In 1977, Mario Andretti dominated Jarama while Williams Grand Prix Engineering quietly entered its first race.  In 1982, Gilles Villeneuve died at Zolder following a qualifying crash with Jochen Mass.  In 2005, Kimi Räikkönen won the Spanish Grand Prix at Barcelona in front of a sea of Renault blue, as Fernando Alo...

On the seventh of May 1967, Denny Hulme won the Monaco Grand Prix. Not far behind him, Lorenzo Bandini was dying. This episode is built around a date — the seventh of May — and four races across four decades that each forced Formula One to confront something it would rather have avoided. At the centre of it is Monaco 1967: the fire, the cameras, the race that didn't stop, and the sport that c...

The sixth of May has hosted exactly one Formula One World Championship Grand Prix in the sport’s history — Imola, 1984. It was the day Alain Prost led from the first corner and never looked back, the day Nelson Piquet set the race’s fastest lap and then blew his BMW engine, and the day Ayrton Senna wasn't on the grid after having to walk back from the furthest point on the circuit after his T...

It's May the fifth, and Chequered Past returns to three Formula One races separated by four decades.  In 1985, Elio de Angelis became the winner of the San Marino Grand Prix without leading a single lap — after Ayrton Senna ran out of fuel and Alain Prost's McLaren was disqualified at scrutineering for being underweight.  Eleven years later, Damon Hill came to Imola and beat poleman Schu...

On a single calendar date — the fourth of May — three remarkable stories from Formula One history converge.  In 1969, the Spanish Grand Prix at Montjuïc produced one of the sport's most terrifying afternoons: twin wing failures sent Jochen Rindt and Graham Hill into the barriers at nearly 140 miles per hour. Stewart won, but it was the crashes that changed F1 forever.  In 1980, the same date...

On 3rd May 1981, Formula One’s brand new San Marino Grand Prix roared into life at Imola — and a tyre gamble in changing conditions cost Gilles Villeneuve everything.  On 3rd May 1987, Nelson Piquet’s Williams hit the wall at Tamburello at close to 180 miles an hour. He walked away. The wall, as history would record, was only getting started.  And on 3rd May 1992, Nigel Mansell won the Spanish Gra...

Alex Zanardi died at home in Bologna on 1 May 2026, aged 59. In this special bonus episode, Chequered Past tells his story from the beginning: the Bologna boyhood shaped by loss, the karting prodigy who swept the 1987 European championship, the Formula 1 career that promised more than it delivered, the two CART titles with Chip Ganassi, the famous Corkscrew pass at Laguna Seca that rewrote the rul...

Chequered Past returns to a date that doesn't announce itself — May 2 has never carried a marquee race — but reveals, on close inspection, a remarkable chain of consequential moments.  We open in 2000, at Lyon-Satolas airport, where a McLaren driver crawls through wreckage and two young pilots die.  We move to 1994, to the morning after Imola — the first day of the sport's modern safety...

No circuit in Formula One has accumulated more meaning on a single date than Imola on the first of May. In 1983, Patrick Tambay won there for Ferrari carrying Gilles Villeneuve's number, in one of sport's quiet acts of dedication. In 1988, Ayrton Senna took his first McLaren victory on the same day, opening a season of almost total domination. In 1994, he came back — and didn't leav...

April 30th is one of the most consequential dates in Formula One history — defined not by a single moment, but by what happened, what followed, and what changed. In 1994, qualifying for the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix was brought to a halt when Roland Ratzenberger was killed after a front wing failure sent his Simtek into the wall at the Villeneuve corner. It was the first fatality at a Formula One...

On April 29, 1994, Rubens Barrichello's Jordan was launched into the tyre wall at the Variante Bassa chicane in Imola at over 200 kilometres an hour. He survived. The paddock noted it, breathed out, and went back to qualifying. Two days later, Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna were both dead.  In this episode of Chequered Past, we explore what April 29 means in Formula 1 history — a date t...

Today we give an entire episode to a single date: the twenty-eighth of April. Across five decades of Formula One, this date has produced five World Championship Grands Prix that each shaped the careers of the drivers involved: Niki Lauda's first win at Jarama in 1974,  Ayrton Senna's 55th pole position at Imola in 1991,  Jacques Villeneuve's breakthrough victory at the Nürburgring i...

On April 27th, Formula One has seen races decided in very different ways — but few as stark as the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix. At Montjuïc Park, a weekend marked by concerns over circuit safety led into a race that was stopped early following a fatal accident. With only 29 laps completed, half points were awarded — and Jochen Mass took the only victory of his Formula One career, while Lella Lombardi...

On April 26th, 1998, David Coulthard crossed the finish line at Imola with a 4.5-second lead over Michael Schumacher — and an engine that had been threatening to let go for the final ten laps. It was the fourth win of his career, and one of the most quietly dramatic of his life. To mark that date, this episode tells four stories connected to April 26th. We begin with Jean-Pierre Beltoise — born on...

April 25th, 1982. Imola. Fourteen cars on the grid, seventy-five thousand fans in the stands, and two Ferrari teammates about to destroy each other. The 1982 San Marino Grand Prix had no right to happen — most of the field had stayed home in protest. But the race that did take place produced one of Formula 1's most infamous betrayals, a feud that would end only with death, and a footnote resu...

Only two Formula 1 World Championship races have ever been held on April 24th. Both were at Imola. And both turned out to be defining moments in the championship. In 2005, Fernando Alonso — 23 years old, two wins in three races — held off Michael Schumacher for ten unrelenting laps around the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari. The margin at the flag: 0.215 seconds. The result: the clearest signal yet...

On 23rd April 1989, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost lined up on the front row at Imola with a gentleman's agreement in place. Whoever led into the first braking zone would not be challenged. It was a simple pact — one they had honoured before. Then Gerhard Berger's Ferrari exploded into the wall at Tamburello, the race was red-flagged, and everything was reset. Everything except the agreeme...

On April 22nd 1951, Alberto Ascari was untouchable at the San Remo Grand Prix. A spectator was not so fortunate. On April 22nd 1957, a twenty-seven-year-old from Luton won the Glover Trophy at Goodwood in a car nicknamed the Toothpaste Tube, with a young Bernie Ecclestone watching from the pit lane. Eighteen months later, both their lives would be changed forever. And on April 22nd 2012, Formula O...