No Grip: An F1 Culture Podcast

During Formula 1's 76-year history, few teams have had quite as many highs and lows as Ferrari, the Italian racing outfit known for its iconic prancing horse, passionate fanbase, and sky-high expectations. It has a long history of scandals and sagas going back decades, but it most recently found itself under fire during a series of incidents in the late 2010s, which culminated in cheating allegati...

Queerness has always had a strange relationship to Formula 1, with homophobia still being a big issue in the sport and just a handful of drivers past and present openly identifying as LGBTQ+ throughout its 76-year history. Despite the lack of formal representation, queer fans have long been among F1's most fervent evangelists, but their presence leads to important questions. What does it means to...

Senna versus Prost. Hamilton versus Rosberg. Schumacher versus...well, a lot of people. Rivalries have been at the heart of Formula 1 since its founding 76 years ago. But it's been roughly half a decade since the sport's last iconic rivalry, and now that F1 is facing a bizarre season of much-maligned rule changes and a schedule upended by global conflicts, a new series of questions are popping up:...

It's now summer, marking the perfect time to relax with an ice-cold beverage and dive into one of the greatest mysteries in Formula 1 history: What happened to the diamond that was lost at the 2004 Monaco Grand Prix? It's a winding tale that includes a backmarker F1 team desperate to get out of the sport, a glamorous movie partnership full of Hollywood A-listers, and a sketchy diamond sponsor. Thi...

After a very public multi-year saga to get on the grid, Cadillac is currently making it way through its first season in Formula 1. On the surface, its results seem lackluster, to say the least. But is there more to this crew than meets the eye? And could it mark a turning point for U.S. teams in the sport? For this week's episode, Lily talks to The Athletic's Formula 1 staff writer Madeline Colema...

These days, conversations about women in motorsports are never complete without mentions of Susie Wolff. Susie is the last woman to participate in an official Formula 1 race weekend more than a decade ago, and now runs F1 Academy, the highly visible Formula 1 support series. She's long been held up as a paragon of motorsports girlbossdom, but is there more to her story? In this bonus episode, Lily...

When it debuted in 2023, the women-centric support series F1 Academy (F1A) was branded by Formula 1 and the greater racing ecosystem as a giant step forward for visibility and opportunity in motorsports for women. It even came with its own digital broadcast channels, major corporate sponsors, and attention from F1 teams. Three years later though, the promising championship has drummed up more ques...

Formula 1 has gone through several major cultural shifts over the past decade, from its acquisition by Liberty Media in the mid-2010s to the 'Drive to Survive' boom that followed a few years later during the pandemic. But there's a major cultural event that doesn't get talked about as frequently and yet really helped bring the sport's current cutthroat capitalist era to new heights: The 2023 pheno...

Though we're only three races into the 2026 F1 season, many drivers have been vocal about their hatred of the sport's brand-new rules and regulations. But what power do they actually have to change them? And how far would these racers go to get what they want? Today's drivers don't seem to have much agency as individuals or as a group to alter their circumstances, but that wasn't always the case i...

Is there one motorsports movie out there that's worse than all the rest? Several years ago, Lily sought to find this out, and after plenty of research, one film kept coming up: 'Driven,' the 2001 box office bomb written by and starring Sylvester Stallone. But is it really that bad? And did a certain Academy Award-winning motorsports movie actually take a lot of inspiration from this cinematic disa...

There’s no shortage of ways to analyze the state of the Formula 1 grid nowadays, with everybody weighing in on lap times, aerodynamics, tire degradation, pitstops, overtakes, and a whole lot more. But during an era of new rules and regulations when so much is uncertain, the planets may actually offer a fresh perspective on what’s happening on the track. This week, Mikaela Kostaras, an...

For much of the 2010s and the first half of the 2020s, Australian driver Daniel Ricciardo was the belle of the ball in Formula 1. Initially beloved for his cheeky personality and mesmerizing driving style, he eventually started to build a larger empire for himself that included a sought-after merch line, an F1-inspired Hulu pilot, and a number of high-profile brand partnerships. However, while Ric...

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