Every record has a B-side. The deeper cut. The one that tells you something the hit single never could. B-Side Sports is a narrative podcast about what's really going on behind the games we watch — the business, the science, the history, the culture. Flip it over. There's always more.
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's about the rival effect, which is the documented phenomenon that we perform at a different level ent...
12 May 2026
Blood Money: The Politics of F1's Calendar
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 airspace closed. In this episode, I try to hold all of it honestly. The concerns about Saudi Arabia and Ba...
5 May 2026
Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Myth, and the Empire He Built
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 ever really wanting to be a businessman. In this episode, I’ll explore the life of Enzo. What dro...
27 Apr 2026
Downforce: How Invisible Air Became the Most Powerful Weapon in Formula 1
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 who wins. In this episode we cover: The physics of downforce and why an F1 car is essential...
20 Apr 2026
The Millisecond War: Where the Science of Time Meets the Sport of Speed
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 winnerHow timing technology evolved from stopwatches to transponder systems accurate to 0.0001 secondsJack Heuer's deal with Jo Siffert and the negotiation with Enzo Ferrari t...
13 Apr 2026
Crashgate: How F1 Fixed a Race
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 sport does when the truth it's been avoiding becomes impossible to ignore. And it’s about a world champi...
6 Apr 2026
50 Gs: The Science of Surviving an F1 Crash
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, but from a single catastrophic failure at the base of the skull. It's about the decades of deaths that p...
30 Mar 2026
The Deal: How Formula 1 Became the World's Most Valuable Motorsport
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 run into the ground by a London private equity firm, to one of the fastest-growing sports properties on the p...
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