Listener Q&A: Does Driving Style Matter in F1?

It's Not the Car

It’s another “No Dumb Questions!” You email us to ask, we sit down to answer. There are no dumb questions, but there might be some dumb answers.

Today’s focus is . . . Formula 1 drivers! What makes one better than another?

Mistakes, for one thing. No room for error in the big leagues. Unless you’re Lance Stroll, in which case, well . . . his pops owns the team, so . . .

UGH, DAD, I TOLD YOU, I CLEANED MY ROOM ALREADY BUT THEN DANNY RIC CAME IN AND MESSED IT UP IT’S ALL HIS FAULT.

This show’s format rotates weekly, because squirrel. For this episode, we’re borrowing the No Dumb Questions framework from Ross’s old “Speed Secrets” podcast.

Related Trivia: This is our 25th episode! NDQ normally lives on this show’s Patreon (link below), but we felt like celebrating.

This episode was produced by Mike Perlman. Jeff, Ross, and Sam are not his dads; that would be nepotism. Or the 1987 Touchstone Pictures film “Three Men and a Baby,” which starred Tom Selleck, Ted Danson, and Steve Guttenberg.

Jeff would definitely be the Danson character in that scenario. Or maybe that’s Ross? Sam is probably Selleck, but only because he’s dreaming now, Selleck had a rad mustache in that flick and Sam has never been able to grow a proper lip rug. The one time he tried, he ended up looking like a cross between Pablo Escobar and a child hobo.

(No one here is *ever* the Guttenberg.)

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Topic suggestions, feedback, questions? Let us know what you think!

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Check out Sam's new book!

⁠⁠⁠Smithology: Thoughts, Travels, and Semi-Plausible Car Writing, 2003–2023⁠⁠⁠

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ABOUT THE SHOW:

It’s Not the Car is a podcast about people and speed. We tell racing stories and leave out the boring parts.

Ross Bentley is a former IndyCar driver and a world-renowned performance coach and author. Jeff Braun is a champion race engineer. Sam Smith is an award-winning journalist and a former executive editor of Road & Track magazine. Together, we explore the emotion at the heart of the machine.

We don’t love racing for the nuts and bolts—we love it for what it asks of the bag of meat at the wheel.

New episodes every Tuesday.