The Last Great F1 Fairy Tale — (Brawn GP, 2009)

It's Not the Car

Once, an English retiree made Ferrari and Red Bull mad. He looked like an accountant and wore dad sweaters. The team he ran was a down-on-its-luck collection of castoffs and pirates; in their very first season, they risked everything and landed the impossible.

Sound like a sports movie? Conveniently, the whole thing was basically a cross between “Major League,” the Paul Newman hockey classic “Slap Shot,” and that scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” where all the faces melt.

Later—much later—Keanu Reeves came in. Who doesn’t love Baba Yaga?

This show’s format rotates weekly, because squirrel. This episode is our monthly deep dive into an epic moment from racing history. In this case, that’s the remarkable story of Brawn GP—the only F1 team to win two titles in its first (and only!) season.

Related Trivia: Ross Bentley and Ross Brawn have the same initials. If you mispronounce Jeff Braun’s last name, it sounds like “Brawn.” Sam has no brawn on his body whatsoever, but he very much loves that moment in “Slap Shot” where the ref hands the hero team the trophy as he calls them all bums.

This episode was produced by Mike Perlman.

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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.