Episode 251: Pole Positions, Burning Rubber and the Checkered Flag: A Formula One Conversation
In this episode, Amira Rose Davis and Jessica Luther dive deep into Formula One racing. But first, they discuss their favorite show tunes. Then, they put the pedal to the metal on F1. Inspired by the Netflix series Drive to Survive, Amira and Jessica discuss the current racing season, the inner drama of the F1 world, the way drivers navigate power and money and how the TV how has increased US fandom for this global sport.
Following this discussion, you'll hear a preview of Amira's interview with Myron Rolle about his transition from the NFL to neuroscience. Next, they burn the worst of sports this week on the Burn Pile. Then, they celebrate those making sports better including Torchbearer of the Week, the USWNT and USMNT CBA for equal pay! They wrap up the show with What's Good in their in their lives and What We're Watching in sports this week.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Links
F1 Drivers in ‘Drive to Survive’ Season 4, Ranked by Narrative: https://www.theringer.com/2022/3/14/22977540/drive-to-survive-season-4-lewis-hamilton-max-verstappen
Climate emergency accelerates F1’s efforts to clean up its image: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/nov/26/climate-emergency-accelerates-f1-efforts-to-clean-up-image
The Electric Future of Auto Racing Will Look, Sound and Feel Different: https://globalsportmatters.com/science/2022/04/19/not-so-fast-the-electric-future-of-auto-racing-will-look-sound-and-feel-different
Why did F1 go racing in Saudi Arabia – and will it be back? https://www.espn.com/f1/story/_/id/33617032/why-did-f1-go-racing-saudi-arabia-be-back
Formula 1 drivers to ask for more input over where sport races after Saudi Arabia: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/30/f1-drivers-seek-more-input-over-where-races-held-after-saudi-gp.html
F1 asked to hold inquiry into alleged human rights abuses in Bahrain: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/mar/24/f1-asked-to-hold-inquiry-into-alleged-human-rights-abuses-in-bahrain
Lewis Hamilton calls for Qatar and Saudi Arabia to be scrutinised over human rights issues: https://www.bbc.com/sport/formula1/59337775
Transcript
Amira: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the sports podcast you need. It's Amira here, and I am joined by the one and only Jessica Luther. Hey Jess!
Jessica: Hi Amira.
Amira: How are you?
Jessica: I'm good. I'm excited to be here.
Amira: I am excited too, because me and Jessica have been waiting what has felt like forever – in reality is basically three weeks – to do this episode we're going to do today, all about Formula 1. Yes. Now, maybe you’re long-term Formula 1 fans and you are now sitting up, turning the volume up, and are like, finally! It has taken five years. [laughs] If you are about to hit pause because you have no idea why we're so excited to talk about F1, do not turn this off. Come with us on this adventure, and maybe you too will become an F1 fan. But before we get into all of that fun motor racing, first of all, my voice, Jessica is such a mess because I have spent the last four or five days screaming at Samari’s shows. She had her back to Broadway showcase with their pre-professional theater company. Jessica went with me on opening night.
Jessica: I was screaming.
Amira: Then of course, I went to the Austin FC game last night, which was a fever dream. It was chaos. So I also lost my voice there. So that's why I sound a little bit raggedy. So Samari had this great show. It was all these Broadway numbers from a million different shows. Like, she sang a featured role in Macavity, which is the coolest Cats has ever been, in my opinion.
Jessica: It was wonderful. Like, Samari actually came out, center stage, microphone–
Amira: In her leather pants. [laughs]
Jessica: Yep. A little Amira there on the stage. It was wonderful.
Amira: And there's a moment in the show, and I said, Jessica, this is from Evita, and you turned to me and you were like, oh, I know! [laughter] So, I want to know about your love of the stage.
Jessica: Well, it's so interesting, because I was obviously prepping for this and I was thinking that all my answers here I want to just preface with the fact that my favorite Broadway songs were absolutely set when I was like 15 years old. Also, shoutout to my best friend in high school, Laura Coffin, who introduced me to a bunch of stuff and like totally fostered this part of my musical knowledge. And in the showcase they sang Home, that's how the whole thing ended, from The Wiz. And this isn't the Broadway version, but the Diana Ross version from the movie, just…I listened to it again last night as I was walking the dog and crying. Like, it is just hope in a song. Oh, the way that Diana sings it is so lovely. And it just makes my heart soar. But then, and maybe this is like really obvious for being 15 in 1995, but one of my most favorite songs in the whole world is All I Ask of You from Phantom, which is Christina and Raoul.
There's this perfect moment, it's from the London cast recording. And I don't know who they were, but there's a part of the song where Christine says, “Say you love me,” and then he immediately comes in. It's so soft and perfect. And he says, “You know I do.” [Amira laughs] Ugh, when I was 15, I was like, if I can capture that love in my own life, [laughs] I will be set. Every time that gets me. And then I will say, the one thing I never saw on stage and I really wish that I had, is Jekyll and Hyde, because I still, to this day, don't understand how the song Confrontation works, [Amira laughs] where he is both Jekyll and Hyde and sings as if he is two people. Like, I just…I tried to watch it online and like the only version was David Hasselhoff. [laughter] And that was not great. It wasn't quite what I wanted. But I can remember just listening to Confrontation over and over and over again and being like how, how, how? And so it was really fun to revisit that. How about you?
Amira: Yeah. I'm basic. Like, Seasons of Love will always be…They did a rendition of it in Samari’s show.
Jessica: Sang the hell out of it.
Amira: Yeah. And first of all, let me just say, yeah, these kids are like weird.
Jessica: They’re good.
Amira: They’re so fucking talented. Like, I can't stress to you how good these kids are. They're not even…Like, you forget that they are like teenagers, because it's just the power in their voices and their dancing. They're so good. But Seasons of Love always gets me. No Day But Today was what I quoted in my senior quotes in high school. And I remember because Rent, the movie was coming out, and so I dragged my friends to go see it. And they were not musical theater people at all.
Jessica: [laughs] Oh boy.
Amira: And so it starts and A) they're singing all the time, and B) it's like, hey it’s death! Like, oh my god. They looked at me and they're like, what the hell do you have us at? I remember that. So, one of the things that they do at the show is every senior basically has a really big solo moment and stuff like that. So after, Samari was saying, I wonder what I'll get for my senior showcase? Which is in four years, but we know will go by in the blink of an eye. And she was like, I really want Waiting For Life To Begin from Once on This Island, which…I will lose it, because that song I love.
Jessica: I don't know that at all.
Amira: Oh my gosh. It's just…It's a fun song, but it's like full of hope and desire to like see the world and want more from where you are and stuff like that. Just the thought of her singing that right when she's going to go to college…Like, oh my god, I won’t…You’ll just have to sweep up me from the floor.
Jessica: I’ll do it. I’ll be there.
Amira: But I was so excited that you got to come with me, because it's much like watching a sports match for me when Samari is performing. Like, I’m too stressed, too enjoying it.
Jessica: Yeah, you were very stressed. [laughs]
Amira: I was very stressed. I was just like…Which is good that I was going the three times I did go. Each time gets a little easier.
Jessica: It was great. Like, they encouraged us from the jump to cheer, like, as the kids are performing. So, you know I did. [laughter] I was giving it back to these kids, because they were just fabulous. And I of course came home and listened to Evita.
Amira: [laughs] Well, the last thing I’ll say is I said to Samari, she had to swing for Hamilton. So she was trying to figure out when she would get her mic. And I was like, oh, you'll probably get it at halftime. And she was like, ugh, what? [Jessica laughs] A sports reference? How embarrassing for you, that you just said that. And I was like, I'm not really embarrassed, actually, because I can have the range to do musical theater and sports. But so now we jokingly call intermission “halftime.”
Amira: So Jessica, it has arrived. Formula 1 racing. It is a motor sport in which they drive cars wicked fast, all over the world. It has been a wild ride since we've gotten into this sport, and we've gotten into it right in time because there has been some really interesting Grands Prix happening. Of course, Miami was a few weeks ago in which we saw, well, the most chaotic paddock, ever. All of these celebrities, Miami out in full force. It's always fun when a supremely European sport does stuff in the United States because it's just embarrassing for us. [laughter]
Jessica: Yup. And we're saying this from Austin, which has the permanent F1 track here, in the country.
Amira: So, first and foremost, yes, it’s cars. And what you're competing with is for two different championships. The first championship is a driver's championship. That's for an individual driver. And then the constructors championship are for the team that has the most points at the end of the season. What that looks like in practice is there's 10 teams; each team has two drivers, and you gain points for top 10 finishes. First place gets way more points than anybody else, and they pick up and they move to a different race track every week, basically, every two weeks sometimes, and set up their race there. And then the next week they're off to a new location. So, this past weekend, of course, the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona, it's one of the oldest races in the Grand Prix, in the circuits for Formula 1. It has a lot of kind of lore behind it, and it had drama behind it too which, as you'll come to know about F1–
Jessica: [laughs] It's all drama.
Amira: It’s all drama. And so the weekend begins on Friday with a practice run, and then qualifying happens on Saturday. And then the race is Sunday. So I got up early all these past days to check it out. It's at 8:00am central time for the race on Sunday. We saw the leader, Charles Leclerc, driving for Ferrari.
Jessica: “Sharl Lecler!” [Amira laughs] He says it both ways.
Amira: He says it both ways. We're just going to go with it. And he was off to such a strong start. It looked like a leisurely stroll.
Jessica: He was like running his own race, basically.
Amira: Just chilling by himself.
Jessica: In his Ferrari. That’s important.
Amira: And then he had to retire the car. The gear box just stopped.
Jessica: It just stopped working. The power just stopped in the car?
Amira: Which is something that happens in Formula 1, like, [Jessica laughs] your engine just stops. So your gear box just is like, nope.
Jessica: Yeah, your brakes go out, you can't stop your car.
Amira: And so he had to leave the race, which was really sad. And so it became, the race looked like, for second and third, all of a sudden it became for first and second. You had the two Red Bull cars with Max Verstappen, you know, defending world champion, and Sergio Pérez were going back and forth with George Russell, who is driving for Mercedes now. And it was a few laps of pure joy watching them jockeying for position, but the Red Bulls were able to pull strategy and basically allow themselves to work together to box out George Russell. And then they called a team strategy and let Max go ahead. And he ended up taking the podium, followed by Checo Pérez and then George Russell rounded it out. Lewis Hamilton was bumped in the first turn by Kevin Magnussen, fell all the way to 19th, had significant damage on the car, heard over the radio he wanted to retire the car. His team said, no, we think you can finish eighth. He drove some of the fastest laps right at the end there, and actually finished fifth. Both Mercedes had a coolant problem with their fuel.
Jessica: Water was leaking into the fuel pump. Yeah.
Amira: They spent the last few laps of the race just trying to hang on to their positions. George was able to hang on to third, but Carlos Sainz bumped up over Hamilton into fourth. So your top five were Max, Checo, George Russell, Carlos Sainz Jr, and then Lewis Hamilton in fifth. Jessica, what were your reactions to some of the Spanish Grand Prix action that we saw this weekend?
Jessica: Well, it's wild. It was very hot in Barcelona. So, the tires were having a lot of trouble. A lot of the cars, they were going to pit twice and ended up having to pit three times in order to keep up with the tires melting on the asphalt. [laughs] I mean, Hamilton was amazing. I want to shout out Fernando Alonso who's like a deep veteran of the sport who started P20, which means he was last place. He made it all the way up to P9 in an Alpine car. I mean, what Hamilton did was spectacular, but he also was driving a Mercedes. So, there is an advantage to that fact. Russell drove out of his mind at certain points, keeping Max back. I don't know if this is like…We’ll talk about this in a minute, but if the show on Netflix is the reason that Max makes me so nervous, because of season four. He makes me so nervous. Like, I was just so sure he was going to clip George and that we were going to see something terrible, but we didn’t.
And I will just say, like, you already said this, but it is just wild that the cars break. Just like, Charles out there just driving a car, [laughs] and then all of a sudden the car does not work anymore. So, as you can tell, the F1 cars, it's not like stock cars in NASCAR. Each team has a separate car. And so they get to, under the regulations, do what they can to make it as fast as they can. And we saw with Max there's something called DRS, drag reduction systems. But the DRS is like this flap at the back of the car that they can open at certain points, and that allows them to get like an additional 20 kilometers per hour for, you know, just a set amount of time. And Max was just…It wasn't working, and he was so angry, and I was like, wow, you can just like…You can have all this money and all these experts, and like, your DRS just doesn't open. But Max, like at one point, he was so angry. Apparently he was like pushing the button over and over again, so he was like opening and closing it and his engineer was like, please, push it once. [laughter]
Amira: So, me and Jessica are of course armchair experts now, despite knowing nothing about the sport probably eight weeks ago! [Jessica laughs] We both came into the sport because of Netflix’s Drive to Survive, which we'll talk about in a minute. But we have spent the last few weeks really reading everything we can about this sport, [laughs] going full throttle into it. So, we are here – Tressa also – to help explain the sport, because now we're so far in, we don't know what it is known about it or not. So, at this point, do you have any questions about F1 racing?
Tressa: I do. [Amira laughs] This is very basic. I'm wondering how long these races are? Because my dad is a big NASCAR fan, so I grew up watching him watch those, which are like hours. And it's like all afternoon. And is that what this is?
Amira: No.
Tressa: No.
Amira: It's like two hours. They are fast and speedy. It's really a kind of three-day thing. So on Friday you have practice, and then on Saturdays you have qualifying, and these are also kind of short things you watch in the morning.
Jessica: It’s like 45 minutes.
Amira: But it's really important because it's what determines your position for the start of the race. And there's actually drama in that because there's three qualifying rounds. Qualifying 1, Q1: all 20 cars, you're going around, and you're trying to log your fastest lap, but there's a timed component to it. So, all the cars have a certain amount of time to try to get their fastest lap in. The last five cars, they have positions 20 through 15 on the grid. They don't get to move on to Q2. Q2, the second qualifying round, you have less time to log your fastest lap, and they do it again where the last five there, they're assigned grid positions 14 through 11. They're not invited to the last Q3 qualifying round. That's where the top 10 cars have a short amount of time to log their fastest lap, and that determines grid position, pole position. Obviously, if you're fighting for points, you want to be 1, 2, 3, right? That's the good part. You don't want to be in the middle of the pack. It gets really scratched up there.
Jessica: The go is so dangerous, the first like 15 seconds of the race.
Amira: They all merge.
Jessica: It's just going to be real chaos. Yeah.
Amira: So, qualifying is an event in and of itself, and like, qualifying can be really dramatic because if you don't time it right, a lot of people try to get a lap in, see where the other times are, change their tires, and have enough time to log the fastest time without leaving any time for other teams to do so.
Jessica: But also, you can get stuck in traffic!
Amira: You get stuck in traffic.
Jessica: There can just be cars on the track, and they've got to get out of your way and stuff, but still, you're like dealing with it.
Amira: And this Saturday, we saw one car mistime it, so then they didn't get to log their last lap.
Jessica: Which is another wild thing about F1, is these…Like, they have hundreds of people who are working on these teams, and then they will make basic mistakes, real basic shit!
Amira: Putting on two left tires, not fully securing…Pitstop should take two seconds, literally.
Jessica: Yeah. Or just like they mistime. Like, somehow the timing’s off. It’s hard. It's like, that's how hard this is.
Amira: And then Sunday, when you see the actual race, this is actually one of the longer races we just saw, the Spanish Grand Prix, and it's like two hours really. So it was 66 laps.
Tressa: So it's fast, but it's also three days.
Jessica: It's a whole event. And there's other races happening before, like, there's other levels. There’s F2. But yeah, it's basically this three-day event.
Amira: But like I said, me and Jessica both came into this sport, like many people in the United States at least came into the sport, which was through Netflix’s Drive to Survive show. There are four seasons out right now. It is so fun.
Jessica: It's so good. It's so addictive. Don't start it unless you're ready. [laughs]
Amira: And I just have to say, Jessica started it before I did. And then when she started texting me about it, I did it. And then I lapped her.
Jessica: Amira is very competitive. So I knew that if I told her I had started it, that I would get a companion. [laughs]
Amira: A buddy. And I finished it before her, and then I had to wait in absolute agony for two days until she finished the show as well. [laughs] But that is how we came to it. And so what this show does is it follows around Formula 1. It starts with the 2018 season, then you have the 2019 season, then you have the pandemic season where we literally see COVID come in, shut everything down, and then everybody's back on screen with masks. It's kind of wild to watch the world change. And then the fourth season is about last year.
Jessica: And they're filming season five right now.
Amira: Yep. And they have a season six that's already been commissioned or agreed on or whatever you call it. So the show features interviews with drivers, with team principals, which are like the people who manage the entire team. They have journalists featured. They also do lots of race footage that includes radio calls between the drivers and their engineers, the reactions to the race in the paddock. They follow their parents. We see some girlfriends and wives, including one very famous wife who is, you know, a Spice Girl. Her cameos are a lots of fun.
Jessica: Which they don't even tell you til season two. I was watching with Aaron and I was like, there's a Spice Girl! [laughter] And he's like, what are you talking about? Because the show in season one is not interested in that particular aspect of her existence.
Amira: So, the show starts that first season…Very intriguingly, it doesn't focus on the top. It focuses on the middle pack. It looks at the fight to be the best of the rest. So, it's looking at the teams fighting for fourth place, and that's a really interesting way to start a show and drop you in, because there's only 10 teams, right? This is not a sport in which if you're coming into it, you have a lot of, you know…If you were coming into learning about the W, that would be 144 athletes alone. We're talking about 10 teams. 20 drivers, right? Other personalities around that, right? But that's how we got into this. And I wanted to ask you, Jess, what have you learned about F1 racing from the show that has surprised you?
Jessica: Yeah, well, I mean, this is so basic and we've said it already like seven times, but there's only 20 F1 drivers in the whole world at any one time. What a tiny, insular little world. So you can see how there would be so much drama within this highly competitive, big moneyed, international sport. The other thing that I find endlessly interesting – and the show will just drive this into the ground here – your biggest competitor is often your own teammate, because they're the only person on the track with the same car as you. So if you want to see how well you're doing, the only person you can one-to-one compare yourself to is your teammate. And so there's just inherent drama within the teams themselves. And as you've talked about with Checo and Max at Red Bull this time around, like, them asking Sergio to move over so Max could go by, like, he was clearly unhappy about that team decision. He did it, he was a good team player, but even those inter-dynamics of the teams themselves…It’s not like a rah rah, you know, we're all in this together. It's interesting, in season two, when you first get Mercedes, which is Lewis Hamilton, which was the only driver I knew – and you don't even see him on camera until season two. He has Valtteri Bottas as his second, and they try really hard to be like, “There's no second driver, there's no first driver, both drivers are equal!”
Amira: But then they'll do things like say race strategy, you need to let your teammate go behind you or in front of you, because we think they have a better chance of winning the race.
Jessica: Yeah. It's like, Max is clearly the number one driver of Red Bull, like obviously. [laughs] And so it's just interesting, like, Bottas having to navigate as a second driver, and like what that means. And I will say, I'm in love with Lewis Hamilton, and I'll just put that out there right now. Like, at this point, he can do no wrong for me. The way he speaks so highly of Valtteri because, as Amira said, it's not just the individual drivers trying to win championships. These constructors are championships of the team. You need both people to do well in order to get as many points as possible in the constructors cup. And as Lewis is winning championship after championship, they're also winning the constructors because Valtteri Bottas is so good as a second driver on that team, coming in second and third to Lewis all the time. And so you have this…I mean, Lewis is sad when Bottas leaves the team, like, the way he speaks about him…
Amira: You see with him too, like with Bottas, he's trying to…The psychological aspect of it, of being the perpetual second. It's not easy to drive behind one of the greatest drivers of all the time, like, most decorated.
Jessica: Yeah. When Toto Wolff, who is this Austrian guy that runs Mercedes, and he's Austrian in the way that Arnold Schwarzenegger…Like, he sounds like him. When he tells George Russell that he's going to come to Mercedes, the way he says it is, “The bad news is, you're going to be on the same team as Lewis Hamilton,” right? “The good news is that you'll be in a Mercedes.”
Amira: And I have to say, this is one of the things that's really interesting about watching it in real time while you're also watching the sport, is that we are seeing this season already play out, like, the actual sporting season, where George Russell has been able to work with the car a little bit better than Hamilton this year and is finishing just in front of him. You know, like I said, he got third at the Spanish Grand Prix and Hamilton was in fifth. So, we will see, going forward. That Mercedes team is suddenly very interesting.
Tressa: So, I kind of understand this team thing, but I don’t. I can understand how two cars can work together to like block other teams and like benefit themselves. But also, you said their biggest competitor is their teammate. Why would I actually care about winning the team cup? Do I get more money from winning the team cup? Or does it guarantee our team to be in the next year’s whatever?
Jessica: Yeah, it’s all of it.
Amira: It’s all of what you said, but I think the ego thing that we have to remember is that every year the teams create their own cars, and you have that new car for the year. That is your 2018 car, your 2022 car. So if you get beat, if you drive a Williams or a Haas or whatever, right? And you are getting beat by people driving Ferrari or Mercedes, the big money, big team, you're like, eh, like what can I do?
Jessica: What can I do about it? They’re in a Mercedes.
Amira: I need a bigger car. But if you are getting beat by your teammate, there is nothing you can point…You know what I mean? And like, sometimes psychologically, that is like the biggest thing, because you're also driving for a contract. Jess said there's only 20 seats in this sport. Sometimes it is a contractual thing. We see early on in the season, for instance, the contract that Red Bull gave to Max when he was first coming into F1, eclipses then teammate Daniel Ricciardo, and Danny actually chose to leave Red Bull, but one of the discussion points that they covered in that moment was how it was hard to watch that investment in the future eclipse what you feel like you have proven already as the veteran driver. And so it works best obviously if you guys are finishing 1-2, 2-3. But if one person is finishing in the top 10 in points and the other one's not, like, it can be very hard.
Jessica: And one of the things that this brings up for me, one of the interesting dynamics within the team…And you see this a lot with Ricciardo. This is like the narrative around this Australian driver, Daniel Ricciardo – who's a character, he's great television – is that he like jumps from different, like within the four years, he's at three different teams maybe. And so when he leaves Renault to go to McLaren, he announces it at the beginning of the season. So this entire season goes by where he's racing for Renault, with them all knowing that he will be leaving at the end of the year to go to McLaren. It's just so damn dramatic! Like, talk about like Real Housewives of F1. These men...There’s this whole thing of they're like crying about the fact that he's leaving the family, right? Just constant, like…But then there's so many times when these principals just fire drivers. They’re like, and you're gone! [laughs] You're not good enough. You're leaving. Like, there is no actual loyalty in the sport.
Amira: Because sometimes it's straight up, like, they needed sponsorship money to keep the team afloat. Who has money? Lance Stroll has money.
Jessica: Yeah. His daddy's a billionaire.
Amira: Right. Because his dad's going to fund the team, so you get a seat on the team. There's Russian oligarchs who appear, right?
Jessica: Because their son, their little mini me…
Amira: They want their son to have a seat. And so if you have two drivers, and you can dump one of them for a new driver that's also going to bring in sponsorship, that's going to save your team, essentially. We see that, where you're replacing drivers.
Jessica: You get all the narrative of like, our families are being…It’s like a divorce. I think Christian Horner, the principal at Red Bull, talks about the Renault thing as a divorce. And I was like, sure, but this is so normal in your sport. So like…
Amira: And they're all right on the paddock to get…It’s very…
Jessica: So tiny, a tiny little world.
Amira: But I do have to say, so Jessica said, talking about Daniel Ricciardo as great TV. And so I do want to address the fact that what we are watching is a show. It has brought in a lot of viewers. F1 is a very European, very European sport. But they have tried to break into the United States market for awhile. Obviously here in Austin, we have COTA, that's the Circuit Of The Americas. This was the first year since the 80s where there was two F1 races in the United States during the season, with Miami and then later this year it will be in Austin. Next year they're also doing a race in Las Vegas, and this is very much part and parcel of the growth of fandom that has happened here. And a lot of that, both people who run F1 and producers of the show have pointed to the success of the Netflix series.
Jessica: Worked on us!
Amira: Yeah, it certainly did. It's a top 10 status in over 56 countries, it has a huge audience. They noticed that when they went to Austin for the Grand Prix this past year, that tickets sold out in record time, the hotels sold out in record time, and a lot of people anecdotally were mentioning how the show brought them into this, because you get access to all of the teams on this show. And yet, there are still some people who you can see have a love-hate relationship with the show, Max Verstappen all of last year, most of the season last year, features a rivalry between him and Lewis Hamilton. He refused to grant access. So we don't have those interviews that we had with Max like we had in the first few seasons. But I find it funny, when he talks about it, he’s saying, well, I don't like it because it's overdramatic. But he goes, it wasn't really about my characterization – he's definitely like the Darth Vader of the show.
Jessica: Oh, yes.
Amira: But he was like, it's not about my characterization, like, let's be clear. I didn't like how they made Lando look like an asshole. Which is like, LOL, because Lando–
Jessica: Lando was like a cutie, like, you wanted to squeeze his cheeks! [laughs]
Amira: Jessica, he said, “They made Lando and Danny kind of look like dicks, and they are nice and I didn't like that for them.” [laughter] I was like, Max! Max, let's be real.
Jessica: Lando does not come off like that at all. And Danny absolutely does, but Danny plays into it, a hundred percent. Danny knows what he's doing.
Amira: Yeah, Danny’s just like a goof, you know what I mean? And Danny gives so much access. Like, we see his parents, his mom, Grace–
Jessica: We see him playing basketball, like, Danny is…Yeah. He is into it, as far as you can tell.
Amira: So, I think it's going to be interesting moving forward, right? This tension between this access, this idea about over dramatization, but the fact that it is absolutely bringing people in. You can already see this divide between people who are like, “I'm a true F1 fan, and this is….” Blah, blah, blah. I think it's, you know, one of these familiar things about like when and where you enter a sport and how you start liking it. But I think that it's very clear that viewership, especially here in the United States, is up. The show continues to be widely popular. That being said, Jessica, I want to know what we want to see more of.
Jessica: Yeah. I have criticisms of how the show handles lots of different things. Like, we can certainly talk about Lewis Hamilton and race. He's the only Black driver ever in F1.
Amira: Me and Jessica were in season one, and I read the episode descriptions ahead, and I text Jessica, “I have to wait til episode 10 of season three to hear Lewis Hamilton talk about being Black!?”
Jessica: Yeah. I mean, he's the only Black driver in the whole sport! And you get almost no acknowledgement of that. It just feels like it's a very white crew. It feels like it's a very male crew making this TV show. There are almost no women. A journalist pops up in season three, a female journalist, as a talking head. And I was like, oh, they recognize there are almost no women in this show. In season four, Lewis Hamilton, when they go to the middle east for a series of races, he starts wearing a rainbow helmet, and it's beautiful. And I remember turning to Aaron and I was like, I assume that is on purpose, that he is making a statement with that helmet in these races. And he was, but the show gives no space for politics, which is super interesting to me because F1 itself is a super political…Like, talk about a mega event, a traveling circus mega event that's going to all these places for lucrative reasons. I have like lots of questions about how they're choosing the sites and how much the drivers are involved in those choices and what the drivers feel about them. And none of that is addressed ever, really, on the show. Like, it felt like season three, episode 10, the last six minutes they give to Lewis to talk about being Black. It's like they knew they needed to because it was 2020.
Amira: Yeah.
Jessica: And all over the racetrack, “end racism…”
Amira: It was like, after George Floyd, yeah.
Jessica: You can visually see that F1 had responded to it with the kind of…They put “end racism” on everyone's steering wheels or whatever so you could read it. But the show knew they had to do something, but they clearly don't feel comfortable at all in that space. And it could be access. F1 would cut them off and we would have no more Drive to Survive. I'm not sure. But it definitely is a concern, and I really don't know what they're going to do with season five and how they're going to get around it at all.
Amira: Yeah. And I think he saw some of that in season three, too, because that's when the pandemic hits. And so this kind of like who's shutting down, where are we shutting down, the fact that like all they do in this sport is travel, right? Like Jessica said, they don't deal with race. You see Checo, who's Mexican, he talks a little bit about how hard it was to be a Mexican driver, because it means you're leaving and you're going to Europe at a very young age. Daniel Ricciardo left Australia to go to Europe, like, it’s absolutely the epicenter if you want a car, if you want to come up through the ranks. You have Alex Albon, who is Thai. He talks about how you can only have one ethnicity in F1 and like one flag that they ascribe to you.
Jessica: He’s also British, but he races under the Thai flag, yeah.
Amira: And he talks about how he chose to race under the Thai flag and why. And like, we meet his mom and his family. And I think that there’s really interesting things that we care about in terms of the politics of the sport. Even Force India, right? Where you get both politics and ethnicity wrapped into one.
Jessica: And big money.
Amira: Huge financial considerations.
Jessica: There’s also like the issue of climate change. Sebastian Vettel, who's won four times and is still competing, he wore a shirt during the Miami Grand Prix this year that said “Miami 2060: 1st Grand Prix underwater. Act now or swim later.” Like, he's been super outspoken about climate change, which, in all my reading about this, it's not the races themselves. It's not the actual going around in a loop in these cars. It's the traveling that is the real issue here. And F1 has said that they are trying, and they've put out a huge report of all the stuff that they see that's wrong, that they're going to try to change in the next decade. Lewis, who speaks out about literally everything, has said he doesn't think that's good enough, fast enough.
And so like we have climate change, we have these races in Qatar, which we've talked endlessly on the show about Qatar with the World Cup. Same things in F1. Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, places that the drivers don't necessarily want to be. Lewis Hamilton has been the most outspoken about this. Apparently in 2020, he wanted to speak to the ruling guy of Bahrain when he went there to address his concerns around human rights. And then he got COVID, Lewis did, so he wasn't able to do that. But you get a lot of like super weird shit from these white men about, like, “we're helping to modernize these places by bringing…”
Amira: They’re talking about Saudi Arabia.
Jessica: Yeah. Like, by bringing some cars and racing around in a circle? And it's like, calm down, everybody. You sound disgusting. It is a really interesting space, beyond even what's on this show.
Amira: Even like how they did like the part with Lewis talking about being Black in F1, they just asked him about it. There was like heartbreaking footage of little eight year old Lewis talking about the names he was called in the racetrack, et cetera. But like, what we're talking about is like analysis, right? It's like, what does it mean for one of the most decorated at drivers of all time, Lewis Hamilton, to be Black, right? The man is a seven time world champion – would have been eight time world champion and broken that record. He is tied right now with Schumacher, who's like a legend. His son is on the circuit now. You know what I mean? And I feel like that is huge. Like, we know subtexts, we know dogwhistles, we know these things. And it's compounded by his greatness. It's giving Serena, it's giving Simone. It’s giving undeniable, right? So you can't come at Lewis's racing, but you do get things about, like, oh, he thinks rules don't apply to him or he's this…And then it's like, Lewis is so…
Jessica: Nice. He seems like a nice dude.
Amira: And so I think that that's something of analysis. And the point on women, like, they are on the show, but you have to watch for them.
Jessica: Can we just say, Toto Wolff's wife shows up – she's part of the Mercedes team – and they never once tell you that she was a fucking amazing driver herself! You get nothing about the fact that she is a total fucking badass! You just get her in relationship to Mercedes and the fact that she is Toto's wife. I mean, when I texted Amira, I was like, do you know about Toto’s wife!? Because of course I Googled her. And she was like, I know. I need a spinoff.
Amira: And this is a great time to shout out that Jess interviewed Sabré Cook a few years ago about racing in the W Series and about women in motorsports. And I think that there's so much territory there. Obviously it wouldn’t surprise you that we're calling that out. But there, I see…I’m rewatching the show now, and I see like shots of women in the pit crew. First of all, I want a pit crew episode.
Jessica: Yes! Yes.
Amira: Like, gimme a pit crew episode.
Jessica: There’s one Black guy on the Red Bull pit that–
Amira: Yeah. Who…I’m obsessed with him.
Jessica: Yeah. I'm like, I would love a sit down with him, please!
Amira: I want his episode, you know what I mean? But I also think so much about the sport, like when people get into it, it's because their godfather raced, or their uncle raced, or there there's so much…I wouldn't even call it nepotism, but there's so many people who started racing because they had proximity to it. It makes me so interested in the people who did not, right, to get to get into the sport. But then also a lot of the women who are there are connected in some way, because they are the daughter of, or they are the wife of, but they have their own relationship with the sport, their own racing history. We get Claire Williams a lot, who's trying to continue her father’s legacy of the racing team, but there's so much more. Okay, Netflix producers – hi, Amira and Jessica here from Burn It All Down. Hire us, because we clearly have things that we want to see in the show.
But I do have to say, all of these issues that Jessica laid out, that go beyond the show, that aren't documented there. They are there in Formula 1. It's one of the things that makes us so enthralled by the sport. The races are fun to watch. The personalities of course are big and buoyant and also fun to grip into. And I'm also fascinated by little things like tech changes. Now we see they can see when the brakes are failing. They have all this information. And I have dug into F1 history, because I wanted to know what it was like to race before they could see, right, that your gearbox was like doing this thing through their fancy screens.
Jessica: Well, like I learned, Amira, that when there's a safety car and it goes to yellow flag, that they are controlled. Their cars are controlled for speed so that they cannot go over a certain speed. And that's fascinating!
Amira: See, we have so much more to say, because we didn't even talk about how dangerous this sport is. I would say of all the sports we’ve covered, besides like gymnastics, this is a sport that also is up there for me in terms of like…
Jessica: There's an episode called Man On Fire in season three. And that is all you need to know.
Amira: It's a very apt description. Tressa, do you have any final questions? Have we convinced you to keep watching this show? [laughs]
Jessica: Well, who's the Spice Girl?
Amira: Oh! [laughs] It’s Ginger.
Jessica: Yeah. Ginger. Geri Halliwell. She's married to Christian Horner, the principal for Red Bull.
Amira: And at one time you see him trying to do this–
Amira and Jessica: 🎶 “Stop right now, thank you very much…” [laughter]
Amria: You see him trying to do the choreography as they take a helicopter to her show, and she's mouthing to the camera, “I work harder than him!” And he's like, “Come on, Geraldine! You're going to be late to your own concert!”
Amira: This week, I interview former football player and current neurosurgeon, Dr. Myron Rolle. The former Florida State standout takes us through his journey to Oxford, to the NFL, and into neurosurgery, while previewing his new book, The 2% Way. Check it out on Thursday.
Amira: It is now time for everyone's favorite segment, the burn pile. I will kick us off. I just am over college football coaches, namely, when–
Jessica: [laughs] They're having a moment.
Amira: They’re having a moment, when Nicholas Saban set everything on fire [laughs] in the worst way, this past week, by going on a rant about parity in football and name, image, and likeness, how it's ruining everything. He accused Jimbo Fisher and Texas A&M of buying “all of their players.” Also, stopped to call out Jackson State, saying they took a “clear Division I player” and flipped him by giving him millions of dollars. He was talking about Travis Hunter, a recruit from Florida State who decided to go to Jackson State and play under Deion Sanders. He does not, by the way, have a million dollars in name, image, likeness deals. He has maybe 250,000 – from a Black owned Mississippi coffee brand. [laughter] Like, what are we talking about here? Obviously he's concerned about the end of parity, because he has been so dominant so long. It's just one of these things that…Like, it doesn't even make me rage. It makes me roll my eyes. [Jessica laughs] Because here's the thing about college football programs: they find ways to spend money to look like they're not as lucrative as they are. Okay?
They find ways to spend money because it creates an arms race, which has been…It’s no different in terms of recruitment, right? If you go to Alabama, where they are so worried about “parity” and bullshit, their weight room looks like a spa. It has mood lighting. It has a glowing ‘A’ on the wall. It has some jet pools. LSU, you know, I think you can remember, a few years ago, when they had like these souped up like weird iPad locker room loungers – at the same time that the university library was literally flooded. [laughs] So like, please spare me with your holier than thou concern about the state of college football right now. I think there are certainly ways that we can talk about name, image, and likeness. I don't really care so much about it because I still think it's a bandaid for the overall issue of exploitation. But the point is that it got everybody in so much of a tizzy that they're standing out here, in full hypocrisy, trying to act like they are the saints of college football when they have been doing versions of this for years.
Everybody's going to Alabama because you have these facilities, because you trot them out. They're going to these schools because they show them the girls, because…We know what you've done. And getting out here and whining is so disgusting, given how much money these coaches have made on the backs of exploited college athletes. Like, I literally can't deal with any of them saying anything. And Saban walked back his comments and apologized to Jimbo and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Deion refused to pick up his call, because he said, “We don't need reasons for people to come to HBCUs.” They kind of just caught a stray in that rant that he went on, but it was very revealing, right? The idea that the only reason you would go to an HBCU is because of somebody who's paying you millions of dollars, which really cuts to the heart of the fact that, well, if this is a resource issue, why are HBCUs under-resourced? Also, maybe people want to go there because at your PWIs, they're treated like Blind Side bullshit. Like, it's just ridiculous, is my point. All of them are showing their asses, which is unfortunately nothing new, but it's still burnable, and it's very annoying. So, burn.
Jessica: Burn. The girls on the Albany High track team in Albany, New York, say that on May 11th, they were told by Albany school district athletic director Ashley Chapple, that it was inappropriate for them to wear only sports bras during practice, because it was “distracting” to their male coaches. That's it! That's the whole burn. Just kidding. Telling girls that they can't practice in sports bras because grown ass men will be distracted is straight up disgusting. I'll note that a fair amount of these girls are Black, and that Black girls are always policed harsher, whatever the set standard is. But in general, dress codes are always gendered, and dress codes for girls are almost always about the apparently rampant and uncontrollable libidos of boys and men that can only be curbed if girls are forced to wear whatever someone imagines will tame those boys and men. Sounds like the problem is boys and men. But what do I know?
According to one athlete, when the girls pressed the athletic director and pointed out that the boys were also running without shirts, Chapple countered that it was against the school's dress code because sports bras qualified as underwear, and that you have to cover up underwear. But get this: the actual dress code does say that students cannot wear “extremely brief garments,” such as tube tops, but it does not say anything specifically about sports bras. This is just one woman's interpretation of the dress code. To resolve the issue, Chapple said that they all had to wear shirts, including boys, while working out. But kudos to these girls. They protested by showing up to practice the next day in just shorts and sports bras. While the boys who were without shirts were simply told by Chapple to put them back on, the girls were told to go home. They returned later for a lacrosse match, many of them still in their shorts and sports bras. Security guards stopped them, and Chapple told them to leave again, still citing the dress code as the reasoning.
The girls then created a petition on change.org. They were then suspended from practice and competition for three days, though they were able to get it reduced to one day. One student though, apparently, is still suspended indefinitely. And then their parents received letters from Chapple hand delivered to their homes, saying the girls were being suspended for “inappropriate and disrespectful behavior.” She said the girls were insubordinate by not putting their shirts back on. She also claimed they used inappropriate and disrespectful language when they were asked to leave, and “caused a disturbance at a lacrosse game.”
She concluded that, based on all of this, she believed the girls posed “a continuing danger to persons or property, or an ongoing threat of disruption to the academic and athletic process” – because they wanted to do fucking track practice in their bras! Like, that sounds wild to me when I say that out loud. The level that people will go to in order to make sure that girls know their place and the threats that their bodies contain by simply existing is extraordinary. And it's fucking horrible. Cheers to these athletes for being insubordinate in the face of this discrimination and this misogynistic bullshit. For everything else, I want to burn it. Everything they're up against, let's just burn it. Burn.
Amira: After all that burning, it is time to shout out some torchbearers of the week. Jess, who you got?
Jessica: Jake Daniels, a forward for Blackpool FC, a team in the second tier of English professional football, publicly disclosed last week that he is gay, making him the UK’s first out male professional footballer since Justin Fashanu. In a piece he penned for Sky Sports, Daniels wrote, “Since I've come out to my family, my club and my teammates, that period of overthinking everything and the stress, it created has gone. It was impacting my mental health. Now, I am just confident and happy to be myself, finally.”
Amira: I want to shout out Dallas Mavericks forward Reggie Bullock, who was named the NBA's 2021-2022 social justice champion. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar presented the award to Reggie and cited his continued advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community as a reason for him being selected. Reggie does so in the memory of his sister, Mia Henderson, a trans woman who was killed in 2014. When he joined the Mavs in 2021, Reggie started working with groups, including Abounding Prosperity, Dallas Southern Pride, House of Rebirth, The Black-Tie Dinner, the Resource Center, and the Muhlaysia Booker Foundation. Congrats to you, Reggie. Well-deserved. And may Mia's memory continued to be a blessing.
Jessica: Lyon defeated Barcelona 3-1 to win their eighth Champions League championship!Lyon’s manager, Sonia Bompastor, is the first woman to win the Champs League title as both a player and a coach. Spectacular, spectacular play from Lyon this weekend.
Amira: And now, a drumroll, please.
[drumroll]
Last week, US Soccer announced a historic collective bargaining agreement with the US men's national team and the US women's national team. The two CBAs are economically identical. What does this mean? Equal pay! Here's how The Athletic broke this down: the CBAs have equal pay for every game played, from friendlies to World Cups and other competitions, equal bonuses for game outcomes and World Cup participation, equal pay for every day in training camps, equal split of World Cup prize money, with the two teams pooling then dividing their prize totals from 2022 and 2023 tournaments, and then in the future, 2026 and 2027. The equal split of commercial revenue share program with US Soccer and equal rate for tickets sold for games controlled by US Soccer.
There is so much here to cheer for – although I also like Midge Purce saying, “My dad never told me to cheer for something that should have already happened.” But acknowledging the long fight to get to this day, and also the fact that US Soccer will now provide childcare to the US men's players during all training camps and match windows, something they've been providing to the US women's national team for more than 25 years. So, US women's and men's national soccer teams, and your collective bargaining agreements, you are our torchbearers of the week.
Amira: What is good in your world?
Jessica: Going to Samari’s thing last week, her performance was definitely a highlight for me. It was a hard week. The dog has double ear infections. My son got sick – he's tested negative for everything. But, you know, he was isolated for days. And then Aaron got COVID, so he is also in isolation. And just kind of dealing with all of that was very hard. So I'm really glad that in the middle of the week I got to go and watch these kids perform their asses off and cheer for them. I also want to mention, I’m having a down moment with work so I have time to like listen to podcasts that I just haven't been able to. And one of my favorite – I’ve mentioned it on this show before – is Slate's podcast called Hit Parade. Chris Molanphy hosts it. It's all pop charts, music charts, and the history behind them. And he is so smart and I love listening to it. I learn all the time. And they just hit their five-year anniversary – they’re almost exactly the same age as Burn It All Down. There's something really sweet about the fact that this podcast I love is the same age as Burn It All Down and getting to celebrate it at the same time. So, that's Hit Parade.
Amira: That is great. My what's good was Samari's show, and it was wonderful to see her grow so much. It's a really challenging, really intensive program. And it's just phenomenal to watch them do that and blossom. My moms flew in for it. It was just such a great week to see that culmination. And then of course it was abruptly canceled, moving into the weekend, the rest of the shows. And that was really hard. Lots of tears were shed, but it's okay. There's five more days of school here in Austin, Texas. Samari has five more days until she's done with middle school. Then, I guess the eighth grade graduation thing? I don't know. Just Gemini season is here. Tressa, it's almost our birthday! But I guess my biggest what's good, which is also kind of bittersweet of course, is I’m staying in Austin. [Jessica applauds] I’ve accepted a faculty position at the University of Texas at Austin.
Jessica: Yay!
Amira: Jessica’s very happy. [laughs]
Jessica: The best news! I’ve known about it for a while, so that's really what was good in my world this week. It's been what's good in my role for like a month. [laughter]
Amira: I am very excited. I of course have so much love for my colleagues at Penn State, and it's not a move without loss, but I am very excited to be staying here, to be staying close to family, to be staying six minutes from Jessica Luther. There are now two members of Burn It All Down in Austin, so I see lots of Austin centric activities in our future. So, yeah, there you go.
Amira: We are watching so much this week…Apparently it's the end of May, and the French Open has started.
Jessica: Wild. [laughter] Lindsay texted both of us yesterday to tell us. And we were like, no, no, what? [laughs]
Amira: There is no way. Apparently there is a way, and it's already going on. So, the French Open is on your televisions. Go watch it. The Monaco Grand Prix, now that we've told you all about this, you have approximately four days from the time it comes out to binge every show – that’s a season a day – so you are fully ready for the Monaco Grand Prix next weekend. Yes, you can do it. I believe in you. Tweet me all your reactions. The men's Champions League final will be Saturday, May 28th at 2:00pm central, 3:00pm eastern, Liverpool vs Real Madrid. Real Madrid continues to defy expectations. That's who I am betting on and rooting for. If you want a preview, remember that Shireen and Brenda broke it down and argued which team Jessica should root for on both the men's and women's Champs League sides. Go listen to that episode if you need a primer before that final. College softball world series is in chaos. It is on right now. We saw many upsets this weekend, many ranked teams going down, including top-ranked Florida State. More chaos to come. Lots of great matches. So, keep an eye on the college softball world series. And of course the NBA and NHL playoffs keep rolling along. There are games all week and into the weekend on both of those competitions.
That’s it for this episode of Burn It All Down, from me and Jessica Luther. This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon of course is on our web and social media accounts. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network. You can follow us wherever you follow people or things – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Listen, subscribe, and rate the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, you know, all the places. For show links and transcripts, please check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. There you'll also find a link to our merch store over at Bonfire, and a link to our Patreon page. Thank you to our patrons. Your support continues to mean the world to us. If you want to be a sustaining donor to our show, visit patreon.com/burnitalldown. That is it for us this week. Burn on, not out, and we will see you next week, flamethrowers.