Mandy Kaplan came to this with three episodes of Drive to Survive and one other piece of racing knowledge, which is that she can recite Talladega Nights from memory. Ninety seconds into the first episode a teenager gets dropped off at school by his mother, says bye Mom, grabs his backpack, and turns out to be a professional Formula 1 driver. Something maternal took hold around then and never really let go.Pete Wright is here to explain the sport, which he maintains is an engineering competition that happens to involve drivers. He gets a few minutes into that before the whole thing falls sideways into a team principal who called himself Darth Vader and then got fired for reasons nobody will say out loud, a crash in Singapore in 2008 that wasn't a crash, and what happens to a car when it gets within one second of the car ahead of it. Mandy wants to know who these boys are and where they came from. Pete would rather discuss regenerative braking. The part where a nineteen-year-old is currently beating the greatest driver of his generation doesn't come up until almost the end. Press play.Guest Spotlight: Pete WrightPete Wright is co-founder of TruStory FM, where he produces and engineers a bunch of what you listen to, this show included. He co-hosts The Next Reel family of film shows, Craft & Chaos, and Marvel Movie Minute, and Mandy has designated him her overlord. His debut novel Onset, Book One of the Manifest trilogy, is out now. It's a dark YA crossover thriller about foster kids, hidden abilities, and what it costs to be noticed. His novella Lattice came out earlier this year.

• Website: It's Me... Pete.
• On writing Onset: itsmepete.com/blog/2026/on-writing-onset
• Instagram: @_petewright
• Bluesky: @itsmepete.com

Reference LinksThe Show That Started It

• Formula 1: Drive to Survive
• Drive to Survive, Season 8, covering the 2025 season, released on Netflix and, in the US, Apple TV

At the Movies

• F1 (2025), directed by Joseph Kosinski and shot with real paddock access on real race weekends
• Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)
• Quarterback, the Netflix series Mandy wishes Drive to Survive were more like

The Drivers

• Kimi Antonelli
• Lewis Hamilton
• George Russell
• Charles Leclerc
• Max Verstappen
• Lando Norris
• Oscar Piastri
• Isack Hadjar
• Liam Lawson
• Jack Doohan
• Gabriel Bortoleto
• Oliver Bearman
• Michael Schumacher

The Men in Charge

• Christian Horner
• Flavio Briatore

How Any of This Works

• Crashgate, the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix
• The halo
• Drag Reduction System
• How 2026 qualifying works
• 2026 F1 season calendar
• Current 2026 standings

The Circuits

• Circuit de Monaco
• Silverstone Circuit
• Marina Bay Street Circuit, Singapore
• Red Bull Ring, Spielberg

Tangents

• The Ship of Theseus
• Ernst Stavro Blofeld
• Pole Position, the arcade game
• "Wonderstruck" by Jane and the Boy

Elsewhere on TruStory FM

• Hangman Adam Page with Kevin Ryan, the wrestling episode Mandy brings up
• Prince with Kyle Olson and Pete Wright
• The Film Board, where Pete writes the openings Mandy likes

Fact-Check CornerSix corrections. Most of what Pete rattles off holds up under checking, including the qualifying format, the championship math, and the entire Horner chronology. These are the exceptions.Hangman Adam Page wrestles for AEW, not WWE. Mandy calls her earlier wrestling episode a WWE episode. Page has been with AEW since the promotion started and held its world championship.Nelson Piquet Jr., not Nelson Piquet. The Singapore driver was the son. His father is a three-time world champion who had nothing to do with it. Pete was clearly spea...