The F1 season starts anew this weekend! To celebrate, we’re taking a look at one of our favourite podcasts. So, we’re here plugging the thing! As if you’re an F1 fan this show is essential listening.

You can find this thing on your standard podcast platforms: Apple, Spotify, whatever else you fancy. It’s into season nine now so there’s a huge back catalogue you can launch into.

Whether you want to revisit classics such as the mayhem at Spa 1998, or some of the more obscure moments from F1 history, then this is the podcast for you! We’re plugging it, plugging it.

Lots of Fantastic F1 History Stuffs in… Bring Back V10s!

The podcast is the work of Glenn Freeman, a journalist over at motorsport website The Race. We’ve followed these guys for years now, as they were with Autosport but created a new platform around 2021 (if we remember correctly).

The Race team also consists of the legends that are Edd Straw, Matt Beer, and Ben Anderson. These three are often on episodes to wax lyrical. The highlight of Bring Back V10s for us is when Freeman gets that bunch on for an episode together.

As they just did for the most recent episode of top 10 Williams drivers (above).

Freeman, Straw, Beer, and Anderson then debate the bejeezus out of a topic, all of them towing their particular F1 biases as they do so, which makes for great listening! They clearly work well together as a journalistic team, but are also happy to throw jibes at each other as they go along.

Some of the podcasts occasionally end on their YouTube channel, such as this one for the Christmas 2023 special. This is a Meet the Team moment, for sure.

Those are the occasional episodes, but the main driving force of the show are those classic moments from F1 history.

Of which there are many! As this is a sport resplendent in much incredible history.

The Classic Races of the V10 Era

The core of Bring Back V10s is the focus on classic, or at least interesting (or not), races from the V10 engine era of F1.

There’s Imola 2005 above, for example, famous for its iconic duel for the win between Fernando Alonso and Michael Schumacher. But also for ITV’s decision to hold an advert break on the penultimate lap, infuriating UK viewers in the process.

Oh yeah, and a note on the BBV10s name.

If you don’t know what that means, basically the current engine spec in F1 is hybrid. V10s ran from 1989 to 2005, which was a dramatic era of F1 history. One that saw enormous change, not least following the deaths of Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna at Imola 1994.

But to be clear, BBV10s isn’t a “back in my day” podcast. It’s a celebration of the past, whilst also revelling in the future.

The episodes are fantastic. Glenn Freeman’s research is stunningly meticulous and he digs up some real gems from history. Little titbit of news stories over the racing weekend that had been long forgotten (until now!).

He also often gets special guests on the show. One was with former F1 driver Johnny Herbert for his difficult 1994 season with the dwindling team Lotus.

There was also a brilliant one on one of our favourite drivers.

That’s with Heinz-Harald Frentzen’s difficult time with Williams. The team had sacked Damon Hill in 1996 specifically to bring Frentzen in for 1997, with Sir Frank Williams convinced the German driver was a Schumacher beater.

However, for a variety of reasons the match was doomed to failure.

Frentzen only ever won one race for the team. However, he did vindicate himself in 1999 joining Jordan and battling for the title in a classic underdog story.

Williams had a difficult patch with drivers during this era, replacing Frentzen in 1999 with Alex Zanardi. He’d been wowing the world of motorsport in America winning two CART titles, but had a catastrophic season in 1999 and didn’t score a single point.

Just a reminder, but Damon Hill won the title in 1996 (the year they sacked him). It wasn’t the best decision team Williams ever made, for sure.

Whilst not on Schumacher’s level, he could at least run the German super genius pretty close.

That period is mentioned a lot on BBV10s, as Glenn Freeman is a Jacques Villeneuve superfan. And regularly tries to mention the Canadian drivers ’96 and ’97 heyday on the show.

Villeneuve won the 1997 title (just… limping over the finish line in more ways than one), then his F1 career nosedived considerably after that (don’t mention that to Mr. Freeman, of course).

Away from that, BBV10s also championed a recent documentary, flagging up the lowkey launch of the Andrea Moda F1 team documentary.

Andrea Moda ran during the 1992 season, a crazy period in F1 where there were so many teams the sport ran pre-qualifying to whittle down uncompetitive entrants from a race weekend.

Andrea Moda is notorious for its shambolic appearances, only getting through pre-qualifying once in nine races. The team was then shut down in Spa when the FIA had had enough of its antics, with the team’s owner also arrested in the paddock that weekend.

Such are the gems that are layered across the Bring Back V10s podcast. For history buffs, or anyone interested in motorsport, this is a must listen.

It covers a much more unprofessional era of Formula 1.

In some ways that made the sport more exciting, but due to it being so shambolic. When you’ve got pre-qualifying and teams like Andrea Moda, it makes it difficult to claim you’re the “pinnacle” of motorsport.

Whereas these days F1 is much more professional. And for the better, we think, but in way that makes reminiscing about the past enjoyable. Particularly as there were more independent teams in the 1990s with Jordan, Williams, Stewart, and Sauber being big name players.

F1 is now very corporate and it’s the big, massive budget manufacturer era. The days of a privateer rolling up, starting their own team, and winning races are long gone.

But it is what it is! F1 will always change and evolve, otherwise we’d still have hay bales by the side of the circuit.

What can you do about it!? Subscribe to the show! It’s free to listen to. If you get a paid subscription, you can also enjoy bonus episodes. 🙌