If someone offered you a chance to drive one of the fastest race cars on earth, would you do it? 

The catch: If you screw up, your boss will shut down your office and fire you and everyone you work with.

Also, you have the entire Indianapolis Motor Speedway to yourself and McLaren-Mercedes people are watching and judging and SERIOUSLY JUST RELAX ALREADY.

Once, Sam belted into a 2007 McLaren MP4-22 Formula 1 car. With the tiny deafening V-8 and the anti-stall and the goofy hand clutch. The car blew his mind, but quietly. He wrote about the day for Road & Track. And in this episode, he is peppered with questions about all of it.

This show’s format rotates weekly, because squirrel. We call this ep’s framework “Sam Tells a Story.”

Ross and Jeff couldn’t make this one, so Sam is joined here by INTC friend and former R&T staffer Kyle Kinard. Kyle is smart and funny, and he was at Indy for that test.

Related Trivia: Kinard’s nickname at R&T was “Kinardi,” after former IndyCar driver Alex Zanardi. The backstory is not ours to share, but it does involve—coincidence alert!—a McLaren and significant personal clenching.

Car magazines, y’all! It’s a weird gig.

This episode was produced by Mike Perlman.

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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 writer 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.