AN AWARD-WINNING MOTORSPORT HISTORY PODCAST
By Elizabeth Blackstock
Uncovering motorsport's forgotten scandals and intrigues
When the cars are this fast and the stakes are this high, anything can happen — and it usually does.
From race fixing attempts to kidnappings, the backbone of motorsport is built on scandal, intrigue, danger, and deception.
Motorsport has always existed on a razor-thin edge, where brilliance meets obsession and the pursuit of speed sends great men to their graves. Behind the podiums and champagne, behind the PR gloss and corporate smiles, racing has always carried its share of somber secrets.
Welcome to Deadly Passions, Terrible Joys, an award-winning motorsport history podcast dedicated to uncovering the scandals, tragedies, and intrigues that transformed the racing world in ways that the record books have long tried to forget.
I'm motorsport journalist and historian Elizabeth Blackstock, and in each episode, I return to the archives — examining interviews, court documents, original reporting, and eyewitness accounts — to reconstruct how these forgotten events unfolded. I want to know the motivations, the conflicts, and the consequences, which reveal how personal ambition and organizational pressure collided in often fatal ways — ways that altered motorsport forever.
These are our deadly passions; our terrible joys.
About Elizabeth
Author, podcaster, journalist, academic, and all-around motorsport historian, Elizabeth Blackstock has dedicated her life to telling stories of speed. So much of racing's complex history has been forgotten as we strive to paint picture-perfect memories of the past; Elizabeth's mission is uncovering and telling those stories as they happened — intrigue, scandal, and all.
“While you can expect plenty of stories about the business hijinx in racing, the show will also take a deep dive at some of the more impactful controversies in the sport (think Juan Manuel Fangio’s Kidnapping, Australia 1994, or Spygate 2007.) Blackstock has lined up industry experts and personnel familiar with the events to help tell the tales, supported by a backlog of archival research. She’ll even touch on some of the stories we weren’t meant to hear, involving some of racing’s more colorful love affairs.”
Society of Automotive Historians: E. P. Ingersoll Award committee
