Drama, science, and 200-mph dogfights: The world’s most famous race is so much more than three hours of left turns.

Sam, Ross, and Jeff use the story of Alexander Rossi’s landmark 2016 Indy 500 win—he coasted over the line with an empty tank—to highlight everything that makes the 500 great.

Related Trivia: Jeff has engineered cars at Indy. Ross nearly died there in 1993. Sam once stood inches from Turn 1 in qualifying and drank a Coke while losing his mind.

This episode of It's Not the Car is our once-a-month deep dive into an epic racing moment from the past. It was produced by Mike Perlman.

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About the show:

Ross Bentley is a former IndyCar driver and an internationally renowned performance coach and author. Jeff Braun is a championship-winning race engineer. Sam Smith is an award-winning journalist 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.

The show's format rotates, because squirrel. One show each month is a deep dive into an epic moment from racing's past—anywhere from a hundred years ago to last week. Sometimes we have guests!

New episodes every Tuesday.

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