Who are Missed Apex F1 Podcast?
Missed Apex F1 Podcast is a fan-led project that has been an authentic voice and community for motorsports fans since 2015.
We occupy a space between the top media outlets and the pure hobbyist content creators. With 200,000 monthly downloads, a total download count of over ten million downloads, and around five million views on YouTube. We believe, we are the most downloaded host-owned independent F1 podcast.
For the last nine years, Missed Apex has built a large, engaged community. Our listeners tell us that they feel part of our conversation while they drive to work and go about their day. We also encourage debate and analysis on the show; so, whatever your view on the race, you generally have someone to agree with and someone to yell at. Our patrons and partners have supported Missed Apex as a fully professional and fulltime motorsport content creator since 2019.
A true organic fan based online F1 community
Although we’ve been lucky enough to speak to some of the most respected journalists in the paddock, we are and always will be, enthusiastic non-expert fans passionately sharing our fan experience. The self-deprecating name, Missed Apex, sums up the ethos that we never want to pretend that we’re expert journalists. Missed Apex is always a space where you can sincerely express your opinion and have a good-natured debate about Formula 1, even if you end up being wrong.
No matter how large our audience may get in the future, Missed Apex DOES NOT have fans. We ARE fans.
In a space that is increasingly flooded with 60 second short form scrolling content, Missed Apex offers a long form space for genuine debate, discussion and audience interaction to breath.
Missed Apex content
Missed Apex has a versatile range of F1 content. The core of the show is unashamedly Spanners and Trumpets discussing and debating the events around an F1 weekend. We’ve also built a large rotating panel of people from drivers, coaches, content creators, and bloggers. However, we’ve also had interviews with most of the top names in F1 media such as Will Buxton, Alex Brundle, James Allen, Chris Medland, and regular appearances from F1 Media Stalwart Joe Saward.
We love running mailbag shows with listener opinions as well as specialist tech shows with top F1 tech journalist Matthew Somerfield.
The Crew
The show is led by show owner Richard ‘Spanners’ Ready and cohost Matt Trumpets. This pairing has been the foundation of the show. As the project has grown, many of the crew have had the opportunity to jump in to host the show or have been given creative space to produce their own kind of content on the platform.
Missed Apex is still going strong after eight full seasons because we have built a rich talent pool of volunteer guests, freelancers, and contributors. People don't have to dedicate huge chunks of time and commitment to be a part of our project and because of the depth of the community our crew have been able to continue contributing in and around changing jobs, countries, and family sizes.
This panel rotation was inspired by Leo Laporte and his TWIT network, and the result is that the show maintains a fresh feel with different voices coming in and out of the project. This foundation has seen us survive and grow around our community.
With Spanners and Trumpets being on opposite sides of the Atlantic the international nature of Missed Apex continued to flourish. With Panellists and producers in Britain, The USA, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Holland and Mexico, we are able to give a truly global view to a global sport.
Life beyond Formula1
Outside of the main Formula 1 feed we have break-off crews running other motorsport podcasts. Kyle Powers and Jules Seegers have completed their first year of the Missed Apex MOTO GP podcast. Cristina Lee Mace and Chris Stevens have continued our long-standing coverage of the FormulaE all electric series with the imaginatively titled Missed Apex FormulaE Podcast.
Live events
By 2019 we had built up enough of an audience to run the first of many live community events, a karting event at Buckmore Park in England. As well as the chaos of 50 strangers racing and becoming friends (and rivals), we also recorded a show on site with a live audience as well as entertainment provided by cohost Matt Trumpets and Missed Apex Mum Nicki, on piano and vocals. This has led to a dozen similar events held whenever time and global pandemics have allowed.
2024 American Adventure
In 2024 we took the bold step of running our first events around the F1 Grand Prix weekends. Due to the growth in our American audience, we tentatively announced plans for a Miami event which to our delight attracted 150 signups.
During the subsequent event in Miami, the crowd joined us for games and a review of the Miami sprint race as well as a podcast where the audience suggested fixes for formula 1.
Later in the year we were able to do a live show near the Silverstone Grand Prix where we put on karting and a live panel with the same great result as the Miami event.
Our 2024 experience has made us confident we can do more. We had hoped to run similar events in Austin for the COTA GP and the Las Vegas GP. We had more interest in COTA than we received for either of the other 2024 events but realised that we needed great partners to make them viable and sustainable. The aim is to make Missed Apex events around F1 weekends something that people go to year after year.
NASCAR
Last year we were incredibly fortunate to make a connection with the 23XI NASCAR team, leading to our first ever trip to cover NASCAR at Darlington. The content we were able to create featured interviews with team strategists, drivers Bubba Wallace and Tyler Reddick and team president Steve Lauletta. Ahead of a subsequent invitation to Watkins Glen we were fortunate to be invited to Mobil 1 HQ to interview JOTA drivers Jenson Button and Callum Illott as well as Mobil 1 Global Motorsports Technology Manager, Tomek Young.
These interviews and the content around the return of Juan Pablo Montoya to NASCAR at Watkins Glen marked a major uptick in what we saw as the art of the possible. Our NASCAR content was received very well on our main F1 channel. And we plan to do more.
American Growth
By the time the first Drive to Survive (DTS) episodes aired in 2018, Missed was already well poised to take advantage of the explosive growth in interest around Formula 1. As numbers grew around DTS we realised that a lot of the new Missed Apex Listeners were American. Fans coming in from America had a naturally lower baseline knowledge of F1 simply because they were new to the sport. We rejected the gatekeeping around people being ‘DTS fans’ rather than Formula 1 fans.
We told our new American friends that within one year they’d be 90% up to speed and not to stand for any gatekeeping from the extant fanbase. We slightly adjusted our approach by occasionally adding quick catch up and background knowledge to help the new fans catch up to the normal discussion and debate that we love so much. Now, after five years the American F1 fanbase is a fully mature and invested community that makes up the majority of our audience. This is not because we lost European listeners but because the American audience grew significantly and embraced the sport.
Spanners’ Story.
Host Richard Ready (Spanners) started his working life as a floor fitter in 1997 before joining the British Army as a Radar Engineer. Spanners served ten years attached to an Artillery Unit then gained employment in the Defence industry as a liaison between his old Regiment and a Defence contractor. Throughout all this time, radio remained a dream with demo tapes and CDs gracing the bins of radio stations throughout the land. Then in 2012 he discovered podcasting, an art form that required no one’s approval or permission. 2013 saw the launch of an off the wall parenting podcast and then 2014 marked the beginning of his F1 content adventure, blogging for an F1 fan site. In 2015 Spanners and Trumpets started Missed Apex and covered Formula 1 and the newly minted FormulaE series. Armed with 4 years of content experience he took a deep breath and once again contacted every radio station in the country. This last attempt led to four wonderful years as a weekend host on BBC Radio Cambridshire and through the twisted hand of fete ended up with a two-year stint as their host on the local ratings hit “The Great Outdoors” despite not knowing or retaining any gardening or countryside knowledge at all. Spanners now hosts “Cambridge Science” on Cambridge 105 Radio to keep the radio dream alive despite becoming a fulltime podcast creator in 2019.
