P1 with Matt and Tommy - Gabriel Bortoleto makes his P1 debut!

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

In Monaco a few weeks ago, we were lucky enough to speak to Audi Revolut F1 driver, Gabriel Bortoleto! We chatted about how he's adjusting to life in the sport, what it's like representing the country of the great Ayrton Senna and even gaming with Max Verstappen!Plus, we're then joined by Audi's Racing Director and former F1 driver, Allan McNish. He tells us about the intricacies of running a team that he's had so much personal success with in motorsport, and how F1 has changed over his near-three decades in the sport. Our brand new live show 'Super Podding' is coming to the UK and Amsterdam this autumn! Get your tickets here: http:/tix.to/p1liveSign up to our Patreon for just $5 a month! You'll get access to every P1 episode ad-free, extended versions of every 2026 race review, early access to tickets & merch, and access to our Discord server where you can chat with us and other F1 fans! Click here to sign up now: http://patreon.com/mattp1tommyFollow us on socials! You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, YouTube and TikTokP1 with Matt and Tommy is the world's biggest F1 podcast. Subscribe for new podcasts around every single race throughout the 2026 Formula 1 season! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello everybody and welcome back to the P1 podcast with Matt, Tommy and Gabby Portoletto. Thank you for joining us here in Monaco. What a backdrop. How are you doing, my friend? Doing good. Well, it hasn't been a cleanest day for me today, unfortunately. We were having a very strong weekend, you know, top 10 all the sessions. And then I crashed into, like I touched the wall in T10 and ended up breaking the suspension.

So finally end over. By the time this goes out, you would have a sudden. score points tomorrow, don't worry. It's all good, it's all happiness from here. We're not gonna reflect on T10, don't worry. Okay, so we've got some questions from fans and ourselves. The first one is do you see videos and memes people make about you online?

How online are you? I see, yes, I see quite a few. I enjoy, you know, the funny ones, obviously. There are some of them that are not funny. But I must say I like watching. I am at the end of the day, I'm Gen Z, you know, they say. So I spend a bit of time on TikTok, Instagram. I don't do much, to be honest, but, you know, before I go to sleep, I open TikTok.

Yeah, a little D-Dooms grow. I see a few memes and I'm laughing all over the place. What's the weirdest one you've seen? No, there was one actually funny this day. I even commented on the video because, you know, I was, I think it was my ami that I want to jump, like when we finish the race, you need to, stop the car obviously like in the park for men and then you need to jump out of the car and then when I went like I look up and then I went over the halo because it's not easy to to to

leave a Formula One car it's quite complex you want to hit the carbon pieces because each of them cost like hundreds of thousands so you need to be very careful so I step in the halo I look up there was no one when I look down put my feet there and I jump again I jump into a mechanic and then I fall and then recently I started just sitting in the halo and then I just move my legs to the other side. So it's much safer and I don't risk any damage to my body. And then someone made like, there was a day where, and then a funny music behind and me jumping and falling and nowadays, me just chilling.

So you're thinking about the TikToks when you get out now and knowing. I cannot reach that level. We have focused to every driver that we've spoken to. And it can be as silly or as serious as you like. What's the one, if you could change one rule in Formula One, what would it be? I don't know actually you know like Formula One keeps evolving and doing different stuff it's different I don't think I would change anything probably just maybe change a bit the format of the race weekends make something different you know not that I don't like what I have now but

maybe you know making it a bit less time in FP and straight away quality or some stuff like this like this we need to push no we spend Thursday and then Friday and then we arrive on Saturday only to do a qualifying. Sometimes it takes a bit too long. How do you feel about reverse grids? We've had that previously. People have said, you know, I don't like that. No, no, because I feel like you should have only one Grand Prix, one race. And then if you do a reverse grid, even if you're a shit in quality, literally, you're going to be good in the reverse grid. And then, you know, we have, we had this in F2 and F3, but I couldn't, I never won a sprint race. But even when you, if you're going to,

finishing the podium, you don't feel good. Unless you start from the back and you finish on the podium. But when you finish on the podium, starting quite ahead, it means that you did a very bad job in quality. Yeah. OK, no reverse grids. That's what we've heard. So we're here in Monaco.

I'd love to get your sort of feelings and emotions the first time you drove a Formula One car around here. Because like, you know, we've driven on the F1 game, and that's scary enough. How would you describe how you felt the first time you went around here in an F1 car? Well, it's extremely quick. It's, you know, the walls are getting closer and closer through the weekends. Unfortunately, I saw one of them very closely today.

Hey, we're not talking about today. Yeah, but it feels like always the first time when you're jumping this track, man. It's crazy. Like, the emotions, the feeling, the speed in the corners, it's amazing. We'll move on to happier things. What's the, could you tell us the funniest thing that's happened when you've had a gaming session with Max Verstappen or like a funny moment that you can remember when you were gaming with Max? I mean, one of them, he rages a lot when he's gaming. So I always have so much laughs when he does

something stupid and I just laugh so much. Or when we are playing Sim and we decide just to race each other quite aggressively and then if someone pushes each other out and then in the next breaking point the other guy doesn't break and then it's so funny to see the frustration there. I love it. I love that even F1 drivers do that. Oh yeah, we do the most. I love hitting people in December. Now talking about a wholesome thing here is a question from Kiwi Maloney. It says Gabby, can you share a sweet memory from your childhood? It can be to do with racing or not? A great memory?

Yeah, sweet memory from your childhood. I don't know, being with my family, everyone having dinner together or lunch, breakfast in the morning. long time I am not able to do that with them, unfortunately, because I live here. I'm a lucky guy to live here, but in the sense they live in Brazil and we don't see each other very often anymore as we used to do in the past. And then I really enjoy that simple moments together, but they were the nicest ones. Awesome. This one's from Corey 07. What era of Formula 1 would you most like to have raced in if it wasn't this one? Oh, good question. I think the 2007, 2006 cars were amazing.

I really liked that one. They were small. You know, the engines were very loud. You know, when I joined F1, it's still rocket ships to drive, even faster cars than back in the time. But they are bigger. The engines have a little bit, like the volume is not so loud as they used to be. I mean, at least to try, you know, I would like to try. Yeah.

Yeah, are they kind of the era you were watching and like aspiring to be a Formula One driver, that kind of era? Well, I watch a lot. I watch videos of Sena. I was not alive. I was 10 years after he died, I was born. But yeah, Senna for me was always my idol. And yeah, he's the greatest of all time. So I take him as an inspiration. I was going to say, in terms of obviously legendary, like Brazil have such an amazing history and, in Formula One. Is it like a help or hindrance or like, do you feel the pressure like representing Brazil or is just something you're incredibly proud of to,

you know, there's a lot, there's quite a while before we saw like a Brazilian back in Formula One and that's like, oh, it's strange to not have a Brazilian driving Formula One until you came back, of course. Do you feel the kind of pressure and the expectation from, you know, being, representing such a kind of legendary nation of F1?

Um, I feel the pressure because I put the pressure on myself. That's the reason why I feel it. Because I believe if you are doing a sport like we are and you don't feel pressure, or you're not in love with what you do or you're not supposed to be a Formula One driver. I feel like everyone here is constantly under pressure unless they achieved so much already that they can just live with the results from the past. But in my case, I'm a young guy.

I still have a lot to prove to myself, to the world, to Brazil. And I feel like, yeah, Brazil has built so many great champions. And I want to be one of them. So I still have a lot to do better and improve. I think I'm doing a decent job right now, but still making some mistakes. And then I still need to clean them up. And then I will be able to collect my price. Absolutely.

Now this is a very important question as there's about a thousand bottles going into a bin right now. R. Bailey 150 says, let's settle it once and for all. What is the correct way of pronouncing your name? Because we hear all kinds of different versions of your first and last name. Gabriel Bortoletto. That's how you say in Portuguese. But I like how they say also. I like Gabriel Bortoletto or Gabriel Bortoletto.

So you're happy. You don't mind. Man, I don't care really. Like whatever. Call me. It's not going to change anything. Unless they call me Joan, you know, completely different name, then yes, but they're trying to guess it. It's not an easy name. No, it's not easy.

Awesome. Can you tell us about being teammates with Nico, obviously a very experienced driver? You've seen some great things online of like you two, obviously your very different paths of your kind of Formula One career. How has it been having like Nico as a teammate? It's great. Nico is a nice guy. You know, we enjoy working together. We work both very hard and I feel like we push each other in the right direction always.

So yeah, it's a guy I am very close to. Also outside of the track, I try to keep the contacts and it's nice. Do you remember the first time you met him? Well, yeah, I do actually. He didn't know who I was yet. I was in F2 and I knew I was possibly going to be his teammate in the future, but he didn't know probably. So I passed to him and I actually wave and he didn't wave back.

So I was like, oh, what a superstar. But then after, I just saw he was a cool guy. Did you bring that up to him when you met it? I told him, yeah. But if you know Nico, you know he wouldn't give a shit. He'd be like, ah, shut up, man. What an excellent way to end this interview. Gabby, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you, man. Appreciate it. And best love for tomorrow. Thank you, guys. Enjoy. All right, we have said goodbye to Gabby Bort's letter, and we're saying hello to Alan McNish. Alan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

For those that don't know, can you just give a little bit of a line about what you do, where you've come from, because of course you've been involved in Formula One and motorsport for a very long time. Yep, I'm the racing director of the Audi Revolut F1 team, and effectively it means that I'm in charge of everything here at the race. Principally, it's all of the racing operations

being in terms of how we run the car, the drivers, management of that, but also touch into all of our VIP guests and, well, communications as well. And so therefore there's quite a wide array of touch points. And as you say, I've been involved in this sport since one way or another, 1988 when I started carting as a wee boy up in the north of Scotland. How is it that obviously you represented Audi at Le Mans,

very legendary partnership that you had together and amazing memories? Now working without seeing them come into Formula One, how has that been? Yeah, you're right. you know, Audi had such a tradition at Le Mans, actually, and it made a lot of our drivers careers in a way. And so Tom Christensen's here this weekend as well, someone that I spent many hours driving around that place in the Las Arth, which is next weekend, as it turns out,

so I'm missing it. I'm in Barcelona, but I've already got the live stream sorted out. But I think the principles of the way we go racing's exactly the same. It's with a clear direction, end goal being winning, but with the knowledge that actually it takes time to do that. It takes time to build the infrastructure to team and also against the competition. And so having seen this particular program right from the beginning from day one

and how it's grown because I've been involved in it with different roles as well in the background of that, then I'm fully invested and fully invested into it. But at the same time as well, pretty excited about the. the next steps because now we're live, now we're going racing. And all the buildup over the last four and a bit years was all about to get to this point. And this year in particular in Formula One, I've found it immensely impressive the speed that this car has been able to produce at such an early point in the partnership. Yes, there's been some reliability

issues, but you must take a lot of sort of positives out of this, considering that, you know, look round here, it looked like you maybe were the fifth fastest team. It's got to be a pretty big step in, in quite an early journey. Yeah, you're right. And it's a bit like a racing driver. It's better to start with a fast racing driver and try and tame it down. And also a fast racing car and trying to, you know, iron out the bugs. And we've got a quick car.

There's no question about it. You know, Nico or Gabby have qualified up until this weekend, 11th, just knocking on the door of Q3. And frankly, this weekend, I think we had the pace to get both cars in Q3. But ultimately, it didn't happen for another. reasons but the raw speeds I think is there when we look at the chassis medium and high speed corners it's really really strong and so yes we are happy with that but we're competitive people so we're happy with that but we're looking at how do

we improve the areas that we need to strengthen up on and that's where the focus and energy is now yeah absolutely and question how does it differ working with the drivers having one of the most experienced drivers on the grid with Nico and then Gabby who of course is trying to make his mark in the spot. Well Gabby I don't know any of the music that he listens to for goodness sakes at least Nico I can sort of half get into touch with him. Now it's both of them are very good and they compliment each other which is really good for us at the moment. You know Gabby's youthful enthusiasm he's just starting his career

Nico on the other side's got that width of experience you know whatever you throw it on I've been there I've done it I know how to handle it and he just gets on with it and we need that at the moment as we're building in the team up as well. He gets right to the nub of things very, very quickly. And the other thing is that they're not egotistical. You know, they're very balanced people. And I mean, I don't mean drivers, I mean people. And that's something that I really do like about both of them. And they're quite fun to be around. I'm looking forward to the Scotland-Brazil match at the World Cup. That's the one I'm really looking forward to.

So I'm going to throw you under the bus a little bit, because we've been told that you have some very funny stories from your kind of time in motorsport. Could you share one with our audience now? I have some very funny stories. I'm not really sure if I can do that. You know, Craigie, I've got Will Sand in here. He's going to be looking at me with this sort of nervous look on his face, saying, no, do not say that one. It's very good when you've been around this sport for so long and you've seen so many things. Some of them are cringe-worthy when you look back on them, to be honest with you. The one that I shared with Gabby

was actually crashing on the way to the grid in Petit Le Mans. And it wasn't a funny story. It was a really frustrating story because I shunted on the way to the grid and I walked into the motor home while they were repairing the car

and Dindo Cabello, my long-time teammate, walked in all happy, saying, everything okay, said, okay, have you looked at it? The things in two pieces, the gearbox was off the back and they repaired it. But the moral of the story was

we went on and we won the race. So, you know, it's not what happens. It's about how you recover. And now I can look back on it and think of it as quite funny at times. At the time, I was kicking anything that was sort of in that front of that motorhome. But yeah.

Yeah, wow, what a turnaround. What a turnaround. So you raced in Formula One back in 2002. That wasn't funny. How crazy is it to see how much Formula One has evolved since then? Well, in so many different ways. we're talking about doing a season of 24 races and 66% of those are outside of Europe.

Back then, you were doing a season of 17 races, of which 66% were within Europe. So just the sheer workload, we had open testing then. I think I did 45 days of testing on my own, not the teammate, not the test drivers or anyone else. It was just insane on these areas. You know, we were changing engines twice per day. And now you're looking at the, you know, the units for the whole season. So there's been so many changes. But the biggest single change, I would say is if you look at the grid from back to front, it's so narrow. It's hundreds of a second that's differentiating, you know, whether you jump into the next part of qualifying or you're on the second or the third or the fourth row. And that was over tenths and, you know,

three, four tenths of a second back then. And the other thing is you had one or two races that were like Monaco, one or two races that were packed out. Now every single race is act out every single person knows about Formula One and when they're coming here, they're coming here for entertainment on and off the circuit. And that's another big change. I would say it's all for the benefit, actually. Yeah, we're pretty happy with how Formula One has gone as well. It's definitely going on the right direction.

Big thanks to Alan for coming on. Really appreciate your insight and for the funny story as well. So thank you. It wasn't that funny. It was painful, I can tell you. It was a PG story. P1 is a Stack production and podcast. of the ACAST created network.