When Brian Müller and Matt Elisofon picked up the microphone for the first time to record the first episode of Red flagThey are trying to fill a niche that they have found themselves in Formula 1 world: “I thought, where is the podcast with F1’s Bill Simmons? There isn’t some guy out there who’s just a crazy person picking a fight with his friend. So we became the podcast you wanted to watch in the world.”
The F1 podcast space can be terrible. Almost any program hosted by a journalist, personality or driver with connections to the sport is bound to be measured, a relic of the era when F1 was presided over by Bernie Ecclestone. Ecclestone is annoying – even for something incredibly small – and chances are you’ll show up to your next race to find your login has been disabled. Even though open-wheel trains have newer, friendlier management, there’s still an attitude that you can’t anger anyone. Too many F1 podcasts rely on F1 to make money. They can’t just be happy.
That’s part of what makes Red Flags such spectacular fun. Hosted by two American “childhood enemies turned best friends turned F1 husbands”, this is the show you will join when you love the Netflix docuseries “Drive to Survive” and wonder what to do. What a way to access this new sport in an equally engaging way. It was the liveliest, screamiest and most chaotic show. catering to “little whores who live for the show.” And damn, isn’t it job.
Muller and Elisofon have known each other since they were kids, but as their podcast bio shows, things haven’t always been smooth sailing.
“Matt and I grew up together in New York,” Muller said. “We were enemies.”
As Muller explains, he “inherited” Elisofon from another group of friends, and the similarities between the two meant that they actually hated each other for a while, feeling as though they needed to compete. In their senior year of high school, they collaborated on a sketch comedy show, and despite being apart for a while, Muller was the first person Elisofon called after watching Netflix’s “Drive to Survive.” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s a classic F1 love story, like the others,” Elisofon added with a laugh. The two men watched several races together via Zoom – via illegal livestreaming, in the dark, in bed, next to their girlfriends, as they tried to stay silent in response to the chaos of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. “I thought, every race should be like this. This is the greatest sport of all time – and every race is exciting because we just watch it.”
They were in full force. Elisofon noted that he wanted to “consume all the media, all the content” about F1, but there was one thing missing: Personality.
He continued: “A lot of British people [F1] podcast, they are very measured and very afraid of upsetting people because they don’t want to upset people when they get older. Brian and I both thought we wouldn’t worry about it. We will never be that big. We really want to be the type of fans that aren’t afraid to be fans.”
Of course, it helps that Elisofon and Muller initially had no intention of working in the world of Formula 1, which gave them more freedom to share their real thoughts and have fun.
“I want to be on Broadway,” Muller said, noting his and his co-host’s acting and writing aspirations. “I can’t be like this [Broadway] the show sucks – even if I think so. But with F1, we have the freedom to let our hair down.”
But the passion and humor of the Red Flags Podcast resonated. They posted the first episode of the podcast and gained a total of “30 listeners,” Muller told me. They started cutting parts of the show for TikTok, and one of those short clips quickly gained attention.
“We just released a clip that we were talking about [Lewis Hamilton’s dog] Roscoe’s sperm, because we know that Lewis froze it, because he wanted to breed Roscoe but he continued to gas every night. Just ejaculate all over the house,” Elisofon said. “We posted that clip and it got about 400 views. So 600 views. Then, suddenly, it had 1,000 views, then 3,000.
“Brian and I were on the phone together reloading the page and suddenly 30,000 people had seen this clip. The next time we released an episode, we went from 30 listeners to 200 listeners.”
But that viral experience helped the two men better understand what people wanted. As they recorded future episodes, they started capturing moments that would make great social clips — and as more clips went viral, more people started listening to Red Flags. They got a producer. They got interns. They got sponsors and partnerships. Now their Instagram page has 131,000 followers, their TikTok has 11.9 million likes. They interviewed Mario Andretti, Willy T. Ribbs, Liam Lawson and Will Buxton, along with a huge list of other names both in and out of motorsport.
Now, they are expanding. Every Thursday, they will launch a new podcast called Vankah Hours, with co-host Guenther Steiner, former Haas F1 team principal. Their approach – doing their own thing without worrying about what others think – has worked quite well.
That growth comes with higher expectations and more pressure — but as Muller notes, they work hard to keep that pressure at bay.
“More pressure [Red Flags] if it does, the product will get worse,” he told me. “But Matt and I both have personal goals beyond F1.” Focusing on those pursuits has taken the stress out of working on a successful podcast, and helped Elisofon and Muller maintain their priorities.
Elisofon notes that there are a lot of things about Red Flag that can take the fun out of it: long meetings, calls with lawyers, countless spreadsheets, etc. But he also notes that the trade-off for these worries That frustration is the ability to enjoy joy – and putting that joy into context is what it’s all about.
“I would say, it’s like being an actor, because there’s so much bullshit in being an actor,” Elisofon told me. “You’re recording yourself. You have to get new close-up shots. You’re sitting around during your audition or in the trailer for your movie. When you finally get the gig, you’ll probably act one minute for every hour you’re on set. You get used to going through hell to get to the fun stuff.” All the work that goes into maintaining Red Flags is worth it once the Zoom call starts and the microphone turns on.
“It may sound cliché, but keeping the fire lit from the spark of the initial idea is what matters,” Muller added. “That’s more important than everything: whether people listen or not, whether things are going well now or not.
“Not worth booking [this podcast] out for short-term gain. We have a friendship to protect.”
“That was the hardest part to navigate,” Elisofon continued. “Doing business with friends means you have to separate the friendship from the business, even though, in many ways, the friendship To be business. That’s what we’re selling, in a weird way.”
After a lot of reflection, I expected something equally introspective when I asked Elisofon and Muller to share the most important thing they learned throughout their endeavor. Their answer was almost as uniform and almost as perfect as Red Flags: “Always a record.”
