Joe Williams
Our first anniversary! What has come out of this crazy, backto-back lockdown is our, now not so little, podcast. We are a year on from launching Road to Redline and what an incredible year it’s been. I thought it might be interesting to have a look back over how we’ve been getting our Porsche fix without even leaving the house.
We are more than 50 episodes in and have clocked up more than 50,000 downloads! We’ve pulled in guests from all corners of the world and filled in the gaps with what we think is some of the best Porsche pub chat ever.
The journey started as an off-thecuff idea which gave us an excuse to get together weekly-ish and have a natter about mainly Porsche and various other things on four wheels. Not having a clue where to start we decided we’d have a go at doing a podcast and see if anyone else out there in the world might be interested too. As it turned out, there’s quite a few people that share our madness.
If you look back at the line-up, we started close to home, pulling in friends to kick us off, and then quickly grew our confidence reaching out over to the States and further afield. When an idea starts round the kitchen table you never quite know where it might lead or who might be kind enough to get involved.
We co-host the show between myself, Andy Brookes and Lee Sibley, which gives a varied dynamic, topped up with what we think is some great banter. In terms of guests I could never pick a favourite and will probably upset someone by not mentioning them now, but here are a few of my highlights that come to mind.
Rob Colbourn gave us the inside track directly from an advanced experience centre instructor, and some of his stories were brilliant. Following on from Rob we had Sharkwerks, which was our first dive across the pond and the first household Porsche name on the pod. The guys there are super chilled and live and breathe their passion, which was so evident.
Back in the UK another Rob, but this time from directly inside the heart of Porsche UK and head of PR, Rob Durrant talked openly about some of the guarded Porsche secrets. Then jumping back over the pond we talked to the less-known Guntherwerks about their awesome 993 commissions and that whole world where they push the boundaries of backdating.
The episode that we were all dreading and thought might wipe out R2R in one swipe was insurance. I mean how interesting can anyone be talking about car insurance?! Well, we all ate our words and for a while it was one of our bestrated episodes!
Again jumping the gap we headed to LA to chat to Magnus Walker, and ended up having a whistle-stop zoom tour of the shop, with a great rundown of what’s currently hot on his scene. When someone has best part of a million followers online and a worldwide Porsche presence it seemed a pretty big deal for him to take out some time to chat on the pod.
I have to shout out Jonny at Classic Retrofit and the bonkers electric 914 and its suitcase of tricks! I’ve decided Jonny is mad as a box of frogs but the first guy you’d happily invite down the pub for a pint or three.
Karlos aka The Porsche Buyer gave us a few market updates along the way with a bit of inside trading knowledge. Alongside Karl we had influencers, Youtubers, photographers and engineers to name a few!
The story that pulled on everyone’s heart strings came from Renee at Valkyrie Racing – 20k racing miles in a 356 raising money for trafficked children.
Craig and his amazing artwork skills have featured throughout the pod, check him out @justicesketch followed by David and his awesome Nezumi time pieces @nezumistudios – the RUF collaboration was an instant sell-out.
One of the big milestones for Road to
Redline has to be the world exclusive on the Singer ACS: we had the founders delve deep into the project and give us all the details before anyone else. When it went live on their website it broke the internet! And most recently Mike Wilds gave us the short version on 50 years in motorsport including F1, Le Mans, Porsche Cup and other race series. You can read an extended version of that in this very issue.
So there you have it, a year of podcasting, in five minutes! We’ve been very kindly supported by our Patreon members and we have all sorts of plans to give back along the way. The date for the diary is 3 July – there will be a big Road
to Redline event incoming with the most inclusive line-up of Porsche ever.