The F1 Season Started. So Did Something New.
Exhaust Notes is live, and the 2026 season is already chaos.
Look, you already know I can’t just do one thing.
I’ve been a car person as long as I’ve been a sneaker person. My first car was a Honda Prelude project at 13. It never ran. I loved every second of it anyway. I’ve been watching motorsport since the early ‘90s, attended nearly every American Le Mans Series race in California, and I haven’t missed Monterey Car Week in over a decade. I live in Monterey now partly because Laguna Seca is up the road.
So I launched Exhaust Notes, a newsletter and podcast about F1, motorsport, and car culture, that I co-host with Todd Yates (who has been watching F1 longer than most of the current grid has been alive) and Rohit Malhotra (who you might know from the Sneaker History Podcast). The 2026 season just kicked off in Australia, the new cars are chaotic, Aston Martin reportedly couldn’t get past 8,400 RPM in testing, and we have a lot of opinions about all of it.
It’s not a race recap newsletter. It’s more like... what we’re still thinking about after the race. The business angle nobody framed right. The brand deal. The strategies. The human story underneath the standings. The same way I approach sneakers, applied to the sport I’ve been obsessed with since Ayrton Senna.
If any of that sounds like your thing, subscribe at exhaustnotes.substack.com. The first two posts are already up.
Back to sneakers on Sunday.
— Nick
P.S. - If you’re not paying attention to the footwear in motorsports in 2026, I think you’re truly missing out. I’ll explain more in Sunday’s long read.