A tongue-in-cheek concours takes center stage with “Concours Depreciation” at Bicester Motion on August 6 (5–8pm), celebrating used, cared-for cars over pristine factory examples. The hosts then pivot into Formula One gripes and rule talk—50-50 power unit regulations, energy limits, and why overtaking can suffer—before shifting to real-world car reviews and ownership notes, including an Audi S5 Avant long-termer and a Porsche Panamera E hybrid “sleeper” take.
0:00
--:--
08:54
Term
power unit regulations
Formula One has rules that control how the car’s engine system works. “50-50” here means the regulations are trying to split the contribution of different parts of the power system in a controlled way, so teams can’t just chase one advantage.
11:12
Topic
Hungarian Grand Prix
The Hungarian Grand Prix is a Formula 1 race in Hungary. In this episode, it’s used as an example of a race where the racing felt more interesting than expected.
11:15
Concept
overtaking
Overtaking just means passing another car during the race. The speaker is saying some tracks make overtaking hard, yet those races can still be more entertaining than others.
11:28
Place
Monaco
Monaco is where the Monaco Grand Prix is held—one of the most famous Formula 1 races. It’s known for being a tight street circuit, so overtaking is hard, but the race can still be exciting.
11:49
Concept
current era regulations
“Current era regulations” refers to the present set of Formula 1 technical and sporting rules that govern car design and race procedures. The host argues these rules are having a negative effect on the racing product—specifically by reducing the situations where cars can meaningfully pass.
11:58
Topic
2031
2031 is the year mentioned for when Formula 1 plans to switch to a new set of rules. The host is basically saying we still have several seasons left under the current rules.
12:03
Topic
2030s
2030 is the year suggested as an earlier start for new Formula 1 rules. The point here is that it still means several more seasons of the current rules.
13:03
Place
Spa
Spa is a famous Formula 1 race track in Belgium. The speaker is saying it hasn’t been producing the best on-track battles lately.
13:03
Place
Silverstone
Silverstone is a famous Formula 1 circuit in the UK. The speaker is criticizing it (and Spa) as among the worst tracks for racing quality, implying the layout or rule effects can reduce overtaking.
13:12
Topic
F1
F1 stands for Formula 1, the highest level of race car competition. The rules are very strict, and they can change how the cars race each other.
13:31
Term
overtakes
An overtake is when one race car passes another and gets in front. The host is saying future changes could make passing easier to pull off.
13:31
Term
delta in lap time
Delta in lap time is just how much faster one car is than another per lap. The host is saying you might not need a big speed gap to pass if the rules make racing closer.
14:20
Topic
rained halfway through
If it starts raining halfway through a race, the track gets slippery and everything changes. The host is saying that kind of weather shift made the racing more dramatic.
14:22
Term
skidding off
Skidding off is when a car loses grip and slides out of the lane. In rain, it happens more because the tires can’t bite as well.
14:23
Term
breaking down
Breaking down refers to mechanical or technical failure that forces a car to retire or stop running. The speaker pairs it with rain and skidding to emphasize how disruptive conditions were in that race.
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Welcome back to the Intercooler podcast, everybody, episode 324 of the podcast powered by car finance specialist JBR Capital.
Full compliments actually this week, Dan Proser, Andrew Frankel, and Jez Medinger with you.
There's a whole load of stuff that we want to talk about this week, guys, but should we start by talking about us
and the event that we've got on next week?
Jez, actually, I'm going to task you with telling everyone about our event on Thursday evening next week.
Which is what? August 6th?
Yeah.
Correct. How desperately exciting.
So it's going to be happening at Bistermotion, running from 5pm to 8pm,
and we are expecting many, many hundreds of cars to come and join us for our inaugural Concours Depreciation,
where we are going to celebrate a motoring life well lived.
So this is not the standard kind of concours where we are expecting to see absolutely straight out of the factory stickers
and, you know, plastic grommets and an engine bay detailed within a whisker of its life.
These are cars that have been used and enjoyed and loved and looked after.
Proper cars.
So we're really excited. We're really, really excited to welcome everybody there for a fantastic TI event.
Yeah. So this is, it's been a fun, right? We're calling it Concours Depreciation.
Depreciation?
You've probably got to see it written down, haven't you?
It's a bit of fun, right? So it's a Concours, but it's a tongue-in-cheek Concours.
And the whole point of it, as Jess says, is to celebrate the cars that are used as intended,
driven lots, driven hard, but also looked after, you know, sound mechanical condition.
We are actually judging this Concours, so there will be 15 or 20 cars entered into the Concours.
And if you've already bought a ticket, you will now, via email, have been invited to enter your car into the Concours.
We're going to choose 15 or 20 of them. And then the judges, including us and a whole bunch of TI writers,
they're going to be out in force, will be awarding prizes to the three cars that we think best embody the spirit of the occasion.
But actually, I think most of all, it's just a bit of a laugh and an excuse to get together and chat rubbish about cars already.
Tickets cost £10 each, so it's very, very affordable.
There'll be a link in the description. Go and click that link and you can find out a bit more about the event and you'll be able to buy tickets as well.
You might have to register with Bista Motion to buy tickets, but it's free and it takes seconds.
And so I'm sorry, is the ticket per car or per person in that car? So if somebody turns up with five people in it?
I'm glad you asked that, Andrew, because I don't know. But all the information is available at the link in description.
So you'll be able to go and figure that out, I'm sure. It'll be really good fun.
There's, as Jess said, we are expecting hundreds of cars and people to come along.
The last few tickets are available. So if you're at a loose end on Thursday next week, the 6th of August, 5 to 8pm,
why don't you buy ticket and come along? And if you think your car is appropriate for our tongue-in-cheek concourse,
enter it and you might just win a prize. Anything to add to that, guys?
I've got just something, because it is fun. That's why we're doing it, it's what we're about.
But I think there's a slightly serious point to it, because, and I've said this many times before,
my problem with the traditional concourse, where everything turns up as, frankly,
so often in better condition than it would have been when it first came out of the factory,
is those sorts of events, although the cars look absolutely wonderful, they actually encourage people not to use their cars.
These cars become works of art. They become things to admire rather than things to get out there and drive.
And this is the opposite of that. We don't care how many scratches and dings or war wounds,
we actually kind of are looking for that. We're not looking for sheds,
we're not looking for cars that are absolutely on their last legs and have to be dragged to it
or are in such poor condition that they've got to be trailer there.
We look at and we can tell. We've been doing this for long enough to know a car that has been loved and used.
And that's what it's really all about. And there's nobody else doing that at the moment.
There's nobody else celebrating actually the cars that we all want to know about,
not the show queens, but the cars that we all love, the cars that we all want to own and drive ourselves.
So that's what it's all about. So please, as Dan says, please go and follow the link.
We'd love to see you there. We've already sold hundreds and hundreds of tickets.
We are capped at something, but there are still a few left.
So if you hear this and you're knocking about next Thursday afternoon, there'll be food there,
there'll be food stalls there. We'll all be there.
We're actually going to have a little display of TI contributor cars as well.
So we've each been tasked with turning up in something suitably interesting, I guess.
Jess, I'm guessing I know what you're going to turn up in.
I'm not saying what I'm going to turn up in, but it will definitely be worth looking at.
Dan, have you got any ideas in that direction?
Yeah, it's a bit of a cheat, but I think it'll be worth displaying anyway.
Excellent. So come and see us.
We've got, I think there will be sort of like a 10 or maybe a dozen TI contributors there.
Most of us will be wearing TI polo shirts, so you'll know who we are, even if you don't recognise our faces.
Come and say hello. It'll be a lot of fun. There should be an awful lot of cool cars there.
And yeah, please, please, please come along and we'll look forward to see you there five o'clock next Thursday, August the 6th.
Absolutely. Yeah, well said. I'm looking forward to it. I think it'll be really fun.
We haven't done anything like this before. We've done lots of events, lots of live podcasts.
Yeah.
But this is something different, isn't it, with hundreds of people coming along.
We've certainly haven't done anything at this scale before.
And who knows if it goes well, we might do it again.
Indeed.
Listen, there's tons that we need to get through this week.
But let's do a little bit of Formula One because we are now in the Formula One summer break, halfway through the 2026 season.
I mean, there are a few different sort of themes that we can pick over.
I do want to start with the regulations, though, these much-vaunted new 50-50 power unit regulations.
Andrew, sort of summary thoughts on how it's been so far.
I'm going to guess that he's going to say bar humbug. Let's find out.
I'm not going to say that. I'm going to say this is the worst season of Formula One that I have seen in half a century of watching Formula One.
It is the first time in my memory that I cancelled my SkySubscription.
Did you?
I didn't notice how long I've had that for. I've cancelled it.
So what I do now is I either watch it on Channel 4, the highlights, or if it's really important, like it was Silverstone or Spa, that was a mistake, wasn't it?
I'll go on to now and you can buy 24-hours access to that channel for 15 quid.
Oh!
Yeah.
So you can watch the race live and you can stop it and you can rewind it.
You can't record it, but you can watch it, stop it, rewind it, do all the things that you do on your SkyBox and it costs 15 quid.
And I was paying Sky like 70 quid a month and it just wasn't worth it.
And yeah, I can't remember. I mean, some people take a completely different view.
I'm not saying I'm right and they're wrong because they see lots and lots of overtaking, but it's not the drivers who are doing the overtaking really.
It's the electronics and it's what they said at the beginning of the season.
That phrase, I think it was David Croft who said it, it's a high-speed game of chess.
That is what is wrong with it.
It is, it should, anyway.
And I think the thing that struck me most, I tuned in to watch the, I spent 15 quid and I watched the Hungarian Grand Prix live yesterday.
Not because I particularly thought it was going to be a great race, but because I knew we're going to be recording this podcast and we're going to do a kind of like an end of season review.
And I felt the need to be up to speed for that.
And I found myself enjoying it more than any other race I've seen this season.
Despite the fact, and I've said this before, if there was one race on the calendar, I would cancel.
It would be the Hungarian Grand Prix because I don't think the circuit is very interesting.
You never get any overtaking and blah.
And so I thought to myself, why did I enjoy watching that race so much?
And the reason is, it was the race to which the rules had least effect.
It was the, I mean, I guess Monaco would have been the same.
And so you have this situation where to watch a half-decent motor race, you've got to go to the worst track on the calendar because it's the only track on the calendar where there's ridiculous business of cars just running out of juice.
It doesn't happen.
And I just thought that was such a damning indictment of the entire current era regulations.
And they're sort of saying, well, the new one's coming in 2031.
Let's bring that forward to 2030.
That still means we've got another whatever it is, four seasons of this rubbish.
And I just, I just despair, I really do.
It has made me do the one thing which I thought could never be done.
It has made me fall out of love with Formula One.
There you go.
But that bar humbug enough for you, Jess.
Well, I have some thoughts on this too.
And actually you sort of came round to sort of come adjacent to them, which is that I don't like the regulations, but I'm quite enjoying this season.
And I don't quite know how to reconcile that in my head.
It does seem that the energy rich circuits, i.e. the ones that don't necessarily serve up overtaking are the ones where the racing is most authentic.
And as you say, Monaco and Hungary have been good races as a result of that.
As soon as you've got big long straights.
But they're the two worst tracks on the calendar.
But now they're the two best.
I know.
Doesn't that tell you all you need to know about how stupid these regulations are?
I don't know.
And the worst circuits on the calendar are Silverstone and Spa for goodness sake.
But that's how F'd up this all is.
So let's just delete the past and imagine that you're an alien who's flown in and you're watching F1 for the first time this season.
And just forget all of the baggage that we bring into it.
You can look at where we're going with this and see a future over the next four years where they sort out some of this deployment issues and the high speed chestness.
And you end up with cars that simply follow closer and are able to do overtakes without needing a huge delta in lap time by virtue of being able to use boost here and there.
And there is a world there where that could actually create some good racing.
Look at the Stappens overtake on Hamilton yesterday as he was getting caught up behind one of the racing balls.
I was one of the best moves I've ever seen.
Yeah, exactly.
To do that to a seven times world champion who was in a quicker car.
Yeah, so there is still legitimate overtakes happening.
We just need to filter out some of the nonsense.
Some of the Super Mario Kart Swaperoo.
And I think we'll actually be in a reasonable place.
Now that's not to say, but the YouTube algorithm gave me the 1995 Spa Grand Prix last night and I watched half of it and it was amazing.
You know, it rained halfway through.
Everyone's skidding off.
Everyone's breaking down.
You've got incredible overtakes everywhere.
You know, that you do watch that era and it does feel nostalgic and brilliant, but I don't know.
There is a world in which we have a new future that could be equally exciting.
So I don't know.
I'm an optimist.
I don't like the new rules, but maybe we can make them work as long as we don't get too burdened by the past.
That's why we need you on this podcast, Jess, because you could be tickled to my ticker to my ear.
And I think that's probably quite important.
There is some potential in them because, as Jess said, the cars do seem to follow pretty close.
And we have seen some cracking wheel to wheel stuff this season.
We've also seen the ridiculous yo-yo racing where they just overtake one another because they've pressed a button.
But also, as we've alluded to, some of the best circuits have been really muted because the cars just run out of energy at the end of the straights
and then big hairy-chested, scary corners that used to be epic are now just non-events.
And it's such a pity.
And I just don't understand how it has been allowed to happen because several years ago, people were saying exactly this was going to happen.
Well, we did talk about it last week, didn't we, Andrew?
Yeah, we did.
It's money and it's about Audi coming into Formula One and honestly, who cares?
As a fan, who cares?
We've got another manufacturer there running around in the midfield.
I don't even notice them during a race weekend.
With all due respect to all the people, all the excellent people who work there and are working tirelessly to make that competitive team,
it brings, so far, it brings nothing to Formula One as far as I'm concerned.
Instead, we've got these, frankly, pathetic power unit regulations that just should never have happened.
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