A race weekend cookbook and Formula 1 archive
Dressed for the paddock. Priced for the grandstand.
Travel the Formula 1 calendar from your own kitchen. Search any driver, circuit, country or race since 1950, then bring that place to your table. No passport required, though an apron helps.
Start anywhere
Every driver leads to a country, every country to a circuit, and every circuit, eventually, to dinner.
This race weekend
Where it began
A world of tradition at our table.
Podium Plates brings together two passions: my mother's love of cookbooks and my love of Formula 1.
Over years of travel, she built a collection of cookbooks from around the world, while I have followed Formula 1 for many years. When we began watching the races together, we started to wonder what it would be like to cook a meal from wherever the race was being held that weekend.
Her collection made that possible, and what began as a single meal soon became a tradition. For years we joked about turning it into a cookbook that follows the Formula 1 season, and eventually we decided to make it real.
Podium Plates is our way of sharing that tradition with others. For every race, we research the location, the circuit, the drivers and the local food, so that anyone can bring the race weekend to their own table.
We make it independently, as a mother and son, and we hope to continue it with a new edition every season.
We invite you to pull up a chair and join us.
Every contribution goes toward researching, writing and printing the first edition.
Our tradition
Every round opens a new country to taste. In our house, the formation lap doubles as the dinner bell.
The race weekend ritual
Find out where the race is, what surrounds the circuit, and what the locals eat when nobody is filming.
Pick something that belongs to that place. If you cannot pronounce it yet, even better.
Sit down together. The meal is the reason, the company is the reward, and the leftovers are the bonus.
Lights out, plate in hand. Years later, one bite will bring the whole race back, including the parts you would rather forget.
Next round, a new country. By the finale you have eaten your way around the world without queuing at a single airport.
The first cookbook
One chapter for every round of the season. Each one carries you to the host city and home again, with dishes made for an ordinary kitchen and stories worth telling over them.
One thousand copies, numbered and signed by hand. Five hundred hardback, five hundred paperback, and a digital edition for everyone else.
Plus shipping and handling. Printed copies come to us first to be numbered and signed, then travel on to you.
Coming soonPlaceholder artwork. The final cover is still being designed.
A taste of the book
Australia · Signature recipe
Crisp skin, lemon myrtle butter, charred greens and roasted lemon. Ready before the formation lap, with time left to find the remote.
How we make it
Every dish belongs to the place the race visits, and we research it in the culture it comes from. When a recipe is our own take, we say so, rather than inventing a grandmother we never had.
Every recipe is written so a first time cook can follow it from the chopping board to the plate, with swaps for hard to find ingredients and versions for every kind of diet.
Dates, results and history are checked against more than one source before they reach a page. The stewards would approve.
We are fans of food and racing. Podium Plates is not connected to Formula 1, the FIA or any team, though we would happily feed all three.
Australia, China and Japan are written. The rest of the season is being researched now.
Be part of it
One thousand numbered and signed copies, from $49.99, and a digital edition at $19.99. Leave your email and you will hear the moment orders open, well before the lights go out.
See the editionsPull up a chair with our community of cooks and race fans, and unlock the whole archive back to 1950, for $3 a month.
Join at $3 and keep that price for as long as you keep your seat. Cancel anytime.
A yearly seat, $99 a year. Everything above, plus each new Podium Plates cookbook sent to you every year, with early access before anyone else. Coming soon
Help a mother and son turn a family tradition into a book worth keeping. Every contribution goes toward researching each chapter and printing the first edition.
Support is not a preorder or a donation, and is not tax deductible.
Questions
Our first cookbook, limited to one thousand printed copies: five hundred hardback at $79.99 and five hundred paperback at $49.99, plus shipping. Every printed copy is numbered and signed by both of us, so it comes to us first and then travels on to you, which takes a little longer than an ordinary parcel. The digital edition, at $19.99, is unlimited.
We are writing it now, one chapter per race weekend, which is roughly the pace of the sport itself. Join the list above and you will hear first when orders open.
The Podium Table is our community of cooks and race fans, and a seat is $3 a month. It opens every season back to 1950, with its story and full results, every recipe with its swaps, dietary versions and shopping list, and every result for every search. Join at $3 and you keep that price for as long as you stay. A yearly seat, coming soon at $99, adds each new cookbook sent to you every year, with early access.
Something from everything. Every season has its calendar, its winners and the opening of its story; every race has its top five; every driver, circuit, country and team has its profile; and every country has a signature recipe. The last five seasons and five landmark years are free in full. A seat at The Podium Table adds the rest.
Not at all. The calendar is simply our excuse to travel by plate. Every recipe works perfectly well on a Tuesday, no safety car required.
The archive is built from Wikidata, a free public database, and checked against the season and race results published on Wikipedia. Every page shows what it was checked against.
No. Podium Plates is an independent, unofficial cookbook made by a mother and son. It is not associated with Formula 1, the FIA or any team. We simply cook, very enthusiastically, in their direction.
Start with this weekend's Grand Prix, or wander any season since 1950. Bring an appetite; we will bring the history.
Motorsport race track near Spa, Belgium
Spa Francorchamps began as a triangle of country roads in the Belgian Ardennes, and it still keeps the speed, the gradients and the moods of its younger self.
Spa Francorchamps lies in the forested Ardennes of Wallonia, about 8 km southeast of the town of Spa. In the early 1920s the owner of a Liège newspaper, looking for somewhere to race, chose a triangle of public roads joining Francorchamps, Malmedy and Stavelot, with long fast stretches, few tight corners and, at the foot of the valley, the Eau Rouge creek, which until 1920 had marked the border with Germany. A stream that once divided two countries now divides the brave from the merely quick. Grand Prix racing arrived in 1925, and Spa was on the calendar for the first championship season in 1950.
The old lap covered about 14 km of ordinary road lined with houses, trees and fields, and no road circuit in Europe was faster. Corners such as the Masta Kink, a high speed flick between farmhouses at the end of a long straight, were deeply feared. Both Chris Bristow and Alan Stacey lost their lives in the 1960 race, the drivers boycotted the 1969 event, and after 1970 Formula 1 stayed away. The original course had held 18 championship rounds.
In 1979 the circuit was trimmed to roughly 7 km, keeping part of the old road and adding a new link through the woods, and Formula 1 came back in 1983. From the La Source hairpin the cars plunge to the stream and are hurled uphill through Raidillon, a blind left right left over a crest, before running flat out to Les Combes, and the long Blanchimont sweep comes later. The weather is famously fickle, often dry on one side of the hill and wet on the other; the 14 car pileup in the rain of 1998 showed what that can mean. A redevelopment finished in 2022 added gravel and run off after serious accidents at Raidillon, among them the one in 2019 that killed the Formula 2 driver Anthoine Hubert.
Spa has now held 59 championship rounds, from Juan Manuel Fangio's win in 1950 to 2026. Jim Clark won four in succession from 1962 to 1965, Ayrton Senna won five, and Michael Schumacher's first victory came here in 1992, the start of a Spa tally of six, the most of anyone. In 2026 Kimi Antonelli won for Mercedes, a little over a century after the first Grand Prix in these woods, and the forest has yet to make the job any easier.