Greg Rust has been going to motorsport events since before he could walk. His parents took him to the track. He never really left. Thirty years in Australian motorsport broadcasting later, his teenage daughters are now working alongside him at the Australian Grand Prix as production assistants, getting access to press conferences he does not even get to attend himself.
Rusty is the voice many Australian motorsport fans associate with the sport — the Australian Grand Prix PA, more than a decade as the face of Network Ten’s motorsport coverage, and Rusty’s Garage, his own podcast that has featured Mark Webber, Oscar Piastri, Liam Lawson and Jenson Button among its guests.
The conversation is wide-ranging and full of good stories. There is Mark Webber quietly taking a group of journalists to dinner in Melbourne before announcing he was leaving Formula 1 for Porsche — a goodbye that nobody realised was a goodbye at the time. There is the story of Rusty’s youngest daughter Stella, a Lando Norris fan, working up the courage to ask George Russell for a selfie at 2am leaving Singapore, only for Russell to stop her as she walked away and offer to do it again because he thought the photo had not worked. The way Rusty tells that one says something about both the driver and the fan.
He also talks about knowing Liam Lawson before Formula 1, what resilience actually looks like in a young driver fighting to keep a seat, and how Drive to Survive changed the sport in ways the industry could not have engineered itself.
Rusty’s Garage is worth a listen if you do not already follow it.