Emily Selleck’s first day working in a Formula 1 paddock could have gone many ways. What actually happened was an interview with Max Verstappen within five minutes of arriving.
That story, told in the latest episode of Away We Go Podcast, reveals something about how the F1 media landscape works and about the kind of person who thrives in it.
Who is Emily Selleck?
Selleck is an Australian journalist who spent a decade in New York covering everything from red carpets to the political beat before landing in motorsport, and she has built a career at the intersection of Formula 1, culture, and commercial strategy. She is now stepping out of journalism and into brand consultancy, a move that reflects what she has spent five years observing: brands flooding into F1 without a clear sense of what to do once they get there.
In this ep
In a wide-ranging conversation with host Dianne Bortoletto and co-host Ciara Gillan from Formula Live Pulse, Selleck traces her path from a career start in fashion media through to becoming a regular in the Formula 1 paddock, attending races from the Australian Grand Prix to Miami. The Drive to Survive era, she notes, created a genuine editorial gap: an audience of new and culturally engaged fans who were not being written for by traditional motorsport media.
The Miami angle produces one of the episode’s more candid moments. Selleck describes Carbone Beach, the Miami Grand Prix’s most talked-about off-track event, as a high-ticket gathering where the guest list on race Sunday has included Lando Norris, who came the night of his first Formula 1 win, and Travis Kelce. It is the kind of access that raises questions about what Formula 1 has become, who it is now for, and what the sport’s commercial expansion is producing beyond the racing itself.
The brand question runs through most of the discussion. Selleck is direct about the difference between partnerships that genuinely understand the Formula 1 audience and those chasing a trend. She cites the Australian Grand Prix as a benchmark, pointing to the event’s intentional recruitment of brands including Mecca and La Roche-Posay, a strategy built on the recognition that Australia consistently records among the highest rates of female attendance of any race on the calendar. The LEGO parade lap activation comes up as a case study in how to genuinely engage drivers, becoming one of the most-cited earned media successes in recent F1 partnership history.
The episode also contains one of the more honest assessments of Oscar Piastri’s championship prospects heard on this podcast. Gillan asks Selleck directly whether Piastri has what it takes. The answer is yes, with a caveat: the McLaren internal dynamic is complicated, the team’s assumed loyalties lay with Lando Norris before Piastri outperformed expectations, and navigating that situation while remaining composed and unhurried requires a kind of long-game thinking that does not always look like ambition from the outside.
Emily Selleck, F1 & travel
The conversation closes with Selleck’s final three: Japan as her dream Formula 1 destination, Monza as the race she most wants to attend, drawn by the Tifosi and the weight of the circuit’s history, and Daniel Ricciardo as her ideal travel companion on the basis that she wants someone who will do thirty thousand steps a day rather than lie on a yacht.
The thread connecting all of it is access: who has it, what it costs, and what it means for brands, journalists, and fans as Formula 1 moves deeper into its most commercially complex era.