Glenn Freeman

The Athletic.

The Athletic.

As always, I'm your host, Glenn Freeman, and to help us get through this gruelling tournament featuring 32 of the best F1 races from 1989 to 2005, we have Ed Straw, Ben Anderson and Matt Beer.

Here's how it works.

We came up with a list of 32 races, taking four suggestions each from us and from our producer, Johnny.

We then had the remaining 12 slots filled out by suggestions from the race members club to give us eight groups of four, just like the World Cup had until this year's edition where they've added more teams and completely would have ruined our format.

Yeah.

Matt, Ben and Ed then had to score each race in the groups from four to one with the highest scoring races progressing into the last 16 knockout round.

We've done a full rundown of the group stage results in an extended version of this episode for our members.

So if you'd like to hear how we got to where we are now, head to the members club to check that out.

In each knockout tie, the three guys simply have to pick the race they want to go through.

So we get a winner every time.

At best, we'll get a 3-0 or a 2-1.

No need for any World Cup penalty shootouts here.

If the World Cup wasn't about international football, I could make an Arsenal penalty shootout joke there.

but to give the first two rounds a twist as host and channeling my inner v10 era ferrari i have one veto i can deploy in each of the last 16 and the quarterfinals if i strongly disagree with the choice being made i won't do it in the later rounds as my ego does have its limits and i'm not allowed to send the same race through twice so i can't just give one of my favorites a free ride and

All the way to the semi-finals.

So here are our last 16 ties based on the teams that progressed from the group stage and following a traditional World Cup wall chart that told me exactly which group winner should play which group runner-up.

So we are doing this legit.

That means we have Nürburgring 1995 versus Monaco 1996.