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It was the sound that made Blake Hinsey fall in love with motor racing.
Blake first heard it when he was seventeen. He and his father traveled from their Dallas home to MotorSport Ranch, in Cresson, thirty miles southwest of Fort Worth. The roaring engines, screeching tires, and thunderous backfires created a wall of noise. “It was so raw and visceral,” Hinsey says. “That was the thing that made me go, ‘Maybe I could drive one of those one day.’ ”
Hinsey’s dream of being a driver was short-lived. Instead, he became fascinated by the engineering behind the cars, the tiny adjustments that make them go faster. Hinsey’s interest grew into an obsession, which he followed first to a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Texas at Arlington, then to a master’s degree in motorsport engineering at Oxford Brookes University, in the UK. He landed his first gig as a performance engineer with the Formula 1 racing team Force India in 2011.
In November 2014 he was hired by Red Bull Racing, where he spent the next seven years working alongside some of the best drivers on the planet: Daniel Ricciardo, Daniil Kvyat, and Max Verstappen, who won the Formula 1 World Championship in 2021.
Just before Verstappen’s triumph, though, Hinsey decided to pivot away from working directly in Formula 1. And he wasn’t just leaving his dream job—he was quitting to start a motorsports-focused YouTube show titled Brrrake.
“It was a weird, jarring thing to tell people I’m leaving my Formula 1 engineering job to make content,” he says. But Hinsey had already beaten the odds just to land a job at racing’s highest level, and he believed in himself enough to take another risk, if it felt right.
A few years into his stint with Red Bull, Hinsey seemed to have everything he had ever dreamed for himself, or so it seemed. He developed a close working relationship with Kvyat, the driver who joined the team the same year as Hinsey. “It was a big step joining the team for both of us,” Kvyat says. “We had to adjust. But because you’re working for a big team, there’s no time to adjust. It was a lot of pressure.”
Hinsey’s task was to improve the car Kvyat had been hired to drive for Red Bull. For reasons the team couldn’t immediately identify, their vehicle had suddenly fallen behind the Mercedes car. “He managed to relax the atmosphere within the team, which was struggling with the engine,” Kvyat says. “He was always direct. He had no problem saying he needed more time. He was also very good at trying new and innovative things with the car.”
As one racing season led into another, Hinsey sensed that the Formula 1 schedule—trekking across the globe week after week, from Saudi Arabia to Australia to Belgium, with countless other stops along the way—was starting to wear him down. He would spend nearly ten months out of every year away from home, with the annual U.S. Grand Prix race at the Circuit of the Americas track, near Austin, providing a too brief taste of home. “Texas is very near and dear to my heart,” Hinsey says. “I basically didn’t live outside of Texas until I was twenty-five, when I moved to the U.K.”
The race car designer wanted to slow down. So in January 2018 he took a new role with Red Bull, working as a simulator performance engineer from the team’s racing factory in England. Over the next four years, he used simulation models and performance data from the team’s vehicles to support Red Bull’s drivers remotely, searching for any edge that could make the cars run faster. “I analyzed all their data and ran simulations,” Hinsey says. “It was my job to boil the information down and turn it into something that we could use.”
His efforts paid off during Verstappen’s 2021 championship season, but by then Hinsley was already growing restless at work. “My awesome factory-performance analysis job had become very operational,” he says. “I had to go to lots of meetings and do lots of coordinating stuff. I wasn’t able to really dig deep into the data and analysis. I just wasn’t enjoying it as much.”
Throughout his Formula 1 tenure, Hinsey maintained an interest in computer science and gaming. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he streamed himself playing Call of Duty: Warzone and got an early glimpse of life as content creator. Streaming his exploits in the first-person shooter game allowed him to connect with fellow players, and the money he earned from his videos helped cover his bills.
Hinsey began to consider a new career path. “I started making videos talking about Formula 1.” He had noticed a dearth of Formula 1 content on platforms such as YouTube. Plus he had expertise that hardly anyone working in motorsports media could match. “I decided to pivot away from gaming and do race watch-alongs, interact with fans, give my take on races, and make different YouTube videos about how everything works.”
With Brrrake, Hinsey wanted to provide data and technical analysis of Formula 1 that didn’t talk down to viewers. He took the intimidating information that often blocks fans from understanding the sport and made it digestible. When he finally decided to quit Red Bull so he could become a content creator full time, some of his colleagues in the sport couldn’t wrap their heads around the choice. His father got it. “The travel and amount of work required in Formula 1, it isn’t really healthy,” Bryan Hinsey says. “It can really suck everything out of your life. When he decided to step away I certainly understood.”
Over the course of two years, Hinsey’s channels amassed more than 128,000 subscribers on YouTube and 102,000 followers on Instagram. When the Netflix series Drive to Survive boosted Formula 1’s popularity in the United States, it drove more casual fans to Hinsey’s content. “I remember the first U.S. Grand Prix in Austin, in 2012, all of my family came,” he says. “They showed up and they weren’t sure if it was NASCAR or IndyCar. They’d never heard of Formula 1. Now all of my nieces and nephews are obsessed. Everything is completely sold out. There are huge names that come to the races.”
Brrrake’s subscriber numbers grew fast throughout the 2023 racing season. The success felt good, but it didn’t take long for Hinsey to realize that the content-creator lifestyle could be just as hectic and demanding as his previous career in Formula 1. He had to be ready to work at all times, ready to film a new video for any breaking news related to the sport. He was constantly writing scripts, coordinating with editors, and planning new ideas for short- and long-form content. He was also making less money than he did as an engineer. “It was eating up twenty-four weekends a year following the races,” he says. “I had to think hard and look at my work-life balance. I was working harder as my own boss creating content than I was for Red Bull. I realized I was worse off.”
It was around this time that Hinsey got a call from Kvyat, who had just signed on as a driver with the Lamborghini Iron Lynx team in the FIA World Endurance Championship. “The cars are very complicated, and you need someone with a certain level of experience and technological knowledge,” says Kvyat. “I thought of Blake because I knew he was a free agent.”
Hinsey was immediately interested. It also helped that the World Endurance Championship calendar consists of just eight races. Hinsey initially agreed to work part-time for the team, but he soon found himself back in a full-time engineering role. “I wanted to have time to do both content creating and work as a race engineer,” he says. “But that did not happen. I’ve been working flat out.” The break from racing helped Hinsey rediscover his love for the motorsport industry.
Despite pumping the brakes on Brrrake, Hinsey says his YouTube sojourn improved his performance as a racing engineer: “I’m so much better at communicating. There are a lot of French and Italian people, and I have been so much more concise and deliberate with my messaging. It’s great to be able to apply those skills to engineering.”
Hinsey is delighted to call the world of endurance racing home for now, but he won’t rule out the possibility of returning to the content mines or returning to Formula 1—or changing careers entirely once again.
“It goes back to taking that initial leap and moving from Texas to a new country,” he says. “I’m always okay with throwing everything away and starting over. If I’m not happy with where this is going, I’m going to go somewhere else. I’m not doing this for other people. I’m doing it for me.”
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