A few years ago my young son and I started watching the Netflix series Drive to Survive, a reality show that takes viewers behind the scenes of last year’s Formula 1 season in 10 episodes. None of us knew much about the sport back then. British driver Lewis Hamilton had slipped into the mainstream of celebrity. But who was he driving? Who ran their teams and built their cars? Where did they compete? The details, apart from the obvious ones – that Monaco has a famous circuit, that there is a Ferrari team – escaped me. It seemed distant and strange – a circus taking place far away.
It was a common experience back then. Formula 1 may be a big sport, but it has often struggled for broad audiences. But Drive to Survive, which turns the twists and turns of a regular season into a gripping melodrama and turns its drivers and team owners into heroes and villains, many of whom seem made for the silver screen, has shifted public perceptions. In this dramatized version, F1 is less about the cars and more about the men who drive them: not just their egos and dire ambitions, but also the tangled issues of contract disputes and parts partnerships and race-day busts and billionaire owners who install them their offspring in coveted driver’s seats.
What could have been a buttoned-up docuseries about technical precision became an examination of the sloppier aspects of human existence instead. Anger, infidelity, jealousy, aspiration – it’s all there. In the first season, which aired in 2019, the show’s producers failed to get access to Mercedes and Ferrari, F1’s premier teams. No bother. Instead, they created stories from the enterprise of smaller competitors – the little-known teams vying for scrap – that turned out to be its own, no less exciting, brand of television.
Christian Horner, Red Bull team boss. Photo: Netflix
Part of Drive to Survive’s success lies in its use of the given cast – the people, most of them men, who make the sport what it is. This is where good and bad happen. Is Red Bull boss Christian Horner, husband of former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, really as terribly driven and sneaky as the show is suggesting? Of course not. However, in a new episode, viewers watch as he stares at a live feed of Hamilton and mutters, “Can’t he shut the fuck up?”
Following the ups and downs of racing in 2021, Drive to Survive season four has been released on Netflix for the last few weeks and has been highly anticipated, not least because last season was a humdinger. At the time of writing, five days after its release, viewers had already watched 28 million hours of the new series, according to Netflix, and within a week it had become one of the top 10 TV shows of the year in 50 countries, including the UK Service has become and Ukraine.
The show’s success had implications for Formula One itself. In 2021, the sport’s total television viewership increased by 4% year-on-year to 1.55 billion. A record number of people – more than 108 million – tuned in to watch the 2021 season finale, which saw Hamilton take on Dutch-Belgian driver Max Verstappen in a winner’s take-all drive-off for the world championship. (That’s a 29% increase over the 2020 equivalent.) My son and I watched this race — the actual race, not a heavily dramatized Netflix version of it, although we’ll be watching that too. Up to that point I had never seen a whole Grand Prix from start to finish I think.
Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton is hoping to regain his world title after losing it to Red Bull’s Max Verstappen in the final race of the 2021 season. Photo: Netflix
The 2021 final raised questions about the troubled marriage between pro sports and its broadcast partners, including Netflix. Controversial decisions were made mid-race, televised live, creating tensions that smolder to this day. At the time, many wondered if those decisions had been made for the benefit of the drivers or the viewers, many of whom were new to the sport and expected from live racing a similar level of drama created by Netflix’s editors. Fans rightly ask: what is real and what is constructed?
In a recent interview, Toto Wolff, team principal at Mercedes, said of Netflix, “It’s scary how much we let them in,” adding, “They add a twist to the narrative. They put together scenes that didn’t happen.” Verstappen has declined to give further interviews to the series’ producers, questioning their integrity. (“Faking rivalries just isn’t my thing,” he said recently.) A few days ago, British driver Lando Norris feared audio footage from one 2021 race was being paired with the action of another, creating a false narrative. One sometimes wonders if drivers have consented to the distraction of cameras so brazenly invading their personal and professional spaces (reportedly F1 went to Netflix with the show’s original idea). Though even Norris is receptive to the show’s charm. “There are things that might be a little too much,” he said. “But overall I just find it exciting.”
Drive to Survive aims to bring Grand Prix racing to a wider audience as F1 is “less about the cars and more about the men who drive them”. Photo: Netflix
But is any of this terrible for F1? Not all viewers think so. Even the show’s mishandling of the sport’s response to the BLM movement — a few minutes of race-related footage added to an episode — didn’t seem to detract from the new interest. After the 2021 season, a tweet said: “Better a controversial sport than a boring one.” In the first episode of season four, F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali proclaims: “I have a duty to maximize the value of Formula 1”, in a tone that suggests he’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen, with Netflix documentaries being just the beginning.
When we started watching Drive to Survive my son was three, too young to understand the details I thought. Because Formula 1 characters swear liberally and sometimes out of the blue, episodes often played silently in the background. But I soon realized that he, too, had been drawn into the drama. Whenever we drove out in our sane family car, he expected us to hit impressive and illegal speeds. I remember once referring to Daniel Ricciardo, a charming Australian driver who plays a major role in the first series. “We’re Ricciardo, Dad,” he said as we drove at the legal limit on a federal highway. And then, pointing to a car in front of us: “This is Leclerc. Catch him!” It was an example of how F1 had infiltrated our lives. In the end we caught him – not Charles Leclerc, the Ferrari driver, but a middle-aged woman with her own children at our backs – and as we drove away , my son seemed pleased, but the thrill of that moment didn’t quite match what we had access to on TV.
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