After spending much of the past two and a half years researching and writing a book about online video (YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, et al), my attention recently turned to streaming TV in a recreational capacity. After burning through iTunes’ offerings, I resubscribed to Netflix after a long hiatus, and there I encountered “Formula 1: Drive to Survive.” As a chapter in media history, it’s a brilliant success story, albeit a complicated one. The more I watched, the more I researched, and the more surprises I discovered.
The show is currently running in season 3, focused on the Covid-shortened 2020 racing season. So even though Netflix began filming in 2018, the story begins two years prior. That’s when Liberty Media, John Malone’s US-based holding company, began the process of buying the Formula 1 series for $4 billion. Like Major League Baseball, F1 racing fans were aging out and not being replaced at younger demographics. Like the NFL, Malone’s team saw media exposure as a winning strategy: recall that there was a Nickelodeon play-by-play simulcast of an NFL game last year, and note that the new NFL media deal gives Amazon exclusive rights to game inventory that will likely involve cross-promotion on its Twitch game-streaming network. The power of long-form sports documentaries is well proven: last year’s Michael Jordan 10-hour marathon on ESPN was a cultural touchstone during the early months of lockdown.
So media exposure helps F1 reach new audiences. What’s in it for Netflix? Despite a content creation budget in the $15 billion range, satisfying global audiences is not simple. It’s hard to know how many US shows have historically found footholds overseas (and both “Masterpiece Theater” and “The Great British Baking Show” crossed the Atlantic from the other direction), but the politics of culture now dictate that Netflix can’t endlessly run “Orange is the New Black” in Indonesia (and elsewhere), and stand-up comedy is far from universal. Merely rebroadcasting US shows to the globe was going to be problematic, and the appetite for nature documentaries is finite. No national broadcaster could take Netflix’s global perspective on F1, and few events can attract such diverse viewership. It’s truly a perfect fit, one impossible to conceive even ten years ago.
Formula 1 racing is truly a global phenomenon, with races everywhere from Australia to Azerbaijan and Brazil to Bahrain. Although the car manufacturers (“constructors”) are overwhelmingly European, most headquartered in England, the drivers come from farther afield: England, the Netherlands, France, Mexico, and Spain are represented. As a result, Netflix gets content that plays well in much of the globe and F1 gets exposure for its member teams. Although it’s no surprise that some drivers have emerged as media stars (Daniel Ricciardo, an Aussie of Italian descent, likes the camera and vice versa), several of the team principals have emerged from general anonymity and contribute personality, intense competitiveness, and cut-throat politicking to the mix. Mercedes’ Toto Wolff is an investor who owns a 1/3 stake in the team, stands 6’ 4,” and is worth about $800 million. At Red Bull, Christian Horner has won 4 F1 constructor championships, is married to former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, and lives on a massive English estate. Aston Martin’s Otmar Szafnauer was born in Romania, educated in Detroit, and worked for both Ford and Honda. All of them, and their peers, contribute to the episodes’ realism with relatively frank on-camera talk.
The series has achieved its objective of explaining the sport to new fans, pulling them into the various rivalries and dramas, and creating story lines from pre-shot footage. I can’t imagine how many hours of video mush have been culled down to the ~10 hours per season. Backstory upon backstory was documented (Finn Valtteri Bottas was shot naked in his sauna months before winning a race), and races invariably deliver ample surprises that must be accommodated. Two British motorsports journalists provide exposition when necessary: why is team X filing a technical challenge against team Y, why does driver A hold a grudge against team-owner B, why does driver C have a particularly good record racing in the rain, etc, Although purists grumble that the season isn’t really documented (a standard year includes ~20 races) because each event doesn’t get a recap, crashes like last year’s terrifying fire that Haas driver Romain Grosjean survived through incredible luck and strength of will cannot be ignored. Thus the scripting of the Netflix shoots can only go so far: reality will dictate some percentage of the final product.
What makes for such gripping yet universal television? It’s a long list:
1) Tech
F1 is essentially the overlay of aerospace onto automotive. Exotic materials, massive data telemetry feeds, incomprehensible horsepower:weight ratios, and minuscule competitive differences are underplayed in this viewer’s opinion. The design of a brake duct, of all things, was found (and not found: F1 is nothing if not political) to have created unfair advantage likely measured in tenths of a second per lap. One thing I’d love to see explained better: the steering wheel is a digital control surface, each custom made and costing up to $150,000. Drivers get radio traffic from the spotting/analysis team, but all manipulations of wing surfaces, front-to-rear braking ratios, battery regeneration (the cars have hybrid engines), and engine management are under driver control via dozens of knobs and switches operated mostly by thumbs on the wheel’s front; paddle shifters are on the rear.
2) Tires
For all the cars’ titanium and carbon fiber, tires are incredibly important, though the series doesn’t really teach the point very well. Part of the reason is that all teams use rubber supplied by Pirelli, and only certain compounds and structures (dry slicks vs grooved rain surfaces) are made available on a given race weekend. One thing you’ll never see is a refueling: cars must run an entire race on the initial tank. This adds considerable weight to the freakishly light vehicles, increasing tire wear early in the race, so determining when to run hard, durable-but-slippery tires versus soft, faster ones (you can tell by the color of the print which is which) is a huge aspect of race strategy.
3) Demographics
The current crop of up-and-coming drivers is incredibly young, and most of them grew up together starting in karting. Current points leader Max Verstappen is 23 years old with 124 F1 starts and 47 top-3 finishes to his credit, and five of the top 10 points leaders are under 25.
4) Money
F1 team budgets will be constrained next year amidst a massive set of rules changes governing everything from gearboxes to aerodynamics (a team’s wind tunnel costs can be a material item, for example), but for now, the Mercedes and Ferrari factory teams have budgets estimated at north of $300 million. Just moving the cars, garages, and other structures around the globe is a massive enterprise. The luxury lifestyle associated with such venues as Monte Carlo and Singapore shows up in the Netflix series as well: watches and fashion eyewear are prominent, and the sometimes-too-young-to-drink drivers have insane vehicles for off-track use. (Hilariously, one McLaren driver is shown going to the grocery in an orange hypercar only to find out there is no place to stow 2 bags of food.) In another episode, a young driver is told by his personal manager that endorsing after-shave gel is a more promising avenue than razors, given the weak facial-hair game that he and many other drivers bring. For now, oil-company logos are prominent, having replaced alcohol and tobacco at the forefront. How that changes with vehicle electrification will be fascinating. The IT world has plenty of representation: HP, Dell, SAP, several antivirus firms, Cognizant, Microsoft, and Cisco all show up.
5) Team dynamics
Each of 10 constructor teams has two drivers. Many have noted that the most intense rivalries on the track can come as two drivers in theoretically identical cars fight to keep their place (about 20% of seats turn over annually) in a brutal results-driven business. Teams wrangle with other teams, poaching drivers, protesting tactics or tech, and strategically outspending in some domain or another. On non-factory teams, drivers that come with funding have an edge, so Red Bull gets some help from Sergio Perez’s long business association with Carlos Slim, and Aston Martin driver Lance Stroll happens to be the son of the team owner. Cash-strapped Haas, the only US-based team, has a similar deal with driver Nikita Mazepin, whose father is a Russian oligarch.
6) Adrenalin
The executive producer of Drive to Survive, James Gay-Rees, produced the notable documentary of racing legend Ayrton Senna in 2010 (the same year he also put out “Exit through the Gift Shop”) so he knows how to handle racing sequences. At this level of skill, wheel-to-wheel footage can be gripping, and Drive to Survive offers glimpses of straightaway acceleration, spinouts, and just plain racing that make for great viewing.
It would be nice to have more. At the same time, Gay-Rees is balancing multiple forces:
1) The Netflix series is a partnership with F1, now newly media-savvy, so it’s not going to expose anything too incriminating.
2) The series has to hold viewers in multiple markets across the world, so somebody’s cultural/aesthetic norms are likely to be irritated at every turn.
3) The outcome is not known before the race, so even though it would make for great narrative if Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc were to win in his hometown race at Monte Carlo, that’s not how things worked out. I have no doubt hours of off-season interviews and other footage were shot to set up that story line, so I’ll be watching next spring to see if that’s how the producers frame that episode.
4) The objective was to broaden the sport’s appeal. While that mission has been achieved, longtime fans and some of the subjects grumble about the portrayal of heroes and villains, fixtures and interlopers, winners and stragglers.
In the end, the fact that viewers are sufficiently invested to protest everything from perceived oversights to inaccurate engine sounds shows how effectively the series achieved its multiple objectives. I can’t wait to see what next March brings when season four drops, and I'm now sufficiently engaged to be able to tell you the top 5 points leaders among the F1 drivers. Mission accomplished, indeed.
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