Near the beginning of F1, veteran racer Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) is forced to endure a brief meet-and-greet with Peter Banning, a cardboard-stereotype corporate villain played with relish by English stage veteran Tobias Menzies. “I’ve caught up on all the Drive To Survive episodes,” Banning says, and the audience is meant to understand that he is therefore not an authentic fan of the sport. However, there’s no small amount of irony to this because without Drive to Survive, there would be absolutely zero case to make a $300 million movie about auto racing. Want a little more irony? Here it is: F1, for all its earnest effort, is quite a bit less entertaining than the nonfiction Netflix show that built its audience.
A better, and fairer, comparison would be with Sylvester Stallone’s 2001 box-office dud Driven, mainly because the two films’ plots are uncomfortably similar. The absurd and impossible scenario of bringing a 50-something-year-old driver out of retirement to work with a headstrong and arrogant rookie? Check. A nearly effortless march up the team standings? Of course. A business manager whose advice nearly kills the rookie’s career? Yes! A final race in which the old racer sacrifices his chances for the young one, then enters a state of grace in which the world goes silent and he can finally drive the way he always knew he could? Why not? F1 is so dependent on Stallone’s reviled effort that it makes The Magnificent Seven look like a clean-sheet project.
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However, to be fair, there are only so many ways to script a racing movie, and that’s doubly true when you have a leading actor eight years older than Jos Verstappen, known to Formula One fans nowadays as the current world champion’s father. And plot isn’t really the point here anyway. You go to see F1 because you want even more immersion into the sport than you can get from the already best-of-breed media surrounding it in real life. This movie will stand or fall based on whether it can deliver the equivalent of a $100,000 VIP seat for the price of a theater seat.
Certainly, the stars have aligned to make such a thing possible. Lewis Hamilton, the sport’s winningest driver, is a producer on the film and the primary antagonist in its final scenes. Where Driven relied on bad CGI and green screens, F1 had the advantage of being embedded in a full Formula One season. When you see the actors standing next to Formula One drivers during the national anthem or interacting with them in the paddock, that’s all real footage from actual races.
The team cars are Formula Two racers expertly modified to resemble the real Formula One cars. However, die-hard fans will notice they are visibly smaller than the “competition” on track. The actors were trained to drive and, more importantly, behave like real Formula One drivers do in the cockpit. My wife, an SCCA road-racing champion in her own right, was unable to restrain herself in the theater from chirping “Brad is looking into the corner correctly!” during an early scene.
So many of the “beats” are correct and charming. The now-retired Kevin Magnussen, Formula One’s closest equivalent to a hockey goon during his career, damages Sonny’s car in the first few laps of his first race. Formula One’s obsession with simulators is amply illustrated. The real-life McLaren Technology Center is the ultrafuturistic headquarters of the “APX GP” team. Sonny has to read a whole manual on his car’s steering wheel. An unpleasant injury to rookie driver Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris) echoes a far more unpleasant one endured by Haas driver Romain Grosjean. (Real-life footage of that crash is more violent and more affecting than the film depicts.) The wristwatch obsession that has permeated Formula One in the past two decades is lovingly documented with long shots of Sonny’s IWC Ingenieur; since the film was released, the used-market price of that item has soared from $9,000 to nearly $30,000.
Yet, despite the microscopic attention to authentic details, F1 feels strangely distant from the world it is meant to depict. Call it the “uncanny valley” effect. Normally, that phrase refers to the subtle differences that make computer-generated footage of human expressions a bit disturbing, but here, it’s a side effect of Netflix viewers watching seven seasons of HD-quality video footage that is essentially identical to what F1 offers, but of the real thing.
The first Formula One film, 1967’s Grand Prix, was a mold-breaker because it was the first attempt to provide in-car footage of the world’s premier motorsport. Prior to that, you either watched the race from the stands or not at all. It was remarkable to see what the drivers actually experienced. However, in 2025, Formula One offers full surround video of every driver and every venue in quality that lags the special cameras created for the F1 movie, but not by much. So all you really notice are the tiny little disparities: an extra car improbably inserted into existing race footage; laws of physics slightly broken by CGI while depicting the sort of incidents that most fans have seen live dozens of times; the fact that the actors’ heads move less than they would in a real Formula One car because the levels of g–force sustained in actual competition require years of training and acclimation to endure. Therefore, they had to turn down the wick a bit even when using actual cars and tracks.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of F1 is how little advantage is taken of the filmmakers’ access to the actual sport. Lewis Hamilton was a producer and a consultant on the movie, and he is never at a loss for words. Why is his one important helmet-off moment in the film a brief and silent shot that could have been pulled from random existing footage? Far too many of the scenes in F1 show the drivers sitting in empty rooms that could be on a Hollywood sound stage. Why go to all the races and embed with the teams if this is the final product? At times, F1 has the atmosphere of a guerrilla effort, like those homemade YouTube videos where fans insert themselves into Star Wars after the fact.
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None of this should be taken to imply that F1 is a bad film. Most of the dialogue is expertly written, and when it is not, well, you have Tobias Menzies, Kerry Condon, and Javier Bardem to sell it. Viewers with no Formula One experience will find that nearly everything is explained for them, while veteran fans will enjoy being able to explain to their friends why, exactly, the shape of the panels under the car can make a huge difference. The pacing never lags, and it’s beautifully shot in a visual language that often verges on black-and-white. It’s worth watching, and it’s especially worth watching in the theater, so you can enjoy the ultrahigh-definition camera work.
Really, F1 has just two problems. The first is Days of Thunder, a vastly more entertaining race film that will still have fervent viewership long after this Apple Films effort languishes at the bottom of the statistical barrel. The other is Drive To Survive and the in-season Formula One coverage itself, both of which are more legitimately interesting than a cockamamie story about a “never-was” who magically understands the sport better than anyone else. All of this perhaps explains why Peter Banning, the closest thing F1 has to a nemesis, is so bitter. After binge-watching all those real-life-and-death struggles, how can you really care about the make-believe ones?
Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver, a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines, and writer of the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.