There’s a particularly painful scene in the new season in which Jost Capito, the sprightly German boss of Williams Racing-a legendarily dominant team that has fallen on hard times and dropped to dead last in the standings-explains the logistical humiliation of being last. “Drive to Survive” portrays the sport as a Darwinist battle in which a driver is only as good as his last race and contracts can dry up in the blink of an eye. And the struggle for eighth or ninth place is often just as high-stakes as the pursuit of a World Championship. The glory-seeking pursuits of the individual drivers are in constant battle with the collective efforts of the team this often results in fireworks on the racetrack. This means that each driver’s greatest competition is often his teammate, the only person on the same mechanical playing field. Each team’s budget and resources vary wildly depending on how much sponsorship it can generate the more money, the faster the car, generally speaking. The sport has ten teams of car manufacturers, each with two drivers. The racing world is rife with idiosyncrasies that seem almost as if they were created to drum up controversy. race has been added to the lineup for 2022, taking place in Miami this summer.Īnyone who watches “Drive to Survive”-even those with no prior interest in motorsport, which is how I described myself until recently-will understand immediately why Formula 1 is a worthy subject. And it’s working: Formula 1 viewership has increased nearly fifty per cent worldwide since the show débuted, and a second U.S. Conceived of and pitched to Netflix by Formula 1’s parent company in an effort to evolve the league’s digital footprint, the series is a potent mix of propaganda and high drama that affirms the power of the content-industrial complex and the promise of access journalism. The show takes the ambition and the grandeur of marquee sports documentaries and scales them down to bingeable reality-TV size. (He’s described by a rival team boss as “a bit like a Jack Russell terrier who will snap at your heels.”) “The drivers have an almost fighter-pilot-like mentality,” Horner tells the camera.Įach season of “Drive to Survive”-the fourth arrives on Netflix this week-captures the previous racing year’s major moments and controversies, documenting the development of the Formula 1 circuit almost in real time. Horner, a game participant in the show, is portrayed as a weasel constantly maneuvering to gain favor with the sport’s governing body. “Formula 1 is the ultimate competition: you’ve got drama, competitiveness, high stakes, politics,” Christian Horner, a steely Brit married to Spice Girl Geri Halliwell and the team boss of Red Bull, says. International playboys, Machiavellian billionaires, humble heroes, racing-world royalty, overachieving underdogs, aging has-beens, hotheaded bullies: “Drive to Survive” has them all. For the last three years, Netflix has masterfully chronicled the grand melodramas and intricate microdynamics of Formula 1 (which is often characterized as a travelling circus) in a tight, zippy series called “Drive to Survive,” a show that largely overlooks the complex and fiercely guarded technological aspects of the sport in favor of its delicious and diverse buffet of big personalities. It was not the sensory effect of the cars that accomplished such a mission, but reality television. Ten years later, Hamilton is a global superstar with seven world championships under his belt-and six wins in Austin-but Formula 1 is only just beginning to persuade America’s stubborn sports-watching audience. “Once you hear it and see it, feel the noise-then maybe they’ll turn out for a race.” ![]() Hamilton, who is the only Black person to have ever raced in Formula 1, offered the reporter a simple answer: “It’s really a matter of getting the car in front of people,” he said. ![]() Nascar was America’s motorsport of choice Formula 1 was the debonair European stepsibling whose competitions were held in places such as Azerbaijan and Monaco, and whose races were referred to as Grands Prix. The league was preparing to bring a race to America for the first time in five years, to Austin, Texas, but there was the lingering question of whether anybody would care. In 2012, a GQ reporter asked the British race-car driver Lewis Hamilton what it would take for Formula 1 to catch on in the United States.
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