Over the past few months, with the Brad Pitt movie F1 approaching and then overtaking the box office — it stunningly is hitting $100 million in just its second weekend of release — those of us who are longtime fans of the sport have sought to explain the appeal to American friends who are F1-skeptical. What is it that makes you so enthused, they ask. Is it the exotic locales? The death-defying speeds? The high-end branding? The gear fetishization?
All of these factors compel a little bit, of course. But the real secret to why Formula One fans devour the sport, as we will again when the British GP at Silverton motors off on Sunday, is much sneakier: it’s reality television.
I don’t mean that in the more fanciful sense of “it has drama the way reality television has drama.” Or, “it’s unscripted in the way reality television is (pretends to be) unscripted.” I mean that in a far more literal way. All the conventions, all the conceits, that makes us watch Real Housewives or Love Is Blind or The Traitors are done on the perpetual multi-screen drama that is F1.
The 24 Grand Prixes that happen around the world every couple weeks are the new episodes, of course, but the true drama happens before and after races, when various drivers and team principals (they’re the coaches) offer provocative disses about other teams, try to sign other players from other teams, explaining why they weren’t trying to send the other teams into a wall at 220 m.p.h. Such off-field drama is the kind of thing that doesn’t happen in other sports — or if it does, it happens as a one-off, not a regular event and certainly not as a main selling point.
Really, the best analogy I can come up with is wrestling, with all its subplots and subtexts that exist outside the ring. Of course, that is all plotted out. F1 offers all the drama of Gunther and Sami Zayn going at it, except no one here is handing anyone any scripts.
Consider the ongoing saga between Christian Horner, team principal at Red Bull, and various other team principals, like Mercedes’ Toto Wolff and McLaren’s Zak Brown.
Horner doesn’t much like Brown. You know this because Horner has called Brown a “prick.” Wolff doesn’t like Horner, which you know because Wolff called him “petty and childish” after Horner filed an appeal following the Canadian Grand Prix last month, which itself followed Mercedes driver George Russell trying to bait Red Bull’s Max Verstappen into a suspension-worthy on-course penalty, which itself follows Verstappen allegedly threatening to crash into him in Qatar last year, which followed… You get the idea. Bayleigh and Tyler from Big Brother would be proud.
The drama will continue Sunday, as Lewis Hamilton will try to notch his first GP win since he shockingly announced early last season he was leaving Mercedes for Ferrari — a Kristen-sleeping-with-Jax-and-screwing Stassi-level betrayal to some. Hamilton has won more F1 races than any driver in history, and won Silverstone nine times. But he’s starting fifth and is a decided underdog. Hamilton’s drama this season has been with his team principal, who he told to “take a tea break while you’re at it” mid-race when he didn’t get an answer quickly enough on whether the principal would order his teammate Charles LeClerc to let him pass.
(How many F1 fans there are in the U.S. is hard to know, but the number is growing. Some three million people watched last year’s Miami Grand Prix, the most ever Americans who turned in. Formula One, for what it’s worth, counts 45 million Americans as its “fanbase,” and says half of them began tuning in within the last five yearss. Netflix’s pandemic-era hit. Drive to Survive of course played a big role, but its numbers have been dropping. The movie hopes to turbocharge them.)
Anyone who’s binged Drive to Survive quickly gets this. The show accentuates tons of reality-television moments, between and within teams. Watch in season one as Horner (the, er, Tamra of the series, as he winkingly admits) fights with leaders of his then-engine supplier Renault. Or in season seven, when McLaren’s Brown asks one of his two drivers, the champion Lando Norris, to slow down and let his teammate Oscar Piastri pass so he can win the Hungarian Grand Prix — a kind of ourtageous request that is like, well I can’t even think of anything else it’s like in any other sport. When the Netflix camera does an abrupt zoom-in on Norris as he’s talking to his friend about the controversy later you can practically feel the 30 Rock Queen of Jordan vibes coming off the screen.
And there are only twenty seats in general and, when you consider about 12 of them don’t have the money to field a top car, only eight slots. Imagine the NBA, but only eight players make the playoffs.
But the truth is for all the ways Netflix has leaned in to (or, as some have critsized, contrived) these moments, they were really just picking up on what was already there. Formula One has always been driven by the pistons of reality television, even before the genre was invented. More than a decade ahead of Kimmi and Alicia fighting on Survivor season two, the all-time F1 legends Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna were fighting in the F1 season, and in a way that would make Jeff Probst feel at home.
“He’s behaving like a coward,” Senna would say about Prost. “It’s become absolutely impossible to work with Ayrton.” They were actually teammates in the late 1980’s with McLaren, which only seemed to make their rivalry worse.
Fans of the 2013 Ron Howard movie Rush know even this O.G. rivalry was preceded by similarly nasty backbiting between the playboy Brit James Hunt and the buttoned-up Austrian Niki Lauda a decade earlier who, even more than Senna and Prost, had wildly different personalities and driving styles.
At least those racers shared a grudging respect. A few years ago, when the young Huntian Brit George Russell ran the Laudian Finn Valtteri Bottas off the road at the Imola Grand Prix in a devastatng crash, the two drivers came together… not to check on each other, but for Bottas to give Russell the finger and Russell to smack him on the helmet. I’m telling you, this is Real Housewives with motor oil.
Like reality television, part of the reason for this combustibility is fitting so many egos in so tight a space. Literally, with some of the narrow passes on various courses (teammates crash into each other on the reg). But also figuratively. F1 teams have exactly two drivers, which means that there is really only room for one top competitor among two egos, the kind of math that makes for mayhem. Nearly all other sports lack such a dynamic, either because they’re team games or lone endeavors like golf.
Also even structurally, F1 teammates are not really that, as while they compete against all the other teams for an end-of-season team championship known as “constructor’s” they’re also competing against each other for podiums and points in the end-of-year “driver’s championship” — and a standing that will bring them back or get them a better offer from someone else. Two egos that have both the same common team goal but also radically different incentive structures too? Mark Burnett couldn’t script it any better.
That’s why F1 the movie is such a Hollywood natural it almost seems crazy it even took this long. The film’s battle between Sonny and and JP — They’re teammates! They’re rivals! They’e both at different times! They’re both at the same time! — isn’t the kind of thing you need Jerry Bruckheimer to gin up. It’s happening to half the Formula One teams as we speak.
Fans have dissected the movie like a pit crew poring over a damaged front wing, and there are indeed some liberties — a 60-year-old ain’t winning any races; these are high-end peak-condition athletes. But if anything, Kosinski and Pitt are playing down the real-like drama.
Thinking about this hidden appeal of F1 I recalled for me the cultural critic Laura Miller’s line that “The Sopranos proved that if you add enough violence men will watch a soap,” only swap in tire-strategy and screaming speeds for violence (but sometimes also violence). Of course, many women also watch F1 — according to its chief executive Stefano Domenicali, they compose 40 percent of the fan base.
The truth is all of us, no matter what gender we are, love a good personality clash. And when it comes with spoiled millionaires acting like jackasses, we like it even more. And when they gun around a track and have the possibility of getting mortally hurt? Well, then what you have is people who stop being polite and start illegally blocking them on the straight.