Latest F1 offering from Netflix speeds up race to the bottom of sport documentaries

The hit Netflix series ‘Formula 1: Drive to Survive’ is nothing more than a collection of Instagram stories about race car drivers and team owners packaged as serious TV, writes Colin Sheridan

Drive To Survive provided a stock drawn-out template that could be copied and pasted from sport to sport.

SEASON 6 of the Netflix “sports documentary” Formula 1: Drive to Survive opens just as you might expect it to, even if you’d never watched it before, or had any passing interest in the sport of motorsport.

An aerial of the sun-drenched marina in Monaco, a handsome young man driving a novelty vintage car around the chicanes above the port, the breeze in his hair. 

McLaren's Lando Norris who opened the Netflix “sports documentary” Formula 1: Drive to Surviveby driving a novelty vintage car around the chicanes above Monaco. Photo: David Davies/PA

The man is Lando Norris, driver for McClaren, and the prism through which we look is a window into his privileged world. Except it’s not so much a window as a crack, a slit through which an archer would fire an arrow from a medieval castle.

We stay approximately 47 seconds with Lando — which is arguably 40 seconds too long — before being whisked off to the slopes of Whistler in Canada where we find another playboy driver, Lance Stroll, shredding the powder with his crew.

“Sugar for the soul,” Lance tells us, and we’ve no time to doubt him. He barely has time to chug his first Molson with his buds Chippy and Scruff before we are off again, this time back to the South of France.

Another young stud, another yacht full of hangers-on, this time it’s Pierre Gasly, driver with a team called Alpine, who I presume are the same guys who make the air fresheners for cars.

Aston Martin's Lance Stroll at the Bahrain Grand Prix in February. Another playboy driver in the Netflix documentary. Photo: David Davies/PA

In the minute we spend with Pierre, we watch him cannonball off his deck into the Med before skipping across the border to Italy for a boozy lunch.

“It’s crazy,” he says, and he’s right, because I’ve checked the average temperature for January in the Cote d’Azur and it’s roughly 14 degrees Celsius.

The water temperature is a little lower. I don’t expect a Pulitzer for that piece of investigative journalism, but it’s indicative of what Drive to Survive and Netflix — with their emergence as a lead player in sports documentary market — are trying to sell us; minute-long vignettes of opulence set to the type of forgettable music you’d expect to hear on Turkish Airlines flight safety videos.

This isn’t a sports documentary, but a collection of Instagram stories about race car drivers and team owners packaged as serious television. I hadn’t watched the first five seasons and felt like taking a trip to Loch Derg to atone for my impure thoughts after watching the sixth.

I love escapism as much as the next daydreaming fool, but real escape comes with the act of getting lost in something. In Drive to Survive, you always know where you’re going, which is probably just as well as it’s a show about driving cars at 220mph.

When it dropped onto Netflix’s home screen in March 2023, Formula 1: Drive to Survive promised behind-the-scenes access to the strange and rarefied world of the elite motorsport — where teams are owned by either Logan Roy types, or Kendall Roy types, tycoons who take risks, but (you’ve guessed it) take no shit.

Red Bull Racing team principle Christian Horner.

Then there are the team managers: highly motivated and compulsively stressed middlemen, permanently dehydrated it seems by the tautness of their skin, and perennially on the verge of a shafting from either a superstar driver or their oligarch boss. 

And then we have the drivers: 20 souped-up car jockeys with unplaceable accents and personalities downloaded from the latest AI program. Barely a relatable human amongst them.

It was a smash hit, revealing the sport to an American audience that — like the rest of us — had a lot of time on its hands to watch the show during the covid pandemic. With no Succession to binge on, Formula 1 became the show — not quite the sport — that everybody loved to love.

One by-product of the new-found popularity was the sudden numbers of women watching. In November 2022, Formula One CEO Stefano Domenicali said that approximately 40% of global F1 fans are now female, up 8% from 2017.

Why? Forget my quibbles with the premise of the show. I’d watch anything, including two seasons of Dubai bling — albeit under soft duress — so I’m not exactly Barry Norman when it comes to Netflix.

Johnny Sexton speaking to Netflix for their 'Six Nations: Full Contact' series. Picture: Netflix

I love sports, and love a peak behind the curtain, I’m just at a bit of a loss to understand how this production has managed to — by some F1 insiders reckoning — ‘save’ a sport, a sport that ought to offend every contemporary, liberal sensibility, celebrating (as it does) sports-washing autocracies, playboy billionaires, toxic fumes, and rampant male aggression.

Maybe I’ve just answered my own question. Having struggled through Season 6, I did my due diligence and went back to the very beginning to hopefully discover the hook.

IT IS true that, upon review, there is a certain allure to watching these megalomaniacs joust with each other in the pitlanes and boardrooms, and that the bitchiness that Netflix so forcibly tries to amplify is mildly entertaining. 

It helps, too, that the drivers especially all look like male models. The aesthetics of the show are off the Richter scale. It’s clear, however, that the show has little or no soul.

One can only guess that the success of Drive to Survive was instrumental in Netflix broadening its sporting canon to include tennis, rugby, golf, and professional cycling. The golf entry Full Swing was a perfect example of the limitations of its tried and tested format.

Netflix’s cameras were rolling the entire time during the PGA Tour-LIV golf split. It was the most dramatic season in the game’s history, yet the best Netflix could produce in its eight-episode first season was a distracted Rory McIlroy and a patently bored Brooks Koepka. Not exactly the Zapruder tapes.

As is often the case, the less saturated the sport is with money, the more authentic the viewing experience. A prime example is Tour de France: Unchained. The format of that show is no less contrived, but given the brutishness of the endeavour, you feel you’ve climbed Mount Ventoux after watching one episode.

The Last Dance inspired a raft of legacy-affirming duplicates.

One year after Drive to Survive debuted, Michael Jordan’s ode-to-self The Last Dance dropped, and a new genre of sports documentary was instantly popularised.

Perhaps it was the Everest of the subject matter, perhaps the dreadful isolation we found ourselves in, but The Last Dance became an instant classic. That Jordan had control over the finished project mattered less, then, as we, the viewer was unused to the contrived concept. 

So unfamiliar with it, it had to be pointed out to us again and again in reviews and commentary. What innocent times. 

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The Last Dance undoubtedly gave permission to superstar athletes and coaches to create documentaries and podcasts that share their version of the truth. It is a curveball to the notion of objective journalism, narrative building, and image rehabilitation and something we can only expect more of in the future.

Four years on from Jordan’s (admittedly intriguing) act of self-love we have had to become more forgiving of the bigger the star, the more self-serving the televisual eulogy. David Beckham’s recent offering, Beckham, was so in love with itself (and specifically its principal celebrity), it understated his brilliance as an actual footballer.

It’s all a far cry from Gay Talese tracking Joe DiMaggio for weeks and weeks for an Esquire profile, never interviewing him, and producing some of the most profound creative non-fiction of the 20th century.

SIMILARLY, George Plimpton went full gonzo as a back-up quarterback for the NFL franchise in Detroit in his book Paper Lion. Off the page, there are some brilliant recent examples of documentaries for which obsessing over creative control was never an issue.

A still from Beckham which was so in love with itself (and specifically its principal celebrity), it understated Beckham's brilliance as an actual footballer. Picture: Netflix

How spoiled we all were with the Bill Simmons’ ESPN brainchild, the magnificent 30for30 series. Buried deep, too, in the forgotten corners of the Netflix library, you’ll find The Battered Bastards of Baseball about a defunct minor league baseball team in Portland, Oregon. There may be no yachts docking in St Tropez, but at least there are real, relatable people.

Whatever my misgivings about the Netflxification of sport, there is no evidence to suggest the streamer is moving away from the genre. Rather, it’s leaning in.

Last month, the company completed a 10-year deal with WWE to stream its flagship weekly wrestling show, Raw, beginning in January 2025, and building massively upon Netflix’s modest steps in live sports to date, such as the in-house golf tournament The Netflix Cup and the similar tennis tournament The Netflix Slam.

Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton during the first practice session ahead of the Bahrain Grand Prix this week. Blink and you'll miss it. Photo: David Davies/PA

Valued at more than $5bn, the WWE-Netflix agreement will not only see the streamer show Raw in the US but also pick up international rights for other major WWE properties, such as SmackDown, WrestleMania, SummerSlam, and Royal Rumble.

In the meantime, you can immerse yourself in the barely believable world of Daniel Riccardo and Nyck de Vries on Drive to Survive. Immerse is the wrong word. Glimpse perhaps, for however long Netflix lets you. That champagne won’t drink itself.