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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