Sports fans love an underdog story. But what happens when the sport itself becomes the underdog? That was the position that Formula One found itself in the late 2010s, as the motor sport – which had been running for nearly 70 years – fell towards the back of the pack.
Though still a global draw, Formula One desperately needed a shot in the arm. It was having difficulty attracting new fans, resulting in record low ticket sales and declining television ratings.
“It was being described, somewhat unfairly, as being a bit male, pale and stale back then,” James Gay-Rees tells The National. The Academy Award-winning film producer was commissioned to make a behind-the-scenes F1 docuseries knew he had to get up to speed. “It just wasn't very cool. It had been in the past, but it wasn't going through one of its more sexy cycles, for want of a better expression.”
Gay-Rees began his production career with the Oscar-nominated Banksy film Exit Through the Gift Shop and followed that up with Bafta-winning Senna, which told the story of one of F1’s most popular champions, both in 2010. The latter film was part of the reason F1 executive Sean Bratches commissioned Gay-Rees to make Formula 1: Drive to Survive for Netflix.
“He just saw much earlier than anybody else what was needed,” says Gay-Rees, the show’s co-executive producer. “It was very prescient of him. Because of that, we were the first to this idea.”
Seven seasons in, the show is still growing across sport and broader culture. Even the highly anticipated Brad Pitt-starring F1, which was partially filmed in Abu Dhabi, would probably not exist without the docuseries.
“Like a lot of people during Covid, I found this great television show called Drive to Survive,” says F1 director, Joseph Kosinski. “I found that it's an incredibly unique sport in that your teammate is also your, in many ways, greatest competition. That makes for a great drama. That's where it started. Luckily for me, I had a contact in Formula One I could reach out to.”
Formula One itself is more popular than ever due to what many have called the “Netflix effect”. The 2024 season attracted a record-breaking 6.5 million fans to grands prix around the globe. Ahead of the new Formula One season, which begins this weekend in Australia, sponsorships are projected to hit $2.9 billion, according to Ampere Analysis. That represents a 128 per cent increase from 2021.
In the US, which was one of the most difficult markets for the sport, there has been a massive spike in attendance and viewership. In 2022, TV ratings averaged 1.2 million. That was more than double the average recorded in 2018, the year before Drive to Survive premiered.
According to a poll by Morning Consult in March 2022, 53 per cent of adult fans in the US cited Drive to Survive as the reason they became regular viewers.
There has also been a huge growth in the number of young female fans. Before Drive to Survive, women made up 20 per cent of fans, according to F1 Academy. By the end of 2024, it had risen to 41 per cent, with the 16-24 demographic growing fastest.
For Gay-Rees, the reasons seem obvious in retrospect. “You’ve got sexy young men driving sports cars and risking their lives. I mean, it's a pretty basic sort of equation for success. My 18-year-old daughter didn't even know how to spell Formula One two years ago. Now, she's obsessed. It’s brilliant,” he says.
But across demographics, the Netflix show has democratised a sport that was previously hard for outsiders to grapple with. For example, he mentions how football is a simple game: the winning team is the one scoring the most goals.
“Formula One is about things like tyre degradation. And once you get into it, the strategy surrounding that becomes unbelievably compelling, but if you turn on the TV and people are just talking about tires, you’re going to turn it off,” Gay-Rees says.
Looking back at that first season, Gay-Rees is still surprised that the show gained so much popularity, considering that some of the top teams refused to take part. Ferrari and Mercedes didn't participate.
As it turns out, that may be partly why it was so compelling. “I loved how the first season of the show focused on the last-place teams,” says F1 director Kosinski. “It was the underdogs, rather than Ferrari and Mercedes. I thought that there was an interesting story to be told about an underdog team not trying to win the championship, just trying to win one race. That’s where the idea for our film started.”
That seems to be the secret to the success of Drive to Survive. The sport is merely its McGuffin. It’s the incredibly focused drama of it all – made up of 10 teams and 20 drivers who are constantly at each other’s throats – even if they’re ostensibly on the same side.
“Formula One is an extremely bitchy world,” says Gay Rees. “That’s why it’s such a great place to make a show. There are heroes and villains. People are out to win at any price and will do whatever it takes.
“It’s a very fertile precinct in which to make a series because it's so contained. The characters don't change. It's dangerous and political and scandalous and gossipy. Those are the key ingredients.”
He says this is what surprises most people as they figured the sport would just be cars going around a boring track with not much else happening. “There’s more than meets the eye, and that’s what we have to find,” he adds.
Finding those stories is never easy – and even after seven years, it still hasn’t got easier, according to Gay-Rees. For one, they’re condensing ten months of activity into 10 episodes, averaging a month per 40-minute instalment.
That means the documentary team need to take artistic license to capture an overall narrative in a short amount of time – something that has remained controversial with fans who feel that the reality of the situation has been doctored as a result.
“You have to get the essence of what you’re trying to get across. It becomes an interpretation of what happened, but our ambition is always to tell an authentic story,” says Gay-Rees.
In addition, because the series is made in partnership with Formula One, there is a review process whereby the organisation itself as well as participating teams and drivers must sign off on the show. If it didn’t reflect reality as they saw it, it wouldn’t air.
“None of these people has editorial control, so you have to have checks and balances to make sure it’s an accurate representation as far as they understand it. With Formula One, we’ve been doing it for years now, so there’s a pretty good understanding of how the other side rolls and they don’t abuse that. And the teams have enough issues on their plate, be it not winning enough races or internal issues, that we end up being the least of their problems,” says Gay-Rees.
“Some people are more relaxed and comfortable than others. Obviously, some people are very natural. Some people find it uncomfortable, but most of them realise that it's become a necessary evil.”
In Gay-Rees’s view, season seven – which released March 7 on Netflix – features some of the best access he and his team have ever had on Drive to Survive.
“I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it. We’ve developed those relationships and that trust over the years, and it keeps evolving. That’s why I still enjoy it,” says Gay-Rees. “These are elite athletes who are all suffering, who all have problems in their lives. They’re not all there for a ton of money: they’re there for different reasons, with different hopes and dreams. And they have got really honest with us about what’s really going on with them.”
As Drive to Survive’s success continues, other sports have taken notice, hoping to harness a similar blueprint towards greater success. Gay-Rees’s production company has even been involved in a number of them, including Sprint, a series about sprinting made in conjunction with World Athletics; Full Swing, a golf series produced alongside the PGA Tour; and Break Point, a docuseries about the world of tennis, also for Netflix.
Each has been successful, but none have reached the heights of Drive to Survive – with the tennis series, in particular, a disappointment for Gay-Rees. “I thought the show was really good, but it didn’t quite connect with people in the same way. And that’s fine, you can’t nail it every single time,” he says.
In fact, Drive to Survive has become such definitive sports storytelling, some are starting to directly rebel against it, including Vincente Amorim, the director and showrunner of Netflix’s 2024 drama series Senna, released in November.
“It’s so pervasive in today’s culture that we were careful not to emulate its language because it’s very specific in a good way. It’s immersive, like a video game. But I wanted this series to have grit, passion, heat and the smell of burning rubber– the kind of feeling you can’t find in Drive to Survive,” says Amorim.
Senna, however, received negative reviews from critics, despite reaching the global top 10 on the platform. For better or for worse, this is Drive to Survive’s landscape, and across both sport and entertainment, things will likely never be the same.
“Everybody’s playing catch-up to some extent with Drive to Survive,” says Gay-Rees. “It’s the way of the world now. And for people who aren’t fans, I would say, look – the train has left the station.”
Formula 1: Drive to Survive season seven is now streaming on Netflix
