Televise to survive

But what Netflix figured out with its high-contrast, high-speed, hit documentary series Formula 1: Drive to Survive is that the bizarre cast of billionaire owners, ruthless managers, and drivers who range from charismatic to sociopathic can make what happens off the track as interesting as what happens in the driver’s seat. The fourth season of Drive to Survive premiered last month.

I first started watching in late spring 2020, perhaps the darkest period in the history of American sports. Desperate for something, anything, to scratch the sporting itch and cooped up in my Brooklyn apartment while riots, fireworks, and COVID-19 took over New York, I decided to watch a show about jockey-sized European men racing around the world’s tax havens. And it worked. Itch satisfied.

As a non-F1 fan, I have no idea if this show would be interesting to F1 diehards. Some complaints about the show from those hardcore fans are common to this style of documentary: Audio is sometimes edited out of place for dramatic effect, and some scenes are staged. (Does the Red Bull manager Christian Horner always commute to work with his Spice Girl wife, Geri Halliwell, via helicopter? One might be led to believe that he does.) And I’m sure new, halfhearted fans like myself are annoying to the longtime faithful. But what I can say is that having not followed F1 before, the show made years-old racing seasons seem as compelling as if I were following the results in real time, all while providing as much human drama as a good 30 for 30 or maybe Real Housewives.

The first season focused on the freak show of bottom-tier teams. This wasn’t entirely by choice: With the exception of Red Bull, no competitive team agreed to participate. But those shows succeeded on the back of legal battles, business swindles, and colorful swearing.

An example: Billionaire liquor magnate Vijay Mallya, the owner of the Force India team, faced extradition from the United Kingdom to India on a $1.2 billion loan default and money laundering charge. The team was forced into administration by a British court and then bought by Canadian fashion export billionaire Lawrence Stroll, who also insisted that his son Lance drive for the team. While Lance has been consistently bad on the track, Stroll père parlayed ownership of Force India into being executive chairman of Aston Martin, after which the F1 team is now branded.

Season two began with the debacle of Haas Racing’s brief sponsorship by Rich Energy, an energy drink company whose product nobody could find and whose Rasputin-looking CEO didn’t seem to have any actual money, except maybe from a Zimbabwean tobacco plantation. The whole incident was reported and summarized well by Jalopnik:

Indeed. (Though Jalopnik’s editorial position, I think, is that this is all a bad thing.)

What has finally clicked into place in season four is that for the first time in a long time the racing is as exciting as the off-track theatrics. Going into the last race of the 2021 season in Abu Dhabi, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and Mercedes’s Lewis Hamilton were exactly tied by points for the driver’s championship at 369.5 points each. No season has had so competitive a finish in years. That a report on the race’s outcome criticized the managers of Mercedes and Red Bull for unnecessarily badgering the officials seems to validate Drive to Survive’s take on the sport as a whole, centered as much on personalities as cornering speeds.

While Netflix doesn’t release any meaningful viewer data about any of its shows, the impression seems to be that Drive to Survive has become a critical product to bring new fans to F1. The show is largely given credit for the 40%-50% increases in U.S. viewership that F1 has experienced since 2019. Since season two, every team has participated, although some more begrudgingly than others: Scuderia Ferrari’s appearances are few and far between compared with the show’s mainstays of Haas, Red Bull, and Mercedes. With Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc leading the driver’s standings so far in the 2022 season, season five may once again have to settle for having greater access to the also-rans.

But I will be just as interested in the behind-the-scenes version of how Haas fired driver Nikita Mazepin after he and his father, a Russian oligarch, were sanctioned by the European Union following the invasion of Ukraine. As with other tightly controlled sports documentaries such as The Last Dance, we may be getting a look behind the curtain, but it’s also clear that the candid moments are carefully curated. While the Mazepin sanctioning and firing seem sure to be included, will the ballistic missile attacks in Jeddah just two days before the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix receive full coverage? Or is that too sensitive a subject for both Netflix and F1, given how much money both companies hope to make in the kingdom in the long term?

That also raises questions about how successful the Drive to Survive model will be when applied to other sports. Netflix and the production company behind Drive to Survive have agreed to make similar shows covering the PGA and men’s and women’s tennis. HBO’s Hard Knocks In Season: The Indianapolis Colts was a step in a similar direction.

From a purely business perspective, it’s hard to see these shows having a similar effect. Football, golf, and tennis are all already popular in the United States, while F1 viewership had been anemic. But I’m mostly skeptical about them as a reality TV product. There are no crashes in golf, pace Tiger Woods. And as much as I love a Pimm’s Cup, I just don’t think Wimbledon quite has the insane superyacht/supercar vibe as race week at Monaco.

As American sports have returned to something resembling normalcy, I am no longer desperate for new competition and am just as unlikely to get up to watch a European Grand Prix at 9 on a Sunday morning as ever. But Formula 1: Drive to Survive will fulfill your need for speed.

Andrew Bernard is a former staff writer at the American Interest and a former Middle East security analyst at Control Risks-International SOS.