In an exclusive excerpt from The Formula, the inside story of how the hit Netflix series forever changed Formula 1 and gave the sport a long-awaited foothold in America.
By Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg
Before Liberty Media bought Formula 1 in 2017, the experience of watching a race often came down to listening to middle-aged men debating how quickly some rubber was falling apart. Anyone expecting displays of pure speed often tuned in to hear discussions over arcane rules instead.
Sean Bratches, installed by Liberty as the series’ commercial czar, had an idea to change all that: F1 was going to commission a 10-part, fly-on-the-wall reality series about itself, eventually dubbed Drive to Survive for Netflix.
The tricky part about pulling back the curtain was that the very things that make Formula 1 appealing to traditional fans are inherently difficult to capture on film. The chess match around pit stops and race strategy is incomprehensible to casual viewers. The course of entire seasons is determined in highly technical meetings that take place in factories in the middle of the British winter. Even the drivers spend the whole time with their Hollywood looks obscured by clunky helmets.
But what even the producers hadn’t realized was that, behind the veneer of corporate sponsorship and robotic good boys who are born to sell watches, F1 drivers and team principals were actually world-champion shit-talkers and prima donnas. At this point, they understood that they weren’t making a straight documentary or reportage. It couldn’t be Formula 1 meets 60 Minutes.
This was The Real Housewives of Monte Carlo.
“Sport is the original reality television,” Bratches says.
The individuals who grasped this instinctively became the stars of the show right away. Red Bull team principal Christian Horner, previously just another Brit on the pit wall, revealed himself to be one of the most viciously cutting characters on television since Simon Cowell, embracing his role as a heel by needling his rivals. And Daniel Ricciardo, the permanently shirtless Australian driver, almost never won races but drew in hordes of new fans with his million-dollar smile and goofball nature.
Fans who flipped from on-demand Netflix soap opera to live F1 racing soon found that the broadcasts were changing before their very eyes. What had been quite old-school racing programs, focused on track position and the analysis of a handful of experts, were soon flooded with new access and data.
The man in charge of that project was a gregarious Australian acolyte of Rupert Murdoch who’d spent 30 years in the business of making sports look good on TV. His name was David Hill. He liked to joke that he’d saved Kerry Packer’s ass when he revolutionized cricket for television in Australia in the 1970s, saved Rupert’s ass when he transformed the English Premier League on British television in the early 1990s, and then saved Rupert’s ass for a second time when Fox acquired NFL rights in America in 1993. Now he was going to do the same for Formula 1.
Hill demanded more cameras on the circuits and on the paddock. Believing that sound design elicited more visceral reactions than any picture ever could, he also ordered all the mics turned way up for the first few laps of a race, a little trick he’d developed producing Nascar for Fox. Only if fans heard the noise of the start could they feel the rumble of 20 Formula 1 cars tearing into the first corner. And most important, Hill wanted live timing and the race order onscreen at all times so that anyone tuning in could understand what in the world was going on.
Hill even gave the whole show a new soundtrack. For decades, the theme most closely associated with Formula 1 was a lick around three minutes into “The Chain,” a 1977 Fleetwood Mac song. Hill thought that was music for dads. New fans needed the big stirring sounds of summer blockbusters and high-end video games. So he hired a composer named Brian Tyler, who had scored one of the Fast and Furious films and a game in the Assassin’s Creed franchise. The vibe, Hill instructed him, needed to be “impending doom.”
Soon, the entire feel of watching a Grand Prix was changing. Underpinning all of it was a fundamental shift in focus that F1 had never really considered in its first 67 years of existence. And it came down to telling production crews what was really important here.
“Their job had been to follow cars around tracks,” Hill says. “But the drivers are the stars, not the cars.”
Liberty soon had proof that those instincts had been correct.
In 2017, the situation was so grim for F1’s prospects as a viable television entity that when Liberty struck a deal for the races to be carried on ESPN, it gave away the rights for free. The sport was that desperate for a U.S. foothold. Over the course of the following year, its first season airing on the network, the sport averaged 554,000 viewers a race.
When the third season of Drive to Survive, the world’s glitziest infomercial, was released in early 2021, the show immediately went to the top of the Netflix global charts. ESPN’s ratings for Grands Prix surged right behind it. Races that season averaged 949,000 viewers, up 56% from the previous year. In 2022, the number was 1.21 million.
It was precisely the validation Liberty needed to pursue its hell-for-leather push into the U.S. market, culminating in 2023’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
"The Formula" by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg.
Mariner BooksF1 pulled every available lever to make sure that the world could fully appreciate its Las Vegas handiwork. A week before the event, Hill boarded a flight from Los Angeles and set about designing the race for TV. He had already brought in an American Idol producer to create a Wednesday night opening ceremony that featured a dazzling mix of lasers, drones and Kylie Minogue. His next mission was to use the luminescent glow of the Strip to create the most spectacular backdrop the sport had ever seen. But everything that made the Strip a promoter’s dream also made it a TV producer’s nightmare. With grandstands and tall steel fences installed on either side of the roadway to protect drivers and fans, Hill quickly realized that any shot from the onboard cameras wouldn’t look anything like a postcard from Sin City.
“It’s like racing in a cage,” he grumbled.
No expense was spared to address this issue. Hill needed more aerial shots from more helicopters taking more daring swoops over the course. At any given moment during the race, half a dozen choppers seemed to be maneuvering through the night sky over the racetrack. Even Hill, who’d been in this business for more than four decades and had to be roused out of retirement to be there, thought this was pretty special.
One guy wasn’t quite so excited about being there. Unfortunately, it was Formula 1’s three-time world champion Max Verstappen. As he lowered himself into his Red Bull RB19, wearing a white, Elvis-inspired jumpsuit, he didn’t feel like an F1 legend taking a bold step to promote the sport of his life. He felt like a clown in the middle of a circus.
By all rights, Verstappen should be the face of F1’s Drive to Survive era. The irony was that no one in Formula 1 felt more conflicted about the sport’s transformation under Liberty. Throughout the showpiece in Las Vegas, Verstappen took every opportunity to openly hate on F1’s shiny new product. He didn’t like the track, he didn’t like the start time, and he really, really didn’t like the circus.
“Ninety-nine percent entertainment,” he said, “one percent racing.”
Verstappen spoke for an entire constituency of fans who felt that their sport had spun off course, becoming less about motor racing and more of a cookie-cutter exercise in corporate branding. The rough edges that they loved—politically incorrect monomaniacs like Enzo Ferrari and Bernie Ecclestone, genuine hatred between drivers, a winking disregard for the rules and the faint air of true peril—had all been smoothed over. Change had come so quickly that many of the stops on the schedule now felt interchangeable.
Six years into Liberty’s experiment, no one could say for sure what had gone into the magic sauce that put Formula 1 among the great success stories of modern sports. Was F1’s rebirth the result of a carefully plotted strategic road map drawn by wily forecasters of the new media landscape? Or was it really what Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff had suggested might be a “lucky punch”? These were questions that no one in Vegas on that November weekend had time to consider, at least not while the engines roared under the neon lights.
Adapted from The Formula: How Rogues, Geniuses, and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World’s Fastest-Growing Sport by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg. Copyright © 2024 by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg. Reprinted by permission of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.