F1: The Movie

We need to build our car for combat... and much better movie for said fictional car to race in.

Let me preface this massive brain dump by saying I’ve been a massive Formula 1 fan for 15 years. Watching F1: The Movie was an interesting experience because I was wary of over analysing what the movie gets correct and incorrect from a Formula 1 point of view, and what the movie is trying to do within its high-speed framework.

Turns out I was worrying over nothing because this is a movie that’s almost insulting to anyone with a brain cell.

F1: The Movie is just utterly, mind-numbingly stupid. Director Joseph Kosinski and his filmmaking team dumb everything down so much it will trigger those with a fear of heights, and I’m just referring to the actual Formula 1 stuff.

The warning signs were already there 10 seconds into the initial teaser trailer when Sonny Hayes (an utterly bored Brad Pitt) utters the line “Red Bull, Ferrari, Mercedes, Aston, now McLaren, all have us beat on the straights. Our shot is battling in the turns.” That’s. Not. How. Formula. 1. Works.

Sadly, that one line in the trailer sets the tone for F1: The Movie because rest of the remaining 155 minutes and 50 seconds isn’t any better.

Sonny Hayes was touted as one of Formula 1’s biggest prospects in the early 1990s, until a huge shunt pushed him into early retirement. He does race occasionally and is pretty damn good at it despite his age, which the movie and Pitt’s wrinkles likes to keep reminding us. One day, Sonny’s old friend and APXGP F1 team owner Ruben (Javier Bardem, who is the only one enjoying himself) thinks to himself, “I wonder if my buddy Sonny wants to drive one of my F1 cars while also mentoring my young hotshot rookie driver.” That hotshot rookie driver is Joshua “Noah” Pearce (Damson Idris, who does his best with less than nothing), who is clearly an analogue for eight-time* seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton but far less interesting than the actual man himself.

(*A/N: I’m forever salty about the 2021 season. We all know who should’ve won that year.)

This is a sports tale as old as Sonny Hayes (who is ancient, don’t forget) and one that is told in F1: The Movie with as much originality and excitement as Pitt’s half-assed acting effort. The movie’s only interesting choice was mapping Sonny’s Formula 1 crash backstory to the real life story of racer Martin Donnelly. However, Kosinski’s use of actual footage of Donnelly’s horrific crash at the 1990 Spanish Grand Prix felt particularly unsavoury. I get that depicting the seriousness of Sonny’s career-stalling crash is an important character beat, but using real imagery of Donnelly’s twisted body felt especially cynical.

Ehren Kruger’s nothing script does almost nothing for its two protagonists, and less than nothing for everyone else, who are as thinly drawn as the miniscule amounts of paint used on actual Formula 1 cars.

But the most egregious thing about F1: The Movie is its depiction of women.

Formula 1 was and still is a male-dominated sport on and off the track, and there remains a very long way to go for female drivers and women in top roles. So it’s somewhat of a surprise that F1: The Movie depicts a woman, Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), as the technical director APXGP. The first one in the sport’s (fictional movie) history in fact. Now that’s great and all, but Kosinski severely undermines that tokenistic effort of representation by having her play second fiddle and love interest to Sonny. Look, if you’re the first ever woman to be a technical director in Formula 1, you wouldn’t even entertain the idea of sleeping with a colleague, let alone one of your drivers, regardless of whether he looked like a 60-something Brad Pitt.

And for a supposedly super intelligent aeronautical engineer, you certainly wouldn’t even take the line “they got us beat in the straights, our shot is in the turns and I need a car for combat” as a joke, let alone the impetus to change up your entire car concept, which, by the way, is completely unrealistic if there are only nine races left in the season because teams would already be working on next year’s car.

A second prominent example of the movie’s undermining of women comes in the form of the sole female APXGP pit crew member, Jodie. Now pit stop mistakes happen all the time, it’s natural. But having a driver yell at one of the movie’s very few female characters for making a normal pit stop mistake would never happen in real life. What’s worse was the movie’s condescending depiction of Jodie’s subsequent “triumph” over the failure and then directly calling it out, almost in a meta, preemptive “see, we treated her nicely!” way. Not exactly a great advertisment for getting women into Formula 1.

Okay, F1: The Movie might as well not have had a story or characters, but what about the racing and the Formula 1 stuff? Well, that’s a mixed bag too.

Now this is just a movie and not a documentary, so I shouldn’t expect all the details about Formula 1 to be accurate. But given the sheer amount of lip service given to the effort put in to make this the most accurate Formula 1 movie ever (to the point of having Lewis Hamilton onboard as an executive producer), the decisions made by Kosinski are utterly baffling.

Watching Sonny and Noah go wheel-to-wheel is jaw-dropping and this movie has some of the best racing sequences ever staged. I’ve followed all the races that F1: The Movie filmed its racing requences at and the seamless way the APXGP cars are stitched into the real life Formula 1 action is seriously impressive.

While the actual racing was fantastic, the behind-the-scenes team and strategy stuff left much to be desired. Watching the APXGP team make a mockery of the racing and sporting rules to gain an advantage is simply, ironically enough, not realistic. Neither is having Sonny, a driver who hasn’t raced in Formula 1 for over 30 years, dictate race strategy mid-race and having the rest of the team fluster about before giving in to his demands.

We may see Lewis Hamilton or Carlos Sainz Jr. try to do it in real life, but this does a disservice to Formula 1 strategy teams, who are legitmately very good at what they do, while also undermining how often teams actually override their drivers’ complaints. It also doesn’t help that the ‘strategies’ used by Sonny are simply stupid. The deliberate breaking of front wings by crashing into a driver and forcing the safety car is pure fantasy because that’ll get a team punished almost immediately (not to mention the cost cap implications and Red Bull team boss Christian Horner immediately whinging to Race Control over the radio), while Noah holding up the leaders so Sonny can catch up is just ineffective because Noah’s worn tyres wouldn’t allow that to realistically happen.

I can’t blame Kosinski too much for this issue though. Real life on and off-track drama throughout Formula 1 history has been so outlandish that depicting it in a movie would make it feel like a screenwriter’s fantasy. What I can blame though is the movie’s collaboration with Formula 1 itself.

All the attention paid towards getting the Formula 1 stuff “correct” is F1: The Movie’s Achilles’ Heel. The movie is so self-conscious in making things authentic that it put way too much effort into details that just doesn’t matter, such as the excessive detail about tyre strategy. This also extends to the movie’s lack of narrative tension. A big part of Formula 1’s appeal is the petty, Real Housewives-esque drama between teams and team bosses. But that is completely missing here, I assume because no Formula 1 team would want to be depicted as the bad guy, which then forces drama to be manufactured from far less interesting places.

All that time and effort working with Formula 1 would’ve been better spent on crafting a better story with better characters. This is ulimately what irks me the most about F1: The Movie.

Making a good racing movie - or even just a good sports movie - is well within the realm of possibility. Case in point: 2019’s Ford vs Ferrari and 2013’s Rush. Both even had the extra difficulty of sticking within the restrictive narrative framework of real life history, yet the movie’s director James Mangold made it work. Hell, even something like Luca Guadagnino’s brilliant Challengers, which uses tennis as an entry point into a trio of fascinating characters, shows that it is possible to do something interesting within a sporting context.

F1: The Movie had the freedom to do whatever it wanted with its made up team and characters, yet it wastes this opportunity on what is nothing more than an F1 marketing exercise.

If I wanted to watch thrilling racing scenes, I’d just watch a replay of the 2024 British Grand Prix or the 2014 Bahrain Grand Prix. If I wanted to watch a big budget marketing exercise with made up Formula 1 storylines featuring uninteresting characters, Drive To Survive is right there ready and waiting.

Yet, everything I’ve ranted about F1: The Movie is completely moot because this is exactly the movie everyone involved wanted to make. Formula 1 gets a high profile Hollywood showcase that promises even more exposure, Hollywood gets a slice of that Formula 1 clout, and we all get left with a 156 minute piece of cynical marketing where the best parts are faked versions of real races. Everybody wins, except the moviegoer and the Formula 1 fan.