# ‘You get hooked so quickly!’ How Formula 1: Drive to Survive became the apex of TV documentaries

Netflix’s motor-racing extravaganza is one of the most influential shows of the decade. How did it turn such a tedious sport into such gripping television?

Tennis has . Rugby union has . Nascar has Full Speed. Golf has . Basketball has Starting 5. Cycling has Tour de France: Unchained. American football has both Quarterback and Receiver. Athletics has Sprint. What do all these documentaries have in common? They have all sprung up in the past five years or so, and are basically all the same show: if they are not full clones of , they are heavily inspired by it.

Drive to Survive thus has a claim to be one of the most influential TV documentaries of the past decade, having pioneered a simple but effective format. Every 12 months since 2019, it has delivered a new season – last week it released the seventh – that recaps what happened in the previous year’s F1 championship, using behind-the-scenes access, race-day footage and retrospective interviews.





It helps that F1 is a sport that is more than just a game. Money and politics play a huge part in it, and the drivers are risking their lives. So there is plenty to talk about and F1 people tend to be confident, suave types, eager to crack wise and be fabulously indiscreet. “The show lives on character,” says Hutchings. “Fortunately, F1 is full of interesting people – ruthless competitors, decisive characters and a few egos.” In that way, Drive to Survive gets around what could be a pretty major problem with making TV about motor racing, which is that motor racing itself can be tedious. “\ it also has a loyal fanbase that isn’t made up of the core F1 fandom,” Hutchings says. “So many of our viewers watch Drive to Survive, but not the F1 races.”

All the above series do, however, share another straightforward but crucial quality, which is that they look at the sport as a whole, rather than making the same mistake as the show that previously tried to kickstart a new era in sports documentaries. Prime Video’s , itself inspired by the godfather of the genre, HBO’s Hard Knocks, focuses on a different football team each year, which is a problem if you’re not a fan of that team. Not favouring any particular competitor makes a sports documentary more agile: when the 2023 F1 season turned out to be a boring procession won comfortably by Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing, Drive to Survive switched to telling smaller stories about less famous drivers.

One series that has made the one-team approach work is , the Disney+ documentary about the Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney buying a decrepit non-league football club and attempting to revive it. Influenced by Netflix’s superb , it plays on the effect of the team’s previous failures on the fragile working-class community surrounding the stadium. Whether it can keep its underdog charm as Wrexham rise through the league system is debatable – if it can, it will be because it keeps telling relatable stories.

“At the end of the day, they are still like you and me,” says Hutchings of the F1 superstars – an improbable claim, but one that sums up the suspension of disbelief that makes Drive to Survive and its imitators so gripping. “We all make decisions every day – we all laugh and cry. If we can tell those human stories in a fun way, that seems to keep the audience happy.”

Formula 1: Drive to Survive is on Netflix
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