After the British Grand Prix last year the drivers took their places in the media zone to conduct interviews, with Formula One world champions Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen and Fernando Alonso among them. Yet it was all but impossible not to cast a glance sideways as Brad Pitt nonchalantly strolled out to face the microphones and cameras of his own, entirely staged, media scrum.
None of us in the media pack openly goggled at the fact that Hollywood’s A-list had joined the sweaty throng, because Pitt was there filming what would become F1 the Movie. And we, as with everyone else, were under strict instructions to behave normally.
Indeed, as farcical as it might sound, by this point we had become almost inured to the presence of the stars and their crew after several years of being part and parcel of the F1 circus. Almost but not quite. I mean, it was Brad Pitt …
The resulting film, released next Wednesday by Apple Studios, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Top Gun: Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski, stars Pitt as the veteran driver Sonny Hayes, who makes a comeback to the sport after a 30-year absence to rescue the ailing and also fictional APX team. The film, which has had largely positive reviews so far – including from the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw – came about through an unusually proactive collaboration between the filmmakers and the sport. F1 bent over backwards to ensure it went well.
The production filmed at circuits on real race weekends for over two years. The APX team enjoyed their own pit garage, their own hospitality and their own uniforms. With Pitt being filmed alongside real drivers and indeed the media around the grid and the “paddock” (the working area of an F1 team), the filmmakers were effectively embedded within the sport as its 11th team – perhaps as deeply as it is possible for an entity to go without actually being a real team.
They have also used real cars, albeit less-powerful Formula 2 models modified to look as close as possible to F1 cars by the Mercedes F1 team. Pitt and his co-star Damson Idris have filmed in cars, with Pitt doing all his own driving. He’s been praised by Hamilton for picking up the skills quickly.
Hamilton is both one of the producers and a special adviser to ensure the picture is as authentic as possible. For the producers, the collaboration is relatively straightforward. They wanted to make as authoritative, exciting and immersive a film as possible. And for the sport the movie is a key part of its global strategy.
For many years F1 enjoyed a strong but undoubtedly niche-based support, largely centred on Europe and with a notably ageing, white-male demographic. But since Liberty Media took over the sport in 2017 from its former chief executive Bernie Ecclestone, who had been in charge for nearly 40 years, it has undergone a rapid and dramatic transformation.
Liberty has expanded its reach, notably using social media and promotion to actively target a younger, more diverse audience. The enormously successful Netflix series Drive to Survive followed, its dramatic and sharply edited retelling of each season proving a huge hit with a market previously indifferent to F1. Drive to Survive is now in its seventh season since 2019.
Suddenly the sport had an entirely new, enthusiastic fanbase; younger, excited and building momentum across the world – notably in the market every non US-based sport craves, North America. F1 has moved from one moderately well-attended race in Texas to three sellouts a year, now also including Miami and a night-race promoted by F1 itself on the streets of Las Vegas.
Tyler Epp, the Miami GP president, noted that their audience is “growing most aggressively in the 20- and 30-year-old buyer. Our data does not tell us that this is an audience of 30- to 60-year-old white men”. Instead, Epp says, there is a 60-40 male-female split – an “eclectic, diverse group”.
Recently, both golf and tennis have tried, with a lesser degree of success, to emulate the enormous surge of interest F1 has enjoyed.
F1’s willingness to accommodate Hollywood is shaped by this prism, the film a chance to sell the sport to a potentially huge audience who just might be converted. Sylvester Stallone tried to make an F1 film in the late 1990s but, given a lack of cooperation from Ecclestone, ultimately switched the story to the US-based CART series and the commercial and critical flop Driven was the result.
Stefano Domenicali, a former team principal at Ferrari and president of the Italian car manufacturer Lamborghini, is the chief executive of F1, an accomplished operator with an easy-going persona. He is relaxed with F1 teams and Hollywood moguls and has been at the heart of the resurgence. “I think that if Netflix was big, that the movie will be massive,” he said this year. “We’re going to hit a target that is not yet present.”
Purists will sniff at some of the picture’s deviations from certain aspects of F1’s realities, and its concessions to dramatic and narrative convention to propel it as entertainment. But it was meant to be a blockbuster not a documentary and that’s what matters to F1 and the producers.
After the film’s screenings in the US, Apple’s senior vice-president, Eddy Cue, said that “very few” of those attending had previously seen an F1 race but their reactions were instructive.
“When we finish and we ask how many of you would like to go see a race now, literally every single hand goes up,” he said. “We think there’s a huge, huge opportunity to grow the sport all over the world with this movie and I think it will do that.”
