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

The Guardian

12-03-2025

Tennis has Break Point. Rugby union has Six Nations: Full Contact. Nascar has Full Speed. Golf has Full Swing. 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 Formula 1: Drive to Survive, 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.
Absurd as it may seem to say that this one-year time lag is the secret of Drive to Survive's success – you could hardly make a documentary about races that haven't taken place yet – it is the fundamental reason it works. Free from the distraction of hoping for a certain result, viewers who know how the story ends are keen to see it from new angles; for the participants, thoughts and actions that would have been precious secrets at the time can now be freely discussed. 'It feels like access to a world that we shouldn't be seeing,' says DTS executive producer Tom Hutchings. 'It's all the elements that you don't get from watching live sport. Viewers get hooked on that very quickly.'
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. '[As well as F1 experts] 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.'
Attempts to replicate the global success of DTS have been mixed. While Unchained has vividly communicated how tense and brutal top-level road cycling is, and Full Swing arrived just as the sport of golf was ripped in two by a breakaway tour flush with Saudi cash, other series haven't clicked. Break Point has struggled to visualise the intrigue within tennis, a solitary, attritional sport that doesn't have players controversially switching teams or coaches giving rousing half-time team talks. Full Contact isn't as good as some other shows at hiding how reliant it is on officially sanctioned access – you rarely get the feeling of peeking behind the curtain and being told something that the speaker is taking a risk by revealing.
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 All or Nothing, 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 Welcome to Wrexham, 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 Sunderland 'Til I Die, 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