Episode two of the new season of Drive to Survive begins with an at-home scene of Father Christmas visiting Red Bull team principal Christian Horner’s house. It’s a charming vignette for the Netflix show – literally just Horner, his wife, Geri Halliwell, his two young children and a TV crew with at least two cameras so they can get both wide and cutaway shots. Those childhood opportunities to be part of father’s content farm are so precious, and Santa begins by asking the children: “Has Dad been good this year?” No, would now seem to be the answer.
Not to break out the journalese or anything, but the boss of Formula One’s entirely dominant team is currently embroiled in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, thanks to a mushrooming scandal that I have very little legal leeway in terms of being able to discuss fully here. It’s all very Keeping Up With the Carkrashians. Let’s just say that Horner was accused of controlling behaviour by a female Red Bull employee, was cleared last week by a resolutely opaque internal probe, only for a cache of messages said to be between the two to be leaked.
At last weekend’s grand prix, the season opener in Bahrain, footage emerged of Horner having an intense discussion with the arguably even ghastlier father of his unbeatable driver, world champion Max Verstappen, while his Spice Girl wife private-jetted in to kiss him for the cameras with the 1000-newton jaw clench of a wronged Tory wife. F1 is heading to the next human rights abusing petrostate this weekend – Saudi Arabia – just as a whistleblower tells the governing body that its own president intervened to overturn one driver’s penalty in that very race last year.
Before we go on, don’t worry remotely if you don’t watch either Formula One or Drive to Survive, because they’re incredibly easily explained (obviously I never miss either). Formula One is a sport in which the chief propulsive force is provided by something other than a human, to the point that alongside the competition for the individual drivers’ trophy, it runs a team title, which it calls the “constructors’ championship”. Races happen around the world, ideally in grim autocracies, and the same guy has won pretty much all of them for quite a long time now, and will probably win all of them this season, too. Formula One has never been more boring, or more popular. Which brings us to Drive to Survive.
Drive to Survive is a lavishly edited behind-the-scenes look at the F1 season a year prior to the one taking place at any given time, and is such a monster hit for the sport that over the past few years, up to 53% of new fans have said it was the main reason or part of the reason they began watching F1. It is the apotheosis of what we in modern sport are obliged to call “plotlines”, and if Leni Riefenstahl were still alive, I imagine she’d be shooting second unit on it. Huge numbers of those most exotic demographics – women, young people and Americans – have been drawn by Drive to Survive into becoming emotionally invested in a sport in which you can’t even see the faces of the competitors while they’re participating. Listen, I take my hat off to it.
You’d think one of the drivers would be the de facto star of Drive to Survive, but I have to tell you it is Horner. With the possible exception of about three 19-year-old footballers, no one in world sport has wanted to be famous quite as much as Christian Horner. He came to the realisation of this ambition comparatively late in life (he is 50), and consequently has yet to settle into his “easy charm” years. A hilariously unbearable short king, Horner is forever organising cursed clay pigeon shooting events and playing to the cameras on the pit wall, or inviting them to capture him and Geri trotting along on their horses in the Cotswolds, or being filmed asking his children leading questions about what they most wish for. “What about Max winning the world championship?” As his small daughter once put it somewhat brutally on camera: “That’s your wish.”
The current drama is not believed to be Horner’s wish. But it does showcase the Faustian downside of sports actively treating themselves like a soap opera. As previously happened with football, where managers have become main characters, the F1 money guys have realised that the actual sport only happens for about 90 minutes, while big bits of its aspired-to global audience are asleep. And in the case of F1, is incomprehensible unless you’re watching the on-screen clocks and stats. But the plotlines can happen the entire time, making it sensible to foreground managerial non-athletes as “characters”, and hope they create drama. The matches/races/whatevers can then just be something that happens between episodes of the soap opera.
In terms of those brief punctuation marks, F1 has been at a particular disadvantage because it is currently the most boring motorsport series on Earth, with its governing body either unwilling or incapable of coming up with ways of making it less so. It’s not really great for a sport if its very first fixture of the season is marked by one of Red Bull’s so-called rivals being asked if it’s effectively already over. “Unfortunately yes,” judged Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff after Verstappen’s different-galaxy 22-second rout of the rest of the field last weekend.
Consequently, most of what people now have left to talk about is things that aren’t the sport – with the Christian Horner scandal being the absolute motherlode. Asked last year if he wished Formula One was more competitive, Horner scoffed: “there’s not one ounce of me that wishes that.” Hmm. I wonder if there is now?
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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