In 2018, I was working as Formula 2's press officer, working as tangentially to the F1 paddock as conceivably possible. Our occasional interloping among the F1 great and good usually went unnoticed, but we were still privy to the odd bit of goss about the driver market so long as it corresponded with our little world in the support paddock. Did you know that Lando Norris was being tapped up for a Toro Rosso switch mid-2018 in place of Brendon Hartley, or that Artem Markelov was apparently set for a 2019 Williams drive before his father was arrested? Funny little footnotes like that, which never quite happened.
F1's growing influence also started to permeate 'the other pitlane' on occasion. We knew way ahead of time that F2 was going to appear in the following year's F1 game, because we were in charge of carting the drivers off towards a non-descript room at the Hungaroring to have their faces scanned by the folks at Codemasters. And we knew that, in the big paddock, that a Netflix documentary was in the works and camera crews were following teams and drivers.
At the time, this seemed great - despite our proximity, it was hard to follow F1. The support categories were done and dusted by that point and, during the European rounds, we were likely en route to the airport by the time David Croft had bellowed something about some lanterns having been extinguished. Silverstone? I was already at home when the grand prix started, but was preoccupied writing a press release about Santino Ferrucci having been banned for two rounds...
The point is this: the resulting Drive to Survive documentary was perfect viewing for someone who couldn't keep track of the full season and had probably missed most of the races. Getting a recap, albeit dramatised, of the key stories over the 2018 season in handy 40-odd minute chunks was a good way to prepare for 2019 - by which time, I'd moved to Autosport and irritated our readership with half-baked opinions and bingo-card mentions of "managing airflow" in our YouTube offerings.
But for someone who still wasn't across everything that year, it still felt incredibly contrived: radio messages being played out of sequence, engine notes a couple of octaves too high for a car in a braking zone, and the conspicuous absence of the bigger teams. So, it behooved producers Box to Box Films to produce their own drama out of what they had, which was a slightly one-sided illusion of conflict between Red Bull's Christian Horner and then-Renault boss Cyril Abiteboul.
It felt as though Horner was very keen to supply the needle and bestow his counterpart with the epithet of "Squirrel Irritable" on the basis of it vaguely rhyming, but it was a little bit reminiscent of the early seasons of Death in Paradise: a grouchy, emotionally uptight Brit clashes with a free-spirited, emotionally available Frenchperson on a Caribbean island, but are forced to work together for the common good. Except, it didn't quite have the same ending; Abiteboul made off with Horner's driver, Horner's team switched engine suppliers, and never did the twain really meet again after that.
Storylines aside, the opening series of Drive to Survive very much fulfilled a purpose: to bring a slice of F1 life to a mainstream audience in a tried-and-tested, but still not completely ubiquitous, docudrama format. It was so successful that every other racing series attempted to do their own - with significantly lesser results. It's probably not an overstatement to say that F1's current permeation into the US market and global popularity is owed to the success of Netflix's formula.
Now? There's no point in me watching it. I've been lucky enough to be part of that world, and the contrivances become more glaring as the drivers and the key team personnel start to play up to the cameras. When you implicitly know that a given situation happened in a certain way, and then gets recreated for dramatic effect for the series, it feels cheap. Do we really think that Toto Wolff offered George Russell a Mercedes drive for 2022 in full view of the cameras? Do we really believe that Horner would hold vital talks over drivers while the microphone was still hot?
There are two layers to the falsities: the layer that is perceptible to the majority of F1 fans - the out-of-order radio calls and the looped-in commentary won't ring a bell to those who are completely new to the championship, but will feel slightly off to those who probably watched most of the season. Then there's the layer that depicts the paddock chats and rivalries, some of which is cut in a way that might not seem out of the ordinary to most except those who work in F1 circles. Ignorance is bliss, and the series' key demographic is for people who are not aware of such layers existing.
But here's the thing: my opinion doesn't matter here, and it shouldn't matter - people like me aren't the target audience. I'm not asking the producers to change, other than to perhaps freshen it up in places so that the series doesn't run the risk of feeling stale. It serves a very clear need to meet the corporate buzzword of "onboarding fans", and it does this brilliantly. It has limited use as a must-watch for people who are already fans of F1, but the inconsistencies with reality have - I'm told, I've only watched a handful of non-first-series episodes - been made less egregious to the point where Max Verstappen felt comfortable enough to be involved.
When you're watching every race in a season and dissecting it in detail that some might describe as "tedious", it has even less use. But that's okay too; I'm not asking Netflix to start incorporating GPS data or lectures on axial motion between the dramatic fallouts or kitchen-sink observations of drivers' everyday lives. A chef, for example, isn't going to spend their evenings indulging in countless YouTube channels about cooking from an amateur point of view - but it speaks to my own in-kitchen skills.
There are people who expect a one-size-fits-all approach to every single facet in life; for most aspects in a fair and equal society, that should be largely true, but it's the fringe areas where we differ. Committed carnivores can't expect a vegan restaurant to serve a 12oz porterhouse; by the same measure, dyed-in-the-wool F1 fans can't expect Drive to Survive to cater to them when it's focused towards a more casual fanbase.
Not everything is made for everybody. And Drive to Survive isn't for me.
