A Formula 1 doc for people who hate Formula 1

Some years ago I was invited to the British Grand Prix at Silverstone courtesy of a watch manufacturer. As freebies go it was one of the best: endless champagne, overnight in a posh hotel near the track (wife invited too), then a trip by helicopter so as to avoid all the frightful traffic jams. All was going swimmingly until the actual race…

God, it was boring. Noisy too. You’re stuck in an elegant marquee with endless booze and as many gold-plated, jewel-encrusted lobsters as you can force down your gullet, but it’s impossible to relax or chat or enjoy yourself because screaming endlessly in your lughole is the ‘neeaaawwww’ noise of those stupid bloody racing cars. Occasionally you pop outside for a bit of distraction: but it’s just cars going round and round, rarely if ever overtaking one another, let alone crashing, which is what everyone secretly hopes to see. Not since Khe Sanh, I imagine, has anyone been more grateful when the chopper finally arrived to airlift them home.

Yet here I am, a decade or so on, totally addicted — as is the Fawn — to Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive. The sport hasn’t fundamentally changed: still basically cars going ‘neeeaaawwww’ very fast round a circuit. But what I’ve come to realise is that the race itself is almost a minor detail. It’s the backstories, the bitter team and driver rivalries, the tyre changes in the pits, the difference a bit of rain makes, the fear and desperation and exultation and disaster that make F1 so endlessly fascinating.

Take Pierre Gasly, a sweet French boy (they’re all terribly young these drivers) whose entire life has been spent working his way up the motor-racing ladder from karting, to Formula Renault, to GP2.