A Formula for Great Television

I am not a racing fan. I’m not a car guy. I never understood the idea of driving around and around in circles, seemingly forever. It felt like a meaningless pursuit, mostly focused on gear heads.

Until now.

I’ve recently been watching Netflix’s series Formula 1 Drive to Survive and it is a winner. To start with, it is an amazing piece of marketing for Formula 1. The amount of access to all aspects of the sport and organization is ground breaking. It is so in-depth, the candor so raw, yet never feels like an advertisement for the premier racing class for single-seater auto racing.

It is the Hard Knocks of motor sport, but instead of following one team, it follows the entire sport. It is dramatic, informative, and above all engrossing.

Being a novice to the racing world, I was coming into this show blind, curious because of whispers that it was a really good show, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I had no idea of the rules or dynamics of the sport, nor who the major players are. What instantly hooked me is how the show layouts all this out without feeling like racing 101, since this show is equally for current fans of F1 and for people like me, who have never watched a race in their life.

You learn quickly that this is a diverse, complex world with many layers of ego, money, and pride, with a narrow amount of positions available, the high stakes are built into the show, with everyone jockey for positioning.

But having quality clay and molding an elegant, seamless pot are not mutually exclusive. How the producers weave the layers of narrative and set the show’s structure, is what really sets this series apart.

They begin with focus on two specific drivers, setting the context of what it is like for a driver in this fast, dangerous, high octane sport, where split second decisions can mean the difference between winning the race or a catastrophic crash.

From there they continue to pull out further to the broader scope of the sport with interviews and background of all the main players within the sport from divers, to team principals, to owners, to journalists. This helps set the multiple concurrent storylines that progress and intersect during the season (both of the show and in real life).

We are shown stories of rivalries between teams and drivers (sometime drivers on the same team), the histories of once great teams searching for former glory, and the inter-workings of strategies and decisions of the teams.

With hindsight of the completed season and the extensive all-access footage, these stories and are expertly threaded throughout the first season, as it follows the the race season, race by race, pacing the drama on and off the track.

Following the race schedule as it unfolds, allows for a grounded understanding of the highs and lows and the rigors of the a race season, while allowing stories to play out over a longer time frame with dramatic effect.

But what really was a stroke of genius during the first season, was focusing on the stories arcs of the teams and drivers from the middle of the pack. The top two teams are barely mentioned or featured. This sets an aura around these teams while also laying out the feeling that they are so good, that they are boring to follow. (Right now, at least.) This is refreshing, because they are at the top, in a completely different echelon. The real drama is the others fighting for victories in a totally different context. The pressure greater, the drives more intense.

The way they structured the show, I didn’t start to realize this until about six or seven episodes in, the context and standings of the teams we are following and that the teams and drivers we’re following, aren’t the best of the best. But it doesn’t matter, because these stories are so engrossing and so well told, I’m already hooked and along for the ride.

But the producers didn’t rest with a rinse and repeat for the second season. After establishing the themselves and the sport in the first season with a linear tracing of the race season, they reformed the structure of the show to have each episode focus on a specific story line that unfolds through parts of the race schedule.

And… we finally get a peak at the top two teams first the first time. Which is handled with amazing deftness, having genuine reason to tell their story (which I’ll leave for your to discovery).

What is interesting with this angle, is that no storyline fully completes itself, allowing for the tension of the race season to continue through each episode. It is refreshing to watching the producers reformulate the same drama in a different way.

Both points-of-view raise and hold the stakes on each level of the sport — driver, principal lead, and team ownership. Because of the amount of money involved in the sport — and it’s a crazy amount — you need risk takers and control seekers. Those requirements typically need ego, or at the very least unbreakable confidence, in one’s ability. When mixed together at 200+ mph, it’s amazing they all make it home in one piece.

But these are professional drivers, the best at what they do, with immense control over their craft and tools. And the same can be said for these producers, finely tuning their stories with precision and intention that would make any race team proud. When mixed together, racing becomes a sport unmatched in drama and excitment.

Hopefully there will be more show to come in the future as the world resets itself. But regardless of the show, the sport will come back, and I’ll be there to follow along.