In F1: The Movie, the fictional racing team APXGP is on its last legs: Its young driver, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), is impulsive and green; its owner, Ruben (Javier Bardem), is at his wit’s end; the tech director, Kate (Kerry Condon), can’t figure out how to make a car that’s not a “shitbox.” There’s only one person who can save them, and that’s rugged American cowboy Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt). Hayes brings an unconventional energy to the AXPGP team: Though not fast enough to wind up on the podium, Hayes opts for an aggressive style of racing that involves crashing and disrupting other drivers on purpose to give Pearce the edge he needs to place. These sequences are some of the film’s most thrilling but left me wondering if real F1 drivers were really hopping in those tiny cars just to crash them on purpose.
I watched F1: The Movie having never watched a Formula One race in my life, so other questions came to mind, too — namely, would jogging really make Brad Pitt fit enough to withstand five times the force of gravity on his neck? I called up Chris Medland, a motorsports journalist and broadcaster based in London who has covered the sport since 2011 and attends just about every major F1 race across the world. He’d spent the better part of the year having F1: The Movie hyped up to him by drivers and the official sport alike. “We were being told it was brilliant,” he said of himself and his media peers, “so of course, when someone tells you that, it’s very hard for the movie to meet those expectations.” Despite sequences where Hayes’s destructive strategies defied (if not broke) conventional racing rules, Medland was more peeved at the simplistic characters in the film, otherwise knowing F1 to be full of much richer (and realer) characters than the movie could summon to life.
You watch a lot of F1 the actual sport, but what were your initial impressions of F1: The Movie?
I thought the action — the blockbuster style of the racing scenes — was all really incredible. The soundtrack was brilliant. I didn’t mind the stuff that’s maybe not fully accurate. I get that there’s some creative license with a Hollywood movie. On a personal level, I thought some of the characters were a bit simple. This felt most obvious with the portrayal of women, especially in the sense that there was some mansplaining going on with Kate (Kerry Condon), the technical director. Sonny Hayes tells her, “Hey, look, your car’s not very good at the moment, but here’s how you make it better,” and then she finally makes a good car. And you’re like, Well, hang on, she’s meant to be this brilliant technical director who’s climbed her way to the top, but it takes Brad Pitt to tell her how to make a good car? F1 has a lot of brilliant women working in the sport, and I think they were trying to highlight that but in a way that actually belittled them, which surprised me. I was a bit disappointed by that.
In the film we see Sonny and Pearce working together as teammates but also against each other. How often are these teams of two working together versus (pun not intended) staying in their own lane?
These days, with these teams, they’re more in their own lanes. When the team and car are good enough for podiums, it’s especially clear that they’re two individuals within a team environment but not necessarily a “team.” That’s what Pearce is doing: thinking about his future seat, how he’s gonna prove himself. You’ll see better team harmony between drivers in slower cars. Once the stakes get higher, that’s when they start to split, especially when there are wins or a World Championship on the table. Sooner or later, those forces will collide.
Sonny has a very aggressive, or even offensive, style of driving. We see him strategically trigger a safety car a few times, which ranges from environmental destruction like kicking up gravel on the track to intentionally veering into other drivers just hard enough for a bit of shrapnel to mess up the track. Is that a viable strategy in a real race?
You definitely see more aggressive drivers out on the course, but in terms of triggering a safety car … If that was seen as something done deliberately, it would be pretty problematic. There was an occasion back in 2008 where a team instructed one of its drivers to crash on purpose to create a safety car at the right time to help the other driver who had just made a pit stop, and then he won the race. That scandal was huge. They called it “Crashgate.” Two people got banned from the sport for life, though ironically, one of those drivers is now back working in the sport as a special adviser. But there were and are drivers who are on the more aggressive end of the spectrum, who are more likely to be involved in genuine incidents.
Can you explain how safety cars get used to drivers’ advantages?
A big part of Formula One is track position. Your pit stops are the key time to try to gain a position. If you haven’t made your pit stop yet, then you’re naturally ahead of the people that have, because they’ve taken time going into the pit. When the safety car, or virtual safety car, is deployed, everyone has to slow down because of debris or a crash or marshals on the track dealing with something. With everyone going slower, the amount of time you lose in making a pit stop is lessened, because the cars out on track are not circulating anywhere near as quickly. These are rough numbers, but generally, if you lose 20 seconds of race time by making a pit stop during normal conditions, you might only lose ten or 12 seconds when the safety car is deployed. That means you can gain positions by making your pit stop during a safety-car period. The drivers just don’t know when those moments are coming. When the safety car gets triggered, the drivers will have a time display on their steering wheels that tells them the speed or lap time that they’re not allowed to go quicker than. If they do, there’s a penalty.
There’s a lot of discussion in the film about the tires and the textures of those tires. Can you talk about the advantages of soft or hard tires out on the course?
So there are actually six different compounds of slick tire the whole season, and the tire supplier picks the best three that are suited to each track, and then those tires are allocated as the soft, medium, and hard options. The soft gives you the most grip, but it will wear out the quickest. The hard compound is more robust and will last longer, but it is not as quick. It doesn’t give you quite as much grip after one lap. The medium is, of course, between the two. So you’re trying to balance the quickest way to the end of the race using a combination of tires. One of the rules of racing is you have to use at least two different tire compounds during a race. You can mix and match whichever ones you want, but you can’t just do the whole race on medium.
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Pitt’s Sonny comes in as this American-cowboy type, a kind of old-fashioned athlete. While Pearce has all this high-tech training equipment, Sonny jogs and juggles tennis balls. Would Sonny’s routine be enough to keep him in shape for these races?
Uh, barely. [Laughs.] But — you know, when Sonny is introduced, he’s still racing. He’s clearly kept himself fit enough for the Daytona race. All of the drivers will say the best training for driving these cars is driving the cars. You cannot replicate the forces on your body in a gym. They’ll be hanging weights off their necks, and cardio is important too. There are plenty of drivers that either run a lot or cycle a lot just to take a bit of stress off their knees. Max Verstappen is the most successful driver on the grid over the last five years. He won four world championships in a row. He does not like training. He does the bare minimum to be fit enough to drive the car. But he drives a lot in his spare time. He goes and drives other types of cars, and I think that really helps his body stay in tune with driving racing cars. Other drivers fully pride themselves on being the absolute fittest athlete they could be, and they could complete five races in a day if they needed to. Certain tracks are a lot harder than others, I think, and we see Brad coming in at Silverstone, which is quite a tough track in terms of G forces on your neck.
Right, so what’s going on with the necks of these guys? Do they have to have neck strength for the helmets?
It’s for the weight of their heads. Your whole body is pretty much a part of the car, but your head is slightly more exposed and loose so you can turn or look. The braking force of these cars is just incredible, way more than acceleration. They can pull over 5G of deceleration load, and so when they brake, their heads are five times as heavy. So they need their neck muscles to hold their head up so they can see where they’re going. If you hit the brakes and you’re not ready for it, your head just goes straight down. You don’t see anything, and it’s a bad time not to be seeing something when you’re trying to decide what to do as you reach a corner. And I don’t know if you’ve seen any photos of some of the real drivers in the film, but they genuinely have neck muscles where, like, you don’t know where the head ends. Their necks are huge.
I wondered briefly if Brad Pitt is almost too tall or broad for these cars.
They mold a seat insert to fit the driver’s body. Pitt’s got quite a decent physique for it. At one point he’s on the podium with George Russell, who’s definitely taller than him.
Are there any American drivers in the league right now?
No, we had one until the middle of last year named Logan Sargeant. There could be next year, because Cadillac is coming in as a new F1 team and they’re eyeing an American driver named Jack Crawford.
Is there any kind of reputation for American drivers as a monolith, or have there just not been enough?
Mario Andretti was a world champion and was excellent, and Phil Hill, of course, but those guys were from the ’50s and ’60s. It’s such a different culture now and I think American drivers have kind of struggled to adapt. I think with the way that Formula One has boomed in the U.S. recently — including with this film — there might be a big drive to get another American in. That’s kind of what happened with Sargeant. He was rushed in, and though he was good and talented, he probably needed another year or two of development. But it’s tough. All the teams are based in Europe, and there’s so much racing culture — tracks, connections, contacts — in Europe. American drivers would have to start thinking about training when they’re 10 or 11, and move overseas, and that’s why it’s been tough for them to break through.
Did you feel like the movie was an effective pitch, or commercial, for F1?
There were certain things, like with Crashgate, where I feel like showing a driver creating accidents isn’t the best example to be setting for the sport, but most of what’s there is rooted in reality. I think anyone who watches it and then watches an F1 race will see the parallels. The latest race was pretty low on action after the first, say, 20 laps. There weren’t really any collisions or accidents. The movie had a lot more combat — a word they loved to use. But in real life, there are so many races. Some are dull, some are brilliant, just like any sports event. As for the commercial aspect, I thought it did a good job with just how prevalent the brands and sponsorships are. They’re everywhere, like the drivers are putting certain watches on before they are on the podium, that sort of thing.
As someone who knew truly nothing about the sport going in, I really admired how much it showed off what a team effort it is behind the scenes.
There was a good explanation by the team boss for Cadillac the other day, he said, “It’s the biggest team sport in the world.” It’s a thousand people competing against another thousand people, but the thing that everyone sees is the two drivers racing in the cars around the track. All the stuff that happens behind it is the actual crucial part.
