The F1 Movie Threatens to Change the Very Sport It Highlights

Brad Pitt’s new F1 film provides the most realistic view into racing Hollywood could buy. But that doesn’t come without an impact.

Despite Sunday’s Austrian Formula 1 Grand Prix serving up a cinematic start setback against the Red Bull Ring’s scenic circuit, Brad Pitt’s “F1: The Movie” debut overshadowed the very sport it aims to boost. 

For the past two years, Apple TV’s goal of creating a realistic racing movie has blurred the lines between fact and fiction in F1. The film follows APX GP, a struggling F1 team that recruits retired driver Sonny Hayes (Pitt) as the singular solution to all the black and gold team’s flaws. Unlike the slew of racing films preceding it, “F1” aimed to slip into the sport’s paddock, set up shop, and film as if the Hollywood crew were just another team. To do so, the minds behind “Top Gun,” working with producers Lewis Hamilton and Toto Wolff, made Pitt and his co-star Damson Idris (playing the hot-shot young teammate Joshua Pearce) regulars on the F1 calendar. 

But rather than seamlessly fit into the sport, the entertainment venture seemed to turn the race track into a movie set: filming fake podiums and media pen interviews with the sport’s 20 drivers as background actors in their own day jobs, handing out APX GP merch to fans in the grandstands and weaving F1 regulars like Will Buxton, David Croft, and Martin Brundle into the plot. 

For existing F1 fans, the highly contentious and highly anticipated blockbuster acted as a love letter to the sport, littered with cheeky inside jokes, cameos, and interactive fan experiences at best. At worst, it was a house guest that overstayed its welcome and redecorated. 

The film’s best asset was its racing. The opening 24 Hours of Daytona racing scene is so objectively good that the on-track F1 scenes throughout don’t hold a flame to the opening sports car racing. But for non-fans, the racing scenes were almost too good. A transfer from director Joseph Kosinski’s camera angles to F1TV’s might prove lackluster. 

If the film was going for realism, it should have gone full throttle. As F1 drivers appeared on screen and the techy behind-the-scenes content lifted the curtain on off-track aspects most fans never see, like team hospitality suites, driver rooms, and air tunnels, the handful of things that were written in—like Pitt’s character failing to be penalized for cheating—were glaringly obvious to hardcore fans. At times, it was even more obvious that Hamilton had a role in bringing the film to life with several scenes and plot lines seemingly straight out of his racing career. 

Above all, the film failed to latch onto one storyline and successfully build out characters, relying so heavily on Pitt’s over-the-top bad-boy charm that it came off too strong, leaving a bad taste in viewers’ mouths. And if charismatic Hayes was the hero, there was no single villain. It could have been the rival teams (or Hamilton himself, as the film hints at), the villainized media, the sport’s ruling body, or the veteran racer’s own physical limitations. 

The scenes of Hayes strategically and purposefully crashing himself and other drivers out of the race to bring out safety car after safety car provided an interesting way of circumventing the rules, and at times acted as comedic relief. But other than an unrealistic lack of penalties, it didn’t show Haye’s racing genius as it intended and instead undercut the magic of the sport. F1’s most thrilling element lies in the seconds separating rivals and the nuances integral to the sport: racing in the gray areas and strategizing within the current rulebook. “F1” failed to capture that complexity fully. On top of it all, creating a car for “combat” without any regard for safety felt like a step back in the series’ efforts to make a historically fatal sport safer. 

The biggest backlash the movie garnered stemmed from its romance subplot. On the surface and from an F1 outsider perspective, the love story between Pitt’s character and the fictional team’s lead designer was a perfectly fine plot point. But in the context of the obstacles and stereotypes women in motorsport have historically faced while breaking into the industry, along with this season marking the first time a female race engineer is on the grid, the storyline felt unnecessary and even offensive. 

But for all the plot holes and AI-adjacent-sounding script writing, the film managed to achieve what the sport’s executives have failed to: produce a show that unites new and traditional fans alike. 

For movie theatergoers unfamiliar with the sport, the film is projected to create a second surge in F1 popularity in the United States. “F1” already broke the production studio’s box office record, bringing in $144 million during its worldwide debut. The globe-trotting European sport infected the masses with Formula Fever in 2019 following the release of Netflix’s “Drive to Survive.” With the docuseries now on its seventh season and not yet renewed for an eighth, Hollywood came at the perfect time. The sport’s popularity surge at the turn of the decade hasn’t been exactly steady, with spectatorship and public opinion swiftly falling in the midst of Max Verstappen’s winning streak. And while the sport now boasts 750 million global fans and amassed a record 3.1 million ESPN viewers during the 2024 Miami GP, only 2.2 million people bothered to tune into the South Florida race this year. The sport could use a blood transfusion in the form of Hollywood’s lights, cameras, and action, providing a potential pipeline from AMC A-Lister to Grand Prix attendee. 

While the U.S. launch date may have been oddly timed, falling on the same race weekend as the Austrian Grand Prix, by sheer luck the race on Sunday provided converted viewers with something to latch onto: a teammate title on-track tussle paired with a feisty radio message from championship leader Oscar Piastri, underdog rookies scoring points, an opening-lap crash between rookie Kimi Antonelli and Red Bull’s Verstappen, and a handful of DNFs. 

But with the potential for a second wave, there’s the question of where the sport goes from here. The sport could be a new fad, creating a “Hot F1 Summer” as some are already touting. It’s true that the advertising around the film—from McDonald’s Happy Meals and Heineken commercials to the music industry’s “It Girls” completing the soundtrack to a PR run that only F1 money and influence can buy: New Yorker Cartoons, Cosmo features and partnering with the sport’s ever-growing cast of influencers—is creating a sense that everyone is talking about the sport. But buying a movie ticket isn’t a commitment to tune in come race day. Plus, while the film may convert a new generation of newbie race fans, it also threatens to create confusion. (The New York Times’ review of the film clarified to readers what and who was fictional versus real.) After becoming an omnipresent part of the sport, “F1” risks becoming attached to its future. 

Everyone loves an underdog story, and “F1” did deliver a good one with speed shown at a rate that was equally dizzying and addictive. The sport had a similar underdog story in the States back in 2019. But F1 isn’t the same sport it was six years ago. 

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Olivia Hicks is a Brooklyn-based sports and environmental journalist specializing in the business, politics and culture behind Formula 1 for NPR and Motorsport.com. Over a race weekend, you can find her reporting live for The Independent. She is The Drive’s F1 correspondent for the 2025 season.