Track or treat: how a Netflix show gave millions a new passion for sport

A couple of years ago, my young son and I began watching the Netflix series Drive to Survive, a reality show that, over the course of 10 episodes, takes viewers behind the scenes of the previous year’s Formula One season. At the time, neither of us knew much about the sport. The British driver Lewis Hamilton had crossed over into mainstream celebrity. But who was he racing? Who ran their teams and made their cars? Where did they compete? The details, beyond the obvious ones – that there is a famous circuit in Monaco, that there is a team owned by Ferrari – escaped me. It seemed distant and alien – a circus going on far away.

At the time, this was a common experience. Formula One may be a major sport but it has often struggled for a broad audience. But Drive to Survive, which transforms the twists and turns of a regular season into captivating melodrama, and makes heroes and villains out of its drivers and team owners, many of whom seem made for screen, has shifted public perception. In this dramatised version, F1 becomes less about the cars and more about the men who drive them: not just their egos and terrible ambition, but the tangled issues of contract disputes and parts partnerships and race-day bust-ups and of billionaire owners installing their offspring in coveted driving seats.

What could have been a buttoned-up docuseries about technical precision instead became an examination of the sloppier aspects of the human condition. Rage, disloyalty, jealousy, striving – it’s all there. In its first season, which aired in 2019, the show’s producers failed to gain access to Mercedes and Ferrari, F1’s leading teams. No bother. Instead, they created stories out of the enterprise of lesser competitors – the little-known teams battling for scraps – which turned out to offer its own, no less exhilarating kind of television.

Part of Drive to Survive’s success lies in its use of its given cast – the people, most of them men, that make up the sport. It is here that good and bad is made. Is Christian Horner, Red Bull principal, husband of former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, really as horribly driven and underhand as the show suggests? Of course not. Though in one new episode viewers watch him ogle a live-feed of Hamilton and mutter: “Can’t he shut the fuck up?”

Drive to Survive’s fourth season, which follows the ups and downs of 2021’s racing, was released on Netflix in the past couple of weeks, and has been eagerly anticipated, not least because this past season was a humdinger. At the time of writing, five days after it came out, viewers had already screened 28 million hours of the new series, according to Netflix, and within a week it had become one of service’s top 10 TV shows in 50 countries, including the UK and Ukraine.

The show’s success has had knock-on effects for Formula One itself. In 2021, the sport’s cumulative TV audience was up 4% from the previous year, reaching 1.55 billion. A record number of people – more than 108 million – tuned in to watch the 2021 season finale, which pitted Hamilton against the Dutch-Belgian driver Max Verstappen in a winner-takes-all drive-off for the world championship. (That’s a 29% increase on 2020’s equivalent.) My son and I watched that race – the actual race, not a heavily dramatised Netflix version of it, though we will watch that as well. Until that point, I don’t think I’d ever watched an entire grand prix from start to finish.

The 2021 finale prompted questions about the uneasy marriage between professional sport and its broadcast partners, including Netflix. Controversial decisions were made mid-race, live on television, creating tension that is still simmering now. At the time, not a few people wondered if those decisions had been made for the benefit of the drivers or the viewers, many of whom were new to the sport and expecting from live races similar levels of drama created by Netflix’s editors. Fans were right to ask: what is real, and what is constructed?

In a recent interview, Toto Wolff, team principal at Mercedes, said of Netflix: “It’s scary how much we let them in,” adding, “They create a spin to the narrative. They put scenes together that didn’t happen.” Verstappen has refused to give further interviews to the series’ producers, questioning their integrity. (“It’s just not my thing, faking rivalries,” he said recently.) A few days ago, the British driver Lando Norris worried that audio recordings from one 2021 race had been paired with action from another, creating a false narrative. Sometimes you wonder whether the drivers signed up to the distraction of having cameras invade their personal and professional spaces so brazenly (reportedly, F1 went to Netflix with the show’s original idea). Though even Norris is susceptible to the series’ charm. “There are things which may be a bit too much,” he said. “But on the whole, it think it’s just exciting.”

But is any of this terrible for F1? Not all viewers think so. Even the show’s mishandling of the sport’s reaction to the BLM movement – a few minutes of race-related footage tagged on to one episode – didn’t seem to dent new interest. In the aftermath of the 2021 season, one tweet read: “Better to be a controversial sport than a boring one.” In the first episode of season four, F1’s CEO Stefano Domenicali announces: “I have the duty to maximise the value of Formula One,” in a tone that suggests he will do anything to make that happen, Netflix docuseries being just the beginning.

Related: F1 2022: six things to look forward to in the new season

When we started watching Drive to Survive, my son was three, too young to pick up on the details, I thought. Because the characters of Formula One swear liberally and sometimes completely out of the blue, episodes often played in the background, on mute. But soon I realised that he, too, had become caught up in the drama. Whenever we went out in our sensible family car, he would expect us to reach impressive and illegal speeds. I remember him once making reference to Daniel Ricciardo, a charming Australian driver who features heavily in the first series. “We’re Ricciardo, Dad,” he said, while we were driving down an A-road at the legal limit. And then, pointing to a car in front of us: “That’s Leclerc. Catch him!” It was an example of how F1 had infiltrated our life. In the end we did catch him – not Charles Leclerc, the Ferrari driver, but a middle-aged woman, her own kids in the back – and as we drove away my son seemed pleased. But the thrill of that moment didn’t come close to those we had been granted access to on television.