Adil's blog: F1 goes to the movies again!

Let me begin by quoting the great Ernest Hemingway: “There are only three sports – bullfighting, motor racing and mountaineering and all the rest are merely games.” OK post this quote, which I truly subscribe to, my caveat for this is that I am biased! Biased because, I have been born with motor racing (on two wheels and four) in my every thought process and the roar of exhausts when the loud pedal goes to the floor, the scream of tyres scrabbling for grip, the shattering acceleration from standstill to hitting velocities the average human cannot comprehend is and has been manna from the heaven for countless motorsport enthusiasts like me and this hasn’t abated one wee bit even as I am on the cusp of hitting the youthful age of 70!

In this adrenaline infested lifespan (it has gone in a jiffy just as I would have liked), I have witnessed both actual motor racing across the globe, have been part of it for the general good and have also marveled at the way the sport has been shown on the silver screens over my close to seven decades on Mother Earth. Most of the time we have had film makers try to mix Hollywood and the various disciplines of our sport while a recent phenomenon has to be dramatized documentaries of various eras or seasons of sport or rivalries between the top performers. I can say with the surety of an automotive historian that for every successful movie in the above genres there have been at least a score which have been abject failures, not to the general public but to the purist motor racing enthusiasts.

Some of the best-known movies about our sport that I have truly reveled in have been (in no particular order) James Garner’s Grand Prix, Paul Newman’s Winning, Steve McQueen’s Le Mans to name but three but then there were others as well like Red Line 7000, Silver Dream Racer, Hitting the Apex and the superlative On Any Sunday three-part series documentary on motorcycle racing. To this one has to add Ford v Ferrari, Rush and Senna, movies which engrossed me totally simply because I had lived that era, seen a lot of the real stuff they embraced and being a total hardcore anorak, cried tears of joy simply because it brought my sport closer to the real world, however contrived on occasion the treatment might have been. As such when the new Brad Pitt movie - F1, was announced (superb and hopeless as a movie title for obvious reasons), I was awaiting it eagerly.

Given the fact that Jerry Bruckheimer had done an earlier motor racing flick as far back as 1990, titled Days of Thunder which based its story on the all-American NASCAR series run on paved ovals and starring Tom Cruise, I hoped that Jerry had learned the nuances of F1 far better than he had NASCAR! Thankfully after watching F1 I surmised that he had done a fine job in blending a Hollywood storyline laced with great F1 action and background. Kudos also to director Joseph Kosinski and Claudio Miranda the director of photography. Of course no movie of this type can ever be perfect but the manner in which the Bruckheimer team went about shooting it within F1’s precise operating procedures during Grand Prix weekends which are timed and adhered to the second, it was refreshing to see a 22-car grid in the movie as against the present 20-car grid which has been operating for well over two decades. Maybe Liberty Media got the idea and from 2026 we could have an 11th team on the Grand Prix grids to take up the field on to 22 cars!

2025 F1 movie plot

Back to the movie though and the storyline of a has been driver Sonny Hayes (essayed by Brad Pitt) making a comeback after 30 years is the stuff of pie in the sky but somehow it works with slick edits and with genuine F1 folks thrown into the mix. Also the scenes included Martin Donnelley’s horrific 1993 crash (when his Lotus broke into two and his F1 career was over) which was masterfully ascribed to Hayes in the movie.

The sequence of the story was about a season of F1 and that was great to focus on with the APX GP team driving a duo of Mercedes-AMG-powered F1 cars by Sonny Hayes and his young teammate Joshua Pearce (played by Damson Idris) and how they have a crap first half of the season before a series of big play moves across the spectrum sees the team find vim and vigour along with internal team dynamics, a load of awesome race footage, wheel to wheel banging, cars hurtling out of corners like four-wheeled missiles and truly slick cinematography.

To the eagle-eyed among our readers, you can make out that the fictional APX GP cars were actually F2 cars modified by no one else than the Mercedes-AMG racing team to mimic present day F1 cars and this notwithstanding, the sheer eye for detail and nuance of bringing F1 on the large IMAX screens is truly fabulous! No one can make out the depth and the detail of the sport from such close quarters as has been depicted in this movie and that is something to savour. Speaking of Mercedes-Benz one couldn’t have asked for a better product placement of its just introduced Mercedes-AMG GT 63 sports coupe as the car of choice for Joshua Pearce, making this yet another of those perfect advertising coups F1 is known for.

2025 F1 movie verdict

One has to understand that this is a film which Liberty Media needed to attract more everyday folk to follow F1, more as entertainment than just being a sport just as they have got Netflix going with the Drive to Survive series which has brought an entirely new audience for F1 Grand Prix racing. As for me the purist, I did enjoy whenever the real F1 personalities were brought onto the screen like Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur and McLaren chief Zak Brown along with APX GP’s team manager in the press room; Lewis Hamilton and Carlos Sainz segueing through the grid, top race commentators like Brundle and Crofty bringing in that rich sporty flavour, the way F1 COO Stefano Domenicali comes in to congratulate the team in between sequences, also the throwback to when Christian Horner made the prophetic statement just before the restart of Abu Dhabi 2021 “It’s now in the hands of the racing gods” before Michael Massi did his devilish bit to deprive Lewis Hamilton of his 8th World F1 title, it was amusingly very good from both a sporting as well as an entertainment point of view. Go watch the movie, it would be two and a half hours well spent. However, the most interesting thing for me was not about the F1 footage and action but the opening sequence showing Sonny Hayes tackle a Porsche 911 Turbo to win the Daytona 24 Hours! That racing sequence was awesome and a big bonus! Just goes to highlight that F1 isn’t the end all and be all for motorsport.