Last year’s sixth season of Drive to Survive radiated an air of diminishing returns. It was as though the novelty of its spy-in-the-paddock ethos was wearing off as the Formula One teams sought to mould the show to suit their own interests, and what once felt spontaneous had begun to seem rehearsed.
They can’t turn back time to the long-ago year of 2019 of course, but 2025’s new series benefits from covering a 2024 racing season which bristled with various kinds of personal and corporate dramas. The allegations of “inappropriate behaviour” by Red Bull boss Christian Horner, triggering a rapidly-snowballing crisis which threatened the team’s survival, occurred just too late to be included in last year’s series, but the story now gets some belated coverage.
Not that much is revealed. Red Bull managed to keep the lid on the details at the time and they do so again here. A tight-lipped Horner presents a stony and monosyllabic facade, with Geri Halliwell gamely filling the Loyal Wife role (Mr and Mrs Horner pictured above). We are merely left to speculate about the shenanigans of Jos Verstappen, the faintly sinister father of world champion Max, and the various unnamed participants in this unsavoury saga.
But elsewhere, the D2S film-makers enjoy greater success. One neat innovation was to have given a group of drivers an iPhone each to make their own films about the Singapore Grand Prix, which has produced some nice little backstage moments like Charles Leclerc playing the piano in his hotel room (pictured below), or Lando Norris confessing how panicky he gets about facing the media.
Leclerc is also the star of his own episode, Le Curse of Leclerc. Born and raised in Monte Carlo, Leclerc had never won the Monaco race until last year, and we see him here at home with his family and friends as he prepares for another crack at it. Unlike some of his rivals, Leclerc appears to be a genuinely charming and civilised bloke, and this is a delightful little film that could work as a standalone item.
The 2024 season saw a shifting of F1’s tectonic plates, with previously-unstoppable Red Bull facing unexpected pressure from a spectacularly-improving McLaren. The latter’s rising star Lando Norris comes under the spotlight, as he tries to throw off his reputation for party-going and struggles to find any form in the early races of the ‘24 season. Rival drivers are starting to call him “No Wins”, until Lando notches his first Grand Prix victory in Miami (though the churlish Horner is heard grumbling that “we were unlucky with the safety car”). But no sooner has Lando apparently gone up a gear than he comes under increasing pressure from his ravenously ambitious younger teammate Oscar Piastri, who is no respecter of Lando’s supposed seniority. It’s daggers drawn in Budapest, where a furious and sulky Lando is forced to let Piastri win after the team make a cock-up with their pit stops.
There’s plenty of human drama at Red Bull too, as Horner has to accept that Sergio Perez isn’t going to recover from his catastrophic loss of form and starts weighing up replacements. The precocious 23-year-old New Zealander Liam Lawson finally gets the gig after brutally driving Perez off the track (and giving him a disrespectful raised digit for good measure), and this season will be partnering Max Verstappen. Two drivers who never give way and like to test the rules to destruction in the same team? What could possibly go wrong?
The 2025 season finds Lewis Hamilton taking his final bow clad in Ferrari’s “racing red”, which left his old Mercedes boss Toto Wolff scrabbling around for a replacement (Wolff eventually opted for 18-year-old prodigy Kimi Antonelli). More intriguing, though, was the fate of the man Hamilton displaced from Ferrari, Carlos Sainz. The D2S crew have constructed an amusing little mystery around Sainz’s search for a new drive, which almost saw him signing with Alpine’s rogueish veteran Flavio Briatore (pictured above), who now resembles a whiskery old Godfather at the hub of a spider’s web of plots and stratagems. But the big reveal is that Sainz finally opted to go with Williams, helmed by the rather scholarly James Vowles (“The Reverend Vowles”, as Horner sarcastically calls him). But it’s Vowles who gets the biggest laugh with his description of how signing a driver is like dating – “you start with texts and then it has dinner involved in it, and then it ends up in a hotel room.”
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