Not a Book: Drive to Survive

What have I been doing this weekend? A little light shopping, ironing, cooking and watching the new series of Netflix’s Drive to Survive.

Something you may not know about me if you only know me from this blog is that I love motorsport. I mean I really, really love motorsport and even then it’s not quite as much as Him Indoors loves motorsport. The MotoGP season started last weekend and we spent a lot of time with the bikes on the TV. Next week, the Formula One season starts – but this weekend the latest series of Netflix’s show about F1 dropped.

If you don’t follow F1, last season was one of the most controversial ever and lots of fans have been talking about the Netflixification of F1. I’ve just finished watching all the NFL seasons of All or Nothing on Amazon and have started the NHL season. And if you watch a few of them, you’ll spot the difference approaches to dealing with a season – DTS is a bit of an outlier in that it doesn’t take things chronologically, but instead jumps back and forth as it focuses on one team or one story each episode. You could argue that this approach is why it’s sucked in so many non-F1 fans – it follows the characters and has more off track footage than the actual race. There is a MotoGP season documentary coming soon too – I’m looking forwards to see what they’ve decided to do.

Certainly DTS has brought a whole load of new fans to the sport – the US Grand Prix added extra grandstands because the demand for tickets was so high. For me, having watched every race of the season already, I’m watching DTS for the behind the scenes content, but also to see which stories they decided to follow through the season and how they’ve put their narrative together. It’s Formula One Jim, but not as we know it.

Bonus picture: we visited Monaco a few years ago in the weeks after the F1 Grand Prix so we saw them dismantling the race track when we walked the route of the circuit! This is the pit complex.