F1 is a soap opera – and all the better for it
Chief Toto Wolff is now revelling in his lead role as Netflix series fuels the drama of an increasingly hostile title race
⮞mercedes
It is strange to recall how, when Netflix first sought to render Formula One as a season-long soap opera, Toto Wolff was distinctly unimpressed. Having already withdrawn Mercedes from Drive to Survive’s inaugural series in 2018, he watched a few episodes on a flight to Australia and instinctively recoiled at what he felt was an ersatz portrayal of his sport. “I didn’t like it,” he said. “I didn’t think it reflected what was happening on track.”
Still, as a venture capitalist worth at least £400million, Wolff was astute enough to realise that the concept was cutting through to millennial and transatlantic audiences long courted by F1. As such, he granted the streaming giant’s cameras access to the team motorhome at the 2019 German Grand Prix, a decision he would soon regret.
Netflix captured not just the worst result of Mercedes’ campaign – ninth place for a flu-ridden Hamilton, and a careless crash by Valtteri Bottas – but an almost auto-parodic performance by team personnel, who were prancing around in white overalls and beige tweed flat caps to recall the company’s F1 debut in 1954. Wolff, who had gone along with these fancy-dress antics under sufferance, was incandescent.
“It shows that you shouldn’t fool around with this stuff,” he seethed. “You should concentrate on the job.”
And yet, almost 2½ years on, we can count Wolff as a fully-fledged convert. Drive to Survive is among the most-streamed shows on record, watched by almost 10 per cent of Netflix’s UK subscribers last year, and the performances of Wolff, quite the thespian when the mood takes him, are becoming central to the appeal. His theatrics throughout a weekend of priceless twists in Sao Paulo suggested a man relishing his role as lead actor in a global drama.
At one stage, Wolff broke the fourth wall between protagonist and viewer, pointing straight at the lens in a rebuke to Michael Masi, after the race director failed to penalise Max Verstappen for driving Hamilton off track. In the aftermath, he opened hostilities with Red Bull, loftily declaring: “Diplomacy has ended.” Even if you believe that such made-for-tv moments diminish F1’s authenticity as a spectacle, you can hardly fail to be struck by Wolff ’s awareness of the power of his own words.
One theory is that Wolff is playing up this persona to spike the guns of Christian Horner, his chief provocateur. Horner is known for not being shy of media exposure: even during the exhausting scrap at Interlagos, he was providing regular updates for Sky from the pit wall. Wolff has mocked his fellow team principal as a “windbag who wants to be on camera”. Horner duly shot back in an interview for The Daily Telegraph earlier this year, characterising Wolff as a “control freak”.
This type of pantomime tit-for-tat unfolded in Brazil in real time. No sooner had Wolff given an insight into Mercedes’ persecution complex, claiming that the team were motivated for the final three races by a sense of being victimised, than Horner returned fire, casting aspersions on the legality of his rivals’ rear wing. In the same way as Haas’s Guenther Steiner is today a cult figure for his non-stop profanity on screen, Wolff and Horner are now embedded as integral elements of the show. The importance of the Netflix effect can scarcely be overestimated. Recently, I discussed its elevation of F1 with boxing promoter Eddie Hearn.
“Before I never had any interest in Formula One – I didn’t understand the teams, the rivalries, how it worked,” he said. “After Drive to Survive, I watch every race.”
A complaint about the series is that it has sometimes tried too hard to confect intrigue and antipathy where none exists. For this reason, Verstappen, the ultimate racing purist, swears he will have nothing to do with Netflix while he chases his maiden world title. “I am not really a dramatic show kind of person,” he said. It is fortuitous, then, that from Bahrain to Baku, from Silverstone to Sao Paulo, Verstappen and Hamilton have been drawn into on-track skirmishes beyond the scripting of even the most imaginative TV executives. Even their live radio communications have required no embroidery, Hamilton greeting the news that Verstappen would not be punished for reckless driving in Brazil with the acid reply: “Of course not.”
The less time the fourth instalment of Drive to Survive spends in the edit suite, the better. This year’s cocktail of racing and rancour has made for the most captivating duel in a generation.
Not since Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost were hurtling into the Suzuka gravel has an often self-sabotaging sport sold itself so well.