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