Behind the scenes with Netflix’s ‘Drive to Survive,’ capturing the F1 drama of Season 7 (2025)

Rain poured down during the Singapore Grand Prix weekend last September, cooling the typically hot conditions associated with that Formula One weekend.

In the background of the accompanying scene from episode seven of the new season of Drive to Survive, George Russell starts to speak before the camera switches on him — only this time, it’s not a traditional camera from production company Box To Box Films. It’s a phone which the Mercedes driver said was supplied by Netflix.

Russell then flips the camera around, showing Charles Leclerc, Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon and Lando Norris, the five drivers tasked with helping film the grueling race weekend for that episode and each provide glimpses of their personal lives — like Leclerc and Gasly at a group dinner, or Russell with his partner Carmen Montero Mundt.

The episode, titled In The Heat Of The Night, is deliberately different and strays from the typical Drive to Survive formula of seasons past. As executive producer Tom Hutchings told The Athletic: “We are conscious of telling the same stories from previous seasons so we look for new angles or new ways of telling them.”

“The format has to evolve,” added Hutchings. “We have to keep the audiences engaged and offer them something new every year.”

The Singapore GP episode is not the only example of this change in formula inSeason 7, releasing on March 7, which The Athletic has already seen.

Though the show has had its critics over the years, from fans to the drivers themselves, Drive to Survive has widely been credited with leading F1’s popularity boom in the United States. Season 2, the first season Mercedes and Ferrari had participated in, dropped when lockdowns began around the world at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and became known for going behind the scenes in this often glamorous sport.

The Athletic was invited to Ferrari’s garage at the Las Vegas Grand Prix in November to exclusively learn how the series is filmed and also spoke with the production company in the weeks leading up to the season release. The production team is tasked with balancing dramatic storytelling with authentically telling the human stories behind the sport in a different light, but Season 7 presented another challenge: capturing multi-team battles throughout the grid while continuing to be innovative in its storytelling.

“It’s like what every brilliant TV show has,” Hutchings said. “Real drama, real emotion, real stakes.”

The idea to create a behind-the-scenes F1 show came after Liberty Media’s takeover in 2017. As series director Rob Willis said, “Pre-Liberty Media, no one knew what was going on within the confines of this sport.”

Sean Bratches, the former managing director of commercial operations for F1, “led the charge to get the show done,” said Paul Martin, a BAFTA-nominated producer and co-founder of Box To Box. The deal was made with Netflix, with the streaming giant lured by the storylines away from race results and technical analysis, with Martin describing it as a show which had “character, had ego, had all those kind of things.”

The raw materials were there, but the teams and drivers needed to buy into the vision. Initially, Ferrari and Mercedes opted out of the first season, but the other eight teams participated — a number which surprised Martin. He vividly remembers one early meeting with the team principals in Abu Dhabi, the last race of the season. “So at that point, they’re all fried,” Martin said, “and we’re trying to sort of say to them, ‘Hey, we’re going to be in Australia, and we’re going to be making this thing.’”

Then-Renault chief Cyril Abiteboul asked what the show was. Martin’s response was that this would be a behind-the-scenes format.

“And he just looked at (executive producer) James (Gay-Rees) and I like we were crazy; like there’s no way you’re making that show. There’s no way that everyone in here is gonna let you in,” Martin said. “But then, funnily enough, Cyril ended up being the first sit-down interview that we ever did on the show, and really kind of opened up, gave us some real sort of steers about the world and stuff.”

Some team principals were open from the get-go, including former Haas team boss Guenther Steiner, whom Martin said “couldn’t care less.” “He’s like, ‘Well, whatever. Just stick a radio mic on me, I don’t care.’”

Martin even gave credit to Christian Horner and Red Bull, a team that played a crucial part in the first season.

“When people realized that ‘Christian, he’s wearing a mic, and he’s taking part in the show and he’s doing it,’ it sort of had a domino effect,” Martin said. After all, they are fairly competitive. “They’re all trying to get an edge on each other, and they’re all trying to find a point of difference.”

Season 1 presented “a massive learning curve.” Martin said:“We delivered it to Netflix, and James was like, ‘What do you think?’” Martin recalled. “I was like, ‘I tell you what. If we get a second season, I reckon it’ll run for 10.’ Because there’s a stickiness there. Unlike other sports shows, it’s more of a soap opera, and I think people want to come back and they want to know what Christian did next or they want to know what Toto (Wolff) did next.

“It works more like a soap opera than it does a sports access show.”

Seven seasons in, those early relationships have evolved into unprecedented access. These days, if a boom mic suddenly appears, everyone knows it is likely Drive to Survive.

Producer and director Piers Sanderson stands still in the back of Ferrari’s garage, a camera hoisted on his shoulder. He needs to be pinpoint accurate in his positioning, otherwise the mechanics that come rushing past for a pit stop will crash into him.

But you wouldn’t know he was not part of the team as Sanderson, who documents Ferrari and Haas, wears the Prancing Horse’s team kit when embedded with the Italian manufacturer for the weekend. It’s about the cameraperson and sound person moving in tandem and blending into the background, though some crews wear normal attire when filming.

Box To Box travels to each race, recording every session, conducting their own interviews and even flying to home shoots.

“People always think we have bigger crews than we do,” said Martin. “There’s always complaints at the end of the year (of) ‘Oh, you didn’t cover this’ or ‘You weren’t there.’ It’s Piers and the sound guy. We can’t be everywhere at once.”

Take the 2024 Las Vegas Grand Prix weekend, for example. The battle for the constructors’ championship was becoming tighter, Max Verstappen was poised to win the drivers’ title, a fight for P6 in the team standings was heating up, and about a handful of people were on the ground to capture that content.

“How do you approach it? It’s got to be targeted,” Willis said. “We literally know how to move around this paddock. It’s a dance. We know where everyone is at every point. It’s very formulaic. They’re in certain places at certain times.”

With bigger races where they anticipate more of the story unfolding, more people will be present to cover the weekend. However, Willis said of the 2024 Las Vegas GP, “We know that we’re following the championship battle between three teams, so we know where to put the cameras: the three teams. We’ve obviously got the battle for sixth going on as well. That’s also interesting, but that’s not going to play out here.”

During the early days of creating Drive to Survive, the crews felt like they needed to shoot everything, but the approach has become more targeted over the years because they learned what works.

The two main assignments are embeds or floating. The directors cover two teams each and sometimes the crew will float, “reacting to the stories as they happen,” Sanderson said. Race weekends are a more complex task, particularly when floating. The crews must trust that they adequately captured one story before dashing to another garage to capture some of the scenes. It’s spinning plates. Typically, only two crews are covering a weekend, with three crews brought in for a big race.

“The adrenaline you feel on a race day is incredible because from the drivers’ parade when they start until the drivers go into their final engineering meeting, which is usually two hours after the race is finished, you don’t stop,” Sanderson said. “You’re on it and you continue reacting and you’re watching.”

For around eight to 10 races a year, Sanderson will be either with Haas or Ferrari, and then he’ll float for another seven to eight races, ducking in and out of garages.

Sanderson spent the Las Vegas weekend embedded with Ferrari. In the weeks leading up to the weekend, he spoke with the communications department, asking which race they could film. Once they decided on Las Vegas, Sanderson sent in his list of access requests.

“You don’t have continual access to the teams. And some teams, you get a little bit more access with and then others, you don’t,” Sanderson explained. “It’s all down to the culture of the team. With Ferrari, it’s all pre-requested.”

The requests vary, such as filming from the garage during the practice sessions or putting a mic on the drivers at certain times. Space is also limited at certain tracks. The teams have their own social media teams, and some drivers have their own videographers.

“If it’s in a small garage, you have to negotiate the space so we’ll find out which sessions we can go into,” Sanderson said. “If they’ve got any activities happening away from track, we’re obviously really interested in that, because the whole thing about Drive to Survive is the access we get away, not just here.”

The teams are accommodating, he added, and “a lot of that comes down to building up relationships and trust” — an example of which was Leclerc asking Sanderson if he wanted to film him ice climbing in the Dolomites during the offseason, clips later aired in Season 6.

Sanderson has been working on the Drive to Survive project since Season 4; one of the reasons he joined was that they needed an Italian-speaking director as Swiss-Italian Mattia Binotto was then Ferrari’s team principal and, even to this day, the team often speaks Italian.

“If you don’t speak Italian, you don’t know what they’re saying, so you don’t know where to point the camera,” Sanderson explained.

After race weekends, the team holds story meetings to review what was captured, which can last a few hours. A separate crew reviews the footage and logs the content, tracking what is being edited.

Live notes are sent in from the field, and story producers in the UK cross-check them with raw footage to identify engaging narratives. Hutchings said: “We are conscious of telling the same stories from previous seasons so we look for new angles or new ways of telling them. Once we are happy with the material that is there, the editors start to cut it.”

That is where it becomes tricky. Despite filming at all 24 races of the 2024 season, many hours of that filming aren’t in the final cut. Sanderson said sometimes only 10 to 15 minutes of footage filmed on a given race weekend make the cut while other times, nearly nothing is used.

Sometimes, they don’t have the footage to tell the story in its entirety, or there’s no way to squeeze a storyline into an episode. Take Daniel Ricciardo’s 2018 Chinese Grand Prix victory, for example. The Australian driver became one of the show’s main stars, and Martin and Willis were present and filming that weekend, including the emotional moment it sunk in that he won.

They were convinced the scene was “amazing,” and that viewers would “lose their mind.”

“And then as we got into the edit, we started to edit that, we just could never make it work. We tried to squeeze it in,” Martin said. “‘Oh, maybe we’ll try in that episode or maybe we could squeeze it in that episode.’ And in the end, it just didn’t have a place in the show. So every year we’re making choices like that, of what really elevates this show in the way that it needs to.”

Box To Box started editing Season 7 in May, just as the 2024 season was still heating up, with Hutchings saying editing can take about 20 weeks. The key is finding the beginning, middle and end of the story, pulling from many sources, including their footage, onboard footage and team radios. A team reviews every minute of what the crews film.

Box To Box has to lock the series and send it to final post-production a month after the season’s final race, as well as for localization, where shows are translated into different languages. The goal is for it to hit Netflix around six weeks later. But keeping it to 10 episodes that range from 40 to 45 minutes is tricky.

“Every day in the edit, we have a conversation where we go, ‘Oh, we could do with having another episode’ where the reality is the episodes are hard to put together,” Hutchings said, “and because you rely on so many bits and pieces to make that work, it’s better just to focus on 10 episodes and make them really good.”

When editing the series, the production company focused on themes, such as the 2024 championship battle between Verstappen and Norris, rather than the chronological approach. Martin said: “What we want is for you to come to Drive to Survive and see it from a completely different perspective and angle and go like, ‘Oh, I thought I knew what happened there, but actually, I’m seeing the inside of it.’”

An episode like In The Heat The Night comes with significant risk, as there is no guarantee that the race will be filled with action. Hutchings met with the drivers and their managers to discuss the idea of them filming the weekend themselves, and they were game.

“For them, the story lies with them: they are the ones taking control of Drive To Survive. So it felt personal straight away and we get to learn about them all as people rather than superstar F1 drivers,” Hutchings said.

“That journey with the five drivers helped mitigate the risk of a race that might not be that interesting… but fortunately, the race had a real mixed bag of results: winners, retirements, someone came last. But the drivers embraced what they signed up for and when things didn’t go to plan, they didn’t shut the door.”

Leclerc’s win in Monaco is another example of a shift in the docuseries’ Season 7 approach. Hutchings described it as “a single and emotional film.” The episode, named Le Curse Of Leclerc, brought in Leclerc’s backstory and contained an emotional ending as he won his home grand prix.

“It’s not the norm for DTS, but it’s brilliant and Charles was happy for us to tell it,” Hutchings said. “We actually sat down with him in Spain this year and discussed it with him and got his buy-in because it’s very personal to him.”

Making this show successful requires creativity and trust. Box To Box does not have unrestricted access to the teams and drivers, but the company’s relationships with those on the grid have allowed it to open doors and open up the sport.

There have been critiques, even from drivers themselves, about overdramatization at times, misrepresenting relationships or placing a radio message over a clip that did not match.

“There are obviously some comments and things here and there which are maybe out of place for sure,” Norris said in 2022, per motorsport.com.“When you’re the person that it’s about, you maybe don’t agree with it so much because it can make you look like you said something in a time and place which is definitely not correct.”

In an email to Netflix, The Athletic asked Box To Box a follow-up question about the radio message critiques from the drivers, but the question went unanswered.

The relationships between Box To Box and the teams and drivers have allowed the production to open new doors while telling the behind-the-scenes human stories — and it’s likely not going anywhere anytime soon.

“They just love a good human story, and I think that’s what this show does really well,” said Hutchings. “It’s a really emotional sport, but the program actually showcases just brilliant human stories amongst a really privileged and amazing world that doesn’t get too technical, doesn’t talk about tenths of a second, doesn’t talk about tire compounds and all this sort of boring stuff that a lot of people just turn off.

“It just gets under the skin of the characters that run the world of F1.”

(Top photo: Images via Netflix; Design: Dan Goldfarb/The Athletic)