Last week’s Formula One Australian Grand Prix was a rollercoaster thrill ride from the warmup lap to the final moments, but can you imagine how hard this year will be for those unfortunate folks at Netflix? After all, the early seasons of Drive To Survive were justifiably lauded for the manner in which the streaming giant managed to unearth pearls of human interest in three generally drama-free and woefully processional F1 championships from 2018 to 2020. There was something poetic about the way in which Netflix ignored the inevitable Mercedes-and-Lewis-Hamilton laurels up front to tell the stories of bit players from Renault, Haas, and Force India. Not only was it brilliant television for people who knew nothing of the sport, but Drive To Survive offered even the most seasoned fans entertainment they weren’t getting from watching F1 as it happened. In a nutshell, Netflix made great seasons of television from lousy seasons of racing.
In 2025, however, Drive To Survive is in danger of becoming rendered completely irrelevant by the brilliance of the source material. Just to recap some of the things that happened in Australia: Four of the six rookies crashed, one before the race even started. The hometown hero, Oscar Piastri, was three-tenths of a second away from winning the grand prix before sliding off the track and coming to a rest in the wet grass while 131,547 fans screamed in support of his laborious and ultimately successful attempt to back up onto the asphalt and continue. Lewis Hamilton, the seven-time world champion whose move to Ferrari upended the entire sport at the end of last year, briefly led the race before falling to 10th place during a spate of churlish and publicly broadcast complaints to his indifferent-sounding race engineer. Kimi Antonelli, who won’t turn 19 until the middle of the season, was 16th-place awful in qualifying but brilliant in the race, finishing in fourth and just a second and a half behind his teammate who had qualified 12 positions ahead.
That was all just the tip of the iceberg for a race that probably requires a couple of rewatchings to be completely understood. Netflix has occasionally been accused by the F1 fanbase of fabricating drama, but surely it won’t be necessary this year. You can’t make this stuff up. Reality will suffice.
The irony is that F1 has long been criticized for refusing to adopt the circus-like, reality-denying tactics of other major racing series such as NASCAR, IndyCar, and IMSA, all of which attempt to create close racing by either forcing the use of a single chassis or arbitrarily adjusting the “balance of power” between different makes and models over the course of the season. Every Indycar is made to identical spec by Dallara, all the NASCAR teams have to adhere to a common template, and IMSA will add weight or reduce power to handicap successful teams. F1 does none of that. Each team is a true “constructor,” building its own car from scratch with considerable freedom in the areas of aerodynamics and chassis design. Tens of millions of dollars can be spent over the course of each season redesigning or refining the aerodynamics. The seats and steering wheels are made from scratch for each driver, with wildly different controls and designs even within the same team.
In the past, this considerable freedom has often led to one team having a much better mousetrap than the others. F1’s traditional response is … to do nothing, preferring the purity of the sport over made-for-TV artificial competition. In the past, this attitude has led to some terribly boring races and seasons. Such was the case when Mercedes won eight championships in a row, and it was also true when Max Verstappen set the record in 2022 and again in 2023 for most wins in a single season. It is far from true now. The cars are so competitive, so close, that seven of the 10 teams managed to get a car in the top 10 of Australian GP qualifying, and seven teams had a car finish in the top 10 of the race — although it was not the same seven teams, which further underscores the point.
In any race series, of course, what happens on-track is only part of the picture, because the business aspect of operating both the series and the individual teams can be exceptionally difficult. In the past, the astounding cost of competing in F1, combined with the daunting prospect of coming up to speed against technologically sophisticated veteran teams, has kept even some of the deepest auto-manufacturer pockets out of the game. Now, as F1 scales new heights in global crowd reach, sporting prestige, and household name recognition, everyone wants a piece of the action, seemingly regardless of cost. Volkswagen has long avoided F1, preferring to compete in the walled garden of LeMans, where its budget brought unparalleled clout, but it’s now acquired the Sauber team and will brand it as Audi F1. Toyota, which departed the sport in 2009, is now back as a “technical support” partner for Haas, which will continue to use Ferrari engines.
Perhaps the most surreal indicator of F1’s ascent: General Motors has now succeeded in convincing the owners of F1 to accept an 11th team under the Cadillac brand. Its application was originally rejected out of hand, at which point the Biden Justice Department stepped in and “investigated” Liberty Media, the Formula One rights holders, in what looked to some like a naked attempt at intimidation on GM’s behalf. Consider, for a moment, that General Motors lost nearly $4 billion in the last quarter of 2024, yet they’re pulling out all the stops to spend perhaps half a billion additional dollars on the clean-sheet creation and operation of an F1 team that is widely expected to lag the existing field by substantial, perhaps embarrassing, margins.
WHEN OWNERSHIP IS THE ONLY HOBBY LEFT
It’s a shame that both of these late-arriving automakers will miss 2025, which is almost certain to be one of the most memorable, perhaps the most memorable, seasons in the 75 years of Formula One championship racing. It seems virtually assured that several teams will win races. McLaren has the finest car, and two drivers who are closely matched, but RedBull has the finest driver in Verstappen. Mercedes is stronger than expected, while Ferrari has a seven-time world champion paired with perhaps one of the finest one-lap drivers in history.
No wonder F1 feels comfortable charging stout ticket prices around the world, to say nothing of the $79.95 a year for its exclusive and best-of-breed F1 TV app. A new set of technical regulations in 2026 is expected to make the racing closer and more interesting still, while also permitting a broad variety of approaches to car design. The sport’s future looks brighter than the already luminescent present, whether you’re a part of Formula One itself, a devoted fan, or a “filthy casual” drawn in by all the recent hype. Pretty much everyone has reason to be optimistic — except, maybe, for whoever will be tasked with distilling and compressing a once-in-a-lifetime season into the narrow confines of a Netflix series.
Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.