Five things we learned watching the first official F1 movie trailer

The F1 movie trailer has landed. In two minutes and 28 seconds of cinematic bombast, writer director Joseph Kosinski lays out a manifesto for where the glitziest motorsport on Earth’s drama lies, how to bring it to a wider audience not already weaned on Drive to Survive, and how to make a 61-year-old Mr Bradley Pitt seem like a semi-convincing Formula One driver. We’ve got some thoughts on the matter.

In case you missed it, here’s that trailer.

This being the internet, we’ve arranged those thoughts into cogent, digestible passages of text which manifest themselves below, and while we’re certainly not saying we should have been consultants on this project all along, after processing these five things we learned from the trailer we’ll let you be the judge.

At the heart of this movie is a story of an intra-team rivalry at APXGP (unrealistic – in real life they’d be called Tesco Mobile APXGP Klarna 0% Greggs Racing) between the veteran racer and gambling addict Sonny Hayes (Pitt) and promising rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), brought together by a team boss (Ruben, played by Javier Bardem) who promised them both the world, then watched them fight it out for top dog status on the track.

If that’s not ringing bells, you probably weren’t around for Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton’s legendarily combative 2007 campaign as team-mates at Ron Dennis’ McLaren. The movie doesn’t map precisely to that scenario - Alonso joined the team as a two-time world champion at the peak of his powers, rather than “a gambling junkie who missed his shot” as Hayes is described in the trailer. But the parallels between Pearce and Hamilton in their rookie seasons – two phenomenally talented and hotly tipped young drivers facing a frosty welcome from veteran team-mates – are clearer.

We didn’t spy any shots of either driver lingering for a suspiciously long time in the Hungaroring pit lane, but this was only the first trailer…

Given the aforementioned parallels, it seems the F1 movie missed an open goal here. This is a motion picture starring Javier Bardem, the only man in the world who looks more like Fernando Alonso than Fernando Alonso, and he’s playing… the team boss.

We’re not casting aspersions on Pitt’s legendary, medium-transcending talents as an actor. We’re not even calling into question his American-ness. While it has been a tough run for US Formula One drivers of late, with their combined points total this century sitting at, er, one, the USA sits second in the all-time rankings for most drivers to represent the sport by nation.

And, look, it’s not even that Pitt is 61 years old, although the idea of a driver that old is patently ridiculous. For reference, Jean Alesi is 60. Imagine Jean Alesi racing in Formula One in 2025.

No, it’s simply that Pitt imbues the smooth-talking charisma of a team boss (think of his role as Billy Beane in 2011’s Moneyball) and Bardem… well Bardem just looks loads like Fernando Alonso and if we’re being honest that’s what we’re pinning this entire point on.

At the 21-second mark in the trailer, we see Hayes donning a rather familiar race suit bearing Camel branding and stepping inside what appears to be a 1987 Lotus 99T. That gives us a lot to think about.

Firstly – vintage Formula One cars in this film. Great result. Love to see it. Hopefully we’ll see some onboard shots of it out on the track.

Secondly, either Sonny Hayes is driving this car for a special vintage event, a la Goodwood Festival of Speed, or…, well, or he’s been racing in Formula one for at least 38 years.

And before you go dismissing that notion as preposterous, that Lotus appears just after Bardem describes Hayes as “the best that never was”, and the shot’s graded in a different way to the rest of the trailer, in a more washed-out palette that looks like it’s mimicking vintage TV coverage. Frankly, we’re really hoping that in this cinematic universe, Hayes has been racing since the days of Prost and Senna.

Tell you what’s striking about the cinematography besides the implication of Hayes' five-decade career: all those cool onboard shots.

It’s long been a criticism of modern F1 that the T-cam shots fail to sell the speed and dynamism of the vehicle, and while that’s partly due to the shift from 4:3 broadcast aspect ratios to 16:9 when we all got HD tellies, and the resultant slowing effect that comes with seeing more peripheral information flanking the car, what we’ve learned from this trailer is that it can be done better.

Using much more expensive, non-FIA compliant cameras, we’re sure, but look at that extreme FOV at 2m 11s in the trailer and tell us you wouldn’t watch a whole race like that.

Something’s clearly gone awry here at 2m 12s. It’s an image that summons some of the sport’s most frightening and tragic moments. Grosjean’s incredibly lucky escape in 2020. Lauda’s near-fatal crash at the 1976 German Grand Prix, in which he was pulled from his flaming car by Arturo Merzario, Brett Lunger, Harald Ertl and Guy Edwards.

And other, less fortunate drivers: Lorenzo Bandini and Ronnie Peterson, who lost their lives on the track in horrific fashion at the 1967 Monaco Grand Prix and 1976 Italian Grand Prix, respectively.

An F1 car on fire is an extremely emotive image, and one that carries a lot of baggage. It wouldn’t be brandished around just for light entertainment. You can expect this to be a major beat in F1’s narrative, so let’s hope it’s handled with the sensitivity it deserves.