Pitt stopped: Brad’s F1 movie has been shut down

Historically, backmarker F1 teams used to disappear from the grid having gone into financial meltdown, but F1’s fake backmarker F1 team - AKA the Apex GP outfit at the centre of Brad Pitt’s forthcoming F1 movie - have gone into hibernation for an entirely different reason.

Nope, rather than burn through untold sums of cash and lose a dodgy, Cayman Islands-based sponsor out of the blue, production has been stopped by the Hollywood strike that’s been making headlines these past few days.

And it’s come less than a fortnight after the movie caused a stir at the British Grand Prix, where the film crew was given its own garage in the pit lane and ran an F2-spec (but loosely F1 styled) car on track to gather footage for the film.

The team and its faux mechanics had been set to appear at several more races over the course of the season, but that now looks unlikely to happen.

The Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) union called on its 160,000 members to strike last week, holding up production of Mission:impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two and Gladiator 2, according to reports.

The row is over how much actors get paid for repeats, essentially, although the threat of AI is also a factor.

Pitt and co-star Damson Idris play drivers for F1’s smallest and least successful team in the as-yet-untitled film, with the former’s character a returning legend and the latter’s a hot-shot rookie.

What do you reckon we’ll see first: this, or the end of Max Verstappen’s winning streak?