The Netflix series Drive to Survive has transformed Formula 1, taking it to entirely new audiences and used by F1 bosses to ignite a burgeoning support base in the United States. With season six looming early next year, interest in F1 shows no signs of abating, despite Max Verstappen having long since romped to a hat-trick of drivers’ titles long before the 2023 season’s end.
Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 Story looks unlikely to have any impact on F1’s ongoing fortunes but that makes it no less compelling as a spectacle. It tells a sporting David v Goliath story, the tale of a team whose owners Honda pulled out of Formula 1 entirely on the eve of the 2009 season in response to the global financial crash. The resulting phoenix from the Ashes saw the team bought for a token pound from Honda (the manufacturer’s boss still proudly possesses it) by its former F1 technical director, Ross Brawn.
Brawn seems so affable, almost huggable, on the surface that the driver Jenson Button nicknamed him “the bear” during the course of the season. But Christian Horner, team principal for Red Bull currently and back in 2009, says: “He’s the most cut-throat, ruthless competitor probably that we’ve ever come across. He would sell his grandmother to get what he wanted.”
Brawn’s eponymous team quickly found itself racing against the behemoths of the sport in Red Bull, Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren with seemingly bottomless pockets. In contrast, cash was so tight they had to offload half of their 800-strong workforce after race one, flew Easyjet rather than private, and any spending over £75 had to be signed off personally by Brawn or the team’s chief executive Nick Fry.
And yet somehow they pulled off a trick their major rivals failed to do. In response to a new set of regulations aimed at reducing the downforce racing cars had at their disposal, a lowly aerodynamicist suggested using a double diffuser on the car. It was a quirk – later proved legal in a lengthy case – which in fact gave the car greater downforce, essentially enabling it to stick to the surface of the track at greater speeds.
Each F1 season begins with winter testing and I remember being at the test in Barcelona where it quickly became clear that Brawn, despite having what looked like the most basic of cars with no sponsors and arriving days late, were seconds quicker than the rest of the field.
Such is the rate of development in the sport, teams quickly caught up after Button had already won six of the opening seven races. The rest of the season became a drive to survive for Button and Brawn both in terms of the racing and their precarious finances.
So the source material is compelling, and fortunately the show has access to all the main players: in front of the camera are Button, his fellow Brawn driver Rubens Barrichello, Brawn himself and the former F1 puppet master Bernie Ecclestone. Keanu Reeves even appears as a narrator and questioner of the story’s main protagonists. An unlikely choice he may be, but rest assured: his knowledge, passion for motorsport and warmth with the various interviewees shines through.
That said, the show also examines some of the figures on the periphery, who are no less compelling. We learn how Brawn’s wife Jean gave him the all clear to go ahead with a highly risky buy-out of the team on the proviso the family home was safe; we also meet the team’s fuel man who quit to become a plumber, only to be lured back when they realised no one else could do his job of refilling the cars at the races.
The drama on the track as the tension of the season’s climax builds is captivating with stories that haven’t been told before even for those across the story at the time. Button tells the moment at the penultimate race of the season in Brazil where his confidence was shot to pieces and his father John took him aside and told him of all the tough times he had come through. The next morning, Brawn recalls Button being a different man as he scythed his way up from 16th on the grid to fifth.
What the four-part Disney+ series also shows is the past politics of F1 under the auspices of Ecclestone and Max Mosley, the then-president of the sport’s governing body the FIA. The Brawn team prove pivotal in that power struggle.
There are the odd bits in 2009’s retelling that don’t quite work. A seeming obsession to return in person to the scene of key moments is unnecessary: putting Button back in his Brawn overalls at Silverstone, home of the British Grand Prix, with Reeves in a back-to-front cap walking in slow-motion to the old Brawn car is a case in point.
But that’s merely picking tiny holes in an illuminating take on what seems, nearly 15 years on, even more of a mission impossible than it felt at the time.
