F1: The Movie review - Brad Pitt rolls back the years as maverick racer Sonny Hayes

As producer Jerry Bruckheimer cautioned a preview audience, “Remember, this is not a documentary. It’s a movie.” Bruckheimer teamed up with director Joseph Kosinski to make Brad Pitt’s Formula One movie, the same duo who masterminded Top Gun: Maverick. Both films share a kind of dazzling hyper-reality which dares you to try to deny it.

The F1 paddock and pitlane must have been getting pretty crowded during the making of F1 over the last couple of seasons, with both Kosinski’s crews and Netflix’s ubiquitous Drive to Survive brigade all jostling for access, but at the very least F1 conveys an authentic sense of what it feels like behind the scenes.

Most of the current F1 drivers pass in front of the cameras during the film’s 150-odd minute running time, not least Max Verstappen, Carlos Sainz, Charles Leclerc, Lando Norris and Fernando Alonso, while team bosses including Ferrari’s Fred Vasseur, McLaren’s Zak Brown and Mercedes’ Toto Wolff get little cameos. They’ve also squeezed in a few frames of Guenther Steiner, Drive to Survive’s master of the four-letter expletive. Lewis Hamilton only gets a tiny flash of screen time, but as one of the producers he was closely involved in making it all happen.

All this carefully-wrought verisimilitude (including visits to F1 circuits at Monza, Zandvoort, Spa, Las Vegas etc) provides the platform for a fictional story which sees Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), a veteran driver who quit F1 three decades earlier after suffering a horrific accident, getting a call to come back from his old driving partner Ruben Cervantes, who now owns the APXGT team. Their HQ is McLaren’s real-life high-tech campus in Woking, but despite this luxury accommodation the team is stumbling around at the back of the grid. Ruben thinks pairing Sonny with their rookie driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris, pictured above with Pitt) could be the key to dragging them up the rankings. Javier Bardem’s cajoling, slightly piratical performance as Ruben is one of the best reasons for seeing the film (Bardem and Pitt pictured below).

Sonny’s memories of his F1 days revolve around racing against the likes of Nigel Mansell, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, so we know he’s no spring chicken (though we never learn his actual age). We gather he’s been living a kind of rootless, itinerant life, picking up drives wherever he can. He’s also fond of drinking and gambling. Pitt plays him with a laid-back, down-home charm which is impossible not to like. It inevitably proves alluring to Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon, pictured below), APXGT’s technical director.

The opening sequence where he competes in the 24 Hours of Daytona saloon car race gets the movie off to a dynamic start, thunderously soundtracked by Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love (you know this is a big-budget movie if they can afford to licence Zeppelin tracks). It also gives us a taste of Sonny’s gloves off, no-holds-barred approach to racing.

Nonetheless, the notion of inviting a battered veteran like Sonny back to F1 after a gap of several decades is one of the creakiest floorboards in the plot. The way it only takes him a couple of laps at Silverstone to get on the pace in a high-tech car, the likes of which didn’t exist the last time he was in F1, is beyond science fiction.

But hey, it’s just a movie, and it’s undoubtedly an entertaining one. The racing scenes are shot in thrillingly immersive detail and immediacy, the on-board camera sometimes shaking hysterically in sympathy with a car travelling at 170mph. Quite a lot of the on-track action is evidently rooted in the real-life folklore of F1. Sonny’s tactic of deliberately colliding with opponents to bring out a safety car and thus slow the whole field down is vaguely reminiscent of the notorious “Crashgate” episode perpetrated by the Renault team in 2008, while a subplot about leaked confidential documents also has real-world echoes. Meanwhile, the sheer number of collisions Sonny has with other cars would have brought him a penalty-points ban toot-sweet.

Nonetheless, by the end, you might well be cheering and throwing your F1 hat (with sponsor's logo) in the air. You can’t complain you’re not getting maximum bang for your entertainment buck.

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