The appearance of a new season of Netflix’s Drive to Survive – now in its eighth year – has become a tradition in its own right. An amuse-bouche to awaken the palate before we gorge on a new championship.
But in recent years the series has felt increasingly stale. Of last season’s 10 episodes, RaceFans judged half of them to be worth watching.
Are the producers finding it harder to tell interesting stories? That would be a compelling explanation for the most significant change this season: it now consists of eight episodes rather than ten, though the running time of each is slightly longer on average.
This hasn’t drastically reduced the number of storylines DTS attempts to cover, as fewer threads are split across multiple shows and episodes often cover the goings-on at more than one team. As in past seasons this is sometimes down to draw a contrast between different team managers: episode two sees Flavio Briatore (Alpine) and Jonathan Wheatley (Audi) fill the roles Guenther Steiner and James Vowles were fitted for in season six.
But what the new season conspicuously lacks is much of the behind-the-scenes paddock chatter which was once its strength. The bad old days of DTS manufacturing patently false rivalries may be no more, but nor is there much in the way of revealing behind-the-scenes titbits.
What there is, now more than ever, is endless contrived scenes of individuals forced together for convenient expository chats. It appears as if F1’s media-facing personalities enjoy nothing better than to sit in sparsely-populated areas, tell each other facts they already know and agree about the blatantly obvious.
As was the case last year, the programme makers attempt to vary the usual format for a single episode. Last year one round was filmed from the drivers’ perspective, this time the principals of the top four teams are tracked around the Las Vegas Grand Prix. However the particular circumstances of that race force a focus on McLaren’s double disqualification and its implications for the championship.
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For only the second time since DTS began, the drivers’ title race went down to the final round – and this was a mite less controversial than the last one. However, here the series’ inability to shed new light on events is most obvious: the last episode is little more than a highlights reel for what was a typically tedious Yas Marina race.
In its early years, DTS would take maddening liberties with the truth but also uncover some fascinating candid moments. In its eighth season there’s little of either and its episodes are increasingly formulaic and unremarkable.
For all that, it remains a useful advert for F1 on the world’s largest streaming platform. But F1 now boasts a successful movie, which has a sequel in the works, and Netflix will show its first live grand prix this year. DTS therefore increasingly looks like a series whose time has passed.
Drive to Survive season eight is available to stream from today on Netflix
Formula 1
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- Firing Lawson after two rounds wasn’t my call, claims Horner
- Cadillac F1 boss told me “I will not let you down” – Andretti