With season eight of Netflix’s Drive to Survive landing this week, why has a docudrama about Formula 1 captured such a large audience?

Drive to Survive has proven to be one of Netflix’s biggest hit shows, with season eight of the series being released later this week.

Drive to Survive Season 8 set to debut on 27 February

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The eighth season of Drive to Survive will be release on 27 February on Netflix, with the new series featuring a slightly reduced number of episodes as the F1 2025 championship is revisited over eight instalments.

From the early days of the series, which made worldwide stars of the likes of Guenther Steiner and Daniel Ricciardo, the show has accelerated the transformation of F1 from a massive, yet still somehow curiously niche interest, into a titan of global sport.

The series is now eagerly awaited by millions of fans around the world each year, although the data of recent years, published by the Sports Business Journal, suggests the trend has been gradually downward.

The seventh season, focusing on 2024, is reported to be the most-watched sports documentary on Netflix, boasting 10.4 million views, a drop of around 10 per cent relative to season six. With Netflix not releasing exact viewership data, exact figures for comparisons across the seasons are difficult to gauge.

Speaking to media, including PlanetF1.com, during the Bahrain pre-season test, one of the series’ executive producers, Tom Rogers, revealed the approach that’s been taken, year-on-year, to trying to keep the product fresh.

Asked by PlanetF1.com how he believes the show has evolved from its beginnings, he said, “This sounds really strange to say, but I think the COVID-19 pandemic actually helped to accelerate Drive to Survive‘s success, for two reasons.

“The world was stuck at home and was trying to find new things to watch. Everyone joked that they’d ‘completed Netflix’.

“So people tried new things, which involved, ‘Oh, have you heard about this series about Formula 1?’ ‘Oh, I’ll give that a go’.

“The second thing was how we had to go about filming; F1 and us as a production company worked incredibly closely during that lockdown period between Melbourne and the first race during resumption to figure out, how are we going to keep the show going?

“In essence, the solution was that we embedded within the teams. We entered their sanitary bubbles. We wore a team kit. People literally traveled, lived with, and sort of breathed the existence of the team.

“Season three is probably one of the strongest seasons of Drive to Survive. It won an Emmy. It has that iconic ‘Man on Fire’ episode with Romain Grosjean.

“And I think half of that was as a result of that change to how we saw access, and we’ve tried to keep the DNA of that.

“So you will sometimes see us again wearing team kits embedded with some teams if we feel that’s the best way to go about it.

“Obviously, as the restrictions have loosened up, you will also see our teams running around the paddock as usual. But I think season three, for me, was the moment when we really had a gear shift, and it was out of necessity.”

While the show started as an irritance for some of the teams, with Ferrari and Mercedes opting against giving the film crews access in those early days, it gave smaller teams a chance to shine in the spotlight – Haas, for example, played a starring role, while the American team does not feature prominently in the latest season.

Some of the grittiness, the raw realness, has faded, inevitably losing out to a more polished sheen of PR positivity as all the players involved are more aware of the potential reach of every moment captured.

“The eyeballs that have been on it over the years since we began, something like a billion people have tuned into this,” Rogers said.

“Most of these kinds of series after two or three years, you start to see a bit of a drop off. It’s incredibly strong in terms of how steady it is. People are still watching it year in and year out.

“If you go back to the beginning, there were about three or four teams that said, ‘Don’t like this. Don’t want to be involved’, and drivers saying, ‘What’s in it for me?’

“Then, by the time we got to season two, everyone wanted to be a part of it. Now, some of those people who were so against it are the biggest stars of the show.

“I think it’s been successful because the teams have seen what it can deliver, and I think they get recognition in the stardom, and it’s helped grow them as brands and individuals, and sports personalities.

“But also, it’s so different, it would have been a disaster and a mistake if we just tried to replicate what we see on broadcast and what we see with what you guys [the media] do week in, week out, it’s a very different take on the people in the sport.

“It’s quite emotional and emotive. I won’t ruin it for everyone, but having seen some of the episodes that are coming, there are some things that will surprise you and interest you. You’ll see different emotional sides of people you may not have seen before.

“Humans, by their instinct, like drama and controversy. They like emotion. Also, people like to see people who are great with fragility and adversity and trials and tribulations.

“All of that combined is what you would expect from a movie or a drama series.”

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Drive to Survive taps into F1’s ‘human emotions’

While the show offers fans the chance to relive plenty of intense on-track moments from the season, the primary draw of Drive to Survive is in the behind-the-scenes interactions between the main actors.

Whether that be a terse word between drivers after a fraught overtaking attempt, admonishment from a team boss, or questionable jokes with their press officers, revealing the personalities behind the helmets and on the pitwall has been a primary reason for the success of the show.

“I think sport is, in essence, the epitome of human emotion. That’s why we all tune in every week. That’s why we watch sports. That’s why we love sport,” Rogers said.

“I think what we tapped into with Drive to Survive is there’s a real desire to get as close to the source of that human emotion as possible.

“People really wanted to see what drivers are like behind the scenes and see what happens within the sport and away from the sport.

“Formula 1, naturally, is a sport where you can’t see that emotion when the athletes are competing; they’ll all wear helmets, obviously, there are a few night races where we get the privilege of seeing their eyes.

“But, other than that, it was always very difficult to connect with those drivers in those moments of high emotion. That’s what Drive to Survive tapped into.”

As for who the show is actually targeting, whether that be complete newbies to F1 or seasoned fans for decades, Drive to Survive has to walk the fine line of catering for those who know precious little about the sport, whilst also keeping the interest of those well-accustomed to the politics of the paddock.

“I would say there are kind of three audiences that this resonates with,” F1’s communications chief, Liam Parker, said of the success of the show.

“There’s a brand-new audience that just like the drivers, the personalities, the conflict, the battles, which is a storytelling element to it.

“Then I think there are the fans that followed us for a long time who maybe have never seen these behind-the-scenes personalities, the conflict, what goes into it.

“Then there’s your guys [the media], you live and breathe it every week, but to see the different context and how it’s all threaded together in the storylines, I think it gives an added element to what we see, the usual driver interviews, the on-track activities, the formalised press conferences.

“It gives you that glimpse of what a lot of you guys see day-to-day, but it threads them all together into a story. So I think there are three audiences this hits, and I think it just adds intrigue outside of what we see day to day.”

Drive to Survive producers insist Formula 1 growth far from finished

With the series moving to focus on “quality, not quantity” with a reduction in episodes for season eight, the natural question that comes up with the show’s maturation is just how long the show will be made for – its absence would certainly be noticeable in the build-up to a new F1 season, despite its relatively recent arrival in the media landscape.

Rogers revealed there are currently no plans to consider wrapping the show up any time soon, with F1 only starting to “scratch the surface” of the American market, with “enormous growth potential” as Apple assumes the broadcasting rights.

“I think the show has evolved, but we’ve tried to retain the essence of what made it successful. Formula 1 was already incredibly well catered for in terms of media coverage of race events, and the TV coverage of race events is great,” he said.

“I’m a lifelong F1 fan. There aren’t actually many lifelong F1 fans who work on Drive to Survive. That’s actually by intention, because we wanted fresh perspectives coming to the sport, and we wanted people in the edit, people on the ground who didn’t really know much about the world, so that they could look at it with a new sense of inquisitive kind of view.

“I think, as long as we keep that fresh take on the paddock,  it will continue to be successful.

“We’re in season eight now, and it’s unusual, really, for Netflix shows to get to season eight. It speaks volumes about the popularity of the show, but also the sport.

“We get asked, do we think it’s run its course? But interestingly, this year, as we’ve seen with the F1 movie breaking box office records for a sports movie, Academy Award nominations… As much as we’ve grown the American market, I would argue there’s still a long way to go in the American market, and it feels like F1 is continuing to go from strength to strength.

“So hopefully, Drive to Survive will continue alongside F1 in that respect.

I think you have to, very early, accept the fact you’re not going to please everybody.

“The reality is that the core die-hard fans inevitably will have some grievance with some stuff that’s in there, but we’re not really targeting the people that are already passionate about F1. This was always the sort of access point for new fans. That was always the intention.

“I remember, when we were considering doing season one, we had lots of conversations with F1, and the brief was we want to turn casual fans into avid fans and non-fans into casual fans.

“I think we’ve achieved that, and we continue to achieve that.

“Drive to Survive is an incredible success story, and, if we knew the secret ingredients to replicate that [for other sports], then we would replicate it, and everybody else would do the same.

“Each sport is unique. We’ve followed the Tour de France. We’ve done tennis, and a golf series which is actually still going on. There are other successes there.

“But I think the reason that this sport transcends so well into Netflix is, in essence, the paddock is a perfect soap opera set. It is the apartment in Friends, it’s the pub in Cheers.

“All of our characters descend on the same spot, every week, every fortnight, and interact with each other. Some of the other sports are slightly more difficult.

“Tennis is quite a solo sport. It’s individuals competing on their own. Those crossovers don’t happen quite as frequently. So I think just the sport naturally lends itself to this type of show.”

Parker agreed with Rogers, saying that the realities of interpersonal relationships between key players in the paddock translate to the screen well.

“This sport is more political than probably any other sport, so there is always something going on,” he said.

“When you’ve got teams like this competing like this as a group of people with investors and brands and money and individuals and egos and personalities, I just think it lends itself more to battles and personality.

“There are examples on Netflix of where people clearly hate each other, don’t like each other, and can’t stand working with each other. And then there are friendships as well.

“So I think it’s quite unique.”

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