Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” returns for its 6th season, spotlighting the Red Bull-dominated 2023 season with its signature behind-the-scenes storytelling. However, despite its entertainment value, the series often takes creative liberties that detract from its authenticity fabricating drama to engage non-Formula 1 fans which ends up distorting the true dynamics of the sport and at times insults it.
In terms of entertainment, Season 6 maintains the engaging spectacle of its predecessors. It highlights the soap opera that goes behind the scenes, the relationship between sports, and also the management and pressure of the people that don’t take the spotlight. The editing is very good, Netflix is capable of making non-race fans engaged in the world of motorsports, but as it’s a strength, it’s a flaw. By pandering heavily to non-racing fans, it ends up almost misinterpreting the sport itself, painting some people involved in the competition as villains and others as heroes, such as how they framed the relationship between Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz as being very tense and also dangerous at times on track when this was barely the case. This is to no surprise as this already happened in season 4, where both drivers of the Mclaren Racing team recorded a video reacting to the season for a YouTube video and were sitting beside each other laughing at how Netflix framed their relationship as if they wanted the other out of the team.
Season 6 was 10 episodes long, but even with almost 10 hours worth of content, there are things that they didn’t mention even once, things that you’d expect them to at least address. The biggest one of these is the Alfa Romeo team, which with a very terrible season you could have done at least a segment in an episode with them instead of two episodes for Alpine two for Mercedes, and two for Alpha Tauri. These missing pieces of the season became more evident as Red Bull Racing, who dominated the season and scored the top spot in both drivers and constructors’ championships, were mentioned only once, and it was only on a single opinion about their sister team Alpha Tauri. This is particularly jarring as Red Bull Racing took jabs from everyone up and down the paddock in and out of track for the whole season, and with big tensions between the team, they could’ve at least made 15 minutes of an episode to them.
“It really surprised me personally not seeing RedBull at all, the season was engaging enough so you didn’t feel like you were missing much, but there was this kind of feeling that there’s a lot more that got overshadowed, and to me that removes from the authenticity that the show tries to present to its viewers,” Senior Jerónimo Cardona, long time motorsport fan and RedBull fan, said.
The other consistent complaint about the season is that just like past seasons, the fabrication of drama or moving moments of the season invent a narrative. The biggest example of this is how they mentioned 10 of the 22 races of the whole season. This was done for fabricating the narrative and excluding key moments for more investment. One of these specific moments was with the whole Alpha Tauri 3 driver musical chairs that happened mid-season, the writers did this to add more drama to it by painting De Vries as being ejected from the team on the “10th race” even when he went up to the 11th round, and he wasn’t ejected in the middle of the race weekend as they tried painting it. The next part they tried to fit into the narrative is that Daniel Riccardo, the driver who took DeVries’s seat, crashed on his first race and got a wrist injury that stopped him from racing for the next month. This is particularly fabricated as he drove 2 races before the one he crashed, and when he crashed it was on the first day of the race weekend in a practice session while trying to avoid another driver who crashed. On top of this, they skipped 4 whole races that Liam raced well in just to paint the Qatar Grand Prix as his first race for their narrative.
“I’m all for the drama, this sport is very cutthroat, so there’s plenty of it and Netflix does a good job presenting it. But it gets to a point where you can notice that everything is being greatly exaggerated and takes out some of the “reality” parts away from the show as it turns into a sitcom,” Senior Santiago Balladares, said.
Overall, Drive to Survive season 6 is an entertaining season of a series that has been criticized for previous seasons. While being not just for racing fans brings its positives, it also hurts itself as it alienates half of the stuff the whole sport is built on and even disrespects it at times, when even the world champion Max Verstappen called it an “Inaccurate portrayal of the sport”.
