It’s that time of year again. The 2026 Formula 1 season kicks off in Melbourne this coming Sunday, and as night follows day, here’s the latest series of Drive to Survive to pump up the global appetite for ridiculously fast cars, backstage dramas, grumpy team bosses and nakedly ambitious drivers.
This is also the last time we’ll see the “old” generation of cars before they’re replaced by this year’s models, powered by ultra-evolved, even more eco-friendly hybrid engines. Max Verstappen, for one, doesn’t like them much.
Drive to Survive has been instrumental in turning F1 into a vast global bonanza, epitomised at its most grotesquely garish by the Las Vegas Grand Prix, and also reflected here in scenes of the sport’s glitterati attending the New York premiere of Brad Pitt’s F1 movie (they closed Times Square for the occasion). Apparently a sequel may be in the works.
But, eight seasons in, some viewers (petrol-heads or otherwise) might be detecting a trace of saminesss in the mixture. The fact that this time around we only get eight episodes instead of the traditional 10 perhaps suggests that Netflix (and Apple TV in the US) might be inclined to agree.
Once again, it’s the Red Bull team that supplies most of the drama, but maybe still not enough. Last year’s D2S season tiptoed gingerly around the “sexting” scandal concerning team boss Christian Horner without revealing any details whatsoever. This time around, Horner’s subsequent sacking is covered in a bit more depth. Horner himself obviously finds it very painful to talk about, beyond speculating that he was the victim of a political putsch orchestrated by the Red Bull management. Possibly, the team’s calamitous showing at Red Bull’s home race in Austria, where they scored nul points, was the last straw. As Horner himself says, “this isn’t a popularity contest, this is Formula One.”
Meanwhile McLaren topped the Constructors chart, with their driver Lando Norris world champion, but some of the best bits of this series concern quirkier or more peripheral events, all of them illustrative of the fantastic-planet nature of F1. For instance, Williams driver Alex Albon and team boss James Vowles going flying with the US Navy’s Blue Angels aerobatic team in Florida, or Mercedes boss Toto Wolff having to get a push-start in his priceless Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Roadster when the battery has gone flat. Best of all is where we see McLaren boss Zak Brown (pictured above) playing tennis, and he reveals that his coach is a guy called Novak Djokovic (24 Grand Slam singles titles, World Number One for 428 weeks etc). “Backhand, we gotta work,” notes Novak, before cheerfully joining in a game of doubles with Zak and his none-too-athletic buddies.
There’s also a profile of the venerable eminence grise Flavio Briatore (pictured right), who could teach Niccolo Machiavelli a trick or two. He’s currently working as “executive adviser” to the Alpine team, and as well as giving viewers a tour of his art collection, he also doles out realpolitik as he mercilessly tells under-performing drivers exactly what he thinks of them. He sacked Jack Doohan after six races in 2025, though admittedly that seems positively magnanimous compared to the fate of Liam Lawson. He was axed by Red Bull after just two races, though Lawson at least got a schadenfreude fix from watching the progress of his replacement Yuki Tsunoda, who put on a mesmerising display of ineptitude. It might pay the big bucks, but F1 is not a very relaxing place to be.
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