The 2024 Formula One race season had plenty of drama, on and off the track, making Season 7 of the sports series Formula 1: Drive to Survive a thrilling look behind the garage doors of the high-octane sport. From drivers switching teams to long-held curses broken and new faces arriving in the paddock, producer Tom Hutchings and his team were there to capture it all.
“I met pretty much all the drivers, all their managers, all the teams, and all of them were saying they want the real story,” Hutchings tells Tudum. “It’s all the stuff that you don’t usually see, the personal journeys that they’re going on.”
Here we take you through some of the most compelling stories that played out in Season 7 of Formula 1: Drive to Survive.
The first several seasons of Drive to Survive covered the years when Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes were seemingly untouchable, winning back-to-back drivers’ and constructors’ championships. Season 7 delivers one of the most shocking stories to hit the sport — seven–time world champion Lewis Hamilton would leave his team and move to Ferrari, leaving team principal Toto Wolff to determine a new driver lineup.
“Toto is such a brilliant figure for Drive to Survive, and now he has got to find someone to fill the biggest shoes in town,” says producer Hutchings. “We knew that that story was something that had to be told.”
And there’s more: After affirming that Hamilton’s teammate George Russell was ready to lead, Wolff decided to pluck teenage Kimi Antonelli from the junior team and offer him the coveted Formula One seat. The series takes us into Kimi’s home, filled with trophies and racing memorabilia, where he gets the call that he will be racing at the pinnacle of motorsport. “Kimi Antonelli is such a sweet kid. He’s so lovable and so young,” Hutchings says. “Everyone has a sneaking feeling that this is going to be a really exciting prospect for the future, because Toto knows what he’s doing.”
When Hamilton signs with Ferrari for 2025, Carlos Sainz enters 2024 without a contract for the future. From the start, Williams team principal James Vowles set his sights on Sainz. “My eye was on him from ’23 because there was one driver that was able to beat Max, and it was Carlos,” Vowles tells Tudum. “In ’24, for an elite athlete to have your foundations completely shaken from underneath, [when] you’ve suddenly lost your job, there are two ways of reacting. You pull away from it because it’s frustrating, or you push into it because you want to show the world that you are strong irrespective of what happens. And he chose the latter.”
With Kick Sauber and Alpine also chasing Sainz to join their teams, Vowles had his work cut out for him. At one point, the Williams team believes Sainz is coming to sign the contract, but he doesn’t show up to the meeting. “There was a [time] by which I thought we would be done,” Vowles says . “And obviously that was the point at which it all went completely the other way, and it takes time to come to terms with that rebuild and come back. But … then you’re like, right, let’s push on again.”
Pushing on was fruitful for Vowles: by the end of Episode 4, Sainz has committed to Williams for 2025. Vowles recalls the day he was able to share with the team that they had won him over. “The energy that was there on that day — even now when I talk about it, I have goosebumps,” he says, “Because it was extraordinary. It’s times like that you remember for the rest of your career.”
In season after season of Drive to Survive, we have watched Monaco’s hometown hero Charles Leclerc drive his red Ferrari around the track of the most famous Grand Prix and come up short. This year, when the Monegasque driver got pole position in qualifying, the Drive to Survive team were ready to jump into action. “I saw the Ferrari guys and I was like, ‘Can we follow this?’ ” says producer Hutchings. “That’s the story we always wanted to tell, but it was never going to be a story we could tell if [he] wasn’t successful.”
The filming crew were with Leclerc the night before he raced. “It was Charles being really open with us and allowing us into his home,” Hutchings says. “The competition is with himself there. It’s not against other people. … [He’s] asking if he can achieve the thing that he’s always wanted to do.”
The magic of Season 7, Episode 7, started with the impetus for capturing something new this year. “We thought, ‘Let’s try and get the drivers to take over Drive to Survive. Rather than us being the storytellers, they can be the ones that do it,’” says Hutchings. Producers gave five drivers — Alex Albon, Charles Leclerc, George Russell, Lando Norris, and Pierre Gasly — phones to record footage during the Singapore Grand Prix weekend. “The drivers really let us into their lives,” he adds. “That was the way of us seeing how they go about a weekend, what they have to do.”
This particular group of drivers have a special bond, having raced together since they were children with go-karts. Williams driver Albon tells Tudum how they are able to maintain their friendships while also competing on the track: “There’s a common respect between us all. We’ve grown up together, and we’ve spent most of our lives together. … I see these guys more than I do my own family.”
Albon and his racing mates each had two iPhones with which to record in Singapore. “We could have made a feature film out of it because there was so much material,” says Hutchings. Some drivers took to filming themselves more than others. “I kept forgetting. It’s definitely not in my muscle memory to start vlogging,” says Albon. Whereas “Charles had filled up two phones before he even got off the plane, just sort of narrating his life,” recalls Hutchings. Who proved most likely to be a great filmmaker? “I’d say George Russell,” Hutchings says. “He’s an absolute workhorse. I would quite happily hire him as a director [on] Drive to Survive.”
2024 was an especially memorable year for one young driver from New Zealand: Liam Lawson. Episode 8 follows Lawson, who started the season as a reserve driver for Red Bull and RB teams, during a year full of promotions. The first comes when Lawson is called to the track at Silverstone to put in some test laps in the Red Bull car. “I spent a lot of time preparing for it, mostly mentally,” says Lawson. Drive to Survive “was there, and I knew they were there. I was just focusing on what I had to do and trying to block everything else out.”
After months without driving, Lawson says it is the physical training that is hardest to maintain to stay race-ready as a reserve driver. “We put a lot of work in fitness-wise to be ready and for an opportunity. When you don’t know when that’s going to be or if that’s going to happen, it’s really easy to lose sight of what you’re working towards.” His opportunity came when the RB team called him up to replace Daniel Ricciardo for the final six races of the season, months after the successful test at Silverstone.
With Sergio Pérez struggling, Red Bull announced Lawson would race alongside Max Verstappen for the team in 2025. The first person Lawson called was his father. “I didn’t really talk to my parents too much or anybody really about what was going on in those weeks leading up to those last few races,” says Lawson. “I knew that I was being heavily looked at for that Red Bull seat, but obviously there was no clear picture of what was going to happen. …After the news, I called my dad. I hadn’t seen my dad [get] emotional too many times, but he was very emotional [about] that.”
Watch Formula 1: Drive to Survive on Netflix now.
