Formula 1 is more popular in the United States now than probably ever before, but it’s not because of the staggering three races held in the U.S. this season, it’s not because the boss of the one American F1 team is a perfect and wonderful character, and it’s not because there’s a new young American F1 driver who actually has a handful of points in the world championship standings. No, it’s because of Netflix’s Drive To Survive, a thrilling docuseries that has charted the “plot” of the last few Formula 1 seasons with cleverly selective editing and a slight reframing of facts in order to make things more dramatic and easier to follow for people who don’t watch the actual races. Villains are created, heroes are highlighted, and viewers get the gist of what’s going on in F1.
But this is a sport that’s been running, sort of, since the 1940s, and that means there are a ton of F1 stories that predate current world champion Max Verstappen and Drive To Survive breakout star Daniel Ricciardo—F1 stories that Netflix fans may be completely unaware of, despite the huge, lasting impact they had on the current incarnation of the sport. One of those stories, as detailed in the remarkable Disney+ series Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 Story, is the miracle season of a team called Brawn GP in 2009, which is a story that surely every true F1 fan knows deep in their bones, but also one that would’ve completely passed by this new batch of fans.
Formula 1 only recently became very easy to watch in the United States, thanks to broadcast deals with ESPN and a dedicated F1 streaming service that shows all of the races, practices, and qualifying sessions. So, to new American fans, the story of Brawn GP is like if someone lived in a country that didn’t care about baseball until 2020 and then heard these fantastical tall tales about the Chicago Cubs going 100 years without a championship before improbably winning it all in 2016.
And that’s part of what makes the Disney+ documentary series, which premieres November 15, so compelling: It’s an incredible tale, the repercussions of which are still being tangibly felt today—new rules are discussed, new engineers and team bosses gain prominence, and that’s without mentioning the ultimate fate of the team after this one famous season. Regardless of whether you’re a Drive To Survive fan, or you’ve never seen F1, or probably even if you watched this all live when it was happening, this is one of the all-time great underdog sports stories and simply seeing it play out makes for thrilling television.
The series obviously goes into the proverbial nuts and bolts of it, but the short version is that Ross Brawn served as the technical director for Scuderia Ferrari for years, helped them win a bunch of championships with F1 icon Michael Schumacher, and then decided to retire … until Honda’s F1 team offered him a job running their team. Brawn decided to essentially blow off his first year, 2008, so the team could spend all of its money and resources making a great car for 2009. Then the global financial crisis happened, and Honda decided it was silly to waste money on racing.
Honda was going to fire everyone overnight, 750 people or so, but Brawn and his CEO convinced Honda to sell them the team for a token sum so they could try and find a real buyer. The plan was to just survive a couple of races and prove that they were a functional team that some other car company should come along and buy, but there was a wrinkle in that plan: The car, branded with the team name Brawn GP by the crew as a tribute to the man who had saved their jobs, was a beast.
The Brawn GP cars ran laps around every other team, so to speak, and after having signed off on a deal that allowed Brawn to get an engine to replace the one Honda would no longer be making (due to the gentlemanly European nature of F1) those other teams got pissed (due to the underhanded, conniving nature of F1). Red Bull team boss Christian Horner—a fixture here just as he is on Drive To Survive, since he’s never seen a narrative he didn’t want to control—explains in the doc that everyone was happy to keep the team alive, right up until the moment they started demolishing the competition.
But the other part of what makes Brawn such a great show is its host, Keanu Reeves, who brings not only a deep well of knowledge about racing but also an enormous amount of enthusiasm for anything with wheels and an engine. Reeves isn’t an unseen narrator in Brawn; he’s basically an equal star of the show alongside Brawn GP drivers Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello, iconic F1 commentator Martin Brundle, dirtbag former F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone, and Ross Brawn himself.
An interviewer who injects so much of himself into the interview could be grating, but Reeves comes across as so genuinely happy to talk to these specific people about this specific F1 season that it’s positively joyous to watch. It’s infectious. Watching this Keanu Reeves, it’s hard to imagine he once had a reputation for being wooden. He’s cracking jokes with these people, he’s offering fun insights of his own, and he gets a big, sparkling grin when somebody shares a juicy comment or an interesting reveal.
Reeves takes this beyond a really good sports story and makes it just a special story in general, something that transcends its sport and says something about human ingenuity and perseverance and our ability to come together and thrive in the face of difficult circumstances. Drive To Survive offers a good showcase for why Formula 1 racing is cool, but Brawn, like the best achievements in sports, offers a good showcase for why people are cool.
Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 Story premieres November 15 on Disney+ and Hulu