F1 isn’t re-inventing the wheel of racing films, it’s just giving it a new axle, new bearings, and some fresh tires, which is uncanny because throughout the film, the topic of what kind of tires are going to be used for each race is diligently discussed. This film is a modern take of a familiar trope mostly seen in westerns. The perpetual fated nomad, strolls in for one last shot of a redemption, i.e. a championship -cemented in their mind as a lost cause.

 In F1 we follow the forever sunkisted Sonny Hayes, played by Brad Pitt. Sonny has a lot of experience racing. He also has a ton of regrets, loads of superstitions and is forever destined to be on the move.  He is comfortable in the confines of a vehicle. He even lives in his van that he travels in. He is the epitome of the nomad. No home other than the road. Never to settle, even if it were to enrich him. He’s a changed man from the many errors and tragedies in his life and career, and instead of dwelling on them, he’s learning from them. One of them is that the  path of winning does not correlate with the path of greatness, and neither of them are linear.  F1 is a traditional racing film. There are a tremendous amount of racing scenes and action sequences that will appease the audience that are seeing this just for that, but F1 is more about the motivations behind racing. Not just Sonny’s, but examining what are everyone’s motivations to choose to be part of the brutal racing profession.  

Directed by Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun Maverick)  F1 has some close similarities to Sonny Hayes and Top Gun Pete (Maverick) Mitchell. Each character has had obstacles that got in their way to profound greatness. Each was a prodigy that never came into fruition, and now seems to be in the forced position to pass their knowledge onto the younger hot shots. The formula to the story is familiar and there are some usual tropes of sports film. A losing team with a heart. The evil company man, and of course the rival of teammates that have to learn to work together. There is an attempt at a love story here, there is also enough peppering of comedy to break up the action, and there is a poker game scene between the rival drivers that is, of course, in a Jerry Bruckheimer produced film that now feels nostalgic. But what works in this is showing the amount of labor , and grueling planning that goes into racing, and I enjoyed the sense of skirting the rules to get ahead. Showing that hustling is still a helpful tool to use even in plain old racing.  F1 does kinda over stay its welcome, a kinda slow victory lap at the end even when we know where the end is going but that is irrelevant, because like Sonny Hayes, F1 is telling us, it’s not about the end, it is all about how you just keep going.   8/10