A behind the scenes documentary on Formula One – sounds fantastic. So when preparing for my most recent long-haul flight I downloaded “Grand Prix Driver” on Amazon Prime.
Four episodes were available, not knowing much about it I was unsure if that was the lot or if it was being drip-fed over the coming weeks.
I watched them all back to back on the plane and quite frankly it was excellent. As an F1 Nut it was great to see behind the scenes at McLaren.
Access seemed almost unrestricted, there were many times when parts were blurred to protect their IP, but overall it gave a very good sense of the process of preparing for an F1 season from a driver and a team’s perspective.
Watching Stoffel prepare through fitness training and some of his behind the scenes media pre-briefings were great. While Fernando’s precious time seemed to have been accurately portrayed.
Plenty of engineers and the senior managers played their part with cameras really showing some rough moments in the car’s development leading up to the reveal and Barcelona test.
Four episodes? That’s it – I think perhaps they hoped it would be more as the phoenix that is McLaren Honda rose from the ashes. That was not to be though, so the final episode essentially fast forwards through the breakdown in the Honda relationship and sets the scene perhaps for a second season with more hope as McLaren Renault?
Not a huge fan of Michael Douglas as the narrator – but that’s probably been done to please the US audience of Amazon, but it’s not a game changer, and you also need to ensure you switch on English Subtitles when they’re talking other languages as the subtitles don’t appear by default on the show.
As an F1 fan it was a good new insight, but perhaps lacked a touch more technical info, though I can see that it was almost right on the limit of what you’d want to throw at an average viewer.
Overall – well worth a watch if you’re fascinated by F1.
