F1: The Movie review: A loud, shiny mess that gets F1 all wrong

F1: The Movie opens its throttle with flashy visuals and engine roars, but if you’re a real Formula 1 fan, you’ll immediately notice something’s off. The sound design is loud, the tracks are accurate, and the camera angles do justice to the speed of the sport. But the rest? It’s a Hollywood dream wrapped in a carbon fiber lie.

F1 fans were promised a racing movie. What we got was a paper-thin fantasy built on bad plot choices, zero realism, and a whole lot of Brad Pitt.

To the film’s credit, it captures the adrenaline of race day—the roar of the engines, the rush of pit stops, and the sheer spectacle of Formula 1’s speed. The sound design and camera work do a good job of reflecting the sensory side of the sport, even if the script doesn’t show the same level of understanding.

A team of twenty and no rules in sight

Let’s begin with the fictional team, APX GP. Apparently a new constructor, they somehow have only around 20 visible team members and yet operate like a top-tier outfit. The garage looks shiny, but APX GP feels hollow. There’s barely any interaction with other teams or drivers, and absolutely no sense of how the sport actually works behind the scenes.

This is supposed to be a team fighting to survive in Formula 1. But there’s no proper factory logic, financial realism, or even a basic understanding of how many people it takes to run a team. In fact, with the number of crashes they go through, APX GP should be bankrupt halfway through the season.

And then there’s the completely unrealistic way Sonny Hayes drives. Blatant violations of FIA rules, refusal to box when told, and aggressive racecraft that should’ve gotten him banned after the very first race. No penalties, no reprimands. Just plot armor.

Sonny Hayes: The one-man show that missed the point

Brad Pitt’s Sonny Hayes dominates F1: The Movie to the point where it barely feels like anyone else exists on the grid. Despite the film trying to show the importance of teamwork, it ends up being all about Sonny.

Sonny drives recklessly, gets involved in multiple crashes, disrespects his engineer, and still somehow ends up being the hero. At one point, he even makes strategy decisions for his teammate mid-race—something no F1 team would tolerate.

There’s also the issue of his character arc. He lives in a van, crashes into people, and yet magically becomes a team leader and strategist, all without any proper qualifications. His return to racing isn’t believable, and the more you know about the sport, the more frustrating it becomes.

Joshua Pearce: A wasted opportunity

Joshua Pearce, played by Damson Idris, is built up as a promising but arrogant young talent. Unfortunately, he’s barely given anything to work with. His character is underwritten and inconsistent. He gets a massive, completely unrealistic crash early in the film—one that looks like it was copied from Alex Peroni’s F3 2019 accident—but with none of the physics or consequences.

At one point, the car flips like a spinning salmon (completely impossible with current F1 car design and ground-effect aerodynamics). Somehow the front wing flies off mid-air with zero impact. Sonny, driving on the opposite side of the track, pulls over to help him—an action that ignores every safety and medical protocol in motorsport.

Formula 2 Championship - Round 8 Silverstone - Feature Race - Source: Getty

After the crash, Joshua’s development is rushed. He goes from smug to cooperative without much in between, and no performance from any actor, not even Damson Idris, can fix a role that’s written this thinly.

The engineer who was everything and nothing in F1: The Movie

Kerry Condon’s character is a bizarre mix of every garage role. She’s the chief technical director, lead aerodynamicist, race strategist, and the primary engineer on the radio. She used to work in aerospace. She now makes major decisions on the pit wall, builds cars, and also sleeps with the driver.

The romance between Sonny and the engineer is exactly what you expect from a Hollywood production—it adds nothing to F1: The Movie. It’s barely five minutes, and yet it manages to undermine her credibility. It makes it seem like she only starts delivering at APX GP after Sonny shows interest in her.

She’s written like a stereotypical “not-like-other-girls” character—good at poker and emotionally guarded. She rolls her eyes a lot and has a soft side that only emerges for the male lead. Not a great look for women in motorsport, especially when Simone Ashley’s role was cut entirely from the final film, reduced to a second-long cameo. The one female mechanic messes up a pit stop. The optics aren’t subtle.

Racing scenes of F1: The Movie— A visual win, a logical mess

Let’s be honest: the racing scenes in F1: The Movie look incredible. The camera work, the sound, the way they capture the thrill of the track—it’s high quality. It’s exciting to watch, and some scenes like the final lap in Abu Dhabi are undeniably cool.

But that’s where the praise ends.

Brad Pitt, star of the upcoming Formula One based movie, Apex, and Javier Bardem talk on the grid during the F1 Grand Prix of Great Britain at Silverstone - Source: Getty

The movie completely ignores F1 regulations:

Overtaking on straights without DRS or logic.
Clear visors in full daylight.
No qualifying sessions shown.
Substituting a reserve driver after qualifying—something the FIA doesn’t allow—without even starting from the pit lane.
Drivers watching F1TV in the UK (which… isn’t available there).
Peel-offs during wet races? Never happens.
Red flag countdown timers that don’t exist.
Aerodynamicists sitting on the pit wall? No.
Crashes recreated from real events—but without the gravity or realism (Monza 2019, for instance, doesn’t translate well here).
Team principal press conferences where real F1 bosses give one-line answers, completely detached from how media-trained they are in reality.

Even small details are off. Timing graphics abbreviate Hayes and Pearce as “HYS” and “PRC,” which look like “High Yield Savings” and “People’s Republic of China.” Not even a joke—just odd.

The final win: When the F1: The Movie remembered the heart of F1

For all its flaws, F1: The Movie gave me one moment I’ll hold onto—the final scene.

When APX GP finally wins, it’s not just about Sonny crossing the line. It’s the celebration that follows. Everyone gets their moment: the engineers, the mechanics, the pit crew, the team principal. The people behind the scenes—the ones who rarely get camera time—finally step into the light. For once, the win feels collective.

And while I watched it, something in me cracked.

It didn’t just feel like a fictional victory. It echoed what I’ve been waiting for in real life: a true team moment, like seeing Ferrari win it all together—red suits under the lights, champagne spraying, mechanics crying, tifosi cheering.

It reminded me of Ferrari.

I want to cry not over a scripted scene in a movie, but over the culmination of a real fight. A real season. A real team.

One day, Ferrari. One day.

The real drivers in F1: The Movie? Just decorations

Real F1 drivers do appear in F1: The Movie, but their roles are reduced to cameos. Max Verstappen gets a single voice line before vanishing from the story entirely. Lewis Hamilton appears briefly—blink and you’ll miss him.

Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz are shown chatting together, which was admittedly comforting to see for longtime Ferrari fans. But they don’t contribute meaningfully to the narrative.

Despite so many big names on set, Roscoe Hamilton ends up getting more screen time than most of the actual drivers. This is simultaneously hilarious and frustrating. Nico Rosberg isn't mentioned, and F1: The Movie doesn't make use of any actual driver personalities, rivalries, or stories that fans genuinely care about.

For all the talk of authenticity and integration with real F1 weekends, F1: The Movie sidelines the real stars of the sport to prop up fictional ones who don’t carry the same weight.

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Even worse, Charles filming a podium scene spraying Brad Pitt with champagne—on the same weekend he went from P19 to P3 while Ferrari lost the Constructors? That’s not just poor planning. It’s tone-deaf.

Final thoughts? F1: The Movie doesn’t get it

F1: The Movie is not for F1 fans. It’s for people who like the idea of racing. The ones who saw a few highlight reels, maybe watched Drive to Survive, and now want a dramatic sports flick with cool crashes and Brad Pitt as the hero.

But for those of us who live through double-stack pit stops, track-limit controversies, and endless radio drama, F1: The Movie falls apart. It doesn’t understand team dynamics. It doesn’t portray strategy with any depth. It doesn’t respect the sport’s complexity.

It’s visually fun if you turn your brain off. Even more fun if you watch it with other F1 fans and laugh at every ridiculous moment together. But on its own?

F1: The Movie looks like Formula 1, but it drives like fanfiction with a movie budget.

Hans Zimmer, You Genius! Also—credit where it’s due—Hans Zimmer’s score holds the entire film together. The racing sequences hit harder because of the music. The slow-motion moments actually feel charged. The final lap, the tension, the celebration—it works because the score carries the emotion the script can’t always deliver.

Zimmer understood the assignment, even when the movie didn’t.

Final Rating: 5.5/10