Five things we learned from watching Drive to Survive Season 7

The new Drive to Survive season has landed ahead of the F1 2025 championship and we’ve binged the entire lot.

Here are five things we learned from watching the show in preparation for this year’s title fight.

Drive to Survive: Toto Wolff’s promise to Lewis Hamilton about Max Verstappen

One of the most endearing narrative choices the Drive to Survive makers have leaned into is that of recording supposedly candid conversations which just so happen to provide the perfect amount of exposition required to move the story along.

One such conversation takes place near the start of the third episode, Looking Out for Number 1, in which Toto Wolff has a leisurely breakfast with his wife Susie at their home in Monaco while pondering the big question of whether George Russell has it in him to lead his team forward with Lewis Hamilton departing for Ferrari.

“Do you think George has it in him to lead the team?” Susie asks her husband.

“He’s always been a little bit in Lewis’ shadow, because of Lewis’ global stardom.”

“Everybody is in Lewis’ shadow.”

The season kicks off without attempting to hide Hamilton’s move coming in the first month of 2024, being addressed almost immediately in the first episode, but it’s the third episode before the idea of who will replace him is directly dealt with.

The Wolff’s conversation goes on to line up some candidates for Hamilton’s seat – including Carlos Sainz, who gets a lukewarm ‘somebody to look at’ assessment, and Fernando Alonso, who would be an ‘interim’ option.

But it’s Susie’s suggestion that Max Verstappen could be a potential candidate to pursue that seems to light Toto’s fire, before he reveals that, until this point, he’s not approached Verstappen over a seat out of deference for the wishes of his star driver.

“I haven’t talked to [Max] because I promised Lewis not to talk to him,” Wolff said.

But, with Hamilton already moving on, Wolff vows, “But I will have the conversation now.”

The season suggests that, despite the relationship between Wolff and Hamilton remaining cordial, awkwardness and a coolness did set in in the aftermath of Ferrari’s securing of his signature.

There’s even a jibe in Hamilton’s direction during a scene recorded at Monza in which, following the signing of Kimi Antonelli in Hamilton’s seat, Wolff, Antonelli, and Russell are posing for pictures on the roof of the Mercedes hospitality.

With the future of the team nailed down, the same weekend in which Hamilton started to reveal how the emotions of his pending departure were setting in, a Mercedes staff member can be heard quipping, “Where’s Lewis?” – a tongue-in-cheek comment that results in guffaws all around.

What this particular narrative reveals is that Hamilton had earned the position to make a reasonable request of his team not to be lined up with a driver he suspected would disrupt his harmony at Mercedes, a position Wolff respected up until the point Hamilton chose to leave anyway.

Lando Norris struggled with the aftermath of the Brazilian GP

The critical race in the run-in to deciding the outcome of the title fight came at the Sao Paulo GP in Brazil, when Lando Norris started from pole position on a day when Max Verstappen lined up 17th.

Momentum was on Norris’ side as he chipped away at Verstappen’s points lead, but the grid order for Interlagos gave him a huge advantage to slice decisively into that gap.

Of course, we all know how the race played out – Verstappen produced a generational drive to come through and win by 20 seconds, while errors from Norris saw him slip down the order to finish sixth.

In the aftermath of that weekend, Norris didn’t cover himself in glory as he made comments such as, “It’s not talent, it’s just luck”, a comment he later retracted once the adrenaline of the day had faded.

Norris appears to be the personality upon whom Drive to Survive has hitched its wagon to in light of the departures of the likes of Daniel Ricciardo and Guenther Steiner, and it leads to some unusual choices of how to present his personality.

There are times at which Norris is presented in child-like innocence, with a particularly jarring moment coming in Episode 2 when Norris is shown playing with puppies and as a physically smaller child compared to Verstappen – interspersed with scenes of Verstappen raging with expletives down team radio.

Going up against the relentless onslaught of Verstappen and Red Bull, Norris’ defeat in Brazil results in an interview piece to camera in which he admits that the critical “pretty bad” error he made upon the final restart in Brazil had weighed heavily on his mind.

“I didn’t sleep,” he said. “26 hours. I went straight.”

Asked if jetlag played a part, he said, “No, that was just me being… in my head.

“I was like… Yeah, it’s f**ked. That was our chance. Now it’s game over.”

Norris’ willingness to show his honest train of thought does make for compelling viewing, given that he didn’t reveal this mindset during the heat of the battle.

As an aside, there’s also a reveal that, during the Hungarian Grand Prix while leading Oscar Piastri on track, Norris didn’t initially intend on allowing the Australian back through…

Christian Horner, the Drive to Survive villain of Season 7

There’s an amusing moment when Christian Horner, sitting in the back of a car on the way to the track, asks the Drive to Survive staff how he’s being portrayed on this season, asking whether he’s being made the “villain” of the show.

The staffer responds to ask, “When has that ever happened?” to which Horner jokes “Seasons 1 to 6!” to the laughter of everyone in the car.

Like with how Norris is presented meekly, the David to Verstappen’s Goliath, Horner does find himself portrayed in a difficult light throughout this season.

With Horner well-known for his propensity to get stuck in during interviews and press conferences, the Red Bull boss finds himself marked out with moments which are polarising to the happy-go-lucky light in which his 2024 nemesis Zak Brown is portrayed.

While Brown is shown appearing as a child on the American TV show Wheel of Fortune, engaging with friends in Slovenia, and running around the field playing baseball, Horner is shown saying “Norris is sh***ing it” on the grid at Zandvoort, calling Brown a “pr**k” (reportedly already an edited word away from the real word used), and staring down the camera with gravitas and intensity during his direct interviews.

There’s little of the lightness of touch Brown and McLaren are treated with, with Netflix choosing to address the off-track controversies that plagued Red Bull right from the offset of the series during the first episode.

Addressing the story, Horner is shown ashen-faced and asking his communications chief to “come save me” during the Red Bull RB20 launch in Milton Keynes, just days after the internal investigation into him began.

The legal difficulty of addressing the storyline is addressed early on, during a sitdown interview in which Horner – clearly not in the mood to chat – asks to get on with things after a communications officer tells Netflix that, “There’s so much that he can’t answer. We’re in the middle of it, so for legal reasons, we can’t talk about it.”

Capturing, albeit in diluted fashion, the ugly and tense atmosphere that plagued the opening weeks of the championship in Bahrain, tense media sessions are shown, while an on-camera moment regarding the leak of alleged information to the F1 paddock pertaining to the investigation shows Horner at his most serious.

“It was obviously premeditated to cause me the maximum amount of distraction, the maximum amount of aggravation,” Horner said, staring down the camera as he addresses the humiliating moment directly.

“It was obvious that the end goal was for me to leave Red Bull.”

Asked if he knows who was responsible for sending the dossier of alleged information, he replies, “That is the multi-million dollar question,” and chooses not to respond when asked if he knows.

Given the difficulty of addressing the story from a legal perspective, the nature of how Netflix would cover it was always going to be one of the big questions of this series. As neutrally as Netflix has attempted to do so for this exact scenario, Horner himself comes out, as he fears, as the antagonist of this series.

At the end of the episode, on-screen messages inform viewers that the dismissal of the complaint was appealed and not upheld.

Flavio Briatore a new ray of hope for Drive to Survive producers

Having lost the likes of Guenther Steiner and Daniel Ricciardo as engaging and popular personalities, the return of Flavio Briatore to Formula 1 for the first time in over a decade gave the producers of the show a new and unique character to showcase – and what a memorable one he is.

Given that Briatore is likely a complete stranger for fans who have arrived in F1 since the first series, given his last season in Formula 1 was in 2009, the controversial 74-year-old Italian was once one of the kingpins of the sport as he shaped the former Benetton team into a World Championship squad, including making Michael Schumacher a two-time Champion.

Renault turned towards hiring Briatore to lead the shake-up of its management organisation last year, and he has already shown his usual steeliness by overseeing critical decisions like pulling the plug on Viry-Chatillion’s engine department and kicking Esteban Ocon out before the end of last season.

Ocon, who had been with Alpine for four years, is criticised by Briatore during Episode 9, Under New Management, as the Italian says, “For months, Esteban was complaining all the time about ‘the car was different,’ and this and that.

“You know what I mean? I don’t like that. Don’t be a spoiled brat. You know what I mean?”

Similarly, with Jack Doohan signed a race driver for F1 2025, the Australian’s future is particularly uncertain as he looks over his shoulder after Briatore led the push to sign Franco Colapinto as a reserve driver on a long-term contract.

Make no mistake about it, Doohan is on a very short leash – as Briatore makes clear when he says, “The future of Jack, I control you every millimetre.”

Once a real-life villain in F1, Briatore has never been shy of courting controversy or being seen as an antagonist if it means being successful – and it’s for this reason he’ll be box-office dynamite for Drive to Survive.

How F1 2024 proved overwhelming to cover for Drive to Survive

Given the limited run-time of the series, it’s evident that key plotlines of the F1 2024 season had to be barely glanced over – no matter how pervasive they were during the real-life championship.

For instance, the storyline of Franco Colapinto’s availability on the driver market and the behind-the-scenes flurry of interest from several teams in securing his services is barely touched upon, despite being a huge part of the real-life story in the second half of 2024. To that end, Logan Sargeant is also barely mentioned during the show.

Carlos Sainz’s appendicitis bout is addressed, but the story focuses on him and not what happened as a result of his absence in Saudi Arabia – Oliver Bearman’s debut race saw him come home seventh for Ferrari in what was a drive that has kickstarted a full-time career, but wasn’t explored.

Similarly, a big topic of the final quarter of 2024 was that of racing rules and the limits of permissibility when it comes to wheel-to-wheel battle, a topic which came about due to the title fight and Verstappen’s desperation to stay ahead of Norris in the championship.

Given how much this topic was relevant in the title fight, it was somewhat surprising that such a relevant area of contention was not addressed.

Read Next: F1 2025 reader predictions: Your title winners, pecking order…and a Latifi return