Inside the Making of the New F1 Movie with Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, and Lewis Hamilton
How some of the biggest names in Hollywood and Formula 1 combined powers in an attempt to make the greatest racing movie of all time.
By Daniel Riley
Photography by Nathaniel Goldberg
May 28, 2025
THE SET • PART I
There’s a roar beyond the grandstands—something atavistic, something mean and mad and on the prowl. Those of us standing on the pit wall of Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina Circuit snap our heads expectantly in the direction of the sound, holding our collective breath for a T-Rex to emerge, or for Brad Pitt’s F1 car to come screaming down the start-finish straight.
Whaaaa! There it is, sliding around the track’s final turn and onto the stretch. And in three…two…one, Pitt’s car rockets by with the speed and power of a fighter jet, belching flames out of its tail as it thunders through turn one and disappears from view.
Our hair blown back, I hear someone say, “I will never get sick of that sound.”
For those wondering: Yes, Brad Pitt is really driving the car in this movie. In fact, Brad Pitt and Damson Idris really driving the car has become, in some ways, the point of the movie—or at least the emotional nucleus during production.
The stated goal of F1, from the beginning, director Joseph Kosinski tells me, was to try to create “the most authentic, realistic, and grounded racing movie ever made.” To further shrink the miniature IMAX-certified cameras Kosinski and his team developed on Top Gun: Maverick, mount them to the cockpit of the race car, and put an audience in the driver’s seat in the greatest racing series on earth. That meant putting its stars in the driver’s seat too. Which is why, since I arrived in Abu Dhabi, every member of the cast and crew has hyped me up for one of these sessions.
There’s the roar again beyond the grandstands, then into the low-speed turns beneath the enormous iridescent hotel behind us, scaled like a fish with night-lights, and then—whaaaa!—again, Pitt’s car races down the straight, with such power and pandemonium that it drops the floor out of your guts like the best idea you’ve ever had in your life.
“The most interesting thing about Brad,” says seven-time F1 world champion and first-time producer Lewis Hamilton, “is that he’s already a bit of a racer at heart.”
“Brad is having the time of his life,” says mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
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“I think for Brad there’s probably a physiological component to the driving, a spiritual high,” says Pitt’s producing partner Jeremy Kleiner, as he joins me on the pit wall.
Though he’s never been in a racing movie, Pitt grew up on dirt bikes in Missouri, before graduating to racing bikes on tracks for fun. He and Tom Cruise had been attached to a version of the Ford v Ferrari story, when F1 director Joseph Kosinski was attached as well. Pitt and Cruise insisted on driving for real, and their director wanted it that way too. But, Kosinski says, the studio wouldn’t meet the budget he proposed.
When Kosinski approached Pitt with the potential to make a movie about Formula 1, it was practically the first question Pitt had for him: Well, can we do it for real?
They would really drive, but the insurance company needed some convincing on why they had to do it at absolute top speed. “The idea of going down a freeway 180 miles an hour sounds completely reckless and dangerous—just absolutely not,” Pitt explains to me, before going out for the session in Abu Dhabi. “But these things, the more you pick up speed, that’s when everything starts working.” Putting a limit on it, Pitt says, would be more dangerous. You have to increase downforce and get heat into the tires to maintain grip, and you can only maintain grip by going fucking fast.
We cannot let Brad Pitt die—was the very reasonable place the insurance company was presumably coming from. But they had to understand: This was Formula 1! This wasn’t some puny car chase in the streets. When they were training, Pitt’s stunt driver, the former Formula 2 champion Luciano Bacheta, would give him a speed-limit warning and Pitt would say: Yep, I am ignoring your speed-limit warning. “I became quite impassioned, needlessly,” Pitt says. “It was actually quite comical in the end. And then when they finally lifted it and just trusted us and let us be, everything was lovely.”
Whaaaa! He’s melting tenths of seconds off his lap times. But also acting for each of the cameras mounted on the car. As he passes by this time, I watch the feeds that everyone in the crew can pull up on their phones. The lights race across his helmet, refracting in the turns. The vibrations of the car cutting a corner and bouncing over a curve register as they do in a Grand Prix broadcast. This, Pitt says, is what convinced everyone that they had to do this for real, all the way: You don’t get that effect with green screen.
“I can’t imagine what it would be like to act while in the car,” says Kim Bodnia, who plays the team principal of Pitt’s fictional APXGP racing team in the film. “The fastness! The focus required to drive, the focus required to act, and he’s doing both! When I first saw him in that car, I was so scared. We’re not making this movie!” He mimes a spinout. “But look at us now.”
“It’s the sort of thing,” says Sarah Niles, who plays Idris’s mother in the film, “that gives the feeling of being a kid at the cinema again.”
Whaaaa!—Flame. The belching beast into turn one again as fireworks detonate overhead.
“I’ve been counting down,” Pitt tells me, looking tortured. “I get three drives left, I have two drives left…. I couldn’t even sleep last night.”
Now he is down to his last drive. The enormous, globe-spanning, strike-interrupted, multiyear production is finally coming to a close. But there is still an edge in the air.
First of all: He is still out there. And the goal is still: We cannot let Brad Pitt die.
But also: They had been working on the movie for three years, filming for 18 months, through a writers’ strike and an actors’ strike, across three continents, and amidst 14 real-live Formula 1 Grands Prix. They had spent $200-plus million. They had reengineered where cameras could go and what they could shoot. They had put the audience in the race car. They had put movie stars in the freaking race car too. They had minted a new star in Idris. They had put Brad Pitt on the poster. If this movie couldn’t work, then what movie could? What kind of industry was this if “Top Gun, but make it race cars” wasn’t a hit?
Whaaaa! There he goes again. One last lap. It looks like they’re going to get him into the pits safely. Which means all they’ve got left to worry about is all the rest.
On the pit wall, Kleiner puts it more directly: “This one is for all of the marbles.”
THE DIRECTOR
Like many people on earth, Joseph Kosinski spent the early part of COVID bingeing the F1 docuseries Drive to Survive. Kosinski, who’d trained as a mechanical engineer and an architect before applying his unique technical prowess to commercial and feature directing, had just finished wrapping Top Gun: Maverick, and had developed something of a need for speed.
Kosinski had messed around with elements of racing on his 2010 Tron reboot, had developed his version of the Ford v Ferrari story, and had spent the last chapter of his life reviving Top Gun—filming objects (and movie stars) in motion in new and novel ways. Top Gun: Maverick, which would ultimately make $1.5 billion at the box office and be regarded as one of Hollywood’s rare megahits of the past five years, is, of course, about the best of the best. What appealed to Kosinski about Drive to Survive and F1 in general was the way that the series made you care about the worst teams—and their pursuit of a single measly championship point or a single race win.
While Maverick was in postproduction, Kosinski shared his initial concept for an F1 movie with Bruckheimer, the still reigning king of the candy-colored action smash. Bruckheimer hadn’t made a racing movie since 1990’s Days of Thunder, and was interested in bringing that treatment to the most popular racing series on earth. Days of Thunder had been produced with the partnership of NASCAR, but the result didn’t portray the sport as authentically as the series and some of its drivers had hoped. For a Formula 1 film, Kosinski and Bruckheimer wondered what it might look like to really integrate the production into the F1 season and try to create a film that was appealing to insiders and outsiders alike.
Historically, F1 has preferred to tell its own story—but Drive to Survive had greased the wheels for giving outsiders access. Plus, Kosinski had an ace up his sleeve. While Kosinski was casting Maverick, Lewis Hamilton got his contact from Cruise and emailed out of the blue to ask for a chance to audition. Kosinski tried him for the part of Fanboy, one of the pilots, but Hamilton had underestimated the time commitment. He was mid–season, in a title fight, and couldn’t possibly step aside for the production. But he and Kosinski kept the door open.
In late 2021, Kosinski and Bruckheimer met with Hamilton at the San Vicente Bungalows (Lewis and Jerry are members) and persuaded him to come aboard to bolster the racing bona fides of the script and liaise with F1 brass. Everyone attached to the movie would need to be “undeniably perfect,” Kosinski recounts, if he were to persuade a studio to foot the bill. Lots of studios were interested, but Apple, Kosinski says, fully understood the vision. (Read: were willing to put up the cash.)
The plan, should F1 assent, would be to fully integrate the production into a real season of F1. They would become, for all intents and purposes, the “11th team” in the 10-team sport, packing up and shipping out their bespoke team garage, their cars, their crew, and their drivers, and moving onto the next race on the calendar, just like any other team. They would shoot the movie with other crews and drivers functioning naturally in the background. They would put the cars on the track, lined up with the other real cars. They would stand on the podium with real drivers, should Pitt’s underdog APXGP team ever find its way to the top of the mountain.
For F1, integration of this sort was a heady ask—a total incursion into the day-to-day of a sport reportedly worth $22 billion—but it came with a boldness only Hollywood could muster. In February 2022, Kosinski, Bruckheimer, and Pitt flew to London to pitch F1 president and CEO Stefano Domenicali. Top Gun: Maverick was not yet in theaters. But Kosinski arranged to take Domenicali and Pitt across the street to screen Maverick in IMAX three months early. “I think that’s when Stefano saw the potential of the film,” Kosinski says. And with Hamilton involved, the racing series knew it was in good hands.
There was only one more matter that needed sorting: Hamilton wanted to make sure that Pitt could really drive. In early 2022, Hamilton joined Pitt and Kosinski at the Porsche Experience Center in Los Angeles. Hamilton had not been in a race car since he and Max Verstappen dueled for the championship in Abu Dhabi a month earlier in one of the most infamous finishes to a season in F1 history. As Pitt whipped around the track in a 911 GT3, Hamilton kept a close eye on him and recognized right away that he could hold his own. This was familiar territory: Hamilton, who grew up in a council estate, used to teach rich guys how to drive race cars when he was a teenager at a facility not unlike the one in LA. After a while, Hamilton jumped in the driver’s seat and said: Brad, let me take you for a spin.
“There’s this one part of the track where there’s a long straightaway,” Kosinski recalls, “and then a carousel, which is a banked bowl that you shoot down and you dive into it and it slingshots you back. And I dunno what the speed limit is going into that, but I watched Lewis take Brad into that carousel at I think two times the speed limit. And they just disappeared and I saw a puff of dust that just erupted into the air. And they came back and the door flung open, and Brad kind of jumped out of the car sweating, and Lewis had the biggest smile on his face. He had obviously done something that scared the hell out of Brad, but I think he just wanted to give Brad a little taste of what it means to be on the edge. I think it hooked him in that moment too.”
THE SET • PART II
In Abu Dhabi, three years later, Jerry Bruckheimer and I are walking down the pit lane toward turn one, where they’re setting up a shot in which Damson Idris, who plays Pitt’s teammate Joshua Pearce, having pulled himself from his car after a crash, is meant to stand atop the barricades and cheer on Pitt’s car as fireworks detonate behind him in the night sky.
“Have you ever done a shot with explosions?” I ask Bruckheimer, the man behind Armageddon, Black Hawk Down, Con Air, and The Rock.
He turns his head and really looks into my soul to make sure I’m kidding. “Yes,” he says.
The 81-year-old Bruckheimer possesses the energy and enthusiasm of a producer in his mid-20s working on his very first film. For most shots, he is right there in the video village, over Kosinski’s shoulder. When he’s not there, it’s ’cause he’s taking photographs with his personal camera. On these days in Abu Dhabi, the production is noon to midnight, and he is present for the duration—arriving early, staying late. When I ask him how many days he’s been on set this year, he scoffs and says, “How many days have I not been on set?” The dedication is infectious. “This group is the crème de la crème,” says a crew member who’s worked on dozens of films, including Bonds and Mission: Impossibles. “When everyone sees Jerry on set at 6 a.m. till late at night, then the rest of the crew can be too.”
Bruckheimer brought his first racing movie to theaters in 1990 with Days of Thunder, one of the most hilarious sets in Hollywood history. The production reportedly spent nearly twice as much as the studio had originally allotted. According to a biographer, Don Simpson, Bruckheimer’s late producing partner, was said to have burned $400,000 installing a personal gym and music system at the hotel where they were staying in Daytona Beach while making the movie. There is a photograph of Bruckheimer, Simpson, director Tony Scott (of Top Gun fame), writer Robert Towne (of Chinatown fame), and Cruise leaned up against the side of a stock car at Daytona, looking like the gang who brought the wheelbarrow of cherry bombs to a Fourth of July block party. Days of Thunder is pure speed and cornball glory. No one knows what the title means. It’s where Cruise met Nicole Kidman. Lewis Hamilton has seen the movie “probably a thousand times,” he says, and “twice this year already.” And, by the way, it made a lot more cash than it spent. The F1 production seems positively sedate by comparison, but there are obvious similarities.
At one point, I interrupt Bruckheimer and Kosinski during their 7 p.m. “lunch” break. “Ah, we’re just bullshitting,” Bruckheimer says. Given their shared experience on Top Gun, I ask, how is this movie different if it’s Cruise instead of Pitt? “Tom always pushes it to the limit, but at the same time is super capable and very skilled,” Kosinski says. “They both have the natural talent for driving. But yeah, I could see Tom maybe scaring us a little bit more.”
Elsewhere on set, the movie’s action-vehicle supervisor, Graham Kelly, puts a finer point on it: “We’d have had a crash,” he says, smiling. “Tom pushes it to the limit. I mean really to the limit. That terrifies me. I mean, I’ve done loads of Mission: Impossibles with Tom and it’s the most stressful experience for someone like me building cars for him, doing stunts with him. Whereas Brad listens and he knows his abilities, and I think he’d be the first to say, ‘Yeah, I’m not going to do that.’ ”
A little later, it’s time to film the scene that sequentially follows Idris on the barricade cheering on his teammate. Pitt needs to pull his car into parc fermé, where it is to be inspected by the scrutineers. For this shot, they trade out the car he’d been driving around the track all production for the special electric car they use for these low-speed shots that might require multiple takes. Besides being electric, the notable thing about this car is that it has something no F1 car ever uses: reverse gear.
About 40 crew members are set up on the track at the finish line, surrounded by the empty stands, and beneath the raised platform where the podium ceremonies take place. Faintly in the background is the techno heartbeat that seems to serve as the unofficial anthem of an F1 race.
“Someone always starts dance music right as we’re about to roll,” Kosinski says.
“I’ll see if someone can turn it off,” a production assistant says, hitting the walkie-talkie.
A moment later: “Action!” Kosinski says, like a director.
We all watch Pitt in his car. Nothing.
“He’s gesturing his hands,” Kosinski says.
Pitt comes on the radio: “There’s a big smudge on my windscreen!”
Pitt rolls the car forward slowly, a little sadly, and a bunch of people rush in to wipe off his visor.
Ying-ying-ying-ying-ying—the race car reverses like a toy pull-back car winding its wheels. Pitt’s maybe a hundred feet down the grid as they go again. B camera operator Natasha Mullan is set up right down the line to shoot a close-up from distance as Pitt comes into frame, pulls off his gloves, removes his steering wheel, and hops out of the car.
The car moseys into frame, no smudge. But I can see Kosinski squinting. He turns to the supervising stunt coordinator, Gary Powell. “Can he come in a little quicker? Just needs a little more pop.”
Ying-ying-ying-ying-ying—back to one. This time the car comes hurtling in, brakes hard, and on the monitor I see Pitt slide into the frame with a whoosh before centering squarely, his face—that face—catching the light, as he unbuckles his harness and restraints, removes his steering wheel and gloves, and hops out of the car. Bam. Just like the real drivers do it. Movie star.
Mullan would later explain to me that her camera, B camera, is often the tighter shot, so there’s almost no forgiveness. “So with Brad and his car flying into frame, I was thinking I might have to follow him,” she says. “But he hit his mark by the millimeter. Millimeter perfect.”
For the next scene, Idris finds Pitt there at the finish line and embraces him, says a couple cool lines, and then they head up to the podium. It’s the film’s equivalent of the aircraft carrier celebrations in Top Gun and Maverick—Cruise embracing Val Kilmer in a sea of pilots, Cruise embracing Miles Teller. We need pure adrenaline, big energy, and emotional catharsis.
But: They’d shot a version of this scene in front of the real-live crowd at the real-live season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on Sunday. And everyone’s struggling a little with the silence and the emptiness compared to the thousands of fans in the crowd three days earlier.
While setting up the shot, Pitt is constantly bouncing and running in place, trying to maintain the glistening sweat of a driver who’d just spent two hours in the car. His longtime friend and makeup artist, Jean Black, gives him a little sweat spritz.
As Idris and Pitt embrace each other, handheld cameras rush in to give it that shaky intimacy. They go once, twice. Idris bungles a line—“Fuck!”—and they rush back to their starting positions.“There was something different the other day,” Idris shouts, mocking himself. “There were people in the crowd or something.”
They go again and Idris steps on the first line, right as they’re about to embrace. Pitt turns on his heel and springs back to positioning, ha-ha-ha-ing as he goes.“You have a beautiful smile!” Idris shouts at him. They get it right the next time, but Idris isn’t satisfied. “Can I have one more for backup?” he asks Kosinski. He’s pacing and hyping himself up: “Energy! Energy!” The next take is the best yet. “Star that one,” Kosinski says. And then they go again. “It’s the last time in Abu Dhabi!” Idris shouts at himself. This take is filled with zeal, organic joy, as though there’s a crowd in the stands and Brad Pitt has just won the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The air feels palpably different. The ions are pointing in the same direction. Nobody is breathing. Everyone feels it, knows, understands. “That’s it!” Kosinski says. “That’s in the movie!”
The crew, who possess in their ranks more On sneakers per capita than anywhere else on earth, start setting up the next shot immediately, leaving Idris hanging there, ping-ponging with nowhere to expel his energy: “Damn! I’m gassed up now!”
Pitt takes a moment for a photo op with some Abu Dhabi officials. “Well, thanks for everything…. We’re over the moon…we’re over the moon…. I’m heading up to the podium now.”
It’s another version of a scene they’d filmed at the real Grand Prix, Pitt on the top step of the podium next to Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and Mercedes’s George Russell. This real image of the fake scene went viral in December. There was this strange question throughout the production: Do we try to hide the plot from the fans or just live with it? They ultimately chose to give away bits and pieces throughout the season, without worrying about the images of Brad Pitt standing on the top step of the podium spoiling the movie for fans.
About 150 extras in creams, whites, blues, and earth tones, a perfect blend of fabrics, sunglasses, and jewelry that communicate Euro and Gulf luxury, pack into the VIP seats visible from the podium. (There are no team colors—a perfect, accurate detail for the VIP set.) Pitt and the stand-ins for Leclerc and Russell spray Champagne. They soak Javier Bardem, who plays the APXGP team owner. Kosinski and Bruckheimer hide behind the podium pylon like gnomes, just out of view. They get reaction shots from the rest of the cast down on the race track below. Nailed it.
THE GOAT
During the 2022 F1 season, Kosinski and Maverick screenwriter Ehren Kruger would send Lewis Hamilton pages from their new racing film no matter where or when Hamilton was in the world. “I’m dyslexic,” Hamilton says, “so reading a 130-page script time and time again was challenging for me in the timescale that I had to churn through it. But if I’m doing something, I do it a hundred percent.”
Hamilton, who has won more F1 races than anyone in history, had a simple but critical brief: to take apart every racing scene in the movie. For example, the script might’ve called for Idris’s character to attack another driver at a part of the track that no one would plausibly attempt an overtake; but, Hamilton would offer, you could certainly make that move at this other part of the track. Later, while editing the film, Kosinski would send Hamilton a cut of a race sequence and Hamilton would identify that, say, in the footage the car is in turn five, when the car would be in fourth gear, but the sound is from turn six, when the car is in fifth gear. Stuff like that.
In the film, Pitt’s character, Sonny Hayes, joins the APXGP team when they are in dead last—racing a “shit box” of a car. Given that they can’t beat anyone with speed, Pitt pulls out some strategic tricks to use the rules to gain advantage. The tricks are so clever and satisfying that they could only come from someone who’s raced 19 seasons and made 360-plus starts in the sport. “I got to be a strategist, really, within all the racing sequences,” Hamilton says.
While Hamilton helped Kosinski and Kruger develop the racing elements of the script, he was involved, as well, in character work and casting. “To make sure that it’s diverse, making sure that it’s really reflective of the outside world,” Hamilton says. “Hopefully, kids will be watching and be like, Oh my God, there’s people in there that I can be too.” Even if some of the roles in reality haven’t caught up to what’s represented onscreen. “Things like, for example, having a female race engineer that’s really at the forefront of the story”—APXGP’s technical director is played by the Irish Oscar nominee Kerry Condon—“you won’t see that very often.”
In preproduction, Hamilton flew to LA to help with casting. “And suddenly I’m sitting in Jerry’s office. What a legend! And he’s got this amazing pen collection. At the time, Brad was the only one that we had. But not Damson yet. So I was able to be a part of the selection, sitting there with pages of all the different actors and actresses and watching all of their videos doing a scene, which was a real learning experience for me, getting to see the details of what goes into making a movie.”
Hamilton wanted to emphasize that this was not just your standard athlete tourism in Hollywood. This was uniquely meaningful to him: “I watch a movie Every. Single. Day.”
What did you watch last night?
“Troy.”
In the movie, Pitt and Idris are not driving legitimate F1 cars per se; they are cars Frankensteined together with less powerful F2 engines and bodies designed by Mercedes to look on the surface like an F1 entry. Affixed to each of the six film cars are upwards of four IMAX-certified cameras in 15 possible positions, even smaller versions of the cameras that they stuck in the cockpits of the fighter jets in Maverick. Endless combinations of, say, a couple near the steering wheel, one on the nose, or one outside the cockpit, looking back, with the incredible ability to swivel 90 degrees at the twist of a dial by Kosinski, so that the camera can whip from the driver’s face in profile to what he’s seeing on the track in front of him to who’s racing beside him. How they figured out how to mount the cameras while maintaining the ability to race these things safely at near top speed, they’re the sort of riddles and solutions that throw one back to giddy summers at science camp. “You have to remind yourself you’re not in a competition,” says the action-vehicle supervisor, Graham Kelly. “It’s about the shot, not the lap time.”
Did Hamilton ever drive the movie car? “No, never,” Hamilton says. “From a racing driver’s perspective, you wouldn’t want to. You drive a Formula 1 car, you don’t really want to go back.”
By the time Idris and Pitt showed up to the 2023 British Grand Prix at Silverstone, the first instance when the film intersected with Formula 1 season, they’d been put through their paces—training at Le Castellet, in the South of France, and at several tracks in the UK, and generally humbling themselves to F1.
“Starting that first time at Silverstone,” Pitt says, “we sat down with the racers at the driver meeting and told all the drivers: If we’re ever in the way, just tell us to fuck off.”
At Silverstone in 2023, Pitt and Idris shocked the Formula 1 world by walking out onto the track before the capacity crowd with Hamilton and the other 19 real-live drivers and standing for the national anthem while Kosinski rolled film. They set up their cars at the back of the grid and prepared to run a lap. But, Pitt says, his car wouldn’t start—was this part of the movie or a total blunder? (You’ll see in theaters.) What it was, was a fitting metaphor for the production, because just five days later, the SAG-AFTRA strike started, stalling production just as it was meant to launch from the starting line.
“We got to Silverstone,” Pitt says, recounting, “which, my God, is a glorious track and became like a home for us and then we’re off and running, and we’re ready! We’re on the grid standing next to the actual racers. The telecast is going to cut us out, but our cameras are going to get us all, we’re a part of it. We have this amazing weekend. Everything goes like clockwork. Everything’s sublime. Everyone’s on a high adrenaline rush. We pull this thing off! I drove in front of 80,000 people in the stands on that day. I didn’t cock up the car, didn’t put it in the wall, didn’t beach it, everything was good! And then the strike happens and I was gutted.
“I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was bumping into walls. I was like, Oh man, man, we have this push and we had this—here we go! And then all of a sudden someone said: Cut.”
“But it was probably the best thing that happened for the movie, and the best thing for me,” Pitt says, cracking a smile. “I got to drive a whole nother year because of it.”
THE ROOKIE
While they waited to get back to work, Pitt and Idris went racing, and Idris learned something about himself that he can’t wait to share with me:
“I’m faster than Brad,” he says, and laughs and laughs and laughs.
“He might have a better way of warming up the tires, and getting quicker faster than me. But when we were in Austin, at COTA, training, it’s the first time I timed him and I timed me, and I’m definitely faster than Brad with no restrictions on. You tell him that!”
“They don’t let Damson and me on the track at the same time,” Pitt says. “Which is smart, I don’t want to get on the track with him.”
From inception, the film centered on this classic on-and-off-track Color of Money dynamic between a rash rookie and a rugged veteran. In F1, Pitt’s character, Sonny Hayes, had been a hotshot in Formula 1 in the early ’90s, before a racing incident with Ayrton Senna—the legendary Brazilian driver who died after a crash in 1994—left Hayes shattered, physically and spiritually, and out of the upper echelons of racing for good. That is until Javier Bardem, his old teammate, needs a miracle in order to not lose control of his last-place team. He has a rookie, Joshua Pearce, played by Idris, who is, of course, talented if raw. But Bardem needs an old horse to rein him in.
“When Lewis came to set,” Idris recalls, “he saw Joshua and he said to Joe: ‘Man, I think Joshua’s too cool! He just looks too cool. He’s got swag and everything. He’s a rookie! He’s supposed to be like a nerd.’ ”
“As a rookie,” Hamilton explains, “he is just much further ahead than I was, or when most rookies come in. His style, his confidence, is unique in its own. I didn’t discover my style until 10 years in.”
Idris continues: “And I was like, ‘Tell Lewis that Lewis is Joshua’s biggest hero and because Lewis is Joshua’s hero, he tries to emulate Lewis and that’s why he’s cool.’ And then Joe goes to tell Lewis that, and Lewis goes”—Idris mimes an interlude of chin-stroking and nodding in acquiescence—“Yeah…okay, yeah, that makes sense.”
Idris laughs and laughs again, still amused at the idea that Lewis the Producer only agreed to let Idris’s character be supercool once Idris convinced him that he was just emulating Lewis. Idris, the 33-year-old British actor who’d starred in the hit FX show Snowfall but never a film of this scale, was a quick study and a chameleonic asset. “He is such a charming motherfucker,” Pitt says. “He is just perfect. He adds so much verve to our story, I just couldn’t see anyone else doing it. I just believe him.”
Unlike Pitt, who comes with decades of fame, the lesser-known Idris blends in seamlessly with the wallpaper of Formula 1. It was seemingly an enormous asset, particularly in the early stages of production, when it was still an open question whether the all-out embed would be accepted by the real racers. Idris recalls a moment, at the 2024 Hungarian Grand Prix, after Hamilton and Verstappen had collided, when Verstappen came blowing back into the pits.
He pulls up beside me, gets out, he’s so frustrated, and I’m just there, sat in the car, just trying to be a little mouse,” Idris says. “You can’t fake that. And seeing that onscreen, it lets the viewer know that this is real.”
When I ask Hamilton what the candid reaction from other teams and racers was to the movie showing up, he betrays no grumbling. “It was just curiosity,” he says. “It’s a completely different world that’s coming into our world and I think you would’ve thought that sometimes people could just jump in and try to take over everything, not understanding boundaries. But their approach was so professional.”
The goal all along was to graft on to the existing operation without disrupting business as usual. Or as Tim Bampton, F1’s official liaison between the film and the series, liked to say: “It’s two cars on the track and you want to get them as close as possible—but they must never touch.”
When the production returned to Silverstone and the British Grand Prix in July 2024, a year after the strike hit, Pitt and Idris had an extra year of driving under their belts and a new sense of security. “In 2023,” Pitt says, “I felt like I was in someone else’s court, someone else’s home and just was really humble and kind of shy about it. I had such reverence for these guys and this sport. But by the next year shooting there, it just felt like it was our own home and we were just so integrated into just the framework of the ecosystem that it was really nice.”
From Silverstone and Hungary in July 2024, the production moved through the summer and fall to Spa (in Belgium), Mexico City, Las Vegas, and, finally, Abu Dhabi. That list doesn’t include the races where a splinter unit went alone: Hungary 2023, Monza 2023, Spa 2023, Las Vegas 2023, Abu Dhabi 2023, Japan 2024, and, finally, to the 2024 Dutch Grand Prix. The movie would set up shop, then move on to the next stop—just one more ring of the traveling circus.
Charlie Hayes, the supervising location manager, who’s also worked on Bonds and Mission: Impossibles, tells me, “We are quite accomplished logisticians, but we were put to shame by everyone at F1. The way they sort of pick up one weekend and put down on a different continent. It’s like magic, really.”
The production never fell behind schedule, Natasha Mullan, the camera operator, tells me, because it had no option but to keep up with the season in progress. The need to shoot the fictional elements of the film blended in with real events required extraordinary precision, like live television. “There’s no alternative to succeeding, so we’re all on two-hundred percent all the time.”
“We had to look, act, and live like the 11th team the entire time,” another crew member says.
That final week in Abu Dhabi, that final night, the army of crew reassemble at sundown. They have been together for nearly 18 months—and are still yucking it up. “No matter if it’s a good movie or a bad movie, a great script or a dog-shit script,” someone says, “when the crew vibes, the movie is better.”
Bruckheimer emphasizes the same point, in his own way: “And this group! Everyone is still getting along. I haven’t had any calls from HR. It’s incredible.”
The platoon sets up one final sequence for Pitt, an impressive crane shot that tracks Pitt as he walks beneath the grandstands against an onrush of fans heading for the track. When the crane, a Scorpio 45′, gets stuck, it takes nine guys, including Oscar-winning cinematographer Claudio Miranda, to muscle it into position.
The scene is meant to communicate: Our lone wolf isn’t here for this pomp and circumstance.
Pitt gets his sweat-and-Champagne spritz from Jean Black. The dozens of extras enter frame as though released from a holding pen, perfectly appointed, ready for their moment.
After a few takes, Kosinski’s satisfied.
“That was cool,” Pitt says. “Yeah, that was nice.”
Before midnight, it’s all over for Pitt. They wrap him in front of the cast and crew.
Idris can’t believe it. “How do they wrap Brad Pitt before me?” he jokes with me later, reflecting back on that night. “He was like, ‘Hey, man, you’ve got my number. I’m going to text you.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean you’re going to text me?! Where are you going?’ ”
There’s a similar moment for their characters in the film—the heroes are finally getting along, but the lone wolf is onto the next. Just looking for a new place to race.
THE VETERAN
But before he leaves for good, they sneak Pitt out for one final session in the car. “I think they may have just given me that out of pure sympathy so that it wouldn’t come crashing to an end,” Pitt tells me later. “Lewis would talk about it, finding this groove as a driver where he could…. Time slowed down for him and he could see every corner, every crack as a breaking point in the asphalt, every bump and just said no one could touch him and what a sublime, like, experience this is for him. And I felt my version of that certainly, certainly that very last night. I think because I got the extra night, it was like a freebie and I was even more free because of it. And I went out a couple of times and had just the most beautiful sessions that I can put myself back in the car and I can feel absolute bliss—and I miss it.”
After Abu Dhabi, the production scatters to the wind. Kosinski finishes a first cut of the movie, but is sent scrambling for a week during the LA wildfires. “So the first time I ever watched the film all the way through was on my laptop in a hotel room, evacuated,” he says. Not exactly how they drew up what Kosinski had described as a movie “meant for IMAX, the biggest screen possible.” Idris begins production on a new film in Cape Town. “I’m going through a phase of my life where I want to be in the motherland,” Idris tells me. And Hamilton begins a new season, his first with Ferrari, picking off a victory with his new team at the sprint race in Shanghai.
Meanwhile, when we speak again in the spring, Pitt is in a marvel of a home in the vast natural dreamscape of rural New Zealand, shooting his next film. It is a Sunday, a day off. He is, on this day off, all alone on the other side of the world from where I’d last seen him. What do you do to make a new place home? I ask.
“I’m a bit of an architectural snob and I’m a bit of a nature lover,” he says, “so I just look for a really beautiful spot for a new experience instead of trying to re-create the—I mean, I bring my own sheets. I’ve grown fond of softness in my older age, but that’s about it.”
Having spent so much time with Lewis and the other drivers now, what do they have most in common with a big movie star?
“There’s an isolation,” Pitt says. “Even a loneliness when you don’t feel like things are clicking. They usually lead to something greater and you can find purpose in it. But there is a definite isolation and it’s not necessarily a negative, it’s an endeavor and a constant discussion with you and yourself of maintaining this thing. And, yes, I think we’ve got it bad. But those guys are so scrutinized and that sport is so revered and there are so many of us that think we could do it, too, just because we drive a car fast down the freeway or something. They get so much shit. It is shocking to me. They’ve got to have thicker skin than even us.”
The car, risky as it can be, often seems to provide a sanctuary for F1 drivers—and it seemed to provide the same for Pitt. It sealed him off, as any film production does, from the noise that has been a regular part of his life for three decades. “My personal life is always in the news. It’s been in the news for 30 years, bro. Or some version of my personal life, let’s put it that way.”
Was this particular film, and the car, a refuge from all the attention? I ask.
“Um, I don’t see it that way,” Pitt says. “It’s been an annoyance I’ve had to always deal with in different degrees, large and small, as I do the things I really want to do. So, it’s always been this kind of nagging time suck or waste of time, if you let it be that, I don’t know. I don’t know. Mostly I feel pretty…. My life is fairly contained. It feels pretty warm and secure with my friends, with my loves, with my fam, with my knowledge of who I am, that, you know, it’s like this fly buzzing around a little bit.”
A couple of weeks after that final drive in Abu Dhabi, Pitt’s private life was the subject of fresh headlines as his very public divorce from Angelina Jolie was finalized. Does anything feel different being on the other side of the divorce finally being finalized? I ask. Is there relief?
“No, I don’t think it was that major of a thing. Just something coming to fruition. Legally.”
Pitt and his new girlfriend, Ines de Ramon, attended a public event together for the first time at the 2024 British Grand Prix, a race won by Hamilton in his final season with Mercedes. I ask Pitt if he and de Ramon deliberately decided to appear publicly for the first time at an F1 race.
“No, dude, it’s not that calculated,” Pitt says, chuckling. “If you’re living, oh my God, how exhausting would that be? If you’re living with making those kinds of calculations? No, life just evolves. Relationships evolve.”
There are many scenes in the film where the echoes between Pitt and his character seem to thrum intensely. Where Brad Pitt, perhaps the world’s most recognizable actor, is playing Sonny Hayes, lone-wolf race car driver who has entered the arena with a past people think they know about and a present of utmost intrigue. At one point, Sonny is explaining in a rare moment of vulnerability how he’s coped with his traumas, his mistakes, his regrets, and why he keeps at it: “As long as I was behind the wheel of the car, I was good.”
There is a feeling, the character explains, that he’s been chasing all his life—the reason he’s still at it, sticking it out in the spotlight, putting his life on the line. A flow state, very much like the one Hamilton described to Pitt. Time slows down. It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. You notice the clouds. You’re floating. You’re flying.
In the spring, while we’re speaking, Pitt looks out the window, closes his eyes. “There’s a peacefulness in the car. There’s some days where you’re off mentally and you’re just a fraction of a second behind on your turning point. Or if you’re having an uneasy day and you’re not committed to the car, trusting the car, you get it all wrong. And then there are these days where it is so sublime, you just cannot believe what these cars can do. You just cannot believe how these cars can stick and how late you can brake and that the car has got you. It’s like getting on a horse and trusting the horse, getting to know the horse and loving the horse and getting a communication with that horse,” he says. “And sometimes you just get it all right, it all falls into place and there’s a, oh man, I got to find a better word, but everything’s right with the world. There’s no shit from yesterday and there’s nothing you got to deal with tomorrow. It’s just this moment and until you get on the straights, which you’re actually going the fastest, but this is the place where you actually get to rest and you can catch your breath and you just let everything down, just a couple of degrees and there your mind might wander, wander like, ‘Oh, what a beautiful cloud.’ ‘Oh, that’s funny: They painted that grandstand blue there. It’s kind of an odd color, isn’t it?’ You just have time to drift a little bit until you start approaching that next breaking point.”
Whether a refuge or a thrill ride or a dream, it was what he’d hoped it’d be: “Man, I’ve been doing this for a while and was wondering: Do I have more stories to tell? Do I have anything to add to this? Is there still any excitement I can find from this?” This story, this film, this rollicking adventure—in the car—was an affirmative: “It just reinvigorated the whole thing again for me.”
His eyes drift and he’s living it all over again—this time in the Ardennes, in Belgium, at Spa: “It’s another place I can put myself in that car, in that seat. I can feel it. I can feel the adrenaline of approaching Eau Rouge”—F1’s ballsiest corner—“and going up that blind full throttle. I can picture coming around the back around Pouhon corner and trusting this car when it looks like it’s off-camber and you’re coming downhill and it looks like you’re just going to go flipping into space, and trusting it, and how it just digs into the curve, this high-speed corner kind of double apex….” His eyes are closed again. “And I am really happy.”
