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The Circle of Life continues—new year, new Formula 1 season, new Netflix Drive To Survive trailer. Usually, I wouldn’t care too much about the new season’s teaser because I already know what happened throughout the previous F1 championship. This time, however, there’s been enough noise over the off-season—like Lewis Hamilton signing with Ferrari—that I was curious enough to give the new trailer a look. Y’know, just in case.
I wasn’t disappointed. Right at the 24-second mark, Netflix shows us a brief scene where Hamilton very clearly tells Mercedes boss Toto Wolff, “You can be here for 20 more years. I can’t.” More specifically, the narrative starts a few seconds earlier when Red Bull boss Christian Horner is heard saying, “A driver’s career has a finite amount of time to it.” Wolff follows that up by saying, “We owe it to them [drivers] to provide them with a good car.”
F1 doesn’t allow videos containing FOM material to be embedded into blogs, so you have to click here to watch it on YouTube.
As we already know, Netflix producers are quite clever with how they align clips, often tweaking the narrative inorganically. I’m not sure if that’s what’s going on here, but it’s reasonable to assume the context of the conversation between Wolff and Hamilton is accurate, given that contract negotiations took place throughout 2023.
Other interesting bits in the trailer include funny comments from several drivers, like McLaren’s Lando Norris saying, “This is quicker than our car!” while driving a golf cart. In retrospect, he’s not wrong. Valtteri Bottas talks about, you guessed it, his mullet, while Esteban Ocon has a cheeky moment with Alpine’s newest investor: Hollywood star Ryan Reynolds.
Of course, it wouldn’t be Drive To Survive without lots of explicit bits from Guenther Steiner. This will likely be his final appearance on the Netflix show given that he no longer works for Haas F1. Or will it?
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