Cars are more often home to emotions than, say, a refrigerator. I’ve laughed to the point of tears in my car while driving my little sister to school, and I’ve shed tears of sadness after driving home from a breakup. I’ve found myself simultaneously in awe and fear as a Hellcat owner feels the need to punch it when the light goes green.

And I’ve felt pure joy as I photograph race cars just a few feet away from my photo hole as they shake the ground below me when speeding by at 200+ mph. I lost count of how many times I’ve mentioned my love for motorsports, but the truth is that I need to infect everyone with said love for all things competitive vroom, and my best way to do that is with my cameras.

As a combination photographer/videographer/cinematographer/whatever-the-hell-other-hat I’m wearing at the moment, I refuse to just tell you about how cool it is seeing a Stadium Super Truck fly over your head at the Grand Prix of Long Beach; I show you it.

I don’t just watch a modified Hyundai Ioniq 5 N charge up the turns of Pikes Peak, I take a shot of it at absurd altitudes without railings, with a background so blurry, it looks like the world itself is struggling to keep up with the car. And why not show you the intensity of 30-some NASCAR Cup Cars going by me at full speed?

 

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I shoot this way in hopes to also inspire excitement for something I love as much as this, so that I can maybe see you at the track next year when the circus comes back in town for those three days. While I hope I do a good job of it, I got to see an early screening of the blandly named F1: The Movie, and I’m confident in saying it’s the new benchmark in capturing the emotion of motorsports, if not exactly the most amazing film you’ll ever see. Let me tell you about it:

The Plot

The story follows current GT3 racer and F1 has-been Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) as he makes his return to the self-proclaimed “pinnacle of Motorsport” with the fledgling team Expensify APX GP F1 Team. He’s joined by the young-talent Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) as they strive to turn the abysmal backmarker team into one with a race win by season’s end. If they succeed, great! If not, they’ll be sold to some presumably evil private equity group that wants to strip them for parts and take away all the things that make them great, leaving behind only a carcass of the brand and new faces nobody believes in or cares about, for better or for worse.

On top of that, our story begins in the back half of the season, with only nine races left before the finale, adding extra bouts of urgency as the new teammates need to hammer out their relationships and engineers need to frantically develop upgrades to the car that will make them “ready for combat.”

If you’re someone who doesn’t know anything about racing, it’s a compelling enough underdog story that beats to a pretty familiar drum. To F1 motorsport fanatics, there are some things there that could make you cringe if you’re incapable of suspending disbelief. Here are just a few:

• Brad Pitt is 61, and the oldest real driver on the grid is Fernando Alonso, an astoundingly (relatively) old 43. Youth is your friend in F1, simply because reaction times degrade as you get older, so the old guys simply just get slower for the most part.
• The timeline is kind of fudged, meaning you see a handful of drivers in the film that straight up don’t race anymore (Sergio Perez has been gone for a year), or are on different teams now (Lewis Hamilton is shown with Mercedes, despite now being with Ferrari).
• “Our shot, is battling in the turns,” followed by “Who said anything about safe?” You mean to tell me you’re the first people to think of having better aerodynamics to assist you in keeping speed in the turns? That you’re gonna ignore fundamental safety rules in pursuit of bringing your shitbox to the checkered flag? Penske just got blasted into hell for modifying a safety structure on some of their IndyCar chassis, and it didn’t even give them a performance benefit. Be real.
• A GT3 driver jumping to F1 is pretty much the exact opposite of how it happens in real life, with Super License points alone being a huge issue there.
• Just in general: car modifications take a long time, and teams are lucky to pump out one big upgrade a year. For a backmarker to have enough money and resources to bring a dramatic upgrade so close to the end of the season is a bit hard to swallow.

But here’s the thing: I’m not an annoying F1 fan. The suspension of disbelief was pretty damn easy for me because the filmmaking was just so good.

If you saw Top Gun: Maverick, you’re already familiar with the work of Joseph Kosinski and his ability to capture speeds in ways you haven’t seen before. The production worked with Sony to build revolutionary camera tech that essentially removed the camera bits from its computer processing bits, leaving them with an incredibly small package they could fit virtually anywhere in a tiny fighter jet cockpit, providing the viewer with some jaw-dropping images.

With the same team coming back for this film, you’ve got a lot of what made Top Gun cool, just reskinned into a package focused on the global racing series that is F1. Tight shots of the drivers reacting to G-forces under a turn? Check. Wide shots that show the entire car and other drivers around them when they punch it up Eau Rouge? Check.

The sound is all there, too. When watching Top Gun in a Dolby theater, I distinctly remember my chair shaking as the jets really started getting after it with the afterburners on full… afterburn? This film scratches the same itch, with engines revving to kingdom come, massive whooshes of air when the rear wing’s drag reduction flap opens (the rear element folds flat instead of staying at its typical angle that provides the car’s with their insane downforce), and I particularly loved the pops you heard every time the exhaust backfired; something you typically don’t hear on broadcast or in person.

As someone who watches almost every race of the different series I follow and shoot at, some of the shots weren’t incredibly revolutionary to me. In particular, the helmet-mounted cameras I’m fairly sure were introduced at Monaco in ‘23 with Charles Leclerc didn’t feel fresh. Does that mean it’s a boring angle? Not at all; my jaw was on the floor the first time I saw it during a broadcast, and the cameras in the film are significantly higher fidelity, making it quite a bit more impactful as they bump and dart around. Stitched between those are shots that look directly ripped from broadcast, just with even higher-res cameras again.

In that case, it’s a bit of “if it ain’t broke” situation and it certainly ain’t. F1 is basically the gold standard of broadcasting and their audience numbers reflect that, however, Top Gun felt visceral because that’s a world so few of us get to see, shown in a way it’s never been done before, while large chunks of F1 are things you can see at any time across the 24 race weekends in a season. But that’s coming from a diehard fan of this. What does the average person think?

The Common Man

The screening I went to was at the IMAX Headquarters in Playa Vista, and I got an invite from a car club I’m a part of. It was put on by one of the fake F1 team’s real-life title sponsors, IWC Watches, and next to me was a man named David T. (I promise you it’s a different DT than our beloved DT), and we got to talking for a minute before it started. Turns out he got an invite from a watch club he’s a part of called Neighborhood Watch Club (clever name, I can’t lie). He’s an engineer by trade (I swear it’s not DT) who always found F1 interesting from a technical level, but he doesn’t know a dang about the sport at all, so I told him to politely shut his piehole and watch the film before I could ruin any of it for him, and that I’ll be talking to him afterwards. Here’s what he had to say:

“That was intense. Oh boy.” Exactly, David! You get it! What else? “Seeing the intensity, the driving, and the skills, the adrenaline. Yeah, it was pretty exciting.”

I know he thought that, because there were several moments I watched him recoil in his seat and chuckle at some of the frames on display in the more action-heavy moments.

“It was a good introduction. I’ve long been curious about seeing the race in Long Beach, but I always miss it.”

Ignoring the fact that Long Beach is IndyCar and not F1, the point remains that David actually wants to go see a race now, meaning this film is enough of a proof of concept for racing as a whole to the average viewer, and I think that’s an accomplishment in its own right. My roommate, who is actively, annoyingly, anti-car/racing, enjoyed most of the spectacle as well (although he rightfully raised concerns about F1’s rampant wealth and all the Middle Eastern oil-money sportwashing that’s on full display).

I guess I’m bringing up David and my roomie to say that this movie is good enough for the average viewer to have fun and maybe even spend some of their hard earned money to see a race in person, and it’s serviceable enough to longtime fans like me, who can forgive any inaccuracies and enjoy the movie for what it is. That’s no small feat!

To Conclude

I think the film got more right than it did wrong; not in the factual sense, but in the vibes sense. Do I find it weird that the beginning of the film has a scene of our main character holding a wrench while a fellow fictional driver is getting ready to fight him, knowing that just a few minutes later he’s gonna be sharing the circuit with real-life drivers like Verstappen and Hamilton? Yeah, it’s a little strange.

Do I think it’s a massive disservice to the accomplishments of women in motorsports by having the team’s technical director, Kate McKenna (fantastically portrayed by Kerry Condon, a fellow Star Wars alum/former coworker of mine) act as a love interest to Pitt’s Hayes? Yeah, pretty gross, maybe just let the fictionalized first woman TD in Formula 1 history succeed independently of a guy who comes in and does a bit of mansplaining and smooching.

Despite its flaws, I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, especially the Monza race that had me fidgeting with my rings and got my heart pumping as they dashed through the rain, or the acrobatic attacks from the APX GP cars against Hamilton in the final race that very much feels like a dogfight.

It looks and sounds great with a pretty darn good score from Hans Zimmer (but an original soundtrack that tows the line between serviceable and sterile), but suffers from a third act that overstays its weoclme and has a couple hat-on-a-hat moments to keep knocking the team down in ways that got old for me. But those are critiques from a former film industry worker, not from a racing fan.

My friends know my annoying simple movie rating scale that goes as follows: 10/10 no notes, for the exceptional films (Dune 2 is the first to come to mind); 10/10, some notes (Gladiator 2, wherein we know it won’t be as good as the first but saw some cool action so let’s move on); and 0/10 many notes (sorry Monkey Man, but you were an egregious waste of my time); and with that scale in mind, I’d have to give it a 10/10 some notes. I had fun but wasn’t blown out of my seat like I was with Maverick, and it didn’t say anything about the world, instead opting to be an escapist act that showed bright lights and fireworks blasting just feet above these tiny rocket ships. As for a traditional rating, probably a 7/10.

I think the only thing I learned from the night is that I clearly have no business wearing a $50,000 watch, which is further proved by the loose thread I had on my suit jacket’s sleeve.

Shoutout my friend Stephanie and her team’s work in the editing department of this film, and a huge recommendation for the show Snowfall if you wanna see the beginning of Damson Idris’ career. Phenomenal show.