HAMILTON DRAWS LEVEL IN CHAOTIC CONTEST
Formula 1 is obsessed with the ‘Netflix effect’. It’s easy to see why. Ever since Drive to Survive premiered in 2019, the documentary series that plays fast and loose with sporting reality is credited with attracting new fans to the championship globally.
Netflix is more than a media giant. It’s a verb – and famously rather a naughty one. But ‘Netflix’ also encompasses how people consume many of the programmes on its platforms: they binge them. The shows play automatically – it’s assumed that you always want ‘just one more’.
And that’s basically what happened in Saudi Arabia’s first F1 race. It was a stop/start thriller eventually won by Lewis Hamilton over his arch-nemesis, Max Verstappen. Action-packed and seemingly never-ending, it was a six-part Netflix drama series, which revealed the extent of how much the championship’s soul has changed.
EPISODE ONE: A FORMULA AWAKENS
The start of the 50-lap race on the shores of the Red Sea was thematically pretty familiar to anyone who has watched one of the plethora of sporting documentaries churned out in recent years, in that it followed a simple scene-setting formula.
When the lights initially went out in Jeddah, a blast of action was followed by a period of tedium that set up what would follow – very F1 – as Hamilton and team-mate Valtteri Bottas roared away from their shared front row. They were chased by Verstappen, whose gearbox had passed a post-qualifying-crash investigation and been assessed as healthy. But where the Mercedes duo got things wrong in defending a 1-2 start against the marauding Verstappen in Mexico, here they were perfect in “the only part of the
