Grand Prix Driver

Finally a series on one of my most beloved sports. Fascinating from the beginning till the end, it brings you behind the scenes of F1 and discover its highly entertaining world. Please Amazon make a 2nd season :)

I follow the F1 racing scene casually. Meaning that i enjoy watching the races, but i am not deep into the material. So for me it was a quite entertaining look behind the scenes. I can understand that a die hard fan would be underwhelmed and give it a lower score.

The technology center in Woking - England, where the car is designed and built, is simply impressive and has a very clean look. I would work there, too :)

With only four episodes it is very easy to watch. If you liked the first one, then the rest is a nobrainer. I watched it in one sitting. I really appreciate, that it is NOT a PR Commercial from McLaren. You notice that they made a lot of mistakes during the build of the car and the executives adress them. You can feel the frustration of the drivers after the first tests on the track and the poor performance of the car.

If you're into sports documentaries give it a go!

Perhaps this was aimed at people who don't follow F1. For those who do it was a superficial review of problems from a year ago.

Purportedly a behind-the-scenes look those shots were carefully planned and orchestrated.

We see some engineering outputs. Some carefully constructed sound bites. We don't see passion.

Given that MCLaren is now led by a marketing man perhaps we should have expected this approach. But I didn't feel any more connected with the team at the end of the four episodes than I did at the start.

That might also be why they have had trouble finding a title sponsor. Everyone knows what McLaren once was. It's not so clear what someone gets today.

Like the team, the documentary could have been a lot better.

Fab series that shows how too many suits result in poor performance. The insights to the management, team and drivers was fantastic. There needs to be more episodes and series

I suppose if it was 2018 (the year before Drive to Survive was released) I might think this was in interesting behind the scenes look at an F1 team. Fernando Alonso is barely in this, despite being one of the top drivers on the grid at the time this was filmed. Instead the 4 episodes are weighted towards Stoffel Vandoorne, who ended up being a huge disappointment and has largely been forgotten.

The fact that there are only 4 episodes suggest to me that this series got a deal for a 4 episode "pilot" and once Amazon saw how boring it was they declined to pick it up for a full season. I know that they likely spent a tidy sum on the pilot episodes, but for the sake of pride they should have deleted this series from their library once they saw Drive To Survive.