Given the F1 season has just kicked off in Australia, it would’ve been surprising not to hear anything more this week about the long-anticipated F1 Movie. No shock then, as the official trailer for the film has finally been released.
It’s the first time we’ve been given a firm understanding of the plot of the F1 film. We knew it’d focus on the return of Brad Pitt’s Sonny Hayes to the sport as a driver for fictional team APXGP, but now we know how that’ll shape up.
We start things off with shots of Hayes driving at Daytona behind the wheel of a Porsche 911 GT3, presumably competing in the Daytona 24 Hours – the traditional curtain raiser of the international motorsport calendar.
Some cliches of ‘once-star now washed-up’ are wheeled out. We see him living in a van, labelled as a gambling junkie and called ‘the best that never was’. It also gives us an insight into Hayes’ history in the sport, with an archive-style shot of the character hopping into a Camel-era Lotus, suggesting his first dance with Formula 1 came in the late ‘80s to early ‘90s.
Then cue a rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain, *the* F1 anthem to many of us, before setting up Hayes’ path to an F1 return.
It sounds as though the plot will see the relationship between veteran Hayes and rookie teammate Joshua Pearce, played by Damon Idris, start off as a pretty sour one. Cue the usual cringe beef: “When was the last time you won a race?”
Camel livery appreciation post
From there in, it’s lots of action shots, crashes, tensions rising between teammates and seemingly a romance involving Hayes and the Kerry Condon-played Kate, who has some involvement with APX that we’re yet to know about for sure.
Dare we say, it actually looks pretty good. We didn’t have doubts over the quality of the action shots, given that much of the film has been documented as largely being shot on-location at races across the last two F1 seasons by the same crew who made the dazzling Top Gun: Maverick.
We couldn’t shake the fear of it leaning into a cringe plotline, though, although we’re getting the impression that fortunately won’t be the case.
F1 is set to hit cinemas globally on 25 June, except for the US and Canada for… reasons, where it’ll come out two days later. Will you be queuing up to see it?
