Formula 1 has long been a niche sport that has had its own set of dedicated fans, but casual sports followers can hardly keep up with the constant ups and downs and the major changes that keep taking place year after year.
It has not been a main stream sport also because it has been difficult to identify with it. You watch a game of basketball, you pick up a piece of trash and throw it into the dustbin while announcing “Kobe!”; that is easy.
You can not zoom around a city screaming Hamilton or Vettel in a hatch back with bottleneck traffic. The sports is just too sophisticated for that.
Netflix has grown from a small streaming service to a brilliant production house, with amazing shows that tend to find a perfect balance between entertainment and excitement.
Over the past few years netflix has been working on sports projects and while Amazon may have stolen a march with its all or nothing series (includes football, American and regular) that have provided great entertainment to sports fans and an incredible insight into what goes on behind the scenes.
Netflix on 19th Feb announced its own foray into producing a sport documentary series on Formula 1, having shot a lot of content inside the sport in the year 2018.
Fans of Formula 1 received the news with extreme enthusiasm. F1 has been a sport with a lot of analysis and open channels between the inside and the outside.
But a documentary will go beyond what we see during the race. The trailer promises a look at the grueling training, tactics and emotions that go on behind the scene at every single race, with every single team.
Of course it comes with a lot of high power drama, which is unavoidable in a sport that is played at speeds of 300+ km/hr.
The documentary focused a lot on Red Bull and some of the other teams that aren’t at the highest rung of the F1 food chain, which had fans speculating about whether there was less access to the prime players in Mercedes and Ferrari, or if they were saving that for the show itself.
However, the news was confirmed today, that while each team was asked to provide some access to its behind the scenes activities, most teams were open to providing more access than the minimum required.
Mercedes and Ferrari, two teams that went neck and neck for most part of the season, did not go over and beyond. So while we will see footage of the two teams and their rivalry through the season, do not expect a very in depth look at them.
However, most fans have taken this in their stride as Ferrari and Mercedes are two teams that got the maximum coverage over the season and while they were the best performers in this sport every team has a story.
Winning is not always the only defining feature for a team. Each team is at a different point in their journey and their goals are set accordingly. So watching what went on behind the scenes of all these other teams will be a new story that fans can get excited about. It might also prove to be a catalyst to getting more people interested in the sport.
In that case it might be an turn out to be a disguised boon that two teams that, for the lack of better words, are the most focussed and single minded (in other words boring) in their pursuit of the victory, will have the least background coverage.
