For the sixth season of Drive to Survive, producers Box To Box films had to fashion 10 compelling episodes from 22 less-than-gripping grands prix.
Max Verstappen pole-axed the competition in 2023. Within half-a-dozen races there seemed little realistic prospect of anyone beating him to the title, and he duly claimed a record-smashing 19 grand prix victories over the course of the championship.
The Netflix series didn’t become a hit by dwelling on this kind of dominance, so the team behind it decided to almost entirely ignore Verstappen’s masterclass performance and focus their cameras elsewhere.
Long-time DTS watchers won’t fail to spot the irony. For years Verstappen refused to have anything to do with the show, unimpressed by what he called its “fake” plotlines. He was eventually persuaded to return to the chair for the previous season, his first as reigning champion, and the programme makers took delight in parading the fact he was back on board.
But this time around, Verstappen isn’t the subject of any of its 10 episodes, and only surfaces as a character in the stories of others. In the final episode Christian Horner reels off details of Verstappen’s remarkable win rate, little of which we’ve seen over the preceding episodes. Still, that probably suited the man himself just fine.
Instead, Drive to Survive fall back on a few old favourites. You can imagine how the production team sighed in relief learning of Daniel Ricciardo’s mid-season return at AlphaTauri. That drama, plus Ricciardo’s subsequent injury and Liam Lawson’s super-sub cameo, takes care of two episodes.
Another DTS favourite, Guenther Steiner, is back too, though not for long as we all know. As the team struggles through another season to Steiner’s escalating frustrations, punctuated with the usual profanities, it’s hard not to feel we’ve seen this all before. Gene Haas seemingly felt the same way and Steiner was shown the door in January.
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That posed the first of a few off-season headaches for the Drive to Survive team. An evident shortage of time and footage means Steiner’s fate isn’t covered in the episode where he features most heavily. Instead but the series concludes with him departing the interview chair, followed by an end card stating his contract was not renewed for 2024.
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