When you sit down to watch the long anticipated Formula 1 racing drama, featuring Hollywood’s Brad Pitt, you expect high thrills, roaring engines, and maybe even a bit of oil slicked grit. You indeed get all of that polished with Apple’s signature production gloss but when the helmet comes off, it is clear F1 plays it all too safe when it comes to what matters most – representation.
Directed by Top Gun Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski, the film is technically stunning. The racing sequences are immersive, captured with real cars, real circuits, and a level of authenticity that’ll make any motorsports fan swoon. Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a fictional former F1 driver lured out of retirement to mentor a young hotshot on a struggling team. It is a classic underdog setup, Rocky on wheels if you will, and to his credit Pitt is as charismatic as ever.
But while F1 lives in a world of speed and spectacle, its perspective feels stuck in the past. Aside from all its high speed action, it becomes incredibly obvious that this movie was made as an easy money making film which paid no attention to the real world of Formula 1 but could spare enough time to draw in the big names and plenty of ads.
For a sport increasingly aware of its gender imbalance, the film disappointingly mirrors the same problem it could have helped challenge.
Women in F1 are mostly relegated to the margins, PR handlers, love interests, or background team members with few lines and even less influence. There’s a brief nod to a female engineer (played by a woefully underused Callie Cooke) who serves as a huge role within the pit and garage, but she’s kept in the shadows, her storyline barely developed, and the only one on the team to make a mistake. She’s shown dropping tools, bumping into drivers, and botching pit stops, dimming her down to just another woman in a STEM career who is not as smart or as experienced as her male counterparts.
There are only two other women in the movie. Leading the team is Kate McKenna (played by Kerry Condon), the team’s technical director and the brains behind several key strategic moves. She is the first in F1 history to hold such a high technical role, but of course she is “bad at her job” and the car she spends her entire career designing is described as a “shitbox”.
Yet, this isn’t the thing that disappointed me the most: it was the totally unnecessary decision to unsurprisingly have her character fall in love with the lead which influenced the majority of her decision making for the entirety of the movie. She goes from being the smartest in the room to blindly following orders from a driver who has been out of the sport for over 30 years. The car is suddenly fighting for P1 at the front of the field, thanks to a man.
Although she explicitly warns Hayes that she never gets involved with drivers, she still ends up in his hotel room the night before a race. Spoiler alert – they don’t even end up together, which raises the question: why write a woman into a groundbreaking position of power only to make her inept?
Our final representation for women is an unnamed background character whose only line is a flirtatious one asking for a driver’s number. This unfortunately plays into the larger narrative that women only like F1 because of the ‘attractive’ male drivers. A narrative that has hindered the female experience of motorsports for years.
This is a glaring missed opportunity, especially in a time when real-life figures like Susie Wolff and the rise of the all-female F1 Academy series are shifting the landscape. The film could have, and frankly should have, reflected that momentum. Instead, F1 leans heavily on familiar masculine archetypes: the aging mentor, the cocky prodigy, the grizzled pit crew, the cigar-chomping team boss. Women? Mostly watching from the garage.
When it came to my attention that Lewis Hamilton was signed on to co-produce the movie, I had hoped that a certain level of authenticity would be reached. Not just in terms of the technical aspects of racing but inclusion also. This makes it that much more unfortunate that this bar for women was not achieved.
It is not just about visibility, it is about agency. While F1 nails the adrenaline of race day, it never quite finds the courage to rewrite the rules of who gets to be in the driver’s seat – literally or narratively.
That said, the movie is not without merit. The on-track action is breathtaking, the sound design phenomenal, and the camaraderie between Pitt and his younger co-star (Damson Idris) adds a layer of emotional warmth. It is a love letter to speed, teamwork, and legacy, told through the lens of one man getting one last lap and passing the torch. But for all its horsepower, F1 lacks the narrative boldness it so clearly wants to embody.
In a world where Drive to Survive has made F1 more accessible and more diverse than ever, the film feels like it’s still stuck in the paddock, revving its engine but afraid to shift into a new gear.