Peter Lyon
March 15, 2025
Formula 1’s 2025 season started in Melbourne, Australia in earnest today with McLaren’s Lando Norris snatching pole position away from teammate Oscar Piastri in the dying minutes of Q3 giving the British team a front row lockout.
Now while this weekend marks the start of the new F1 season, it also just happened to coincide with the release of a new trailer for Brad Pitt’s next film. For those who missed last year’s teaser trailer, the most recent one offers a more thorough look at the movie, which follows Pitt as he transitions from living in a van to racing in F1 at some of the most renowned tracks in the world.
In the film’s promotional materials, Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, who is referred to as “the greatest that never was.” In the story, he was one of Formula 1’s rising stars in the 1990s, but an accident almost ended his racing career. He spent the next thirty years as a racer-for-hire until his former teammate, now an F1 owner (played by Javier Bardem), showed up and offered him an open seat, because apparently there weren’t any other qualified drivers available. Hmmm, maybe they hadn’t heard of ex-Red Bull driver Daniel Ricciardo, who has eight F1 race wins to his name and is looking for a seat. Anyway, as you’d expect, high drama naturally breaks out when Hayes bumps heads with Damson Idris, his new teammate and rookie sensation.
To give the flick reality, scenes featuring the hypothetical Mercedes-AMG race car being driven by pro drivers were filmed during the 2023 British Grand Prix. Director Joseph Kosinski, who directed Top Gun: Maverick, apparently wanted to lean on as little CGI as he could, so Pitt and Idris trained with the big boys (real drivers) to get seat time for some scenes. Notably, Lewis Hamilton, a seven-time F1 champion, is listed as a producer.
‘F1’ will be released in theaters in the United States on June 27, 2025, a few days after its global premiere on June 25. Additionally, it will ultimately be available for streaming on Apple TV+ because it was developed by Apple Original Films.
CARLIST THOUGHTS
While I like Pitt as an actor, I think the film’s producers are pushing the realms of what’s physically humanly possible by having 60-year-old Pitt (at the time he shot the movie) make a comeback to F1 and race competitively. Why? Because Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso is currently the granddad of the F1 driver’s lineup at 43 years of age, and we can expect his retirement any year now. Ok so the film’s trailer looks interesting enough, but we can only hope that the story is better than 2023’s Gran Turismo and vies with the superbly put-together 2019 flick Ford v Ferrari. Oh yeah, and thank heavens for the continuing popularity of Netflix’s Drive to Survive series that made this movie feasible.
