ROMAIN GROSJEAN COULD NOT BREAK
free. His foot was lodged underneath his gas pedal.
Something firm was trapping him from above. And it was
getting warm. At first, he wasn’t sure what had happened.
He opened his eyes and tried to escape. Maybe I’m upside
down, he thought. Maybe I’m pinned against the wall.
Someone would come rescue him soon. They always did.
He looked right, then left. Orange. Is that the sunset? No,
the sun hasn’t been up for hours. Lights from the circuit?
No, this was brighter, and hotter: fire.
He started asking himself questions about where he’d
feel the burn first and how painful it would be. Those
who’ve watched the never-released rear-facing camera
recording from Grosjean’s car recount first seeing a man
with fear in his eyes, then one resigned to his fate. He
knew he was going to die.
FORMULA ONE IS AN UNFAIR SPORT.
Perhaps the most unfair sport. Unlike most of the major
U.S. leagues, which have guardrails like the draft or a
salary cap to ensure parity, F1 is happy to let teams spend
their ways to competitive advantages. Top teams like
Mercedes and Red Bull don’t just have the best drivers,
but also the money and resources to build cars that lead
the pack year after year; their more powerful engines
and more aerodynamic chassis have propelled them to
every championship since 2010.
A financial gap tipping the playing field isn’t novel.
Moneyball changed baseball and gave lower-budget
teams a path forward; an 18th-round reliever, in the right
circumstances, might be more valuable
than an expensive arm. But there is
no amount of coaching that can fix a
bad car. A great driver can make up
fractions of a second per lap around a
track, but skill is worth only so much.
In 2019, Mercedes, then on the
hunt for its eighth-consecutive world
championship behind leading man
Lewis Hamilton, spent $442 million
perfecting their cars. Meanwhile, Haas,
Grosjean’s team for five years, zipped
around the same tracks with a budget
less than half that amount. As things
are now, the best teams get richer,
and those at the back languish on the
treadmill of mediocrity. The better a
team finishes at the end of the year,
the larger its payout, which is then
spent to improve its car. Sponsors shell
out more to get their names on better
cars. Mercedes is always getting faster,
and Haas is left to watch them f ly into
the distance.
This is the world Netf lix entered
when it released the debut season of
Drive to Survive in 2019. The documen-
tary series doubles as an F1 gateway
drug; it’s Hard Knocks if Hard Knocks
had the guts to brake late into a cor-
ner going 200 mph. The appeal isn’t
complicated: The show follows 20 tele-
genic, highly competitive drivers and
their teams as they attempt to push
the limits of modern engineering and
speed to victory. Over three seasons,
it’s touched on the championship race but is most engag-
ing when focusing on teams further back in the pack.
After Mercedes and Ferrari elected not to give Netf lix
access during the show’s inaugural season, the producers
had no choice but to search for new characters outside
the title fight, and they struck gold. Over the past few
years, it’s made stars of drivers like Australian charmer
Daniel Ricciardo, whose penchant for jokes has won him
as many fans as his driving. The series opened a new world
to a massive audience and formed a cult fandom in the
process. More than 50 million F1 obsessives have streamedSPORTS ILLUSTRATED Q SI.COM 78OUT OF THE ASHES
After nearly dying in a fiery crash during the 2020
Formula One season, Grosjean reinvented himself in
IndyCar, where he will contend for a title in ’22.