Welcome to Office Hours, a Paddock Project exclusive interview series with drivers, team principals, and top executives in and around the world of Formula 1. Today’s interview is with James Gay-Rees, Executive Producer of Drive to Survive and founder of Box to Box Films.
It’s that time of year.
Drive to Survive Season 8 drops this Friday, February 27 on Netflix. The first race is next week in Australia. The group chats are warming up. The pre-season predictions are all wrong. It’s happening.
Cue the annual groaning about editorial choices, selective storytelling, dramatic radio cuts, and whether this will be the season that finally “ruins” the sport. (It won’t.)
Drive to Survive holds a special place in my heart. It was my gateway into Formula 1 six years ago, back when I didn’t know that NASCAR was something different. Yes, really.
I still watch every season the moment it comes out. I love seeing how a year of chaos gets distilled into ten episodes. I’m always curious what the producers decide to center, what we’re all going to gasp at, and what inevitably gets left on the cutting room floor.
Last year, that curiosity got the best of me. I reached out to James Gay-Rees — executive producer of Drive to Survive, co-founder of Box to Box Films, and the producer behind Senna, Amy, and a slate of other award-winning documentaries — to ask how this machine actually works.
Miraculously, he said yes.
We talked about how the show came together in the first place, why it exploded the way it did, how they balance access with ethics, what teams are allowed to push back on, and what happens when the music eventually stops.
This one is worth your time.
For the full episode, you can listen to the podcast interview:
Whose idea was Drive to Survive? Did F1 or Liberty Media come to you, or did you pitch them?
As far as I remember it, because it was quite a long time ago now, I think what happened was I went to a CAA Sport networking event in London with my partner Paul Martin. We bumped into some of the marketing team from Red Bull Formula 1 team. I was introduced as the person who made Senna, so we got talking about that and they just said, “we want to do our own documentary.” So we ended up working a series around Red Bull Racing. We took that to Liberty Media as a proposal.
We cut this fancy teaser and we had a deck and we did this whole thing. And this really amazing guy had been brought in by Liberty from ESPN to be the marketing officer of the new Formula 1 under Liberty Media ownership. He was great. He was just like, “Wait, you’re wasting your time. This is a waste of time. I’m not going to do this. But we’re talking to Netflix about doing a show around the entire sport. Do you want to do that?” I was like, “yeah, totally.” So we’d been having sort of parallel conversations with Formula 1, with Netflix, and with him. But it all coalesced and came together very quickly after that.
It must have been a bit of a risk. Formula 1 wasn’t big in America at that time. Did you know that Drive to Survive was going to have this effect?
It was maybe slightly opportunistic in the sense that the sport was kind of going nowhere fast. But no, I don’t think anybody associated with the show thought it was going to land in the way that it did. We had the benefit of opening relatively big, but then the show grew rapidly over two or three years. Most shows on Netflix, even big hits, decline incrementally, or they hold, but very few things actually grow. But it grew really aggressively from a quite a solid base. Who knows why things connect? I think there’s always an element of timing. There may be somebody at Netflix with a scientific answer to that, but I don’t know if it really is scientific.
You take it and run with it. What do you think are the ingredients that made it so successful? Was it the pandemic? Why did so many people latch on to this show and to this sport through the way you portrayed it?
I think pandemic was season two, wasn’t it? So I think partly that. I think it was also a total discovery show to Americans, because as you said, they literally hadn’t really had a Formula 1. And Formula 1 had tried pretty ineptly to try and crack America over the last couple of decades. But they did it in a quite clunky way and didn’t work.
Taking the helmet off these sort of variously attractive young men who are risking their lives in this quite glamorous sport that seems global and a bit “other,” for whatever reason, caught people’s imaginations. And I think that the established Formula 1 territories like the UK or Germany or Holland or Italy, it sort of revitalized a sleeping fan base into maybe looking at the sport slightly differently.
Having said that, there’s plenty of hardcore fans who don’t like the show because it’s not purest enough. And then for America, it was like, “what the hell is this?” It was purely a word of mouth hit in America. And to get that younger demographic, I mean, kids watch Formula 1 now, which they just didn’t ever. It was very male, pale, and stale viewership.
How much convincing do you have to do to get access to teams? And what’s that process like?
