Drive to Survive, the fly-on-the-wall documentary about Formula 1 racing, began streaming its third season on Netflix final Friday. Once once more, the digicam crews had been in the appropriate place to seize some spectacular footage, and it is a gorgeous factor to watch, significantly in 4K. Fans of the earlier two seasons shall be handled to extra effing and blinding, significantly from Gunther Steiner, workforce principal for Haas F1. But the devoted F1 follower might properly feel short-changed from the 10-episode run that leaves out among the 2020 season’s greatest storylines.

When F1 changed hands in 2017, one main job for the brand new homeowners at Liberty Media was to begin rising the game. In years previous, F1 repeatedly claimed it was the most-watched sport on the planet after the Olympic Games. But the game’s viewers has shrunk precipitously over the previous couple of many years, mostly because of pay-per-view TV deals in its key markets just like the UK and Germany that took the races off free-to-air channels.

Among the strikes that Liberty made was inviting a Netflix documentary crew into the paddock all through 2018, giving the media firm’s cameras unprecedented entry on race weekends. Most of the groups and drivers had been equally accommodating, though not all—neither Mercedes nor Ferrari agreed to take part, and each groups and their 4 drivers had been nearly absent from season 1. That first season positively acquired F1 in entrance of lots of new eyeballs, and the absence of megastars like Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel allowed among the drivers to shine.

Season 2 was a lot of the identical, though this time the dominant Mercedes workforce allowed the cameras in to witness what was an utter debacle of a race that was supposed to have a good time the automobile firm’s 125th 12 months in racing. Ferrari—the workforce most synonymous with F1—additionally confirmed up for a single episode specializing in the intra-team dynamic of a four-time World Champion getting eclipsed by a younger hotshot. But once more, a viewer new to F1 may properly come away with the impression that the game’s greatest names had been Australian driver Daniel Ricciardo and the aforementioned Steiner.

If you had been anticipating extra of the identical for season 3, you will not be disenchanted. As all the time, Drive to Survive appears to be like spectacular, particularly when you could have all of the pixels. (Our writer simply had to substitute a TV and so is definitely wowed by 4K content material.) Ricciardo is introduced as soon as extra because the affable would-be champion. Steiner is confronted with one other robust 12 months, and that is earlier than one in every of his drivers, Romain Grosjean, ended his F1 career in a fiery blaze in Bahrain.

It’s an incomplete image of the 2020 season

But there are many omissions that may baffle F1 fans. How, for instance, can we clarify the near-absence of Lewis Hamilton, who received a seventh world championship and took his win tally to 95, eclipsing even the nice Michael Schumacher, significantly in a 12 months wherein Hamilton’s political activism got here to the fore? Instead, Hamilton’s record-breaking season is lowered to about three minutes; by distinction, his teammate Valtteri Bottas acquired a complete episode to himself.

Some of the 12 months’s different greatest storylines are virtually utterly absent as properly. There’s nothing about Honda’s shocking decision to depart the sport, leaving the Red Bull and Alpha Tauri groups to discover a new engine producer. George Russell’s substitute look in Hamilton’s Mercedes barely deserves a minute. Same, too, for supersub Nico Hulkenberg, who merited a complete episode in Season 2 but could not get a second of display time for season 3 regardless of a pair of gorgeous races for Racing Point. And I’m fairly certain that among the automobile noises overlaid on the racing footage belong to the naturally aspirated V8s that have not raced because the finish of 2013.

For the informal fan or somebody utterly new to the game, none of this shall be an issue. And that is the demographic Liberty wants to attain if it needs to improve F1’s attain. And for these of you who know the distinction between a barge board and a mass damper, no less than you could have one thing fairly to have a look at earlier than the vehicles hearth up in anger this coming Friday morning.

Listing picture by Netflix