With F1: The Movie plastered across billboards and bus stops from Monaco to Mumbai, fans have been ready. After all, the sport is in its golden era of mainstream obsession. Between Drive to Survive, meme pages, thirst edits, and Twitter wars about tyre strategies, Formula 1 has never been more in the public eye. And with this film starring Brad Pitt as a retired racing legend making an improbable comeback, it looked like Hollywood was ready to ride that wave.
The premise? Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a washed-up former driver who is roped back into the paddock to help revive the fictional APX GP team, joining rookie driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) under the chaotic guidance of team owner Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem). It’s a high-octane, fictionalised version of the real thing, peppered with actual grid footage from the 2023 and 2024 F1 season—you’ll spot everyone from Max Verstappen to Lando Norris casually existing in the background, with Pitt racing past in scenes that feel more Hollywood than Silverstone.
There are cars flying (not kidding), illegal overtakes that would make real-world stewards break out in hives, and at one point, Sonny literally has to read a manual the day before testing. A man who has allegedly been away from the sport for decades somehow gets cleared to race in modern F1 without snapping a vertebra or failing a single FIA regulation? Okay. Fernando Alonso may be 43 and still on the grid, but even he would be rolling his eyes at this midlife crisis in a race suit.
To be fair, it’s fiction. We can suspend disbelief. We can let some of the absurdity slide in the name of cinema. But what’s harder to ignore, especially for the women who make up a growing, vocal chunk of F1’s global fanbase, is how spectacularly the film fumbles female representation.
Leading the fictional APX GP team is Kate McKenna, played by the always compelling Kerry Condon. On paper, she’s a dream character: the first female technical director in F1 history, a title that should feel momentous. She’s bold, no-nonsense, the kind of woman who seems like she’s earned her stripes in a paddock full of egos. She is introduced like she’s in control, cool-headed in the chaos, someone who finally represents the brains and grit behind the machine.
And then, Sonny Hayes walks in. Brad Pitt’s character—who lives in a van, hasn’t driven an F1 car in 30 years, and is the very embodiment of “washed-up but white male lead”—lays eyes on her and immediately starts asking questions about her. There’s tension from the first meeting, of course. The camera lingers. She sizes him up. He smirks. It’s almost formulaic how quickly she becomes the 'strong but vulnerable' love interest who needs a man to help her unlock her full potential.
Kate, we learn, left her previous role to travel the world and build a winning car with APX GP—a dream job she takes at the cost of her marriage, because of course her husband wasn’t supportive of her ambitions. Heaven forbid a fictional woman in motorsport have both a groundbreaking career and a healthy relationship. And then comes the real punchline: this brilliant, history-making technical director has apparently designed a car so bad, it’s affectionately called a “shitbox”. Three seasons, zero points. But wait! Sonny Hayes tells her (after losing a bet, mind you) to build a car “for combat”. Suddenly, she’s inspired. Suddenly, the car works. Suddenly, we’re expected to believe that this is the moment she becomes great at her job—because a man who read a manual the night before told her to think differently.
There’s even a one-night stand thrown in for good measure. Right before a race weekend. Because clearly, there’s nothing more empowering than a woman sleeping with a self-destructive former driver to peel back his emotional layers. What’s most insulting, though, is how the film tries to have it both ways. Kate is framed as capable but ultimately submissive to the plotline of a white male saviour. And even when he’s doing the bare minimum or actively undermining her, it’s played like he’s some kind of rebel genius rather than someone who should, realistically, be politely escorted off the pit wall for safety violations.
Callie Cooke plays Jodie, the lone female pit crew mechanic on the APX GP team and, unfortunately, the film treats her like comic relief. Her big introduction? Bumping into Joshua Pearce and getting asked, “Try not to kill our driver?” Subtle. From there, she’s shown fumbling around the garage, botching a pit stop and generally looking completely out of place. Sure, she technically improves over the course of the film, even standing up for herself after Brad Pitt’s character publicly defends her in a team meeting (a moment she rightly points out makes her look weaker, not stronger). But the question remains: why is she written like this at all? Her character arc feels entirely unnecessary, especially when the film could have just given us a capable, respected female mechanic from the start. Instead, Jodie becomes another checkbox character: not someone who pushes the narrative forward, but someone used to show how “progressive” the film thinks it’s being.
Even beyond the pit wall, the film leans heavily into one-dimensional portrayals of women. Sarah Niles plays Bernadette, the only woman of colour in the main cast, and she’s boxed into the maternal archetype. Her character exists entirely around her son, Joshua Pearce—cooking for him, caring for him, shielding him from the consequences of his choices.
Meanwhile, his manager boasts that Joshua is “popular with the girls” and drags him to a Vegas club for some last-minute flirting as a branding exercise. There, a young fangirl recognises him, only to instantly ask if he can introduce her to Carlos Sainz. It’s easily one of the film’s funniest moments—everyone in the theatre laughed, because, yes, the Sainz fandom is real—but it lands awkwardly. The joke could have been brilliant satire, but it feels hollow in a film where the women aren’t given nearly enough complexity or care for us to laugh with it rather than at them.
And that’s what’s frustrating. Because outside of this Hollywood fantasy, motorsport is moving. Women now make up 41 per cent of the global F1 fanbase, with the fastest growth in the 16 to 24 demographic. The FIA’s Girls on Track and CareerShift programmes are actively working to pull more women into technical careers. These are real, measurable shifts. The sport is growing, diversifying, and becoming more inclusive by the year.
So, is it too much to ask that its big-budget Hollywood debut reflect even a little of that? That it give us characters who are more than love interests, more than comic relief, more than emotional support systems? Especially when it’s co-produced by seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, a man who’s been a vocal advocate for women in motorsport, and who has pushed harder than most to make F1 more accessible and equitable.
The truth is, F1: The Movie had the track laid out for it. A huge platform, a passionate fanbase, and a chance to shift the narrative. It chose spectacle over substance. And while it may have taken pole position at the box office, when it comes to representation, we’re still stuck in the pit lane.
