Review: Follow The Rookies | Part 1 | F1 Academy (2025)
★★★★☆
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RuokaA6X7I
I started watching Formula One regularly in 2023. Coincidentally, this was also the inaugural year of F1 Academy, an initiative by Formula One to get more women into higher racing series by providing a women-only Formula Four-level single-seater championship with (to some level) guaranteed sponsors, attention, and resources. The first year, races were not shown live or in full; instead, after each race weekend they would release commentated highlight reels. In 2024 and this year, they have corrected this obvious mistake (among other tweaks & improvements). I have been following the series since the beginning.
F1 Academy has always had a particular aesthetic presence that I find mostly to be solid in its fundamentals, if a bit on-the-nose & obvious in its messaging. It is very clear that it is following in the footsteps of F1, but with a much smaller budget. Additionally, the producers really want this series to inspire young women and prove to the world that women can be good at things like racing (a totally reasonable goal). Mostly I think its presentation is fine, sometimes I think it's a bit heavy-handed, occasionally I am annoyed at what feel like rough edges that should be smoother.
Formula One, on the other hand, is slick--in my opinion--to a fault. I am an irregular watcher of Drive to Survive, the Netflix docu-sports-soap-reality show that summarizes (and makes narratively legible) each year of the Formula One World Championship calendar. It is and always has been Formula One Propaganda, teaching its viewers how Formula One would like to be understood, discussed, respected, digested, remembered. It tells you who are the heroes & villains, and who are the winners & losers. It, also, is edited exactly like another one of Netflix's reality shows, Selling Sunset. (As an enthusiastic viewer of Selling Sunset: retweets are not endorsements.) That is to say, there is a lot of footage shot to provide maximum editorial freedom, there are plenty of confessional interviews to write whatever plot you need, everything conversation caught on camera feels like a recreation of a real conversation, and the music is melodramatic as hell. It is a perfectly smooth stone; a tightly-edited narrative roller coaster so pristine you almost won't even wonder how they condensed an entire year of a sport into under 8 hours of content with no loose ends.
Follow The Rookies | Part 1 | F1 Academy is quite simply better and more interesting than any recent episode of Drive to Survive. And, interestingly to me: it is better for all of the reasons that F1 Academy's production can some times feel "lesser".
- The editing and pacing is very straightforward: the episode takes place over the Shanghai GP 2025 race weekend, it follows three of the F1 Academy rookies this year, and the episode itself consists of footage and interviews with each of the three punctuated by practice and race highlights, proceeding forward chronologically.
- The race highlights are edited very straightforwardly: you can feel the race and the commentary being compressed, a somewhat staccato rhythm focusing down on the three drivers the episode is following.
- There are no confessional interviews; each interview, seemingly, takes place on-site and is shown chronologically (i.e. an interview that occurs between Free Practice and Race 1 is shown between the two).
- The show is willing to stay with each racer for an extended period, in both interview & shot duration. We're not getting soundbites and vagueries -- we're hearing strategy, hearing thoughts and emotions being processed, hearing attitudes, hearing personalities!
- There is zero music: just the sounds of the racers, the crew, people talking, mechanics working, and cars driving. The artiface and the dramatics get out of the way, and let the work speak for itself!
I've enjoyed watching F1 Academy evolving as it goes along -- you can feel the real thinking going into it all, and I do respect that. Obviously, no organization like this is going to be without problems, but I do read a serious non-cynicism present, an earnest desire to make an entertaining racing league that also explicitly is attempting to serve a social purpose. And I think it comes out in media like this really nicely. Shoutouts to the (I assume relatively small) creative team that worked on this episode. I am looking forward to future episodes.