It’s the dark ages for every fan of Formula 1 after being exposed to the manipulative spotlight of Netflix’s Drive to Survive. With episodes twisting events into a misleading narrative, the audience is left with an unconscious bias regarding drivers like Lando Norris and Max Verstappen who locked horns for the championship title in 2024.
Despite their close relationship since the karting days, Norris and Verstappen were both bound to clash since there can only be one Formula 1 champion at the end of a year. However, despite the competitive spirit that kept the two rivals desperate to get ahead of each other, the McLaren and Red Bull drivers are also one of the best friends off the grid.
However, such a narrative hardly sells on television which demands constant drama and intense jealousy rooted in every episode.
Lando Norris calls out a fake arc in Drive to Survive
Drive to Survive has been a necessary evil in the world of Formula 1. Although the series elevated the niche sport’s popularity worldwide among fans almost overnight, the Netflix documentary has also been disruptive to the F1 community by spreading fake narratives to sell their onscreen drama.
While most drivers and team principals on the Formula 1 grid understand the need for Drive to Survive, Max Verstappen has been one of the most vocal haters of the series after the show twisted one of his quotes to sow discord among his closest F1 peers.
Now, Lando Norris has also joined the Dutch driver in calling out Drive to Survive for perpetuating a fake narrative (via The Guardian).
They need to show the truth about people more. I’m not a fan of fake stuff. I want facts, I don’t want made-up scripts and fabricated nonsense, which there is. The portrayal of Max and how we were against each other so much. They don’t need to create. There’s drama, they can just show the facts of the drama. They don’t need to do anything more than that. They need to come back to reality a bit more, it’s drifted too far away.
Lando Norris had been openly supportive of the Netflix series until recently. However, with Drive to Survive taking advantage of his on-track rivalry with Max Verstappen and manipulating it into a destructive narrative for the fans, even Norris has now recanted his support for the show expressing disappointment at the harm caused by the documentary’s selective editing.
Drive to Survive exploits Verstappen vs. Norris rivalry
As the four-time world champion, there is hardly any driver on the track who can even come close to touching Max Verstappen’s speed and skill behind the wheel – other than McLaren’s Lando Norris. The Papaya driver has not only secured his F1 career’s maiden win in 2024 at the Miami Grand Prix but also led McLaren to their first Constructors’ Championship win in 26 years.
However, Drive to Survive‘s focus on the drivers’ rivalry has blackened the series’s intention as it manipulated Norris’s Miami win by showing it in a montage of his rivalry with Max Verstappen spanning years, even going back to their karting days. The episode pushed the pair’s rivalry down the audience’s throat, leaving a bitter aftertaste with all the misleading accounts.
In the latest season’s Episode 2 titled Frenemies, Verstappen was shown as being deeply unhappy and sour after Norris’s Miami win, which in turn was depicted as a close cutthroat race between the McLaren and Red Bull drivers. In reality, both of those visuals were blatantly false, since the first footage of Verstappen’s reaction was borrowed from another race and the race was not at all a close call but won by a comfortable margin by Lando Norris.
Max Verstappen was also left deeply disturbed by the Netflix series’s need to sow false narratives in the audience’s minds simply for views and ratings. In reality, the Dutch driver was anything but unhappy at Norris’s Miami win and even celebrated the 26-year-old driver’s first victory later that evening.
Lando Norris later came to Verstappen’s defense by saying (The Guardian):
To portray someone in an incorrect way, people are going to have their opinions of that incorrect person, it’s almost lying in some ways. I just don’t think that’s correct. I don’t think you can paint someone in the wrong picture when it’s not the truth. I don’t think it’s fair for anyone in the world, especially as it has such a big following and so many people love it, people believe what they see.
However, Max Verstappen remains infamously quiet and persistent about his hatred for the Netflix series as he doesn’t bother to entertain the Netflix crew with comments and sit-down interviews anymore.
Drive to Survive Season 7 is currently streaming on Netflix.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
