F1 (2025) Review: The Good, the Bad, and the Slightly Undercooked

Real racing, but missing gears.

When you’re an F1 fan walking into a movie about your sport, you’re bracing for the worst. And for a while, it looked like we were in for it. That trailer line—“We need a car built for combat”—paired with Kerry Condon’s “That’s not safe,” had a lot of fans panicking. F1 spends a lot of its time being safe, while speed in the corners is the design brief for any engineer. More on this later.

But to the film’s credit—and probably Lewis Hamilton’s relentless obsession with authenticity—it didn’t fall off the rails. Hamilton, who co-produced the film, reportedly got involved in everything from gear shifts to pit-wall banter to barrier reverb acoustics. And you could feel it.

From Sonny Hayes using warm-up lap tyre temps to climb the grid, to race strategies built around tyre degradation and weather changes, the racing was solid. This wasn’t a “downshift and slam the throttle” kind of film. This was a “warm your tyres, play the rulebook, and work as a team” kind of film. Although slightly fantastical, many of these tactics were extrapolated from real life, keeping fans happy.

Cast & Characters: Some winners, some stalled on the grid

Let’s start with the MVP: Kerry Condon as Kate McKenna, the engineer. Every time she was on screen, she owned it—even with a slightly silly mission (“transform the car for combat,” whatever that means). The character might not have had technical exposition to sell the engineering upgrades, but Condon did the heavy lifting.

Kim Bodnia as Klaus, the team principal, was another highlight—gruff but warm, believable.

Javier Bardem (team owner Ruben Cervantes) was fine and seemed to be having a good time.

Tobias Menzies (Peter Banning, the boardroom villain) played his role with a mix of clueless wealth and hidden ambition, but the script let him down. His motivation—to sabotage the team just so he can buy it—seemed very weak to me and resulted in a weak scene that would bring Brad Pitt back into the team to “do combat” one last time.

Then we get to Brad Pitt (Sonny Hayes) and Damson Idris (Joshua Pearce)—the Top Gun duo. The problem? Neither character had a superpower.

In Top Gun, Maverick had an edge from minute one. The cobra manoeuvre, “Hit the brakes and he’ll fly right by.” Boom. Case closed. With Sonny, we’re told he’s a racing god, but never really shown it in a consistent way. He definitely dabbles in strategy, which I guess is tied to his card-playing gambling background, but this seems like a weak hand in the film.
JP? No clarity on his raw talent. Fast? Sure. But how? One-lap magic? Wet weather king? Tyre whisperer? We never find out. They crash into each other. A lot. Often Brad’s fault. The chemistry? Meh. Acting? More F2 than F1..

Plot & Stakes: Where it loses pole

So let’s recap. Brad Pitt comes out of retirement to be a safe pair of hands and develop the car. What does he actually do? He starts by causing turbulence in the team and crashing into JP—a lot. He then contributes to a brief to make the car ready for combat, which isn’t explained especially well, but puts the team in more contention for midfield finishes.

Meanwhile JP’s big character moment—burned hands from a fireball crash—goes nowhere. There is a perfect opportunity to see burn scars on his hands while playing poker. But the film never handles this, missing the chance to show the jeopardy of F1 in the most tangible way. So, no scars. No recovery arc. He just... crashes again. Into Lewis Hamilton with the line “Remember me.” (From when?) And somehow still seems excited and proud when he doesn’t finish many races and never gets on the podium. What exactly did JP learn in this film? “Never leave your wingman?” Nope.

The central “villain” arc (Tobias Menzies tipping off the FIA to get the car banned) didn’t hit hard enough. It might have worked better if the sabotage came from another team. As it is, the stakes never feel personal. Never visceral. We needed more Menzies, or less. The amount of him we get just puts the film in dirty air.

And here’s the miss: Sonny Hayes’s fear of injury. The film hints at it—pins in the neck, past trauma—but only at the end. We never see Sonny hiding it, working around it, or the fact that it has compromised his bravery in any way. Surely F1 would be a bigger strain on the body than his previous racing endeavours since the accident. Would that not scare him? The extra G-forces in cornering on his already weakened neck?

Imagine if Sonny’s superpower used to be late braking, and he lost it post-crash. Imagine him getting it back. Imagine that moment. Even in other films like Rocky, as he gets older, we see his tactics change. This never really happens in F1, and it’s worse for it.

Visuals: Real racing, beautiful shots... and one weirdly huge Perez

The movie looked great. The shots of the crowd, the paddock, the cutaways to real drivers—it nailed the spectacle. Watching real-life F1 figures like Alonso, Leclerc, and Verstappen drop in (Alonso even back-pats Pitt) added that perfect documentary-fiction blend. But two weird things:

• Perez’s car looked enormous in an early scene
• The Apex car (a rebadged F2) looked small—because it was small. You could kind of tell.

That said, the racing scenes were the highlight and were never dull. There’s even some 360 footage that you can create for yourself when karting with the GoPro Max.

Top Gun parallels: Close, but no anthem

Let’s talk about the Top Gun of it all—because you can’t watch this movie without feeling the vapour trail of Maverick. The parallels aren’t accidental. Director Joseph Kosinski was at the helm of both films. And Lewis Hamilton, who produced F1, was originally asked to appear in Top Gun: Maverick before F1 commitments got in the way. So what we’re left with is this spiritual handshake between two cinematic universes: fighter jets and Formula One cars, both fast, loud, dangerous, and operated by adrenaline junkies who are either chasing ghosts or running from their own.

There’s even a line where Brad Pitt’s Sonny Hayes is trying to hold off Max Verstappen in the closing laps and mutters:

“Damn, this guy’s good.”

Which is basically a beat-for-beat echo of Viper watching Maverick dance with death mid-dogfight. That moment knew exactly what it was doing—and it worked. A nice wink for those paying attention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fC976fuQm4E&t=79s

What the movie doesn’t quite capture is Maverick’s defining trait: that paradoxical combo of being flawed and still the best. In Top Gun, you get proof early. Cobra manoeuvre—instant credibility. You know he’s got a gift.

With Sonny and JP in F1, you’re told they’re great, but not really shown why. You could argue it happens in the opening scene, but consider this: what if, in the opening scene, Brad was forcing the car in front to use too much of his tyres and forced him into a mistake, and what if that had been communicated over the team radio? Result: Brad = strategic genius.

For me, there's no singular scene that cements their talent in a believable way. No “holy sh*t” moment that makes you believe. That hurts the emotional payoff down the line.

Also missing: an anthem. Maverick had that soaring, dangerous, goosebump-inducing anthem. Hell, even Indiana Jones and James Bond had signature musical cues that told your brain, “This is the moment.” F1 didn’t have that. It had some good Hans Zimmer atmosphere, but no big, rousing, victory-laced musical payoff.

When Sonny “flies” on the final lap, it looks great. It even harks back to a shaky Las Vegas balcony monologue about flying. But there’s no musical touchdown. No theme that burns itself into your soul and stays with you on the ride home.

Would that have saved the film? Maybe not. But would it have elevated it in key moments?

Absolutely.

And if we’re really going full Top Gun, this movie missed one more thing: stakes that matter. In Maverick, you’ve got aging, relevance, grief, guilt, a ticking clock, a near-impossible mission. In F1, the stakes are… keeping a fictional team in the sport? Maybe Sonny’s redemption? It’s a little underdeveloped for me.

It’s not like JP learns to manage his tyres like Cole Trickle learns to do in Days of Thunder—remember the Tom Cruise pit wall crew, “He’s not going faster. Everyone else is going slower…”

So yes, F1 wanted to be Top Gun with cars. And in some moments, it got close. But in terms of character clarity, emotional payoff, and full-throttle soundtracking? It never quite broke the sound barrier.

The final lap: A strong finish

Around the two-thirds mark, when we hit that balcony scene—Kerry Condon doing her absolute best with a charming twinkle while Brad Pitt delivers possibly the worst-acted monologue of his career (and that’s saying something)—I was genuinely thinking, “Damn, this film might actually be bad.”

But to its credit—the film brought it home in style.

The season closer in Abu Dhabi is where F1 finds its groove again and the movie suddenly remembers what it’s about. There’s a red flag—that effectively re-starts the final race with three laps to go. (Not unlike the now-infamous 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, where a late-lap safety car and a one-lap shootout decided the world championship between Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton in what might be the most controversial finale in modern F1 history.)

In both cases, there’s chaos. There’s rule interpretation. And then there’s raw, unpredictable drama compressed into a handful of laps. In F1 the movie, the Apex car is damaged, but the red flag allows for a full repair—echoing the real-world uproar where some cars were unlapped, others weren’t, and suddenly everything was on.

The tension is high, with most of the sequence running in real time. There’s a cringe callback to Sonny Hayes finding his flow on the final lap, talking about “flying,” which luckily is saved by the audio-visual experience of the film.

It’s corny. You smile. You’re back on board.

To close, we’ve lost Kerry Condon and we’re with Brad again tearing across the desert in a Baja buggy. This did give the film closure, but do you know what would’ve been better? A post-credits scene at Silverstone. Brad Pitt in a Mercedes. Lewis Hamilton coaching him, trading lap times, laughing between gear changes. Real-life F1 royalty passing the baton to Hollywood’s version.

That would’ve been the Easter egg of all Easter eggs.

But even without it, the final sequence feels earned—with the door open for F1: JP sequel if they feel like it.

Verdict: 6/10, with DRS open

✅ Racing realism
✅ Kerry Condon as the MVP
✅ Visual spectacle
❌ Thin character arcs
❌ Weak stakes
❌ No anthem

This isn’t Top Gun. But it respects F1—and sometimes, that’s enough to take the chequered flag for the fans.