Making of F1: How team of Brad Pitt's film turned real racing physics into breathtaking cinema

Brad Pitt hurtling down a Formula One track at 300 kmph, with Damson Idris battling for the lead by mere tenths of a second - the tension is palpable. Director Joseph Kosinski captured the rush perfectly in this year’s global blockbuster, F1: The Movie. Even for a viewer with little knowledge of the sport, the action is thrilling - and it leaves you wanting to learn more about Formula One, the machines, the tracks.

But the on-screen thrill is only a fraction of the madness on-track. “Almost-F1 cars" had to be engineered from scratch, actors trained on real circuits, and the sound team, thanks to some friendly sweet-talking, nearly ended up on the track to record the cars screaming through tricky turns.

Kosinski had to “change the way we make films” because the team adopted an immersive filmmaking approach that turned Formula One’s paddock into a live movie set for two years. “We’d get only a 10-minute window, sometimes just three minutes, so we had to be incredibly prepared. Our actors might only get one or two takes instead of the usual 10–15,” he said on the F1 Explains podcast.

The brief was simple: satisfy hardcore fans who demand realism (for which they had seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton on board) and newcomers who need to understand what they’re watching.

Before showing the film to real F1 drivers, Kosinski warned them, “Guys, we are in love with your sport, but this is Hollywood.” Because under all the speed and spectacle, F1: The Movie is also a story about second chances, teamwork, and friendship — which is what makes the film a warm, thrilling watch.

So, what were these “almost-F1 cars” and how were they engineered?

The makers didn’t start with a flimsy “movie car.” In fact, the idea came straight from Mercedes team CEO Toto Wolff. As Kosinski recalls, “He said, ‘Don’t start with a movie, but a real race car.’” That’s exactly what they did. The production company bought 12 Formula 2 cars (6 for driving, 6 for crashing) and, in partnership with Mercedes engineers, turned them into 'near-F1' machines capable of touching 200 miles an hour.

“We worked with Mercedes AMG, the Formula 1 team and their engineers to build real race cars that could carry our camera equipment, recorders and transmitters,” Kosinski said.

Enter Graham Kelly of GK Evolution, the motorsport engineer who has been making cars for the silver screen for 30 years, who, along with his team, helped turn this wild brief into metal. His idea for building the cars for F1: The Movie was straightforward: take a Mercedes Applied Science F1-style shell, bolt it onto a stretched Formula 2 chassis, and boom — you’ve got a near-F1 beast built for Hollywood.

But looks weren't enough. Kosinski wanted the cars to move like the real thing. So the first APXGP car got a proper Mecachrome Formula 2 engine. Meaning? An actual motorsport-level power, not movie magic. Once they cracked that, they kept going. Another F2-engined car. Two more with old-school GP3 V6s. And then Kelly thought: What if one of these things was electric?

“Quite a lot of the film was going to be shot in the pit lane,” he told Formulaone.com. “We can’t use a petrol engine in the pit lane. It would just explode! So we quickly put a whole electric 400-volt plan together… and truthfully, that car saved our lives — it kept us filming all the time.”

When Hollywood met motorsport reality

Here’s where things got tricky. Kelly explained that in a normal film, you can do 20 takes, push the car back to the start, do it again. But not with F1 cars. Race machines can’t sit around idling while a film crew debates angles. “When they’re running, they have to go,” Kelly stressed, adding, "They have to go, air has to go over the radiators and then they'll have to go and do a cool-down lap."

“You can’t just bring the cars in,” he kept warning the crew. “Otherwise, they’re going to be on fire when they come down the pit lane.”

For an enterprise used to retakes, this was absolute chaos, but in the end, as Kelly puts it, everything “came together beautifully.”

And yes, Brad Pitt really drove. The actors weren’t pretending behind the wheel. Their instructor? Seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, also a producer of the film. The Briton realised on day one that Pitt wasn’t faking it and called him a “very talented, naturally gifted driver.” So when you see Pitt wrestling to keep the car off the walls, that intensity is real.

What is Formula 2?

A feeder series to Formula 1 and the sport’s proving ground (FIA). Many F1 drivers hone their skills here before graduating to the main grid.

Camera, sound and the chaos

Building the cars was only half the battle. Then came the challenge of getting the cameras and microphones inside them. Kosinski wanted viewers to feel the speed, the roar, the tension - like they were in the cockpit with Pitt or Idris.

Formula 1 cars are tiny, noisy, and incredibly sensitive. Mounting cameras was a tricky task: too heavy, and the car’s balance would shift; too low-tech, and the footage wouldn’t survive. So, Kosinski referenced Grand Prix, the 1966 film directed by John Frankenheimer, still called the best example of motor racing films in cinema, for getting the sound right.

Supervising sound editor Al Nelson told AOL that production sound mixer Gareth John began by placing mics directly inside the Formula 2 cars Pitt and Idris were driving. They captured “great sounds,” Nelson said, but the team knew they would eventually have to replace them with real F1 audio.

Nelson explained on the Dolby Creator Talks podcast why. “When they are fast, they all sound the same. But when they are slower, you can tell a Red Bull from a Ferrari from Mercedes… they sound different from an F2 car. In the film, they used F2 cars for our actors, so they had to be ADRed. Lewis Hamilton reviewed the sound of the cars and told the sound designers where they were going wrong.”

Meanwhile, sound mixer Gareth John was doing whatever he could to get raw, “full-fat” audio. The microphone packs, he revealed, were held on with cable ties — placed “as near to the exhaust, with as much risk as you’re willing to take with your equipment.”

They tried air ducts, exhaust edges, anywhere they could squeeze in a mic without melting it.

Shooting at 300 kmph

Capturing the images was no less chaotic. Kosinski, fresh off Top Gun: Maverick, needed dynamic chase shots, which meant finding a camera car fast enough to keep up with their near-F1 machines. This is where it became difficult for Graham Kelly.

“It became very obvious that we didn't have a traditional camera car available to us that would keep up with these cars,” Kelly said. They eventually sourced an old Le Mans Prototype camera rig from America, “a horrendous thing,” he admitted. It was fast in a straight line but hopeless in corners. “Our cars would come out of the corners and disappear and [the camera car driver] would lose us on the straights so it was a whole world of pain.” The breaking point came in Hungary: “We blew it up… We lost all the oil pressure and then the pump fell apart, and at that point I said, ‘Send it away, I'm done now!’”

Despite all this chaos, the final soundscape still needed one more ingredient - authenticity. So the filmmakers roped in the real voices of Formula 1: commentators Martin Brundle and David Croft. Used sparingly, their commentary adds just enough adrenaline and familiarity for F1 fans, without overwhelming newcomers.

The result was a rare balance: you’re watching a Hollywood movie, but you hear the real sport - the rumble of engines, the commentators’ urgency, the drama of a Grand Prix weekend, folding seamlessly into the storytelling.

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