Almost a year after its summer release, the Apple-backed F1 movie is still rewriting the sport's relationship with mainstream Hollywood — and Sky Sports F1's lead commentator David Croft is in no mood to undersell what it's done.
Speaking on Sky Sports F1, Croft reflected on the film's run through awards season and its impact on the sport's fan base, after the production picked up both an Oscar and a BAFTA in the same season — joining its commercial milestone as the biggest sports film ever released.
"I think it is amazing for Formula 1 that not only was a movie made that became the highest-grossing sports movie of all time, but has picked up a BAFTA and an Oscar as well," Croft said. "This has done so much good for the sport that we love, has introduced us to new audiences, and has potentially given us a sequel as well."
The statuettes were collected in the technical categories, with the film's sound design winning the Oscar — a category in which the on-track audio drew heavily from real Formula 1 broadcast assets. Croft's own Sky commentary, alongside Martin Brundle's, was layered into the film's racing scenes, meaning both men can technically claim a small share of the Academy's recognition for the picture's audio.
For Formula 1's commercial team, the run of awards is a useful capstone to a 12-month stretch in which 'Drive to Survive' fatigue had begun to surface as a real concern. The movie did what the Netflix series, by its tenth season, had stopped doing reliably — broadening the audience again, particularly in markets like the US, Brazil and India, where the film's theatrical performance outstripped industry forecasts.
Croft's reference to a sequel is the headline line. Apple has not formally confirmed a follow-up, but the production economics — a $1.4 billion-plus global box office and now an awards-season halo — make a continuation difficult to refuse. Sources inside the sport have, for months, hinted that pre-development work is already underway, with the storyline expected to lean into a championship-fight arc rather than the underdog comeback the original used as its spine.
For F1 itself, the cultural footprint matters as much as the awards. The original film opened the sport to a viewer who didn't know what a Q3 lap looked like and ended up booking grandstand tickets. Croft, who has called Grands Prix for two decades, knows the difference between fans who arrive through highlights and fans who arrive through cinema.
"It has introduced us to new audiences," he said.
It's a quietly important sentence inside Liberty Media's offices, where the next round of broadcast and ticketing negotiations will lean on exactly that audience growth. The Oscar and BAFTA do not, on their own, sell race tickets. But they extend the story Liberty has been telling broadcasters since the Drive to Survive era — that Formula 1 is no longer just a sport, it's a piece of mainstream entertainment infrastructure.
With the awards now collected, the sport's attention turns to whether the sequel materialises in time to ride the 2026 regulation reset, the new Cadillac entry, and what is rapidly becoming Formula 1's deepest driver bench in a generation. If it does, Croft and Brundle's voices may yet end up on another Oscar reel.
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