Grand Prix vs F1: The Movie – box office battle

When the teaser trailer for F1 dropped during the British Grand Prix in July 2024, it included footage filmed at Silverstone the previous year, with Hollywood A-lister Brad Pitt hustling his APX GP F1 car around the Northamptonshire circuit as veteran driver Sonny Hayes. But just as exciting for motorsport fans was the brief shot of Pitt and his co-star Damson Idris on the grid, standing next to Red Bull’s Max Verstappen during the national anthem, a remarkable blend of fact and fiction that pointed to the level of realism and authenticity that F1’s makers were striving for.

Directed by Top Gun: Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, whose long list of credits includes NASCAR-set Days of Thunder and automotive thriller Gone In 60 Seconds, F1 roared into cinemas at the end of June 2025 with a tsunami of marketing behind it. It marked the latest attempt by Hollywood to present the glitz, glamour and speed of motor racing on the big screen, be it action-dramas (Rush, Ford v Ferrari) documentaries (Senna) or whatever the hell Driven was, dating back to the granddaddy of motorsport movies, John Frankenheimer’s 1966 epic Grand Prix.

Rewatching Frankenheimer’s film in the wake of F1, the similarities between the two movies are plentiful, with Kosinski quick to acknowledge the influence of Grand Prix. At almost three hours, Grand Prix is a good 30 minutes longer, but its run time includes both an overture and an intermission, as well as lots of sappy relationship drama involving wives and girlfriends. F1 is leaner and more muscular, with wall-to-wall racing and only a modicum of romance. Both films are products of their eras, with F1 benefiting from Top Gun: Maverick’s technological innovations, and Grand Prix documenting an era when driving a Formula 1 car was more likely to lead to early death than TV punditry retirement.

“Both films contain intense action, horrific crashes, rivalries and cameos from real racers”

Both Frankenheimer and Kosinski shot at actual race weekends with their main cast driving modified race cars — Formula 3 in the case of Grand Prix, F2 for Pitt and Idris — and feature real racing footage spliced into the scripted drama. Both contain intense action, horrific crashes, driver rivalries and cameos from real racers and team personnel — Graham Hill, Juan Manuel Fangio, Bruce McLaren and others in Grand Prix; Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton, Zak Brown, Fred Vasseur in F1. Kosinski went one step further than Frankenheimer, however, by having Hayes and Pearce race for a fictional 11th team on the grid, APX GP, which even had its own garage — at Silverstone it was between Ferrari and Mercedes — motorhomes and hospitality, with the film crew dressed in APX gear.

Grand Prix was meant to star the ‘king of cool’, Steve McQueen, as the quick but reckless American Pete Aron, one of four drivers competing for the 1966 world title. But after a disastrous meeting with producer Eddie Lewis, McQueen walked, and attempted to set up his own F1 movie, going so far as to secure exclusive filming at the Nürburgring, meaning Frankenheimer couldn’t shoot there. In his place, Frankenheimer cast James Garner, McQueen’s neighbour, friend and co-star in The Great Escape. Ultimately, McQueen’s film didn’t materialise, but he later starred in and produced Le Mans, set against the backdrop of the 1970 24-hour race.

Pitt’s Sonny Hayes is more McQueen than Garner. A charismatic, laconic, racing rebel who crashed out of F1, quite literally, in the ’90s, Sonny is lured back by his former team-mate, played by Javier Bardem, who now owns APX and needs to win one race before the season’s out to retain control of the team. Like his character, Pitt exploded in the early ’90s with an eye-catching turn in Thelma & Louise, but unlike Sonny didn’t crash and burn, finding success in a whole range of movies. Pitt is also a successful producer, via his company Plan B, having produced Netflix’s recent hit Adolescence as well as F1. In 1966, Frankenheimer was coming off the back of a run of films — Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days In May, The Train and Seconds — that are now all considered classics. Grand Prix was his biggest production to date, with a budget of $10m. As a director, Frankenheimer had a reputation for being uncompromising and brusque and insisted on utter realism for Grand Prix, which meant no matte or process shots in which actors awkwardly pretend to drive in front of a projected backdrop. He wanted his cast to drive for real, so he could cut together scenes of them behind the wheel with real racing footage shot during real races.

Garner, a natural talent by all accounts, was dispatched to Willow Springs Raceway, California, to train with Bob Bondurant, winner of the GT class at Le Mans in 1964, before joining his co-stars Yves Montand and Antonio Sabàto Sr (as Ferrari team-mates Jean-Pierre Sarti and Nini Barlini), and Brian Bedford (as BRM driver Scott Stoddard) at the Jim Russell Racing Drivers School in Norfolk. Russell was also responsible for building the film’s cars, turning 16 F3 Lotus 1.5s into three BRMs, three Ferraris, two AARs, two Brabhams, two Lotus, three Japanese Yamuras and one Maserati.

Likewise, Kosinski, who shot his Top Gun cast flying in fighter jets, wanted his two leads to drive their cars for real. Pitt and Idris underwent four months of driver training with Luciano Bacheta, who raced in F2, and Craig Dolby, a former Superleague Formula driver. (The pair also doubled for Pitt and Idris during filming.) As with Garner, Pitt took to the track like a duck to water, impressing not only Bacheta and Dolby, but drivers on the grid, especially Hamilton. “If you see Brad’s face, then it’s him driving, and often at speeds up to 180mph,” says Kosinski. “When they went into those turns, the G-forces were insane.”

Kosinski had spent years trying to make a film about racing, coming close a couple of times, including an adaptation of AJ Baime’s book Go Like Hell, which had Pitt and Tom Cruise attached but would eventually become Ford v Ferrari. But as Kosinski devoured the first series of Drive to Survive, an idea started to percolate for an F1 film, and so he reached out to Lewis Hamilton to see if he would be interested in helping him make the most authentic and realistic F1 movie since, well, Grand Prix. Hamilton said yes, joining the film as a producer and introducing Kosinski to Toto Wolff, CEO of the Mercedes F1 team, for whom he was then driving. Wolff, in turn, made the introduction to F1 Group boss Stefano Domenicali to get his buy in, before the filmmakers and F1 embarked on a year of meetings to get the teams and drivers on side.

When Frankenheimer began on Grand Prix, he was greeted with the scepticism and disapproval of several teams who found the presence of a film crew in the pit lane, grabbing shots of drivers coming in for petrol or a wheel change, an inconvenience at best. Moreover, Frankenheimer started filming without the co-operation of Enzo Ferrari, who refused to allow even a mention of his team in the movie. And so, Frankenheimer cut together 30 minutes of footage he’d shot at the Monaco Grand Prix and flew to Maranello to show it to Enzo. As the lights came up, Frankenheimer recalled, Enzo embraced him warmly and agreed to Ferrari’s involvement, even opening the doors to his factory to the filmmakers. To capture the dizzying speed of F1, Frankenheimer and his Oscar-winning cinematographer Lionel Lindon, himself a former racer, pioneered a revolutionary new rig to mount a large format Super 65mm Panavision camera, among others, to the front and side of cars using tubular, aluminium struts. This allowed them to shoot angles of the moving cars and their drivers that would later be replicated by F1 broadcasters.

“It was an earn as you learn production,” Frankenheimer recalled later. “We just tried it and if it worked, we kept it.” The production had as many as 20 cameras shooting each race as well as low-flying helicopters for aerial shots and several camera cars to film the on-track action. These included a modified Ford GT40 and AC Cobra, driven by Le Mans legend Carroll Shelby and 1961 F1 world champion Phil Hill. Another GT40 served as a kind of sled, pulling the actors’ vehicles along for shots. The idea, said Frankenheimer, was to put the audience in the car.

It worked. So much so that Kosinski and his own Oscar-winning cinematographer, Claudio Miranda, did the same thing on F1, mounting tiny digital cameras onto cars and building on the technology they’d developed for Top Gun where they’d put up to six cameras inside the cockpits of fighter jets. On F1, they were able to attach up to four Sony digital cameras onto each APX GP car at a given time — any more would affect the aerodynamics — with a similar number mounted to two camera cars, also on track as they filmed during race weekends, keeping the angles tight and the action frenetic, aided by immersive sound design and a thunderous score.

Grand Prix presented a fictionalised version of the 1966 season, with Frankenheimer shooting at five races, beginning with Monaco and taking in Spa-Francorchamps, Zandvoort, Brands Hatch — complete with marching band — and Monza, and incorporating racing reality into his film. Not that he was averse to Hollywood hokum. The Mexican, US and German Grand Prix are all alluded to rather than shown, while the French Grand Prix held at Reims was instead staged at Clermont-Ferrand with hundreds of extras for the crowd scenes.

Each race was designed by Frankenheimer to be different, so cinema audiences wouldn’t get bored. Monaco is loud and aggressive, Zandvoort is zippy with plenty of POV car shots, while Monza, with its bumpy banking, proves brutal on vehicles and drivers. The film frequently relies on split-screen montages, courtesy of visual consultant Saul Bass, to spice things up, a stylistic nod Kosinski doffs his hat to in F1 by showing Pitt and Idris, in closeup, side-by-side on the start-line.

By contrast, Kosinski filmed at nine different grands prix — the British (twice), Hungarian (twice), Belgian, Dutch, Italian, Mexican, Japanese, Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi — shooting his actors on track, in the pit lane and paddock, soaking up as much production value as possible by being there with the real teams. He began filming in July 2023 at Silverstone, with Pitt and Idris in the paddock, on track and on the grid, as well as part of the formation lap. But then Kosinski had to pause production the following week, due to the Hollywood actors’ strike which sidelined his cast, and lasted until November.

Filming restarted in January 2024 at the Daytona 24 Hours, another high-octane sequence which introduces Hayes as unafraid to push against the rules, before returning to the F1 paddock. Kosinski also used Brands Hatch to double for Jerez — for a flashback involving Hayes, based on Martin Donnelly’s horrific, career-ending crash at the Spanish Grand Prix — and for Monza, for when rain spells trouble for Idris’s character, Pearce.

Frankenheimer’s film concludes at Monza with a four-way battle for the title between Aron, Sarti, Stoddard and Barlini on the legendary banking, although that section of track hadn’t been used since the 1961 Italian Grand Prix when the Ferrari of Wolfgang von Trips tangled with Jim Clark’s Lotus on lap two. The subsequent accident killed von Trips as well as 14 spectators, handing the title to von Trips’ team-mate Phil Hill. Kosinski pays homage to Grand Prix by having Pitt run the banking as part of his pre-race ritual.

“The action is propulsive. Seen and heard in IMAX, it’s utterly visceral”

F1 climaxes in the desert in Abu Dhabi, with neither APX driver fighting for the title, but with the team needing a victory. There are the requisite thrills and spills and even a red flag, with the real drivers spraying champagne. While Grand Prix relied on practical stunts, F1 uses both real cars and stunt drivers, together with the latest visual effects technology, taking broadcast footage and digitally ‘reskinning’ existing F1 cars, in much the same way that Kosinski reskinned planes in Top Gun: Maverick, so it appears that the APX cars driven by Pitt and Idris are battling Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari. The effects are seamless. The action propulsive. Seen and heard in IMAX it’s utterly visceral.

Death and danger loom large in Grand Prix, for spectators and drivers alike. This was a time — without seat belts, full-face helmets or the halo — when drivers died at an alarming rate. In fact, almost half the drivers who appeared in Grand Prix were dead before the decade was out, including Graham Hill, Jochen Rindt and Jim Clark, while Lorenzo Bandini was killed at Monaco in 1967, in an accident eerily like one that opens the film.

As well as being less safe, the world of Grand Prix was less commercially minded and more European based — despite the first US Grand Prix taking place in 1959 — which is why Frankenheimer kept the action, on and off track, confined to Europe. (A stamped passport and a hotel room is the most we see of the US.) The signage at circuits is nearly all car-related — Castrol, Agip, Champion, Goodyear — compared to today, with prestigious watch brands, tech companies, fashion houses and luxury cruises the norm.

Formula 1 in 2025 is truly international, with 24 races in 21 countries, the increased popularity of the sport sparked by Netflix’s hugely successful Drive to Survive, which has finally helped F1 ‘break’ America. There are currently three US races on the calendar — Miami, Las Vegas and the Circuit of the Americas in Austin — and more planned, while drivers such as Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen, Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris are global superstars, with lucrative sponsorships deals and annual salaries in the tens of millions.

Grand Prix opened in cinemas in December 1966, a mere nine months after Frankenheimer began filming. Races at the time were rarely shown live on television, and if they were, they were in black-and-white. Not only was Grand Prix filmed in colour, it was released in Cinerama, which required three synchronised 35mm projectors, each projecting one third of the image onto a huge, curved screen, making grand prix racing available to the masses, and on an enormous scale. Despite sniffy reviews, the film was a roaring success with race fans and cinemagoers alike, earning twice its budget back at the box office, and going on to win three Oscars for technical achievement: best sound effects, editing and sound.

“Apple Original Films is said to be exploring a sequel”

At the time of writing, the F1 movie has an 83 percent approval rating on the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes and an ‘A’ grade from audiences on CinemaScore. While some reviewers have criticised it for paper-thin characters and a hackneyed plot, Kosinski’s racing sequences have earned universal acclaim, especially when presented in IMAX. So much so, that Apple Original Films, which financed F1 to the tune of $200m, is said to be exploring the possibility of a sequel. Fingers crossed.

Mark Salisbury is a film journalist and former editor of Empire magazine.

Grand Prix      F1: The movie

$10m ($100m in today’s money) Budget $200m
May- Oct 1966 Filming May 2023 – Dec 2024
176 mins Running time 145 mins
Dec 1966 Release date June 2025
$20.8m Box office $146m (opening weekend)

Watch Grand Prix with David Brabham

Motor Sport have teamed up with Footman James and Scalextric to bring you the inaugural Motor Sport Cinema Club with special VIP Guest David Brabham, hosted by Alex Brundle.

Join us on Wednesday, November 5, 2025, for an exclusive cinema screening of the ultimate Formula 1 racing film: Grand Prix at London’s Curzon cinema in Mayfair.

For more details and to book visit motorsportmagazine/cinemaclub.