Netflix confirmed the ninth season of "Formula 1: Drive to Survive"

Netflix confirmed the continuation of one of its most successful sports productions. Formula 1: Drive to Survive will have a ninth season, which will arrive on the platform in 2027 and will closely follow everything that happens during the 2026 championship of the category.

The new installment will once again showcase the behind-the-scenes of the Max, focusing on the main drivers, the decisions of the teams, and the situations that develop inside and outside the circuits throughout the current season. It is worth noting that this ninth edition will take place during a particularly important season for the category, marked by a new generation of single-seaters and numerous regulatory changes.

"We are very excited to shoot the ninth season of this iconic program. This year we will delve deeper than ever into the intricacies of this fantastic sport", expressed James Gay-Rees and Paul Martin, executive producers of Box to Box, the company responsible for producing the series.

Since its premiere in 2019, the production has become one of the main audiovisual phenomena related to motorsport and has had a significant impact on the media expansion of Formula 1, especially in the United States.

The success of the series has been accompanied, however, by some criticism regarding its way of presenting certain events. The editing sometimes prioritizes drama and rivalries to build a narrative closer to entertainment, something that has generated questions among some fans of the category.

Still, those responsible for Drive to Survive highlight the sustained growth of the production. "We all know the statistics about the demographic shift towards a younger audience, and it is difficult for anyone, for any large organization, to hold firm given the number of options available to the consumer. Attracting such a large new audience to a sport -something that, obviously, it deserved, it just needed someone to open the doors- is tremendously satisfying", noted Gay-Rees.

Although an exact premiere date has not yet been announced, the new season will arrive sometime in 2027. Formula 1 fans have already begun to speculate about which chapters will be the most notable and which episodes will be marked as the great moments of the campaign.

Colapinto's appearances in the series

Although he never really held a leading role, Franco Colapinto was part of the last two seasons of Drive to Survive. His presence in the seventh season, corresponding to the 2024 championship when he was still with Williams, was practically testimonial and generated discomfort among Argentine fans. The Argentine appeared for less than ten seconds in a single scene and was shown from behind while talking to a journalist about a race, without even being able to see his face.

Colapinto himself later questioned the little space he had in the final cut. In the podcast Nude Project, the Argentine stated that the production had filmed him for a long time, but that practically all that material was left out of the final version.

The situation was very different in the eighth season, which covers what happened in the 2025 championship. There, the Alpine driver took on a much more relevant and sustained role within the team's story. His appearance even occurs from the first episode, when he reacts alongside Flavio Briatore to the serious accident of Jack Doohan during the Australian Grand Prix.

The series uses Colapinto's figure to show part of the internal tension that Alpine was going through at that time, especially around the situation of Jack Doohan and the movements within the team. Additionally, various moments of the Argentine's life outside the circuits appear.

One of the aspects that caught the most attention was precisely his relationship with the Netflix cameras. Colapinto appears with his usual ironic tone and, in various scenes, he asks the cameramen to stop following him, a dynamic that ended up becoming another element of his participation in the series.