Is the ‘F1’ Movie Based on a True Story?

The F1 movie is now available to buy and rent on digital platforms, and audiences have been racing to watch this popular 2025 sports drama at home.

Directed by Joseph Kosinski (who is best known for his record-breaking flick Top Gun: Maverick), with a screenplay written by Ehren Kruger, F1: The Movie stars Brad Pitt as a former Formula One race car driver named Sonny, whose career was cut short by injury. These days, Sonny makes a living gambling and driving cabs in New York City. When an old friend (Javier Bardem) calls up Sonny to get him out of retirement, Sonny gets a second chance at the sport he loves. But he’ll have to deal with the young, arrogant driver named Noah (Damson Idris) as his rival.

Fans of F1 will see a lot of familiar faces in this movie, including cameos from real-life drivers like Lewis Hamilton (an executive producer and consultant on the film), Max Verstappen, Lando Norris, Esteban Ocon, Valtteri Bottas, and more. The F1 film definitely strove to be an accurate representation of the sport, but is the F1 movie based on a true story?

Is the F1 movie based on a true story?

The F1 movie is not based on a true story, in the sense that the main characters in the movie, Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) and Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) are not real people. They are made-up, fictional characters. That said, Pitt has said that his character’s backstory was inspired by real-life former F1 driver Martin Donnelly.

Like Hayes, the real-life Donnelly, a British racer, suffered from a near-fatal crash at the height of his career in 1990, which forced him to leave Formula One. In 2015, at the age of 51, Donnelly returned to professional racing, but did not return to F1 racing, as Pitt’s character does in the film.

In a recent BBC interview, Donnelly recalled receiving a cold call from F1 driver Lewis Hamilton, who is a producer and consultant on the movie. Hamilton asked Donnelly if director Jospeh Kosinski could use footage from Donnelly’s crash in the movie, as well as use his crash as the backstory for Pitt’s character. (Reportedly, the filmmaker also considered using Gerhard Berger’s 1989 crash, but the liked the footage from Donnelly’s crash more.)

Pitt also incorporated some of Donnelly’s real-life mannerisms into his character.

“[Pitt] was asking me to direct him around the garage,” Donnelly told the BBC. “I had a superstition of getting in at the left hand side and putting my left leg in first, and he does exactly the same thing in the movie.”

That said, the real Donnelly never returned to F1, as Pitt’s character does in the movie. The movie is sort of like Martin Donnelly fan fiction, if you will, imagining a more glamorous end to Donnelly’s story.

“”If only it was that easy,” Donnelly told the BBC. According to the BBC profile, Donnelly competes in the national racing on occasion and runs his own Martin Donnelly Academy in Norfolk. He was also a drivers’ steward for Formula 1. “I have three great kids and I’m still involved in motorsport. Life goes on.”

Beyond that, much of the racing action in the F1 movie was filmed during the actual Grand Prix weekends throughout the 2023 and 2024 F1 seasons. The F1 organization allowed Pitt and other actors to get behind the wheel to film, even though they were not actually participating in the race.

In an interview with F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast, Pitt said, “They let us in, they opened the gates for us. We couldn’t have done it without F1. We couldn’t have done it without the teams and the Team Principals and Lewis [Hamilton], who’s informed so much of our script and really opened the doors for us. We shot in the sim at Mercedes. We shot at Williams. McLaren is our headquarters. Everyone opened the doors for us and in such an amazing way.”

So even though the F1 movie itself is not telling a true story, some of the races you see on screen is real footage from the 2023 and 2024 F1 seasons.