To make ‘F1: The Movie' real, Brad Pitt had to learn to race

New York Times

23-06-2025

Craig Dolby watched in his mirrors as actor Damson Idris spun, navigating the triple righthander at Circuit of the Americas. The feeling of 'No, no, no, no' sank in.
The two had been practising in Austin for 'F1: The Movie,' and Dolby, a stunt driver and the additional sequence choreographer, was leading the way around the circuit. Confidence was increasing, and Idris reduced the gap. 'I thought, 'I know what you're going to try and do',' Dolby tells The Athletic. 'He came through there and he tried to close in. But as he closed in, he got in my wash and lost the grip.'
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Idris nailed a 360-degree spin safely. But it goes to show the levels to which Idris and co-star Brad Pitt pushed in the cockpit of the Formula Two cars used for filming the latest Joseph Kosinski and Jerry Bruckheimer production.
While reviews across the motorsport and entertainment industries weigh the authenticity of different scenes, the filming of the racing moments wasn't just a product of solid acting from Pitt or Idris. They weren't being towed on rigs or driving at half-speed. They pushed the limits in real cars, and their body language and reactions became a natural outcome of moving at up to 200 mph.
It was months, and years, in the making.
'I think a lot of people won't believe that they got in the cars and did what they did,' Dolby says. 'But when you're on track with them and doing what we did with them, it's mind-blowing.'
Professional racing drivers typically start their careers in go-karts, usually at around the age of six, and build from there over the years. They learn the physical training needed to navigate higher speeds and grow their skill sets. Pitt, 61, and Idris, 33, only had a few months to get up to speed as the movie's production developed. Both had different starting points, but they had the help of former racers turned stunt drivers in Colby and Luciano Bacheta.
Bacheta, the 2012 F2 champion (a series unrelated to the current F1 support category) and lead sequence choreographer, worked closely with Pitt. He described the motorcycle-loving actor as 'a bit of an adrenaline junkie'. In his spare time, Pitt will go driving through mountains, and 'because of that, he had a fairly high understanding, but not necessarily a high experience, of track driving.'
Idris, though, needed more work, as he was 'a blank canvas, which was nice, because there were no habits to have to iron out,' Bacheta said. Idris wasn't into bikes like Pitt, but he at least had played the F1 video game. His training began earlier than Pitt's, given the differing starting points, and Dolby said they built up over a four-month period. In those early days, Idris would stall the car, but once he was moving, he began quickly picking it up.
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Both Pitt and Idris started their movie training in sports cars before progressing to open-wheel versions, then making their way to Formula Three and F2 challengers.
'When you first start, you're making big jumps — gaining seconds. And as the months go by, you're fighting for quarters of seconds,' Pitt said in the movie's media notes. 'The first month is just learning to trust the car — that it will stick to the ground, will stop, even when you're heading for a wall. The more you put into it, the better it sticks, the faster you can whip around a corner, even as every instinct in your body is screaming, 'No! No! No! No! No! It's gonna give way, it's gonna give way, it's gonna give way!'.'
But how Bacheta and Dolby approached the training differed for each actor, as Idris enjoyed simulator time while Pitt 'less so', according to Bacheta.
'When they came to (driving on) track, we'd usually allocate simulator time to get used to the track, let them learn the layout, and Damson would do that,' he says. 'But with Brad, we'd just kind of go out in a road car and physically show it and talk about it. And that was the best way to work with him on that, because you see it, you get the lay of the land. You're physically on it. You see the curbs, you talk about them. And to be fair, that's how I kind of like working as well. I'm much more practical.'
One of the habits Pitt needed to learn was when best to deploy hard braking. He did have a session with seven-time Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton before working with Bacheta, who thinks 'Lewis had told him that you hit the brake as hard as you can, which is the case sometimes in F1, but not always,' Bacheta says. 'So the first time we went out on track, I had Brad in my mirrors, and every time he hit the brakes, the wheels were locked up. He was absolutely killing them.'
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Similarly, Idris had to work on pressing 'the brake pedals correctly' and 'using the aerodynamics' on the car to stay on track. This meant building trust 'that the faster you go through a corner, the more downforce you get and the more grip you get, so the more comfortable it will then feel,' Dolby says.
And Idris would ask questions, such as how to improve clutch use. The actor is right-handed and would use that hand to operate the clutch, believing that would be easier than using his left (though Dolby advised doing it that way). One day, Idris tried it because he had to and told Dolby afterwards, 'That was so easy.'
Idris and Pitt spent around six weeks driving F3 cars before progressing to F2, which is the type of car that was modified to look like an F1 challenger in the movie. Dolby and Bacheta would lead the actors when driving on the track, and they'd have an open mic radio system between the cars, where the actors wouldn't have to press a button like the real F1 stars do to communicate with their teams during track sessions.
They'd talk through braking points, apexes and the gears. It was about getting the actors into a comfortable rhythm, before Bacheta and Dolby began speaking less — to prompt Pitt and Idris to think through the lap. If there was ever a radio failure, they couldn't have the actors relying on the instructors to prompt them on what to do.
They then progressed to driving wheel-to-wheel, even through corners. Bacheta would ask Pitt to outbrake him, which the actor 'got really competitive with at times, which was scary, and we'd start to just have a sort of a dummy race, if you like, where sometimes I'd say to him, 'You're going to stay ahead of me. I'm going to be behind, and you can't let me pass.'
''I'm not going to talk. You just have to look for me in your mirrors',' Bacheta says. ''I'm going to pop up. I'm going to dive down inside of your corners. I want you to defend as if there's no rules. As in, if you want to push me on the grass, push me on the grass.' It was on me to not hit him.'
Pitt wasn't the only adventurous one. Dolby recalled 'when Idris found the race map in the engine', which ups its output. When they were exiting a corner and Dolby was following the actor, Idris took off, leaving Dolby to switch to their faster map to catch up.
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'They were both eager. They wanted to have some fun and we did let them,' Dolby says. 'When we could, and when it was safe to do so, we opened the cars up and really let them experience what they could do.'
But driving these cars is more than just shifting gears and nailing braking points. Pitt and Idris needed to find their limits, and, if they exceeded them, needed to learn how to recover. Dolby says, 'If something did go wrong, it wasn't like we just had a safety cushion. They're on their own once they put that helmet on and they're strapped in.'
While there were spins and lock-ups, nothing big went wrong for Idris and Pitt. Dolby, on the other hand, experienced an unintentional high-speed crash, one so significant that it was ultimately used in the film. The stunt driver involved is alright now, though he did injure a hand and was sidelined for three weeks (but didn't miss any subsequent driving/filming).
Pitt and Idris improved as drivers as filming continued. The whole process took two years, with production halted during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. For Pitt, his speed and confidence stood out. Bacheta felt the actor had the pace in the first year of filming, but with crowds present and the pressure of filming on real-life F1 weekends, they did hold back so there wasn't a spin or a crash in front of fans. But come year two, Pitt seemingly had no fear or pressure when performing in front of others.
For Idris, it came down to the car's aerodynamics. Dolby remembered when they were testing F3 cars at Silverstone in the UK and how the actor obeyed natural human instinct and would brake at what would've been a full-throttle corner for real racers. But over time, he began trusting the car more and taking Copse, one of the fastest turns at Silverstone, flat out. F2 and F3 cars have plenty of grip, but Dolby says it's still 'very difficult to do that'. He adds: 'I've seen racing drivers in the past not get the hang of that kind of thing.
'So for him to be able to, in the time we had him, that really impressed me. And also just being able to be consistent every lap, so we can get closer and play to the cameras more. Because effectively, when Brad was driving, Luci was playing Damson, and when Damson was driving, I was playing Brad.'
One of the big goals of 'F1: The Movie' was trying to create an authentic racing film. While there were storyboards with choreographed sequences and both Idris and Pitt needed to also act with their eyes when driving and learn their lines, both needed to take a professional approach to their racing training. According to Dolby, while they were at Silverstone, they were already practising for the next track filming location (in that case, Hungary) on the simulator.
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Both Bacheta and Dolby have done stunt-driving in major movies before. Both worked on three different 'Mission: Impossible' films, for instance. Dolby was a stunt driver for 'Ferrari' and 'Gran Turismo,' and felt those experiences compared to filming 'F1: The Movie' were completely different. It had the feel of ''Top Gun' on wheels', which doesn't come as a huge surprise given that Kosinski directed and Bruckheimer produced 2022 hit 'Top Gun: Maverick'.
'When we're filming, a lot of the time it has to be a certain speed or a certain kind of choreography,' Dolby says. 'But for Luci and myself to get sent storyboards and then come up with some of the maneuvers to make it look so dynamic and work with the real F1 footage as well going in there, I think it just raised the bar on what a racing movie is like. We were, every day, 180/190 miles an hour.'
Bacheta echoed a similar sentiment, sharing how typically a stunt driver will go through cardboard boxes, do some drifting, and navigate at lower speeds (around 40-50 mph). Sometimes they and the actors wouldn't have time to do a warm-up lap (or only have one) given the tight filming windows on an F1 weekend, and so they had to adapt on the fly.
The experience overall reminded Bacheta of his racing days. He had hoped to compete in F1, but two sponsors had independent issues that kept him from continuing his dream. But this movie provided a full-circle moment of sorts.
'It's quite funny, because obviously, through working with Brad, we spoke about all of the process (of becoming an F1 driver). And I feel like he was quite keen for me to experience it with him,' Bacheta says. 'It wasn't just the Brad and Damson Show. Brad was very keen for me to almost lap it up, in a way. To be like, 'Oh, you're kind of getting it in some kind of way. You're experiencing the F1 world'.'
The similarities between that world and Hollywood extended beyond the track and into recovery from the effort needed to drive racing cars.
Barry Sigrist, who has an elite sport background, has worked with Premier League football clubs and consulted in F1, was brought in to help with physio — specifically for injury prevention and physical preparation. He described it as 'passive stuff', such as massages, helping lower core temperatures, and soft-tissue work to help with mobility, the nervous system and physiological recovery.
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Idris and Pitt dealt with G forces, given the caliber of their training, with the back, neck and core typically feeling this the most. A warm-up is key, and Sigrist took a more athletic-based approach, meaning the focus was on mobility rather than increasing body temperature.
Reaction testing is another component of driver preparation, which helps with the nervous system. They'd use a similar light-up pod device, as real F1 drivers do, where the actors would have to hit as many as they could in an allotted time. Sigrist pulled from his experience but adapted the training 'because, with all due respect, they do train, but F1 training is very different…. It was derived from a regular driver's F1 warm-up.'
'F1: The Movie' is, at the end of the day, a Hollywood movie and is geared towards the general audience. But, it does have authentic elements that could get a motorsport fan onboard. Calls were made early on about the script and what needed to be removed because a driver may not prepare or do something that was in the initial copy, Sigrist says. This went from how drivers prepared to how team members interact in garages, to how the on-track scenes were done, as the competitors raced closely to get the perfect shot.
'It was dangerous, what they did,' Dolby says. 'Every time they strapped themselves in the car, there was a high risk, and they took it. And hopefully that shows in the film.'
(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; NurPhoto/ Getty, Scott Garfield Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures / Apple Original Films)