New Hulu miniseries on Brawn GP drops this month
Over the last few years, the Netflix series Drive to Survive has shined a fascinating spotlight on all of the on- and off-track drama in Formula 1, helping to attract new fans to the sport in the process. Now Hulu is getting in on the action and hoping to snag its own share of the sport’s enormous fanbase. The streaming service has just announced its new series, Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 Story, which digs into the wild account of the team’s 2009 campaign and how it became one of—if not the only—team in F1 history to have a 100 percent world championship success rate.
Die-hard F1 fans will know of Brawn GP, but newer fans might not be familiar with the Cinderella story that took place during the 2008–09 season. The tale is now getting the attention and airtime it deserves from what seems like an unlikely source: Keanu Reeves. Best known for his action movie antics and his passion for motorcycles, Reeves is also a big racing fan, and he has assembled a four-part series that documents the extremely fast rise and fall of the one-season-wonder Brawn GP.
The team’s curious origin story involves a big stack of cash and a small stack of cash. Honda had the big stack and was spending like mad in the seasons leading up to 2009, but the global economic downturn made the accountants at Honda pull the plug on its Formula 1 effort, which was when motorsports engineer Ross Brawn stepped up and convinced Honda to sell him the team for a single British pound.
Beyond a lack of sponsorship, the team’s struggles ranged from making a Mercedes engine work in a chassis designed for a Honda powerplant to the suffering from success that came with dominating the early season, only to have the teams around them catch up. The end result, however, was a Herculean effort that earned Jenson Button the drivers’ championship and the team the constructors’ championship, after winning 8 of the 17 races on the 2009 schedule.
The Brawn GP story is prime for a miniseries like this, and while we love Drive to Survive, we are also excited to have a show with some great footage featuring V-8–era cars and racing. We’ll be tuning in to Hulu for the first episode on November 15. Will you?
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