When Formula 1: Drive to Survive first landed on Netflix in 2019, it was a bet on an unproven idea: that people who had never sat through a grand prix might still care about the people driving in one. Seven years and eight seasons later, the bet has been renewed again — and this time the production team has been handed the richest raw material the show has ever had. Netflix has now confirmed Drive to Survive season 9, and it will be built around the 2026 Formula 1 season currently unfolding.
The timing is the story. Season 9 will cover a championship year in which Formula 1 tore up its own rulebook, added two manufacturers, and watched a driver in his second full season take the lead of the title race. If Drive to Survive has occasionally been accused of manufacturing tension, 2026 has spared it the trouble.
A season that barely needs the edit
The 2026 regulations delivered the biggest technical overhaul in a generation: new hybrid power units split roughly 50/50 between combustion and electrical energy, no MGU-H, fully sustainable fuel, and a new chassis formula with active aerodynamics. The grid expanded to 11 teams and 22 cars, with Cadillac arriving as a new entry running Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas, and Audi taking over the former Sauber operation with Nico Hülkenberg and Gabriel Bortoleto.
Then there is the championship itself. Kimi Antonelli leads the drivers’ standings for Mercedes — not Max Verstappen, not reigning champion Lando Norris — while Lewis Hamilton is deep into his second season in red at Ferrari. Zandvoort alone, where Norris won and Verstappen crashed out of his home race, handed the cameras a feature-length episode. Our full report on that weekend is here.
What Drive to Survive season 9 is promising
Box to Box Films, which has made the series since the beginning, framed the renewal as a push further inside the paddock. “We’re so excited to be making Season 9 of this iconic show,” executive producers James Gay-Rees and Paul Martin said. “This year we’re going to go deeper than ever before into the hidden spaces of this fantastic sport.”
That is a familiar promise, and one the show has not always been able to keep — access has tightened over the years as teams grew wise to how footage gets cut. But Gay-Rees has never been shy about what the series achieved. Speaking to Formula1.com in 2023, he called it “the first main access show — certainly out of the UK anyway — that has had this profound effect”, pointing to the younger, more female and markedly more American audience the sport picked up in its wake.
The criticism that never quite lands
The standard charge against Drive to Survive is that it bends chronology, sharpens radio messages and builds rivalries the drivers themselves do not recognise — a complaint several of them have made on the record. The counter-argument is simpler and harder to dismiss: Formula 1’s commercial and demographic transformation since 2019 is not seriously disputed by anyone inside the sport, and the show is the most obvious single cause of it.
Netflix’s motorsport appetite is broadening, too. The streamer has a Michael Schumacher documentary dated for later this year, and the current paddock is no longer the only garage it is filming in.
No release date has been announced for season 9, though the series has typically arrived in the opening months of the following year, which would put it in early 2027 — once the 2026 title has been settled. On current evidence, the editors will have rather more to work with than usual, and rather less need to help it along. Full confirmation of the renewal was reported by Motorsport.com.
