Season 6 therefore launches straight into a glitzy Aston Martin road car launch to set up the opening episode focused on the Silverstone team. Lawrence Stroll slips back into his Bond villain role as he schemes for world domination – he just about manages to suppress an evil cackle at the end of his main interview.
Aston’s rise to early-year greatness is covered in detail, but unfortunately we don’t get to see its mid-season malaise or Lawrence’s son Lance going into über-brat mode when things get a bit difficult.
From here the cameras turn to the struggles of the McLaren team – it’s then we realise DtS really has entered its third era.
The first was F1 at its most ‘fok-smashing’, candid best. Almost no one in the championship had been filmed like this before, they didn’t know how to behave, so they just carried on as normal.
The second was when teams realised they could use the series as a PR tool, and so we had to suffer horrendous staged scenes such as Formula Partridge (George Russell) getting his call up to the big boy team and Valtteri Bottas getting booted from Merc over a glass of sparkling water with Toto Wolff.
Now DtS’s third age features characters using the series in a ‘meta’ like fashion. Zak Brown tries to emotionally needle Lando Norris into staying with McLaren in front of the Netflix cameras, while the driver himself turns to a lens he knows is focused on him to pull a face when journalists ask him if he’ll still be in Woking next year. These kind of Netflix-aware moments are frequent throughout.
Guenther Steiner is still the star, and the Haas episode is by far and away the most emotional – the writing looks to already be on the wall for the soon-to-be ex-F1 team boss when he goes to see an old and familiar F1 face to muse on his future.
Alpine becomes almost comedically French as Otmar Szafnauer’s sacking in the middle of the Belgian GP is covered in detail. Other team principals’ reaction to the development show just how bizarre it was.