‘Drive to Survive’ and his mess with Fernando Alonso and Aston Martin | OneFootball

The Netflix series Drive to Survive, now in its seventh season, reviews the last season of Formula 1 and shows fans what the big circus is like from the inside. Surprisingly, there is no episode dedicated to Fernando Alonso in this seventh season.

Drive to Survive ignores Fernando Alonso and Aston Martin

The latest installment of the popular television series once again focuses the media spotlight on the most relevant stories of the season, ignoring one of the most iconic drivers on the grid: Fernando Alonso. Indeed, despite the fact that the Spaniard experienced several of the most important moments of the year, Drive to Survive has chosen to leave out this driver and his team, Aston Martin.

Seven seasons in which there is talk of Lewis Hamilton and his departure from Mercedes, of the friction between Max Verstappen and Lando Norris, of the situation of Ferrari with Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc, but the Silverstone team is relegated to brushstrokes, despite experiencing a season with many comings and goings from the promising start of the season to the worrying drop in performance.

Aston Martin’s 2024 season was not enough to Drive to Survive

The possible exclusion of Aston Martin could be explained by its performance in an irregular 2024 season in which its performance was very poor. After an encouraging start to the season in which Aston Martin itself was competing with Mercedes for fourth place at constructor level, the development of the car was very poor and competitiveness plummeted dramatically.

The AMR24, despite having started the season with a lot of points in the first races, lost ground in the following competitions and began to take a back seat to McLaren and Mercedes. With a lack of effective improvements and the difficulty of understanding the car’s behavior, the team ended up having to fight at the bottom of the grid in some of the most important races. The American tour was particularly difficult, as there were up to four races in which they failed to score any points and the technical crisis that the British team was going through became clear.

Drive to Survive and its narrative approach

Since its premiere, Drive to Survive has reaped harsh criticism regarding the framing of the stories, excluding not only drivers or teams that are unable to fit into its narrative style. The truth is that the series has given preference to very tough rivalries, to very spectacular transfers and to very accentuated fights between drivers and teams.

In this sense, the lack of presence of Fernando Alonso and the Aston Martin team can be explained by the fact that the seventh season has focused on episodes around fights for the title, emotional farewells and key moments in teams such as Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes.

Despite this, Aston Martin is excluded from the story of the 2024 season, and the rapid loss of performance, the few improvements to the car, or the Spaniard’s constant struggle to hold his own, which could have made for a very interesting story for the series.

Netflix has served to tell other stories, standing firm in its idea of telling stories that have a media impact, leaving aside the traditional narrative that dealt with more technical and sporting matters of Formula 1. In this sense, they have not considered that one of the best drivers on the grid has his space in the popular series.