Christian Horner has revealed a vital area of the Red Bull Formula 1 team led to him vetoing footage from Netflix's Drive to Survive. The behind-the-scenes documentary has been pivotal in fuelling F1's explosive growth since it first aired in 2018, with filming currently underway for series six which will chart the 2023 season. The series has provided insight such as team boss arguments and is renowned for its lack of censorship over the colourful vocabularies of paddock personnel, with RacingNews365 understanding that teams do have a right of veto over certain footage. And Horner has revealed he needed to use this so-called 'get out of jail free card' to block some captured footage.
Horner reveals Drive to Survive veto
"What you've got to remember is that it is a TV show, and so they capture hours and hours of content," Horner explained at a Financial Times live event. "And the problem is that they put a microphone on you at the beginning of the day, the cameras are embedded within the team. "There's so many cameras around, for one, you don't know which ones are Netflix ones or somebody else and you forget that they are there. "Then you get to the end of the season, the end of the year, and they tend to send you through the clips they have of your team. "They don't show how in context it is to others, and then you think: 'Did I really say that, did I really call someone a 'See You Next Tuesday'?' "And at that point you say: 'You can't put that in, it's part of our car in there', and that is the only get out of jail free card we've got - that there's some technical IP that we don't want them to see."
Horner backs Hamilton
Horner also backed claims from Lewis Hamilton that all the showbiz and celebrity attention F1 has earned in recent years to a "Kardashian show." "With the audience that we've attracted, we are now the Kardashians on Wheels," Horner said. "Basically, you're just looking for Guenther Steiner to lose it, or for me and my friend Toto [Wolff] to have a little bit of jousting - but it gets you behind the scenes to know the personalities of the drivers a little more and to put faces and expose the characters. "It is not just about the front of the field, it is about the trials and tribulations, how it has gone at the back of the grid, what they're up to and fighting for. "What it has done it just opened it all up, if you just watch the Grand Prix, you get the entertainment of that race, but you don't get the behind the scenes look into what goes on. "So that dynamic has completely changed what Formula 1 is to a degree, it is a bit of a soap opera - the way it operates, the characters involved, the money, the politics. "There's so much going on in the sport outside of the cars and driving for two hours on a Sunday afternoon."
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