Stood on an industrial estate beneath the Gatwick Airport flightpath in the leafy southern counties of the United Kingdom, a thought crosses my mind: we\u2019re a long way from Hollywood.<\/p>\n
And yet here, within an unassuming collection of warehouses and garages, lurks one of the stars of F1 The Movie \u2013 and no, it\u2019s not Brad Pitt. As I hop out of the way of a passing Porsche 993 about to be brutally carved up and cosmetic surgeried for another film, I catch sight of the gold nose cone of the APXGP car lurking in a garage.<\/p>\n
The actual machine that Pitt and co-star Damson Idris \u2013 as the fictional, fractious team mates Sonny Hayes and Joshua Pearce \u2013 race in the Joe Kosinski-directed movie released internationally on June 25.<\/p>\n
One of the privileges of this job is getting to stand close to bona fide Formula 1 cars, and as I enter the garage, there is that reverential zen feeling you get when you\u2019re close to these machines at rest, like entering the stable of a prized thoroughbred racehorse. Except that despite its looks, this beast is far less thoroughbred racehorse \u2013 and far more \u2018mule in gladrags\u2019\u2026<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the creation of Graham Kelly and his team at GK Evolution, the company the former motorsport engineer put together over 30 years ago to create vehicles for the silver screen.<\/p>\n
Kelly\u2019s cinematic CV is staggering. From Bourne to Bond, and having even worked on one of the most revered stunt driving sequences of all time \u2013 in Ronin, directed by John Frankenheimer, the man behind the 1967 F1 classic Grand Prix \u2013 Kelly has been there and done that when it comes to making movies with fast cars in them.<\/p>\n
Or at least he thought he had.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis film came along and I couldn’t really say no,\u201d Kelly chuckles as we talk in his office, overlooking the work bays where his team are tooling over various pieces of automotive exotica. \u201cI think I was the fourth person on the film.<\/p>\n
\u201c2022 was my first phone call and then that July I ended up at Silverstone with Jerry Bruckheimer and Joe Kosinski on a kind of recce at the race, which was interesting. Then it went away for a little bit. I went back to a film that I was on in Italy and it kind of just went very quiet. Then September I got a call saying, okay we’re on, we want to go next season. They wanted to start shooting at Silverstone in \u201823.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt this point we had no cast, no real concept, a couple of ideas. But one of the conversations that happened without me was with Lewis Hamilton, who introduced Joe to [Mercedes Team Principal] Toto Wolff \u2013 and there was a kind of a frisson of ideas that came out of that. And the idea was to build the cars.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mercedes step in<\/p>\n
Kelly\u2019s concept for building the cars for F1 was simple: Mercedes\u2019 Applied Science division would create F1-style bodywork that could be bolted onto a Formula 2 chassis that had been stretched and widened with \u2018spacers\u2019 to take it to near-F1 dimensions.<\/p>\n
Having a glitzy car with no firepower, however, simply wouldn\u2019t cut it for the type of immersive driving that Kosinski had envisioned for the film, and thus the first APXGP car \u2013 the one on show in Kelly\u2019s garage today \u2013 was fitted with a genuine Mecachrome Formula 2 engine, giving the car full-on, motorsport-grade pace.<\/p>\n
A further Mecachrome-engined car followed, along with two cars using GP3-era V6s \u2013 while Kelly also had a brainwave to create one electric chassis.<\/p>\n
\u201cQuite a lot of the film, it seemed, was going to be shot in the pit lane,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd this is where my background of film and my background of motor racing helped immensely, because I could see a problem straight away: we can’t use a petrol engine in the pit lane. It would just explode!<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we quickly put a whole electric 400-volt plan together\u2026 and truthfully that car saved our lives \u2013 it kept us filming all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the races<\/p>\n
Having fettled the car at both Silverstone and Spain\u2019s Ascari circuit, it was time for it to play at real race weekends, with the film team embedding themselves at actual Grands Prix \u2013 to the extent of even running the cars at the back of the field for the formation lap at the 2024 British Grand Prix.<\/p>\n
However, here again the world of Hollywood bumped into the realities of motorsport.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Normally on a movie] we set a scene and then we have cars prepared to do that scene, and then we cut at the end of the road and reset back to \u2018number one\u2019 [the original position] and we do it again, probably 20 times,\u201c says Kelly of his usual process of setting up driving scenes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell Formula 1 cars, or race cars, can’t do that. They can’t sit there idling while we decide what we’re going to do. It’s kind of like, when they’re running, they have to go, air has to go over the radiators and then they’ll have to go and do a cool-down lap. And these are all of the issues that I was trying to wrangle with during the film process.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m like, you can’t just bring the cars in, you have to give them a cool lap, let them get some air over the brakes, otherwise they’re going to be on fire when they come down the pit lane and everybody\u2026 was really struggling with the idea that we’re now in the motorsport world.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it all came together in the end beautifully.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finding the right chase car<\/p>\n
Having fast cars on track was one thing. But for Joe Kosinski \u2013 fresh off the ultra-visceral Top Gun: Maverick project \u2013 to get the chase and following driving shots that he wanted, he also required a high-speed camera car \u2013 leading Kelly to recall one of his less happy memories from the shoot\u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cIt became very obvious that we didn’t have a traditional camera car available to us that would keep up with these cars,\u201d he says. \u201cSo we went through various options and we ended up with a horrendous thing from America which was an old LMP [Le Mans Prototype] car which was super quick but not quick in the corners, so the balance of what we were trying to shoot was all wrong.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur cars would come out of the corners and disappear and [the camera car driver] would lose us on the straights so it was a whole world of pain there.<\/p>\n
\u201c[In the end we] decided that the thing that we got from America was just no good. In fact, we blew it up in Hungary! We lost all the oil pressure and then the pump fell apart and at that point I said, \u2018Send it away, I’m done now!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Another one of the GP3-engined APXGP cars was used as a replacement \u2013 an imperfect solution but one which helped add to the visual impact of the movie.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe GP3 car wasn’t as quick as the F2 cars,\u201d says Kelly, \u201cbut we could tame that back a bit and the camera movement was good because it could get in the mix, and that gave us quite a lot of \u2018speed effect\u2019 in the camera.\u201d<\/p>\n
Actors-slash-racing drivers<\/p>\n
In the world of cinema, it\u2019s normal practice for actors to be filmed driving in close-ups, only for be-wigged, be-costumed stunt drivers to then be substituted in when there\u2019s proper driving to be done.<\/p>\n
And while precision drivers were used for many segments in the film \u2013 including Duncan Tappy, Craig Dolby and former Formula 2 champion Luciano Bacheta \u2013 both Pitt and Idris themselves spent hours and hours spinning laps in single-seaters, especially at Silverstone, in order to both train them up for the rigours of motorsport, and to capture convincingly fast shots of them driving.<\/p>\n
\u201c[The single-seater training cars] were quicker through the corners than our [APXGP] car so they had quite a lot of aero characteristics, which was good to train Brad on \u2013 he needed to feel what the aero was doing and it seemed like a good step to get him from that to the [APXGP] car,\u201d remembers Kelly.<\/p>\n