There are plenty of things in "F1: The Movie" that aren't entirely realistic to real Formula 1 racing, but the film goes out of its way, more often than not, to pay tribute to the sport and its legends, from the inclusion of real modern racers to the attention paid to pit stops and aerodynamics. But one thing you might not know if you aren't super familiar with the history of Formula 1 is that Brad Pitt's character, Sonny Hayes, is also based in several key ways on a real F1 driver.
The man in question
is Martin Donnelly, a Northern Ireland driver who raced on the Lotus F1 team from 1989 to 1990. As you might guess after seeing the movie, Donnelly's career was cut tragically short after a brutal accident at the 1990 Spanish Grand Prix. The real footage from the crash -- one of the most infamous in the history of the sport -- is used in "F1" to represent Sonny's own F1 career-ending accident. Though Donnelly sustained numerous internal and external injuries from the crash, he did survive. However, unlike Pitt's character, he never got another chance in F1 due to the severity of his sustained injuries.
Pitt's character is more of a fairy tale version -- someone who not only makes a (mostly) full recovery after a brutal accident, but decades later also gets a chance to return to the sport well past his athletic prime. For Donnelly, things didn't have that Hollywood sheen.
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How Martin Donnelly's Crash Inspired The F1 Movie
Martin Donnelly was brought into the "F1" movie project in 2023, when he received a call from seven-time Formula 1 world champion and modern-day legend Lewis Hamilton. At the time, Hamilton had already been brought on as a consultant and producer on the film, and that process led him and director Joseph Kosinski to consider Donnelly's story as a sort of foundation for the character of Sonny Hayes.
Not only did they use the crash as inspiration, but the team brought Donnelly on set to get help from his expertise. On one occasion, Pitt started asking the former racer questions, like how he used to approach the car on race days. "He was asking me to direct him around the garage," Donnelly told BBC. "I had a superstition of getting in at the left hand side and putting my left leg in first, and he does exactly the same thing in the movie."
The real story of Donnelly's crash, of course, is far from a pretty one. The accident wasn't caused by any driver error, but by a freak suspension failure that put his car into the wall at upwards of 160 miles per hour. Donnelly broke both of his legs and sustained major organ damage. As a result, his left leg became shorter than his right, and lingering nerve damage made a return to the sport impossible.
F1 Still Takes A Lot Of Creative Liberties For The Sake Of Drama
While Sonny Hayes' crash may be based in reality, the rest of his story, for the most part, is pure Hollywood drama. It simply isn't believable that a driver of his age, having been out of the sport for so long, would be able to find anywhere near the sort of success that Sonny has on the track -- even with all of the highly questionable, aggressive maneuvers he employs. The character is essentially a cowboy. He wanders the world looking for new driving challenges to tick off like he's a character in a Tony Hawk game. It's fun, sure, but it's hardly an original archetype in American film.
Beyond Donnelly's inspiration and the other Formula 1 driver cameos in "F1: The Movie," there are a number of other connections to the real sport, though most of them take their own liberties in adaptation. Some viewers have drawn connections between the accident Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) has midway through the movie and another real F1 collision sustained by Romain Grosjean at the 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix. In both cases, a slight loss of traction ended up with the car in flames. Fortunately, Grosjean was able to walk away from his accident under his own power. It's a testament to how much safer the sport of Formula 1 has become over the years, though it's still one of the most dangerous there is.
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Read the original article on SlashFilm.
