F1 EXPLAINS: How 'F1 The Movie' was made – with director Joseph Kosinski

Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Javier Bardem and Kerry Condon’s performances in F1 The Movie are stellar, but the APXGP car which appears in the film is also a star.

The black and gold machine raced by Sonny Hayes and Joshua Pearce looks like a real Formula 1 car. However, filmmaking secrets lie beneath the bodywork.

F1 The Movie director Joseph Kosinski told the F1 Explains podcast how the car was created, and how it was influenced by Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff and Lewis Hamilton, who worked as a producer on the movie.

"Lewis had said to me they had never seen a film that really captured the speed, the feeling of being in one of these things", Kosinski tells podcast presenter Christian Hewgill. "Toto said, 'Don't start with a movie car and try to make it fast.' He said, you should start with a real race car and then modify it to your needs."

To find a car which could be made to look like it belonged in Formula 1, Kosinski looked to junior categories.

"We bought six Dallara chassis from Formula 2 cars", he says. "We brought those to the Mercedes F1 team and worked with their engineers and designers.

"We extended the wheelbase 400 millimetres and did a complete custom bodywork that mimicked the new regulation [F1] cars, but at the same time looked slightly different than any other car on the grid – as it should. If APXGP had a car out there it couldn’t be the same as anything else."

To shoot F1 The Movie’s visceral racing scenes, Brad Pitt and Damson Idris drove the APXGP car on Formula 1 tracks around the world, including Silverstone, the Las Vegas Strip Circuit and the Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi. It was rigged with cameras to capture the action, up-close.

"We designed the car so that it had built-in camera mounts at 16 different positions for our camera system," Kosinski says. "We found spaces under the radiator to hold our battery packs, our receivers, our transmitters, our recorders.

"It was a machine built for shooting a Formula 1 movie – completely custom, but a real race car at the heart of it."

In the full episode, which you can listen to now, Kosinski also explains the high-speed shooting schedule he had to stick to in order to film scenes on the racetrack, the grid, the pit lane and the Formula 1 paddock.

The full episode of F1 Explains is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all other podcast apps, or you can listen using the player above on this page.

F1 Explains is the official F1 podcast which answers your questions about the sport. You can send your questions to F1Explains@F1.com.