How ‘formula E: Driver’ Gets Racers — And Cars — Ready For Their Closeup

Motorsport isn’t lacking when it comes to cameras. Formula E — the racing series where all 11 teams and 22 drivers throw fully electric cars around iconic tracks and street circuits at speeds of 200 miles per hour — outfits each racecar with nine onboard cameras, providing different views from the nose to the tail of the car. But for the new Prime Video series “Formula E: Driver,” the production company Astronaut films wanted to push the limit of how an audience can experience what it’s like behind the wheel. 

The sports docuseries follows four drivers in particular — António Félix da Costa, Mitch Evans, Jake Dennis, and Dan Ticktum — across their battles in the ‘23-’24 campaign. And while the overall approach to being trackside during races without disrupting the teams is similar to Netflix cousin “Drive to Survive,” “Formula E: Driver” has a couple of things that make it distinct. One is that it’s much more explicit about its subjects and tracking their highs and lows over the course of a season. Another is that the camera teams are focused on the duels between cars, where a centimeter can make the difference between a legendary overtake and crashing out of the race. 

“The [Formula E championship] has always been closer than F1, coming down to the last few races in the past seasons. This was great for us as it means there’s no need to go looking for jeopardy or feel like we’re forced to amplify anything. It’s all right there,” Jon Alwen, executive producer behind the series, told IndieWire.  

There’s still a lot of care that the documentary team took to capture what is all right there, of course. The team used a mix of Sony FX9s and FX6s, with a DHI 4D and Sony FX3 for gimbal work, and then a mix of Angenieux zooms, Sony zooms, and Sony primes. It was important, Alwen said, for the show to have a rich cinematic feel, and yet still capture the run-and-gun energy of race days. The Zooms allowed for that level of flexibility, and the added benefit of feeling close to the action without getting in the way of the pit crews.  

“Formula E races are often fought wheel-to-wheel, which is why they are so exciting to watch, but [the cars] so hard to drive in. So we wanted to try and literally put the viewer in the driving seat as much as possible so they could get a feel for how quickly our drivers have to react,” Alwen said. 

With the action so much more crushed (or sometimes crunched when there’s an off at Turn 1) together, it can take every single camera on the track, from the three documentary crews on the ground at races to the footage gathered by Formula E itself, to assemble a clear and compelling race sequence. Alwen told IndieWire that the series tried to blend Formula E and onboard footage with their own in order to create as seamless an experience for the viewer as possible. 

“We consciously tried to blend the race footage with our own,” Alwen said. “Having the luxury of more time in the edit to work with it helped, as we could go through and find all the different camera angles to build a scene. We also graded it to match our own footage with the help of the talented team at Molinaire in London.” 

The race footage, captured and cleaned and arranged to be as sharp as possible, is ultimately a compelling contrast to how Alwen and his team wanted to treat the drivers in “Formula E: Drivers.” 

“Personally, I don’t think I’ve seen anything before that has really explored the sacrifices professional drivers have made — and it’s also why they are all so desperate to win, having given so much just to get on that starting grid,” Alwen said. “The distance between the highs and lows they experience is something most of us, in our normal lives, can’t even comprehend. That means we needed to be there for both and let the audience into what it’s like to be them.” 

“Formula E: Drivers” is streaming on Prime Video.

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