How the ‘F1’ team pulled off that epic car race crash

Warning: This article contains spoilers about F1: The Movie.

Like Chekhov’s gun, any movie about racing or Formula One must also come with a massive set piece of a crash.

That expectation is certainly fulfilled multiple times over in F1: The Movie, now in theaters, but the most memorable of the various collisions comes midway through the second act when rookie driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) fails to listen to Sonny Hayes’ (Brad Pitt) advice and goes for an opening to take the lead in a race when he is cautioned not to.

As a result, he skids off the track and the car flips into the air, turning multiple times before landing in the grass in a fiery blaze. While many films nowadays might accomplish the stunt with visual effects, director Joseph Kosinski was determined to make it happen for real.

“We did do that crash practically,” he tells Entertainment Weekly. “It was a massive set-up. Damson put his time up high in the air in a spinning car, which was pretty intense. It was actually based on an incident that happened on the same corner in Formula Three about 10 years ago. We adapted it for our film and put it in the rain and Formula One.”

Making it even more intense was the fact that, as can be the case with something of this scale, not everything went exactly as planned. “It ended up being not what I expected, but still a bit spectacular in many different ways,” Kosinski explains. “We had done all these calculations about exactly where the car was going to land. We knew precisely, and the first time we launched the car, it fell about 10 feet short.”

Kosinski’s solution: Crank up the speed. “We ended up sending it much further than we had calculated,” Kosinski continues. “But because of that, there’s an uncontrolled wildness to the accident that really translates on screen.”

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Indeed, when Sonny — not far behind — witnesses what happens, reminiscent of the accident that took him out 30 years earlier, he jumps out of his own car and rushes to pull Joshua out of the blazing wreckage. Pearce’s injuries take him out of the game for several weeks as he recovers from burns to his hand. Kosinski notes that Pitt was able to observe the crash, taking in the unexpected distance and then working in that extra scale to his reaction when filming his component of the sequence.

F1 follows once-promising driver Sonny Hayes as he takes one last shot at redemption at the invitation of old friend and fellow racer, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), who is on the verge of being ousted by the board of his racing team. However, things don’t go exactly as planned when Sonny butts heads with newcomer Joshua Pearce and brings his exploitative tactics to the track.