Netflix’s Drive To Survive will come back for at least two more seasons

This Sunday is the inaugural running of Formula 1’s Miami Grand Prix, a race that was added to the schedule just to cater to the growing number of F1 fans in the United States—a number that is growing largely because of the popularity of Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive To Survive, which artfully translates real events during a Formula 1 season into digestible, TV-friendly narratives that sometimes don’t necessarily reflect what happened in real life but still make for good television.

In yet another attempt to cater to American fans (beyond inexplicable photo ops with American sports teams), Formula 1 has gone ahead and announced that Drive To Survive has been picked up for two more seasons—its fifth and sixth—covering the 2022 and 2023 championships. That means we’ll theoretically get episodes about some of the cool stuff that has already happened during this F1 season, like Sebastian Vettel driving a scooter in Australia after he wrecked his car.

One interesting thing about this two-season renewal, though, is that F1 drivers recently expressed some concerns about the way Drive To Survive selectively edits footage to artificially make things some more dramatic. Defending champion Max Verstappen has refused to be involved with the show since its first season because of how he was depicted on it, and the people in charge of F1 have reportedly started to worry about the show’s handcrafted “storylines” reflecting poorly on certain drivers.

So if the show is now getting two additional seasons, it seems to imply that either those concerns have abated or F1 was exaggerating about how much it really cared. We’ll have to wait until next year when the first of these seasons airs to see if there’s any tangible difference between it and the previous seasons, though. As long as we get more of Haas team boss Guenther Steiner, we’ll be happy. Actually, don’t even bother with the other teams and the racing, just give Guenther Steiner his own show.