F1’s Take on Men, Teams, and Triumph

Brad Pitt’s F1: The Movie races to the top by showcasing the thrill of male rivalry and the bonds that make teams unstoppable

This is a guest essay from Joseph Holmes.

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F1: The Movie is easily one of the biggest dark horse success movies of 2025. In a summer movie season full of dinosaurs (Jurassic World: Rebirth), superheroes (Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps), and horror films (I Know What You Did Last Summer, Together), Brad Pitt’s “Top Gun: Maverick but with cars” has steadily climbed at the box office to become the top-grossing film of Brad Pitt’s career in a leading role.

Part of that comes down to how genuinely good the movie is. The chemistry between the actors—particularly Brad Pitt and Javier Bardem—is electric. The script, creating smart, witty banter between the characters, is razor-sharp throughout. And the editing, which switches you back and forth between watching the racing from the outside and experiencing it from the inside, is exhilarating in its musicality. Even though I’m not a racing fan, I was in love with F1.

But part of the movie’s success is also how well it understands male competition and collaboration. Whether the filmmakers intended it or not, F1 speaks more profoundly to the distinctive ways men compete and build deep friendships with each other. It also shows us why male friendship and mentorship are breaking down by showing what happens when older men start competing with younger men.

F1: The Movie stars Brad Pitt as Formula One (F1) racing driver Sonny Hayes, who has left the sport behind after a catastrophic injury forced him out of the game. Thirty years later, his former teammate Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) asks him to return to save his underdog team APXGP from collapse. There, Sonny will not only have to prove himself to everyone who thinks he’s past his prime, but also lock horns with rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), who wants to make a name for himself and has no intention of being upstaged by Sonny.

Competition is obviously all over F1. It is, after all, a racing movie about F1 teams competing to win F1 races. But it’s also about competition between the two leads. Brad Pitt’s Sonny is competing with the young up-and-comer Joshua to be the top dog of the team. This competition repeatedly risks undermining their ability to win races and nearly shuts down the team, until the rest of the team is able to help them reconcile.

The competition portrayed is of a particularly masculine kind. Broadly speaking, male competition and female competition work differently. As Joyce Benenson, a lecturer of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, explains, “Females more than males engage in safe, subtle, and solitary forms of competition.” By contrast, “Males want it public, they want it conspicuous, and they want it very, very clear who’s the winner and who's the loser.” This is one reason that traditionally men have been more involved in sports, which thrive on such forms of competition.

This causes many people to see men as more competitive than women, and men’s forms of friendship more fragile. But this isn’t quite the case. Men’s competition tends to be more public, but men are also more comfortable with results, which they use to clarify what they are the “best” at and therefore what their place in the group is. Benenson says of men, “What’s nice about the way they do it is, a lot of times everyone gets to be better at something. Everyone who is a member of the group.” Meanwhile, women get very upset if one of their female friends is better than them at anything, so women who are accomplished at something tend to minimize their accomplishments or attribute it to luck.

What explains this difference? Dr. Tanya Reynolds argues that women have traditionally had the most success surviving and thriving when their relationships have been based on mutual reciprocity, which requires some degree of equality. Meanwhile, men’s success in life has traditionally involved hunting or warfare, which requires hierarchy and specialization.

If every man on a battlefield is going with his own whims, that is really uncoordinated. So if we think of a modern context of warfare, one example might be football, there is a clear line of command, there’s the coach, then maybe the quarterback reads the plays, and everyone knows what the game plan is, and that leads to success on the field. You also need specialization. So maybe there’s one guy great at throwing the spears, one guy who’s great at making the spears, one guy who’s great at coming up with the strategy. And so having this role specialization is really useful for large groups because you can then maximize your talent.

So success for men in life revolves around building successful teams with other men in order to beat other teams. This means they have motive for elevating men on their team who are better than them, because then their team is more successful and that makes them more successful. That translates into better romantic opportunities as well. An okay football player on a winning team will have better success dating a cheerleader than the number one player on a losing team. But a cheerleader doesn’t get more attractive to men because of how many cheerleading competitions she wins. So they don’t have the same incentive to elevate their teammates above them.

We see how this masculine form of conflict and competition manifests itself in F1. Ruben wants to elevate his players like Sonny and Joshua because when they win, he wins. Everyone on the team, from the players to the pit crew, all have to work together in order for them to have a chance to win. Sonny and Joshua are competitive with each other for the top spot in the team. But they get over it when it becomes clear that not doing so would cause them both to lose. It’s that competition with other teams that incentivizes cooperation—both for themselves and by others on the team who pressure them to clean up their act.

This bonding of friendship through competition is one deeply resonant to men, and therefore deeply satisfying for men to watch. Sonny, Joshua, and Ruben develop deep bonds of friendship over this partnership. Men desire to bond with men by working together toward a common goal, to defeat an enemy that they triumph over together.

The film showcases male friendship and competition in other, subtler ways. When Sonny’s love interest Kate sits him and Joshua down to mend their friendship, she does so by sitting them down to play poker, with the two of them sitting broadly side by side. While women bond by looking at each other in the face, men bond side by side (probably a throwback to bonding by being on the same team).

But this helps explain why men are having a uniquely difficult time building friendships today. If men bond by being on the same team going after the same goal, then when shared missions and teams break down, it uniquely hurts male friendships. If employment isn’t dependable, and you change jobs every few years, then your bond with your coworkers is fragile as well. (I discussed the problem of male friendship more in my review of the film Friendship.)

You see this in F1, where Joshua and Sonny’s competition is prompted by Joshua’s manager reminding him that the team he’s on is likely to collapse, so he has to look out for number one. With the church collapsing as well, there aren’t many places where men can find stable mission and purpose to bond them to other men. Women’s bonding, which is often facilitated more by sharing deep feelings, is more lasting through these changes. But attempts to fix male friendship by applying feminine solutions don’t work as well for men.

But there’s another modern problem—which this film touches on subtly—with the modern world that undermines male relationships: extended adolescence among men. When men get married and have kids, it takes away an incentive for older men to compete with younger men. These older men are no longer competing for sexual or marriage partners with the younger men and so can focus on mentorship with them because they want men who will be capable of being good teammates and—potentially—husbands for their daughters. One unspoken factor driving Sonny and Joshua to be top dog is because they are both single and want to attract the women that come with that.

This is another angle in the “Boomer” discourse, as Renn has discussed many times on this site. Boomers never gave up power to Gen X or millennials, and so younger men never got the opportunity to gain power. Many of these men are married, but they still don’t want to step out of a role that gives them the status they crave.

Brad Pitt himself is actually a pretty good example of this. He’s 61, and yet is still pursuing the lead roles where he plays the leading single man who sleeps around with women rather than the wise old mentor. He’s the age to be playing Obi-Wan roles but is still playing Luke Skywalker roles. It’s probably not a coincidence he also is divorced and dating a woman close to half his age. People have made the point that there aren’t any movie stars anymore. But people rarely bring this up as a possible reason—older movie stars not wanting to give up on those roles.

This creates a vicious cycle, as young men who didn’t get mentored, and therefore took longer to get where they wanted to go, feel behind, and want to get the benefits when they’re old that they feel they were robbed of when they were young. I can relate to some of this, as I got a later start on many aspects of life compared to my peers, so I feel a reluctance to pass the baton. But that just means I continue the cycle of closing out the next generation who never get their chance.

It isn’t clear how we solve this. When it comes to competition between the old and the young, one important answer is figuring out a way for stepping away from the role of CEO or leading man to feel less like a demotion for those who step down. Another is repairing a culture of marriage. The Brad Pitts of the world don’t need status as much if they are still married to their spouses. When it comes to friendship, a good starting point is to simply acknowledge that the solutions for male friendship are going to be different from women’s. Then we can try a bunch of things and see what sticks.

For all of the celebration of male friendship and bonding in F1, it ironically ends rather sadly in that regard. (Spoilers) Sonny leaves the new friends and teammates and relationships he’s formed to go off on the road again. He wants to keep chasing the high that comes with being the lone wolf, rather than a respected member of a community. In many ways, we’ve created a culture that creates many Sonnys. And it’s incumbent on us to figure out a way to bring them back.

Whenever a movie resonates deeply, it means it’s saying something deeply—at least partly—true. F1 speaks to the reality of male competition, both at its best and its worst. It remains to be seen if we as a culture will be able to deal with the problems it addresses, or be consumed by them.