Netflix Drops Trailer For Latest Season Of 'Formula 1: Drive To Survive"; Here Are The Storylines To Look For

All 10 Formula 1 teams will have their newest cars on track Wednesday in Bahrain as testing for the 2024 season gets underway.

Pre-season testing is always an exciting time to be an F1 fan, but it also means it's time to take a look back at the previous season with the release of another edition of Netflix's docu-series Formula 1: Drive To Survive, which premieres on Friday, February 23.

While Drive To Survive has served as the gateway drug for a lot of fans in recent years — and kicked off a slew of other docu-series for other sports — it has proved controversial.

Some — including reigning champion Max Verstappen, who sat out of the series for an entire season — believe that the show overcooks some of the drama that F1 generates.

That is undeniably true, so it's important to take everything you see with a grain of salt.

Still, the show offers behind-the-scenes access that you can't find anywhere else.

So, with all of that in mind, here is what's in store for season 6:

What's always funny to me about series like Drive To Survive is that while they occasionally offer some surprises, nothing that happens on track will shock you if you followed the season as it happened. 

However, that doesn't mean that there aren't storylines that will be fun to watch, especially looking back on it knowing what we know now.

Here are a few of those.

The Winding Down Of Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton Era

The biggest piece of news this offseason is that Lewis Hamilton will move from Mercedes to Ferrari in 2025.

Now that we know this, watching how Mercedes and Hamilton dealt with a sometimes difficult 2023 will be arguably the most fascinating part of the entire season.

There's a part in the trailer where Lewis says to someone (probably Toto, but remember editing — especially in a trailer — can be deceiving) that while they can be with Mercedes in 20 years, he can't.

Well, at least not as a driver.

So, it seems that we'll get some insight into some of Hamilton's frustrations with Mercedes' last two cars ever since the 2022 regulations overhaul, the W13 and W14.

Hamilton wasn't shy about voicing his frustrations with the team's development direction, and Mercedes even called a mid-season audible, making big changes to their original "zero sidepod" concept.

I think this is going to be the most interesting part of this season of DTS, and it has been made all the juicier over the last month.

Daniel Ricciardo's surprise return to the Formula 1 grid — and his return to form — will be a big story on this season of Drive To Survive. (Photo by Joe Portlock/Getty Images)

The AlphaTauri-Red Bull Driver Saga

Despite how dominant Red Bull was there was a lot of drama in 2023 surrounding their driver lineups.

It seems like every season involves Sergio Perez fighting for his seat alongside Verstappen, but that got taken up a notch in 2023 thanks to what happened down the pitlane at Red Bull's second team, AlphaTaruri (now clunkily known as Visa Cash App RB).

It started with the team bringing ex-Formula E champ Nyck de Vries into the fold alongside Yuki Tsunoda. De Vries' tenure went poorly, to say the least, with the Dutchman being booted from the team before the summer break and replaced by then-Red Bull reserve driver Daniel Ricciardo.

Just a couple of races into his return, Ricciardo broke his arm in a crash at Zandvoort and was replaced by Red Bull Junior team product Liam Lawson.

Lawson impressed during his return, and when Ricciardo got back in the car, he did as well.

This led to questions about internal challenges to Perez's seat. There's even a clip in there of Christian Horner remarking that someone (likely Ricciardo) had done a lap that would put him on the grid alongside Verstappen, something that Perez struggled with for most of the season.

It all sounds vaguely Shakespearean, and the internal battle for the Red Bull seat (which oddly enough might end up going to Williams' Alex Albon) will be fascinating.

The Rise And Fall Of Aston Martin, The Slow Start And Rise of McLaren 

McLaren and Aston Martin had seasons that trended in completely opposite directions which led to a late-season battle between the teams. (Photo by Dan Istitene - Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images)

Rise of McLaren

Aston Martin will be heavily featured this season as we could tell from the trailer and so will McLaren. That's great because those two teams had some of the most interesting seasons on the grid which were almost the exact inverse of each other.

It started in testing last year, when Aston Martin showed up with a car that showed shocking speed. Even at the first race (which Lance Stroll completed with broken wrists), the team had without a doubt, the second-fastest car on the grid, as evidenced by a string of podiums for Fernando Alonso.

The opposite was true for McLaren who struggled at the back of the field from testing through the first few races.

Then over the summer it completely flip-flopped…

McLaren suddenly had a car that was fighting for podiums almost every weekend, while the Astons sometimes struggled to score. This led to a late-season battle for P4 in the constructors' standings that was ultimately won by McLaren.

This will be a doozy to watch play out this season for sure.

The Las Vegas Grand Prix

The Las Vegas Grand Prix would have been one of the biggest storylines this season of DTS, even if the weekend and the race were boring duds, which, of course, they were not.

Vegas' return to the calendar proved to be one of the wildest weekends of the year, with Ferrari's Carlos Sainz clobbering a drain, ruining his car, delaying the first night of practice, and causing Sainz to need a new power unit which put him above his allotment for the season.

This led to a highly controversial grid penalty for Sainz, and more importantly, Ferrari, which was locked in a tight battle with Mercedes for P2 in the Constructors' standings. Eight of the nine other teams wanted to overlook the penalty due to — to quote Steve Buscemi in Fargo — "circumstances, Jerry... force majeure, acts of God."

Mercedes was the lone hold — take a wild guess as to why — and hopefully Netflix cameras were on hand to capture some of this F1 politicking as it happened.

The off-track happenings aside, Las Vegas' new street circuit provided one of the best, most exciting races we saw all season. That should make for some interesting fodder too.