The movie's audio teams worked together to make sure it sounded as speedy as it looked. Sound quality: The F1 team shares inside track on complex race sequence The movie's audio teams worked together to make sure it sounded as speedy as it looked. By Sarah Rodman Sarah Rodman is the Entertainment Editor, covering TV and music for EW. EW's editorial guidelines December 4, 2025 12:00 p.m. ET Leave a Comment :maxbytes(150000):stripicc()/bradpittf1movie12042513c36f95d106249d3b00e411c21034920.jpg) Brad Pitt in the driver's seat in 'F1: The Movie'.

The movie's audio teams worked together to make sure it sounded as speedy as it looked.

Sound quality: The F1 team shares inside track on complex race sequence

The movie's audio teams worked together to make sure it sounded as speedy as it looked.

By Sarah Rodman

Sarah Rodman is the Entertainment Editor, covering TV and music for EW.

EW's editorial guidelines

December 4, 2025 12:00 p.m. ET

Leave a Comment

Brad Pitt in the driver's seat in 'F1: The Movie'. Credit:

Apple Original Films

The first race in *F1: The Movie*, at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, results in a spectacular double crash that illustrates just how disastrously things can go when you don't work together.

Conversely, creating that sequence was a master class in teamwork from every department on the film.

When you focus strictly on the sound in this interlude, the sheer quantity of variables is dizzying.

"It's a sound designer's dream — or nightmare — with the number of elements that you're trying to balance in that moment," director Joseph Kosinski (*Top Gun: Maverick*) tells **. "You're getting the announcers helping guide you through what's happening. You're hearing both [Brad Pitt's] Sonny and [Damson Idris'] Joshua talk in their cars. You've got dialogue at the pit wall. You've got the screaming engine of the cars. And then you've got Stephen Mirrione's rapid-fire editing, which is literally cutting between all these perspectives twice a second."

To calibrate *F1* just right, Kosinski called in his top guns. "This is the team from *Maverick* taking it all to the next level," he says.

There were varying degrees of fandom among the crew that EW surveyed.

Re-recording mixer Juan Peralta was at the top of the leaderboard, having been a fan for 30 years. "I watch it religiously," he says. "I have books!"

Many of the others, including supervising sound editor Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, re-recording mixer Gary Rizzo, and production sound mixer Gareth John, received a crash course when they signed on. And all of them were either already in deep or had become enamored of Netflix's *Drive to Survive*. They came out the other side of the nearly three-year production as converts.

"Now that we've done what we've done," says supervising sound editor Al Nelson, "I can't miss a weekend."

The individual teams worked both concurrently and subsequently on *F1*.

John and his team are at the top of the funnel, on set capturing a huge swath of sounds in real time. "We were going to the tracks and capturing audio at live F1 races, which was super challenging," he says. "Myself and my [boom microphone operators] and assistants start the process, and then I give all my work to the dream team here to run with it and do their magic."

Brad Pitt doesn't 'think we could have done' 'F1' without star driver Lewis Hamilton

A Brad Pitt fan rushed the 'F1' set for a photo with the actor, interrupting filming

Nelson and Whittle are next up. "We inherit what Gareth's team captures and are constantly reviewing the cut and then putting it together," says Nelson. Whether it's as quiet as footsteps or breaths or as loud as screeching tires and crashing carbon fiber, "every single sound you hear in the film has gone through us."

Rizzo and Peralta then take over, in collaboration with Nelson and Whittle — all of whom work at Skywalker Sound — to manage the dynamics so, for instance, the actor's voices sound right over the roar of the engines.

"It's really the four of us putting our heads together in the room at the same time," says Rizzo. "And working with Joe and Stephen to make sure that it plays with the right amount of impact and magnitude, and that we're telling the right story."

In this particular scene at Silverstone, seen above, it's a very *busy* story and the teams are attending to hundreds of details from the Wendy house (portable buildings where engineering and technical teams monitor various aspects of vehicle performance during races). In the space of a few minutes, the viewer is whipsawed between the whir of a pit crew member's wheel gun and the exuberant announcers to the crowd doing the wave and to the drivers speaking on helmet microphones.

'F1: The Movie'.

Apple Original Films

"We just tried to record everything as well and hot as we could, knowing that it had to compete with the cars and everything else that was going to end up in the final mix," says John of sounds as varied as crowd noise and car crashes.

At this point, Whittle explains, Mirrione is making his pick of takes so she and Nelson have the proper corresponding audio tracks.

"We take those and we can expand it out, so we can hear all the different mics — Brad and Idris, the Wendy house — and we go through and make sure everything is as clear as possible," Whittle says. "If there's something that we just can't fix through all our cleanup tools, we do ADR, which is where they go and record the actors again. One thing that's great about this film is that it's such an international sport. Almost everyone was allowed to use their own accents."

One place that ADR was key, in this scene and the film as a whole, was the sound of the cars: "We use Gareth's stuff as reference for the cars because they were F2 cars, which sound very different from F1 cars," says Whittle.

The entire crew marvels at how instrumental producer and Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton was in making sure everything sounded authentic, even offering to let them record him during a practice lap.

"He said, 'I'll tell you what: At the next race, I'm going to pull up to the grid and I'm going to wait for everybody else to leave. And then I'm going to pull away and go through the gears.' And, he did it!," says a still grateful Nelson.

'F1' star Brad Pitt and producer Lewis Hamilton.

Apple Original Films

Rizzo and Peralta then work to make sure the audience is placed where they need to be, that the crowd noise is at the right distance, the announcers at the proper volume, the crank of the jack is pitched right with all the competing sounds in the pit, and on and on. As Kosinski veterans, "We've learned what he likes," Peralta says. "To be honest, this film did not feel laborious. I felt like we were always in sync with each other through the process and it made the work really fun."

Even in this conversation, the team members exude that sense of joy and graciousness. To a one, they said they had a ball — even in the most complicated and pressurized moments — and are raring to work together and with Kosinski again.

***Check out more from EW's *The Awardist*, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year's best in TV, movies, and more.***

"It really helps that everyone that we happen to work with, luckily, are very, very good at their jobs," says Whittle, who calls working on *F1* "unusually lovely" because the co-workers were "invested in what they're doing as well as the film as a whole. No one is trying to be a shining star. Everyone was ridiculously supportive."

"It was a seven-week mix, one of the longest mixes I've ever done," says Kosinski. "It was definitely the most complicated because we knew that seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton was going to be reviewing every cut of the sound, making sure the cars sounded like they were in the right gear for the corners they were turning. It was a level of detail that we've never had to do before. They're the best there is, and they really delivered here."**

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Published: December 05, 2025 at 08:38AM on Source: ANDY MAG

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