You might think car racing films are all the same. The main character is a driver with a tragic backstory or an attitude problem (or both), and he needs to move on or grow up (or both). But, just like no two murder mysteries are really the same, the details make each car racing story different.
For example, what makes The Love Bug special is that the eponymous Volkswagen beetle is sentient and can drive by itself.
What makes Speed Racer special is that it’s about an honest underdog fighting a dishonest system.
What makes Death Race special is the stakes: prisoners enter car races to win their freedom—or die trying.
What makes F1: The Movie special is that the main character, driver Sonny Hayes, “the best that never was,” doesn’t care about being in the spotlight. Eventually the story reveals why that is, and transforms this detachment from a weakness into a strength. Meanwhile, the audacious stuff he does is absolutely hilarious, albeit unrealistic.
See below for a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.
Beat sheet plot summary of F1: The Movie (2025)
Opening Image
Sonny is living in an old van.
Setup
Sonny is working as a replacement driver in a 24-hour race at Daytona. During the night, when the fans are not watching anymore, he helps the team move several positions up, into first place. Fireworks explode overhead for some reason. In the morning, he tells the next driver who takes over: “If you lose the lead, I’ll kill you.” The team wins, but now, strangely, Sonny doesn’t seem to care. He refuses to stick around and join the team permanently, or even celebrate.
Catalyst
Sonny is approached at a laundromat by Reuben, an old friend, who wants to hire him onto his F1 racing team. Sonny had been a promising F1 driver in his youth, but never won. (He was in some sort of accident.)
Debate / Theme Stated
Over a meal at a diner, Reuben offers Sonny the chance to finally be the best in the world. Sonny tells Reuben no, and Reuben leaves. But then he asks the waitress, “What would you do if a friend made you an offer that was too good to be true?” She says, “How much money are we talking?” He says, “It’s not about the money.” She asks, “Then what is it about?” Hm. Maybe he really does want to be the best in the world.
Break Into Two
Joshua Pearce is practicing driving an F1 car on the track, with the technical team monitoring a lot of stats on glossy computer screens. He makes mistakes and can’t make the target time, maybe due to a fault in the car, or himself, or both. Sonny shows up. He is replacement candidate number 9 or 10. Nobody wants him there except Reuben, especially “JP”, which is what Sonny decides to call Joshua, against his wishes. (“It’s a nickname. You don’t get to decide.”) Sonny says he’ll beat JP’s time, or he’ll leave. They let him drive the car, even though he hasn’t been in an F1 car in a while and the tech has changed. He starts off too slow, and he kinda wrecks the car crossing the finish line. But he beats JP’s time, so they let him join the team. The car engineer, Kate, is grudgingly impressed. “It’s a start,” he says. He describes the specific shortcomings of the car, which JP was unable to do.
B Story / Fun and Games
There’s a press conference where Sonny gives one-word responses to unkind questions about his past and JP jokes about “second chances for the elderly” (his mom later makes him apologize).
In his first race, Sonny pulls a weird trick: he sits at the starting line claiming he has “power problems” when the race begins. This ironically gives the team an advantage, but they lose the advantage when other things go wrong.
In the second race, Sonny pulls another trick, ensuring that the team, which started last, places in the top 10 so that they won’t lose their funding right away. JP cavorts for the media, hoping that exposure and followers will garner him a more stable employer and higher income, but Sonny says that there’s nothing to celebrate, and that anyway the media is just “noise”.
JP trains using all sorts of technological aids, including a treadmill with electrodes and a simulator with a 360-degree screen. Sonny’s training is old-school: he goes running outdoors, does planks, push-ups, and pull-ups, bounces balls—and sits in tubs of ice water for some reason.
Sonny meets Kate for beer. Kate says Reuben warned her not to let him flirt with her. But she won’t let him flirt with her anyway because she thinks he’s an arrogant screw-up who doesn’t know how to be a team player. Sonny visits her wind tunnel lab and says he wants a car design that can handle chaotic airflow created by other cars, and, although it takes some additional convincing, she finally makes one.
The team uses the new car design and some aggressive strategies to “combat” the other teams. It’s a lot of fun to watch Sonny blocking other cars, or even deliberately crashing into them. He doesn’t say what he intends to do out loud, he just acts. The race announcer describes the results.
Midpoint
Sonny gives JP the opportunity to get ahead of a key opponent. However, JP doesn’t listen to his advice about the right time to overtake this opponent, and literally crashes and burns. Sonny pulls him out of the wreck, but JP’s hands are damaged and he needs time to recover before he can drive again. JP’s mother blames Sonny and threatens him with dire consequences if anything else happens to her boy.
Bad Guys Close In
While JP recovers, Sonny’s combative driving tactics make him famous. Fans are waving huge posters of his face. When JP returns, understandably jealous, he clashes with Sonny on the track, hurting their team’s chances for the season—among other things. Sonny says it’s stupid for him to risk his entire career when his career is just getting started.
Kate invites Sonny and JP out for drinks. She insists they play poker with the deck of cards that Sonny always carries and the glass beads from the bar’s table decoration. As part of the game, she makes Sonny and JP discuss their own weaknesses and each other’s, but they don’t really reconcile. Sonny, somewhat more of a team player now, lets JP think he won the poker game. JP goes off to a club to engage in marketing and promotion, but he’s deeply unhappy. Meanwhile, Sonny and Kate hook up. Clearly, her opinion of him has improved.
Looking out at the night skyline from the hotel balcony, Kate says she became an engineer to prove to several men in her past that they were wrong about her lack of sufficient technical skill, but she won’t have succeeded until the team actually wins. Sonny tells her that he loves driving because of the blissful, quiet flow state he sometimes achieves when he’s driving. All the driving gigs he’s done, he’s been in search of this flow. [This is really the Dark Night of the Soul insight.]
Reuben comes looking for Sonny. He’s just heard that their car design has been disapproved because Kate supposedly made unauthorized modifications. It’s a BS accusation, but it will prevent the team from racing with the improved airflow device that gives them an edge. So they have to drive with the old inferior design.
All Is Lost / Dark Night of the Soul
At the next race, distracted by the kerfuffle over the “unauthorized” car design, Sonny forgets to put a random lucky playing card into his pocket like he usually does. He crashes and is injured. Reuben visits Sonny in the hospital and reads out a dire medical report. But it’s not the current prognosis, it’s the prognosis from Sonny’s crash 30 years ago. With those injuries, Sonny should never have been allowed to drive again. And he certainly can’t be allowed to finish the race series now.
Break Into Three
It’s morning and Sonny is leaving. If he can’t drive for Reuben, he’ll find someone he can drive for. He’s intercepted by the investor he met at the first race. The investor says he’s going to buy out the (now obviously failed) team and wants to hire Sonny—not as a driver, of course, but to run the team. He admits that he thought Sonny would make the team lose faster and enable a buyout sooner. Sonny suddenly realizes, it was this guy who sneakily blocked the team from using the improved car design, because all along he wanted the team to fail. Sonny doesn’t give any reply about the offer, but a leadership role that excludes the possibility of racing is obviously a crap offer from his point of view: all he wants to do is drive.
JP spends time in the simulator reliving the race in which he crashed and injured his hands. If he tries to overtake early, he crashes in the simulation, just as he did in real life. But if he waits, which is what Sonny wanted him to do, he wins. He realizes that he caused his own crash by not listening to the voice of experience, and tells his mother that the crash wasn’t Sonny’s fault. He tells his agent that he’s not interested in media, marketing, and promotion any more; he’s going to focus on driving.
Finale
Sonny shows up at the track and convinces Reuben to let him drive again, in part by brandishing a “totally legit liability waiver written by a totally legit Tijuana lawyer” and in part by saying, “I’ll be happy if driving this car is the last thing I do.” Luckily, the car design has been un-disapproved by the relevant authorities. The investor sees Sonny about to get into the car. Sonny sees him and uses his phone to text him an offensive gesture.
Because of the old accident and the recent accident, Sonny’s head is ringing and his vision is blurry, but this turns out not to matter. JP and Sonny successfully work as a team and manage to pass all their competitors except one, while the investor watches in horror. Sonny again positions JP to win, but JP collides with the rival—I think intentionally, but even if it was unintentional, he’s cool with Sonny taking first place, because, as Sonny pointed out, he’s still got a promising career ahead of him, and he’s now taking it seriously. So Sonny zooms into first position, gets into his quiet zone, and finishes the last lap, winning the race and saving Reuben’s team. Again, fireworks explode. On the podium, he asks for the trophy to be given to Reuben. It wasn’t being the best in the world that mattered, it was that feeling of flow.
Conclusion
Joshua turns down an offer to change teams. Sonny parts on good terms with Kate, and, separately, with Reuben.
Closing Image
In response to a classified ad in the paper, Sonny drives his van to a beach in Mexico. He tells the guys there he heard they were looking for a driver. They say they can’t pay much. He says, “It’s not about the money.” They say, “What is it about then?” Then we see him driving a dune buggy, having the time of his life.
(Here’s another detailed summary of F1: The Movie. It has more names of people and places, and interprets the characters’ motivation differently.)
