Brad Pitt has a lesson for Formula 1’s (dumb) green makeover: David Fickling

Key topics:Brad Pitt plays a rugged maverick in F1: The MovieFormula 1 pushes a net-zero goal with questionable methodsSport’s green push is more PR than real emissions reduction.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By David Fickling.Every film star entering their seventh decade knows they’ve reached an age when they have to play to type. If only venerable sports franchises had the same self-awareness.F1: The Movie, the Brad Pitt/Formula 1 crossover currently in cinemas, illustrates this contradiction perfectly. Pitt used to appear as romantic leads, sword-and-sandals heroes, comedy turns and in art-film roles. As he’s aged into his sixties, that range has been boiled down to its original essence, leaving him typecast as a pretty, and increasingly rugged, maverick. Audiences don’t seem to mind. F1: The Movie saw the biggest US opening for a Pitt vehicle since 2013’s World War Z.Formula 1, the sport, is taking a different approach. It wants to broaden its appeal — to younger people, women, and particularly to Americans, who’ve long favored the IndyCar and NASCAR championships instead. That charm offensive has spawned the latest film, as well as a Netflix documentary series now in its seventh season. More absurdly, it’s led Formula 1 into the claim that it’s going to reduce its carbon footprint to net zero by 2030. The latest update came last week. The sport has cut emissions by 26% since 2018, a press release proclaimed, mostly by using sustainable fuels for its cars and transport operations, changing the ways it moves staff around the world, and using renewable energy to power its sites. An accompanying promotional video is full of images of solar panels, race fans on bicycles, and trucks and aircraft powered by zero-carbon fuel. This earnest ambition is ridiculous, for a couple of reasons. Primarily, it’s so light on detail as to be next to meaningless. While Formula 1 boasts about the CO2 it’s saving by using sustainable fuels in race cars, by far the biggest part of the carbon footprint for sporting events comes from all the fuel that’s burned getting fans to the event — and that’s not counted.Meanwhile, the sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, that it’s using to cut its carbon budget isn’t necessarily going into the planes that fly the cars, crew and equipment to the 24 races held each year. Instead, it comes in the form of tradable certificates, stating that somewhere in the world the SAF exists. SAF currently costs three to five times more than traditional jet fuel, and needs to be cost-competitive if it’s to take a bite out of aviation’s carbon footprint. Formula 1’s spending is far too small a share of the total to make much of a difference on that front..Read more:.Formula 1 in SA: The race to get Kyalami back on the calendar.You can justify all these decisions, to be sure, but the choice of metrics puts a thumb on the scales. Whether to count fan travel toward your own carbon footprint is a grey area in most greenhouse reporting standards. Major events like the Olympics and FIFA World Cup declare it, but you can still ignore it and remain within the letter of the regulations. Similarly, there are so many loopholes and dubious assumptions around emission-reduction certificates that the market for carbon credits has been collapsing in recent years. SAF, however, is a frontier industry, where scrutiny tends to be less exacting.Such skirting within the regulations is very much in keeping with the spirit of Formula 1, where mastery of race strategy and the rulebook can often be as decisive of mastery of the track. In F1: The Movie, it’s Pitt’s nerdy ability to deploy safety cars and red flags to his team’s advantage without getting disqualified, rather than his simplistic “drive fast” dictum, that actually determines his success.That just highlights the second problem with the sport’s net-zero drive. Because this is Formula 1, for God’s sake! A sport built from the ground up on the roar of internal combustion engines, the stink of burning gasoline and rubber, and the adrenalin produced when you round a corner at 260 kilometers (161 miles) per hour. The chief sponsor is Saudi Arabian Oil Co., the world’s biggest producer of crude.A more sensible explanation for the current emissions-reduction drive is that the sport has long depended on car manufacturers using it as a test bed for their engine research and development, a pool of money that’s been dwindling as the industry focuses on electric vehicles. The current focus on hybrid drivetrains and alternative fuels isn’t about Formula 1’s own net-zero ambitions, under that theory, but a way of tempting back carmakers like Ford Motor Co. and Honda Motor Co., which have been losing interest as the energy transition accelerates.To the extent Formula 1 will really make it to net zero, it will come from the decline of the sport itself. That doesn’t look like happening any time soon, as my colleague Lara Williams has written: The electric vehicles in the rival Formula E, for all their superior acceleration and top speed, can’t yet match the average pace of a hydrocarbon-powered single seater.In the meantime, an industry that accounts for roughly one two-thousandth of one percent of the world’s fossil fuel emissions should just accept that the fate of climate change won’t be decided by whether Lewis Hamilton is using refined crude or used cooking oil to power his Ferrari.Brad Pitt isn’t going to remain relevant by giving himself a Timothée Chalamet makeover. Formula 1, similarly, should quit pretending it’s part of the climate solution. It’s noisy, smelly, fast and dirty. That’s the whole point..© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

Brad Pitt has a lesson for Formula 1’s (dumb) green makeover: David Fickling

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