Damson Idris’s introduction to Formula 1 followed the kind of path that will feel familiar to a generation of fans who discovered the sport through a screen rather than a grandstand. He played the F1 video game with his brothers, accumulated a casual interest and might have stayed there if a Hungarian Grand Prix in 2018 had not done what live motorsport tends to do to people who experience it for the first time. He went to the race, watched Lewis Hamilton win and left, by his own description, hooked for life.
Four years later, he was cast in F1 The Movie alongside Brad Pitt. Now, Idris has been named Formula 1’s newest global ambassador a role that makes formal what the film made organic, and positions the British actor at the intersection of entertainment, fashion and one of sport’s fastest-growing cultural movements.
What making the film actually demanded
The audition process for F1 The Movie was unlike anything in Idris’s previous acting experience. Before he could demonstrate whether he could play a rookie driver, he had to demonstrate whether he could actually drive. He was placed in various cars, including an F3000 and a JP LM two seater, and assessed on his driving ability and drift work. Only once he cleared that threshold did the more conventional acting workshop with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Joseph Kosinski and casting director Lucy Bevan take place.
What followed was a five-month intensive training program that took Idris from Rockingham to Silverstone, Budapest and eventually Circuit of the Americas in Texas where he describes feeling genuinely one with the car for the first time, a moment he adds was perhaps to his own detriment. The training escalated gradually, building from foundational skills to the kind of high-speed work that allowed both Idris and Pitt to perform their own driving scenes in front of live race crowds.
The physical transformation was equally demanding. Idris began the project at approximately 85 kilograms and finished it at 77 a reduction he describes with the dry humor of someone who earned every pound lost and immediately reclaimed them once filming wrapped. He binged Drive to Survive to absorb the culture of the sport, drove privately in California, did extensive simulator work and adjusted his eating habits to match those of a competitive driver. The preparation was total.
What the sport revealed that the fan never saw
The dimension of F1 that the film opened up for Idris was not the speed or the technology it was the collective human effort behind every lap. As a fan, he had focused on the drivers. As someone embedded in the world of the sport, he came to understand the full scope of what it takes to put a car on the grid, keep it competitive through a race and bring it home in one piece.
Hamilton, who co-produced the film, was particularly instrumental in shaping Idris’s understanding of the mental state required to compete at the highest level. George Russell visited the Budapest set, and a casual reassurance he offered Idris after a spin at Turn 2 became one of the actor’s most vivid memories from the entire project. The drivers’ willingness to invest time and perspective into the film gave Idris access to the interior experience of the sport in a way no amount of viewing could replicate.
The ambassador role and what Idris wants to build with it
His first project as F1’s global ambassador was the All to Drive For campaign video, featuring Idris alongside current drivers. The alignment, as he frames it, required no engineering it emerged naturally from the combination of the film he made, his genuine ongoing passion for the sport and his presence at the intersection of entertainment, fashion and culture that F1 has been actively cultivating.
The role Idris sees for himself in the sport’s continued growth is specific. He identifies regions the United States, Africa and other markets where F1 is still building its audience as places where his visibility and credibility across entertainment and culture give him a useful bridging function. F1 is already enormous in Europe. The next phase of its expansion depends on reaching audiences in places where the sport remains a growth story, and Idris believes his particular combination of authenticity and platform makes him a credible voice in that effort.
A sport at a cultural reinvention point
Idris frames the moment F1 finds itself in as something comparable to the transformations that reshaped the NFL, the NBA and global soccer periods when the sport’s core product remained the priority while the cultural footprint around it expanded dramatically. The drivers were always stars, he argues, but the scale of that stardom has reached a different level in recent years, driven in part by media properties like Drive to Survive and now a major Hollywood film with four Oscar nominations.
What Idris hopes to contribute to that evolution is inclusion the sense that F1 is a sport for people of all backgrounds and ages, not a closed culture requiring specific credentials to enter. The video game his brothers played together years ago was a small version of that accessibility. The global ambassador role he now holds is, in his mind, a continuation of the same impulse: finding the people who have not yet found the sport and building the bridge that gets them there.
