Photos courtesy of Apple
There I am, parked on a barstool at a hotel bar, sipping a beer and piecing together a story on the Porsche 963 ahead of the Rolex 24 at Daytona. It’s a moment of quiet before the storm of an entire day’s worth of racing action – when into my orbit strolls an executive producer of F1: The Movie, flanked by two men who look like they belong on the grid. As it turns out, they do – at least when Brad Pitt and Damson Idris aren’t in the frame – because this pair are their stunt doubles.
“Fancy some beers, lads?”
Meet Luciano Bacheta and Craig Dolby, two ex-professional racers turned stunt drivers who, in a twist more cinematic than scripted, are also responsible for teaching Pitt and Idris how to drive convincingly for the camera for the fictional race team APXGP. They’re not just stuntmen – they’re sequence orchestrators, character consultants, driver coaches, and the backbone of the racing authenticity that director Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick, pictured below) and executive producer/consultant Lewis Hamilton (seven-time F1 World Champion) demanded.
On this day, production had just wrapped filming the movie’s opening sequence, where Pitt’s character Sonny Hayes emerges from his motorhome and strides over to his Porsche 911 GT3 R to relieve none other than real-life sportscar hero Patrick Long. In typical Hollywood fashion, the Daytona action scenes were filmed before and after the actual 2024 Rolex 24, which means the stunt drivers have a couple of days of downtime as the race happened. For me, it was the start of an unexpected deep dive into the true motorsport spirit behind this high-octane cinematic effort.
Bacheta actually plays APXGP’s third driver Luca Cortez in the film (although, sadly, he doesn’t get a single line!) as well being the film’s Lead Sequence Choreographer. His stuntman filmography speaks volumes: Mission Impossible, The Mummy, Transformers, Men in Black, Indiana Jones, Spider-Man, and – apparently never to be seen – Batgirl. But perhaps his most improbable credit? “Stunt double: Samuel L. Jackson” in Spider-Man: Far From Home. How cool is that?
But, back in the day, I knew him as Luciano Bacheta, Formula 2 champion. Born in Essex, UK, to Indian parents, ‘Luch’ was an ace in karting, Ginetta Juniors and T Cars, before switching to open-wheel racing in Formula Palmer Audi and European Formula Renault. But after claiming the F2 title in impressive style in 2012, his racing career fizzled out and he quit the sport at the age of 26 to become a stunt driver – which sounds like a movie script all in itself!
His fellow driver-coach and co-choreographer, Craig Dolby, has a racing résumé that could itself be a movie. After scrapping through underfunded junior formulas, he landed in Superleague Formula, an oddball but awesome mashup of soccer teams and 750-horsepower V12 open-wheel race cars branded as ‘The Beautiful Race: Football at 300 km/h’ and boasting a €1 million prize money pot per race weekend.
Selected by Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur (pictured above), he made a name for himself as the fastest and most fearless showman on the grid – always leaving his pit box with the rear tires already lit and on full opposite lock. You spotted that in the film, right? Hailing from Melton Mobray, in the UK’s midlands, Craig was just shaded for the championship in 2009 and ’10. As well as being a fun bloke to be around, he was also by far the championship’s most entertaining drivers to watch in a field that included ex-F1 drivers Sebastien Bourdais, Antonio Pizzonia and Robert Doornbos.
I watched the film keenly to try and spot the scenes when Craig and Luciano were driving, as opposed to Brad and Damson. And, when I spoke to the guys, the news had recently broken that a lot of the filming already in the can was being binned, due to the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strike that had delayed filming – and sent them into another F1 season across an eventual 18 months at a cost of over $200 million.
After super-famous producer Jerry Bruckheimer realised that the cars changed their liveries from season to season, I think I’m right in saying that the only footage used from 2023 was the British Grand Prix, just before the strikes began, when Bacheta and Dolby got to take the real-life formation lap – and both were sorely tempted to take the start proper! But, wisely, they did not… Which allowed them to return the following year, when the actors also did some driving in front of the raceday crowd, as well as those cool scenes where they walked to the grid alongside the likes of Max Verstappen and Carlos Sainz.
The key to the film’s success (it had taken over $310 million at the box office at the time of writing) was that ace director Joseph Kosinski managed to further shrink the miniature IMAX-certified cameras that he’d used in Top Gun: Maverick to film actors Pitt and Idris so you could see their faces as they drove the cars for real. The rather amusing brief for Bacheta’s coaching role was simply “Don’t kill Brad Pitt!” – and the strikes allowed both actors to get a lot more track time than originally planned, which you could say expanded their range.
So, what were the actors like as student racing drivers? They were trained up at various circuits over a period in F4 and F3 cars to begin with, to literally get them up to speed. I’m told that Pitt was truly excellent, a great listener who soaked up their coaching like a sponge and built his speed up to the limit that his insurers allowed him to drive at (they were later convinced to drop this, as the F2 car required its highest speeds to generate sufficient downforce at a high-speed sequence like Eau Rouge).
Idris, on the other hand, was the opposite; he tended to drive the car immediately like he’d stolen it, and was constantly being told to slow down! He showed enough natural speed that he could’ve been a racer, if he’d had the sufficient seat time in karting, and the millions of dollars required for a junior open-wheel career.
This was in stark contrast to when Bacheta and Dolby were behind the wheel, as Kosinski’s direction after each take was basically “I loved it, now do it again faster, and hit him harder”. The GT car scenes filmed at Daytona, where Dolby is playing Hayes in the Porsche, and Bacheta is driving a Turner BMW M4, got particularly lairy. The diveplanes that fly off as they banged wheels on the backstretch was not CGI, and add into the equation that Pat Long (who did get lines in the movie!) was driving a Lola B2K/10 prototype in among them as the camera car, getting those amazing up-close shots as brake rotors glowed, sparks flew and Bacheta eventually goes spinning off into the grass at the Le Mans Chicane!
They tell me another version of that scene involved them bump-drafting through the chicane, their cars connected nose-to-tail, with Bacheta shouting over the radio when he would brake, so Dolby didn’t fire him off at over 150mph! It’s fair to say they had plenty of ‘war stories’ that included contact between them in the open-wheel cars at Silverstone that led to one asking “I didn’t kill him just then, did I?” as the other spun off towards the crash barrier…
But that’s what made the movie a must-watch for me. Yes, it’s basically Top Gun with F1 cars, with a typically overblown Hollywood plot, and the only way that it hit the spot was for the action scenes to be tremendous. And that’s where Bacheta, Dolby, Long, Kosinski – as well as Pitt and Idris – must receive huge praise for making it happen to deliver the close-up thrills. But one thing to bear in mind was that Pitt and Idris were never on track together during filming, so whenever it was wheel-to-wheel between them in the film, that was Craig/Luch – with Kosinski in their ears on the radio, urging them to go wild!
What I also loved about this was seeing two old racing friends enjoy the time of their lives. Imagine the buzz of receiving text messages from Brad Pitt – asking how to behave around the mechanics, to play his scenes convincingly as a pro driver – while planning his driving scenes, being the center of attention for a $200 million movie, and getting to watch yourself drive on the silver screen. Even I got a call, from the Executive Producer a good few months later, asking if I thought a particular track was suitable for the actors to use as a ‘warm-up’ their driving skills ahead of the 2024 Las Vegas GP – talk about the tiniest of bit parts!
For the casual fans, F1: The Movie delivers spectacle. But for motorsport purists, there’s a deeper satisfaction in knowing the behind-the-scenes effort that went into each frame of wheel-to-wheel action. The movie hits different when you know the names of the real drivers behind the helmets – and when you know they could’ve been racing in F1 for real had breaks fallen their way.
Another welcome consequence was both Craig and Luch getting to have massive amounts of seat time in a pseudo-Formula 1 car, and both admitted they were now far better drivers themselves than they ever were when they were chasing that F1 dream. In a way, they got to achieve it – especially with that emotional real-life formation lap at Silverstone in their home Grand Prix.
Ahhhhh, if only they’d taken the start…
