Former F1 TV presenter and regular talking head on Netflix’s Drive to Survive Will Buxton has joked about becoming a meme thanks to the popular docuseries.
Drive to Survive, which was first released in 2019, has been huge for the popularity of the championship, especially with a younger and more female audience and in the United States.
In addition to offering fans a behind-the-scenes look at Formula 1, it gives clear explanations of different situations, which has sometimes left Buxton at the butt of online jokes for his somewhat obvious statements.
“So there is this misconception that I either write my lines or I have a script,” Buxton explained on the Up To Speed podcast. “I do like six, seven, eight sittings through the year. Each one’s five hours long. If I was that bad at reading a script, they would have got rid of me by now and got someone else in who could do it in one sitting.
“No, they just ask me questions for five hours and I fire the immediate responses. And the reason it takes so long for the answers to come out is because it’s just the cogs in my brain turning at a very slow rate of what do I want to say? How can I get myself in the minimum amount of trouble possible? But make it kind of understandable.”
Addressing the memes that have flooded social media since the release of Drive to Survive, the Briton added: “The memes thing is really funny because my eldest daughter’s 16 now and I think last year at some point I’d said something really obvious in the car and she was just like, ‘Oh god, dad, you’re such a meme.’ I love leaning into that.
Alex Palou and Will Buxton, Presenter
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
“I first started in this sport as a print journalist, right? I wanted to be a serious writer like David Tremayne and Nigel Roebuck and those great guys that I grew up reading their race reports, and I started as a print journalist and I was breaking stories.
“I was like ‘yes this work is important’ and then I went into television where journalism goes to die,” he laughed, before joking: “And then I went on Drive to Survive and now I’m just a joke.”
“I don’t mind, it’s fine, it’s all good fun.”
The eighth season of Drive to Survive was released on Netflix on 27 February, covering the on and off-track events of the 2025 F1 season.
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