‘Top Gun’ on wheels: Inside the high-octane race to create the sound of ‘F1’

They called it "Top Gun on wheels."

That's because the aim of F1: The Movie, the Formula 1 racing film directed by Joseph Kosinski, was to provide the same kind of high-octane speed and intensity as the high-flying Maverick sequel.

“Everything is very fast,” supervising sound editor Al Nelson tells Gold Derby. “But I think one of the other things that intrigued Joe was that you're not only competing with the other teams at Mercedes, Ferrari, and Red Bull, but within each team you have two drivers who are competing against each other, which is what our film focuses on.” Nelson, an Oscar winner for sound for Maverick, was part of a sound team that included supervising sound editor Gwen Whittle, re-recording mixers Juan Peralta and Gary Rizzo, and production sound mixer Gareth John.

You've got Brad Pitt's hotheaded has-been, Sonny, who doesn't want to give up the position to Damson Idris' Joshua, the cocky rookie. “If you're in F1, you want to be the fastest and the best racer in the world, and so does your teammate,” adds Nelson. “And so there's some challenge and infighting going on.”

Formula 1 is considered the biggest and loudest racing spectacle: a global sport that shuttles its drivers week after week to 24 races in 21 countries across five continents. And each location has its own flavor, whether it's the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, the Temple of Speed at Monza, the Suzuki circuit for the Japanese Grand Prix, Las Vegas, or the finale at Abu Dhabi.

However, unlike the sound for every other film, this one amounted to controlled chaos, as the crew embedded itself in the 2024 F1 racing circuit. They captured the actual sounds of the real cars on every live track, alongside the energetic pit crews and dedicated crowds, ready to improvise at all times.

“In a Formula 1 car, you're fairly contained, it's like a little cocoon,” sound mixer John tells Gold Derby. “They actually mold the seat to your body. But F1 is obsessively concerned with weight to keep the car efficient and balanced. Everything is very dangerous.”

Yet it made more sense to put Pitt and Idris in F2 cars (specially engineered and built by the Mercedes AMG Formula 1 team), which could be fitted with custom Sony cameras and DPA mics and transmitters. This allowed the actors to race at 200 miles-per-hour on F1 tracks, with the sound team later replacing the F2 recordings with the proper F1 sounds.

“We spent a lot of time capturing the authentic sounds, and when you go from that documentary approach, then you get into the sound design," Nelson explains. "How does it sound if you're a driver? Or how does it sound sitting in front of that big Imax screen being Sonny going 200 miles an hour down the street?"

From there, the team played a lot with augmenting the recordings.

“These are V6 hybrid engines, so they've got a higher, more technical sound to them. They don't have that beefy growl; they're more wound-up," explains Nelson. "But we wanted to eke out of them as much of that power by finding other frequencies and really filling the room with the lower end of it. When they go by, you feel that punch in the gut that you can only get standing there at turn three at Silverstone when the car comes accelerating by. And so we used a lot of additional low end sweeteners. It was kind of the same thing we did on Maverick, where this is what a jet sounds like. This is what a Formula 1 car sounds like, and this is what it's like to be there.”

The film evolved based on how the season progressed, with some wild days at the track, and each race was intentionally different. "Silverstone is very much a kind of bare knuckles F1 race and there's no music," Nelson says. “You're in the seat with the [drivers] feeling that race. Then there are more montage-based races. Vegas is more of a muted, angry race, and Abu Dhabi is the big climax, and we wanted to feel like at any moment, with either Joshua or Sonny, everything could be lost."

The key for the team was making sure the audience was always in the passenger seat, along for the breakneck ride. “[Composer] Hans [Zimmer] has just got this pulse going, and we are right there, full throttle," says Nelson. "There are a lot of turns, and on turn five, which is really sharp and tight, there's a lot of bunching up. There's a lot of passing and spin outs, and a lot of drama that we wanted to depict authentically, but with as much energy as possible.”