The F1 Pit Crew Draft: 7 Movie Characters Getting the Call for Austin
The United States Grand Prix has landed in Austin, so we're assembling a fictional F1 pit crew from seven movie characters on Tubi. Their résumés are unconventional. Trust the process.
You're traveling nearly 200 miles per hour when someone asks you to voluntarily pull over and let a group of people surround your car with power tools. Formula 1 calls this strategy.
A modern F1 pit stop turns controlled chaos into choreography. The car hits its marks, the crew lifts it, four tires come off, four fresh ones go on, and everybody clears the way in the time it takes most of us to realize we've dropped a French fry. One mistake can turn a lightning-fast stop into the longest few seconds of a race fan's life.
The United States Grand Prix has taken over Austin this weekend, which means the teams at Circuit of the Americas have already spent countless hours rehearsing exactly who goes where when a car enters the pit box. Tubi is joining race weekend from the viewing side: our The Fast Lane Returns for the Austin Grand Prix guide breaks down the new watch experience, while The Fast Lane LIVE: Austin lets you jump straight into the action.
The real pit crews have prepared for this moment. We have done none of that. Naturally, we're drafting a crew anyway.
Our only requirement: every recruit has to come from a movie currently streaming on Tubi and give us at least one reason, however generous, to believe they belong anywhere near an F1 pit box. Motorsport qualifications are appreciated. Superpowers will also be considered. Tubi's Sports Stories collection can handle the serious side of competition while we focus on the much more pressing question nobody asked: which movie characters are getting hired for our pit crew?
Seven movies. One pit crew. Lights out and away we go.
Gone in 60 Seconds
Our Pick: Memphis Raines | Pit Role: Crew Coordinator
Every operation needs somebody who can look at an impossible deadline, several moving pieces, and a group of strong personalities without immediately updating their résumé. Memphis Raines understands the assignment.
In Gone in 60 Seconds, Nicolas Cage plays a retired master car thief forced back into the business when his younger brother lands in trouble. Getting him out requires Memphis to assemble a crew and steal 50 high-end cars in a single night, turning Los Angeles into one enormous automotive checklist with very serious consequences for missing the deadline.
The legality is unfortunate. The transferable skills are excellent. Memphis knows cars, understands what different people on his team can do, and has experience keeping a complicated operation moving while the clock becomes increasingly rude about it. Nobody in an F1 pit crew gets to arrive at the car wondering what happens next, which makes the guy who successfully assigns people to 50 stolen vehicles strangely useful here.
Available until
Spider-Man: Homecoming
Our Pick: Peter Parker | Pit Role: Wheel-Gun Operator
Fast hands? We know a guy.
High school is already complicated enough before Tom Holland's Peter Parker starts spending his free time trying to prove he's ready for bigger superhero responsibilities in Spider-Man: Homecoming. His enthusiasm regularly exceeds Tony Stark's willingness to promote him, but Peter's superhuman reflexes, strength, and coordination aren't really up for debate.
Which brings us to the wheel gun. During a pit stop, wheel-gun operators remove and secure the wheel nuts while the tire crews swap the rubber around them. Translation for anyone who doesn't spend Sundays analyzing pit-stop replays: do one extremely important thing with your hands very, very quickly and do not mess it up.
Peter's reflexes make this feel almost unfair. There is one concern. Give a teenage engineering genius access to specialized F1 equipment and he may decide the wheel gun needs “one tiny upgrade” before qualifying. Peter. Put the screwdriver down.
Available until
Bad Boys II
Our Pick: Mike Lowrey | Pit Role: Tire Carrier
The assignment is beautifully simple. Get the tire where it needs to go. Do not create an international incident on the way there.
Miami detectives Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett are investigating an ecstasy operation in Bad Boys II, and the case doesn't exactly remain a quiet police investigation. Car chases, gunfights, explosions, and the kind of property damage that would make an F1 cost-cap accountant physically ill eventually enter the picture. Will Smith's Mike spends most of that chaos moving like someone who has never considered slowing down a particularly attractive option.
Tire carriers need a similar sense of urgency with substantially less collateral damage. When the car stops, fresh rubber has to reach the wheel immediately while the used tire gets cleared from an already crowded workspace. Speed matters. Coordination matters more. Mike has the first one covered. We're working on the second. Marcus would like the record to show that he opposed this entire hiring process.
Available until
65
Our Pick: Mills | Pit Role: Front Jack Operator
The car is coming directly at you. Your job is to stand there. F1 really knows how to write a job description.
A catastrophic spaceflight leaves pilot Mills stranded on what he initially believes is an unfamiliar planet in 65. One surviving passenger gives him somebody else to protect, while discovering they've landed on prehistoric Earth introduces a slightly larger complication: dinosaurs. Adam Driver spends the resulting survival story operating equipment, reacting to threats, and keeping his head while very large things repeatedly approach with bad intentions.
Our front-jack operator has to get directly into position as the F1 car enters its pit box, lift the front end immediately, and clear the way once the stop is complete. Timing and nerve are doing a lot of work there. Mills has already dealt with incoming dinosaurs. An F1 car is at least less likely to eat him.
Available until
The Mechanic
Our Pick: Arthur Bishop | Pit Role: Mechanical Specialist
Yes. We drafted the guy from The Mechanic to handle mechanical problems. Please respect the rigorous scouting process.
Charles Bronson stars as Arthur Bishop in The Mechanic, but his job title isn't quite what our pit crew would hope. Bishop is a veteran mob hitman who has turned killing into an exacting craft, eventually taking the son of a former associate under his wing as an apprentice. Patience, precision, and an obsessive attention to detail keep him alive in a profession where mistakes aren't exactly encouraged.
We're choosing to focus heavily on the transferable skills. Race cars occasionally return to the pits with problems nobody rehearsed for. Damage may need attention, an adjustment may become necessary, or some extremely expensive component can decide this is the perfect moment to stop cooperating.
Bishop is accustomed to studying a problem before acting and staying methodical while the stakes get ugly. Automotive expertise may be missing from the résumé, but at this point our hiring standards have clearly become flexible.
Available until
Ava
Our Pick: Ava | Pit Role: Release Watcher
One wrong call here and the driver could leave their pit box directly into somebody else's path. No pressure.
Ava gives Jessica Chastain a very different high-pressure workplace. Her elite assassin works for a black-ops organization until breaking protocol and questioning her assignments puts a target on her own back. Staying alive means reading a room quickly, tracking the danger around her, and knowing exactly when to act. Those instincts transfer surprisingly well to the pit lane.
Once an F1 pit stop is finished, the driver still has to merge back into a pit lane where other cars may already be approaching. Send them out at the wrong moment and you've created an unsafe release, which is F1 language for “congratulations, everyone is now having a much worse afternoon.”
Ava gets one instruction: watch the traffic and tell the driver when it's safe to go. Observation and timing already come with the skill set, and making high-stakes decisions under pressure isn't exactly new territory. For once, our scouting department may have made a reasonable decision.
Available until
The Circuit
Our Pick: Kylie Shines | The Driver Trusting All of These People
After six hiring decisions of increasingly questionable relevance, we should probably put someone in the car who actually knows what they’re doing.
Michelle Trachtenberg takes the wheel as Kylie Shines in The Circuit, a rising stock-car star building a racing career in the shadow of her estranged father, Al, a legend of the sport. Their already complicated relationship eventually moves onto the track when father and daughter agree to compete against each other in a once-in-a-lifetime race. Kylie therefore arrives with something nobody else on our roster can claim: actual competitive racing experience.
Stock-car racing and Formula 1 are very different disciplines. We're aware. But Kylie already understands what happens when speed, machinery, pressure, and tiny differences in execution start deciding outcomes. She also understands the trust required between driver and crew. Pull into the pit box and, for a few critical seconds, the car and potentially the race belong to everybody waiting around it.
Unfortunately for Kylie, her crew consists of a master car thief, Spider-Man, a Miami detective, a dinosaur survivor, a professional assassin who is inexplicably our mechanic, and one more professional assassin who may actually be qualified for her job. Kylie, we're so sorry.
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.