Season 6 therefore launches straight into a glitzy Aston Martin road car launch to set up the opening episode focused on the Silverstone team. Lawrence Stroll slips back into his Bond villain role as he schemes for world domination – he just about manages to suppress an evil cackle at the end of his main interview.

Aston’s rise to early-year greatness is covered in detail, but unfortunately we don’t get to see its mid-season malaise or Lawrence’s son Lance going into über-brat mode when things get a bit difficult.

From here the cameras turn to the struggles of the McLaren team – it’s then we realise DtS really has entered its third era.

The first was F1 at its most ‘fok-smashing’, candid best. Almost no one in the championship had been filmed like this before, they didn’t know how to behave, so they just carried on as normal.

The second was when teams realised they could use the series as a PR tool, and so we had to suffer horrendous staged scenes such as Formula Partridge (George Russell) getting his call up to the big boy team and Valtteri Bottas getting booted from Merc over a glass of sparkling water with Toto Wolff.

Now DtS’s third age features characters using the series in a ‘meta’ like fashion. Zak Brown tries to emotionally needle Lando Norris into staying with McLaren in front of the Netflix cameras, while the driver himself turns to a lens he knows is focused on him to pull a face when journalists ask him if he’ll still be in Woking next year. These kind of Netflix-aware moments are frequent throughout.

Guenther Steiner is still the star, and the Haas episode is by far and away the most emotional – the writing looks to already be on the wall for the soon-to-be ex-F1 team boss when he goes to see an old and familiar F1 face to muse on his future.

Alpine becomes almost comedically French as Otmar Szafnauer’s sacking in the middle of the Belgian GP is covered in detail. Other team principals’ reaction to the development show just how bizarre it was.

The shades of Ligier at Alpine are uncanny, given its two warring French drivers in a blue French car and a new, slightly odd French team boss who embraces an unconventional management approach laced with Gallic eccentricities.

Red Bull principal Christian Horner, who makes a good pundit, alludes to no-one really understanding how Enstone operates – we’re all a bit confused, even Alpine looks confused, but it somehow manages to squeeze a few podiums out of the season.

Danica Patrick is a bit wild when speaking live for Sky TV but, restrained in DtS, is the engaging American voice it’s been looking for. Ex-Williams principal Claire Williams adds a bit of class, and Will Buxton’s still there to lean in to the camera and dramatically intone things when you need him to.

The Lewis Hamilton episode centred around his Merc contract is fascinating, particularly as it runs completely contrary to recent events with his Scuderia switch.

There’s no mention of the Ferrari move, nor other recent happenings. There’s not one single utterance on Andretti being rebuffed from F1, or the championship’s on-going war with FIA President Must Be Seen, sorry, Mohammed Ben Sulayem. We wouldn’t F1 to look bad now, would we?

Horner-gate also didn’t make it into any kind of frantic, last minute re-edit, nor Toto Wolff and his head of F1 Academy-wife Susie being accused of a conflict of interest. It’s a controversy-free TV show.

It does mean that between the genuine insights, proceedings become a bit repetitive.

The producers appeared to have listened to some F1 fans’ complaints about the series not focusing on the racing enough. The narrative is now more tied into the wheel-to wheel action – so we have less water cooler chat and more epic countdowns to the lights going out at the race start, while drivers murmur profound epiphanies such as ‘I really want to win’, or something like that.

Much like the 2023 season, it’s too predictable. If you want a glossy highlights package, this is what you get. It starts well but loses its impetus as a similar narrative unfolds race after race. That’s the danger of following the racing action.

The staged set-piece cringe-fest conversations haven’t been reduced completely either. We continue to find them littered with such bombshells as “We need to work together to achieve our goal etc etc”. If you can stay awake through these soporific one-liners, though, you’re likely to still enjoy yourself.

The final episode is a glowing tribute from F1 to itself – or more specifically, the Las Vegas GP, the first race it has set up and promoted independently.

Max Verstappen’s sullen face, when drivers are instructed by a stage director on the choreography for the opening ceremony, is a picture – it would look great on a t-shirt.

Just where F1’s interests lie is nicely illustrated by an incident a few minutes into the on-track Sin City action: Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari gets a drain cover up his derriere, destroying his car, forcing FP1 to be cancelled and pushing FP2 past the curfew time for workers, meaning spectators are ejected from the track.

Netflix shows the Las Vegas street furniture giving it one to Sainz’s red car, but is the free practice farce mentioned? Nope! Straight on to qualifying then. If you want DtS in a microcosm, this is it.

The Las Vegas episode is a reasonably entertaining and interesting look behind the curtain of this gargantuan event, but works as a demonstrator for the series as a whole, and where it’s at right now.

It’s certainly watchable, gives medium-ish insight into the world of grand prix racing, and doesn’t ruffle too many feathers.

That’s F1 in 2024, and that’s Drive to Survive Season 6.