And just as The Last Dance, a docuseries for Netflix from 2020, brought back wonderful memories of Michael Jordan’s most glorious performances in his final season with the Chicago Bulls, another game show on the streaming giant compelled two South African brothers to hop on a plane from Pretoria to the UAE to watch the Abu Dhabi Formula One Grand Prix.
That might sound like farce, but the first thing Chislon Pillay and his brother Samuel Muchenje saw on Netflix was Formula One: Drive to Survive, and they were made in sports.
“We are South Africans and rugby, football and cricket were our favourite things all the time,” Chislon said in the Fan Zone while gesturing to his Proteas jersey.
Not that they didn’t have Formula One before the Netflix series. “Yes, we did, after all our country was a former Formula One race too. But there was only one race left in South Africa back in 1993, and that was long before we were born,” Chislon, 25, said.
Then Samuel, 23, a 23-year-old IT engineer, told me how the docuseries got them into Formula One. ‘We learned so much that series. “What a performance” he explained.
‘From the first episode to the last, the excitement, the drama, the suspense, you know, every single time the drivers go to practice and qualifying and then when they go to the race, it is like your heart’s racing.
So addicted were they to that Netflix show that the two brothers began obsessively watching F1 races on the television.
But they had never been to a race until they got here last week in the UAE.
“We came to Abu Dhabi because it was the first F1 race that we watched on TV in 2021,” Chislon, who is an engineer by training, said.
“That last race in Abu Dhabi that 2021 season was the best, we’ll never forget that Max Verstappen Lewis Hamilton race”.
The fight over the 2021 drivers’ world championship in Abu Dhabi was as dramatic as the drama in that Netflix show.
‘We have always wanted to go to Abu Dhabi since then. We booked this trip and this race only in F1. “First the F1 tickets, second the plane tickets,” said Chislon.
But the Formula One race was not the only thing they would remember about their UAE visit.
“I would say the whole thing is awesome. The biggest thing about this country besides this awesome experience is safety,” Samuel said. ‘You are so protected here, in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Nowhere else did I ever see it.
“The transport infrastructure is very good. And the infrastructure is so crazy I don’t see a pothole! The police are really nice, everybody is helpful, you’re not made to feel like a foreigner.”
And, if they can’t wait for next year’s race, should they?
“No way, no way,” Samuel smiled.