Jerry Bruckheimer on F1s Music: This Is a Contemporary Movie, It Needed a Contemporary Soundtrack

When Kevin Weaver was in the midst of creating the soundtrack for F1, as he was pondering how to thread the needle on a project that featured a hodgepodge of talent from Chris Stapleton to Rosé, eventually he hit a bit of a wall.

“There was a point here where I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to play as a body of work,’” Weaver says. “Is this going to translate? Can it make sense with all these genres? And then what ended up happening is it just informed itself. I sat down one night and I started sequencing these demos into what I felt like an album could be, and then I took that and put it in my car and listened to it on the way home. I realized at that point that this works incredible. Just like the movie has all these ebbs and flows of emotion and feel, that’s what we got with the music.”

F1 is easily most eclectic album in a crowded best compilation soundtrack for visual media category this Grammy season, casting a wide net featuring every genre from rock to pop, EDM to country, Afrobeat and hip-hop. Finding a throughline across such a sonically diverse collection of songs came with challenges, but Apple TV and original films head of music David Taylor says listeners’ disregard for genre in the streaming era helped make it work.

“In terms of how people listen music these days, I don’t think it’s genre-specific anymore,” Taylor says. “I enjoy these genre-agnostic playlists because they’re surprising in how they flow across genres but keep the same vibe. I think our soundtrack is representative of how people listen to music today.”

As Jerry Bruckheimer says, he and director Joseph Kosinski saw quickly that music was an essential part of telling F1‘s story.

“We had the temp score together and you could see even then how much music propelled the narrative,” he says. “This is a contemporary movie, it needed a contemporary soundtrack, everything new and fresh for the audience. What we don’t do is what they call jukeboxing, where the label will give you a song that they want to promote to be a big hit, and they’ll try to jam it in to a scene.”

Bruckheimer adds that such a diverse record was also a necessity given how global F1 is as a brand. Focusing on one genre or even one region of music wouldn’t reflect the feel of the sport.

“That was what we were talking about very early on,” Bruckheimer says. “We knew it needed to be international to hit every kind of audience the same way the sport does. We gave Kevin and Dave a template, and that sound is the genius of what they brought to us.”

As Weaver first starting ideating on a soundtrack, he initially expected it’d sound more rock heavy, like what Ed Sheeran delivered with his John Mayer co-write “Drive,” which was also shortlisted for the Oscar for best original song.

“I figured a lot of rock, maybe some EDM dance records,” Weaver says. “Some of that stuff landed, I wasn’t initially thinking something like Rosé from Blackpink initially, but that ended up being a fantastic record for us. Those turns make this record really unique.”

The biggest hit off the album became Tate McRae’s “Just Keep Watching,” which is quietly approaching half a billion streams on Spotify, even as it only peaked at 33 on Billboard’s Hot 100. The song earned McRae her first-ever Grammy nomination for best pop dance recording.

“She was having a moment with some of the records she was doing, songs like ‘Sports Car,’” Taylor says. “She fits the car world. The song’s fun and captivating. We showed a scene or two to Ryan Tedder, who’s written a ton of hits with her, and he was like, ‘Yeah, let’s talk to her,’ too. We already had her in the back of our mind. It came together serendipitously.”

The compilation soundtrack category is quietly one of the most interesting and competitive categories heading into this year’s Grammys. Outside of the star-studded F1 soundtrack, there’s of course this year’s global phenomenon with KPop Demon Hunters. The film’s breakout hit “Golden” also nabbed a song of the year nomination and remains a frontrunner this Oscar season. Also in this category is Wicked, the biggest soundtrack of 2024, as well as Sinners, one of the biggest box office stories of 2025, driven by a story championing the mysticism of the blues. Timothée Chalamet rounds out the group with his work evoking Bob Dylan on A Complete Unknown, earning him his first-ever Grammy nomination.

Beyond awards though, the longer term goal is to have made music that could become synonymous with F1 going forward. Only time will tell on that front, though, as Bruckheimer says, so far it seems to have paid off.

“They’re already playing Ed’s song at the races, and Tate,” Bruckheimer says. “That’s already happening.”