Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hyperdrive’ On Netflix, Where Experts In Drifting Drive A Massive Obstacle Course

Drifting, at least the type you see in car chase movies like The Fast and the Furious franchise, is an actual thing in the real world. Drivers who are skilled at the art of spins, sharp reverses, and drifts spend money tricking out cars and enter competitions. But Hyperdrive, a new reality competition, goes far beyond what most of the world’s best drifters have ever seen. Read on for more…

HYPERDRIVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shots of a massive auto obstacle course carved out of an old factory location. Interspersed with those shots are shots of drivers getting ready and their hot cars waiting to go.

The Gist: Hyperdrive isn’t your average driving competition; drivers don’t just drive in a circle, they have to navigate obstacle courses that test their drifting skills. What is “drifting”? Well, if you’ve seen any of the Fast and Furious films, you know what it is: stunt driving that involves skilled use of steering and breaking in order to make drivers’ souped-up cars spin or skid under their control.

In the first of four qualifying rounds, 12 drivers take to a course that tests their ability to reverse into a 360 and come out the other side without hitting any penalty pylons, do a 540 turn (that’s a revolution-and-a-half) in a tight space, hit a target with the back of their car after driving through inches-deep water that would flood most engines, and finally go up a 40-degree incline and stop on a dime to make the incline teeter down faster.

Drivers from all over the world take the challenge; an inexperienced driver from Texas, a world-class drifter from Brazil, and even a young woman who lives in Soweto are among the candidates. The cars are either highly-modified cars with supercharged engines or street cars that are tweaked. Which cars will make it through the course intact? The top three times skip to the Knockout rounds, and the bottom three times are eliminated. The middle six have to immediately participate in the next qualifier, against six brand new drivers on a more difficult course.

The hosts are Mike Hill from Fox Sports 1, former American Top Gear host Rutledge Wood, Fox’s Lindsay Czarniak and former UFC fighter Michael Bisping.

Our Take: After watching the first episode and a half of Hyperdrive (more on that odd number in a bit), we feel pretty confident that the show is definitely a hybrid of Top Gear and American Ninja Warrior, with a soupcon of personal drama mixed in. Aaron Catling is the showrunner, and he and his fellow executive producers — including Charlize Theron — know the reality competition biz pretty well; Catling’s biggest calling card was BattleBots. They know which contestants to go in depth on, how to amp up the drama and heart-pounding excitement, keep things interesting, and make things visually stunning. All of that goes into a show that, while it can be corny at times, kept us glued to the screen.

The qualifying round is one that has the danger of growing tiresome as you see people going through the same course. But what Catling and company instinctively know is that, after the first clean round shows you what the drivers need to do to in order to compete, the format gets shaken up. Some drivers are only shown in the portions where they mess up, others are shown having difficulty with the water round or the incline — one guy goes airborne going over a barrier that he shouldn’t have — and doing the deep emotional dives into the ones that deserve it.

The hosts’ commentary is almost as amped up as the engines; we expect a gearhead like Wood to be enthused about all the cars and what they could do, but Hill is a veteran host and broadcaster who should know better. Czarniak does just fine as the sideline reporter. And we’re not sure what Bisping brings to the table other than what seems to be the requisite that at least one person calling a racing broadcast has to have a British or Scottish accent.

What annoyed us about how manipulative they were about the story of Stacy Lee May, the young driver from Soweto. Not only did they send “one of our executive producers, who’s from South Africa” (their cheeky way of mentioning Theron) to visit her and her family, but then they decide not to show her round until the beginning of Episode 2. Yes, they got us to flip to the next episode, but we felt that was a cheap way to keep us watching.

Sex and Skin: Unless you get all hot and bothered over fast cars, there’s nothing.

Parting Shot: Like we mentioned, we see Stacy Lee May, nervous as hell, behind the wheel of her pink ’80s-era BMW, saying to her spotter/father in a tiny voice, “Tell me when to go, Daddy.” Then the light goes green and the screen cuts to black. And we wanted to scream.

Sleeper Star: Many of the drivers are pretty vanilla personalities. So we’ll give this to the cars, because they’re all so varied. In the second episode, a rich guy tries to go through the course in a modified, $200k Lamborghini that has a 1000 hp engine and all-wheel drive and was not designed to do drifts and tight donuts. Compare that with the woman who had a street car with a “mere” 270 hp under the hood, and you’ll see that the cars are the stars.

Most Pilot-y Line: We’re not sure why the drivers who had to slog through a qualifying round or three have to go up against a fresh set of drivers who haven’t had to push their cars and themselves to the limits. Seems unfair, but it’s definitely a good way to expand the qualifying rounds a bit.

Our Call: STREAM IT. This is one Netflix show you can just turn on and not think about. Watch the fast cars and the lights and ignore the commentary, and you’ll have a good time watching Hyperdrive.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.