Senna – Film Review

In less than ten years in Formula One Ayrton Senna carved out a legacy which is still felt in the sport today, nearly twenty years on from his untimely death at Imola in 1994. His unique ability to seemingly push the cars he drove beyond their physical and mechanical limits in order to achieve victory is something which is gravely missing from modern day motorsport. Senna is the documentary film on his life at the pinnacle of F1 and it demonstrates brilliantly the man’s passion for raw speed, his incredible humility in victory and defeat and above all his unflinching quest to win.
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My first memories of Formula One occur after the death of Ayrton Senna, I do not remember him racing which is not surprising coming from a GAA background where motorsport was never high on the agenda in household. The first race which I actually remember was the final race of the 1994 season, the Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide. This was the infamous race where Michael Schumacher in his Benetton Ford blatantly tried to ram Damon Hill’s Williams Renault off the road, putting him out of the race and damaging Hills car so badly he could not continue.



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Nigel Mansell won that race in the other Williams and Schumacher won the first of his seven World Championship titles. But in the eyes of more seasoned and Formula One fans the year will be remembered more vividly as the one which saw both Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenburger die on the same weekend at the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola.
If you ask the casual sports fan, like myself, who they believe is the greatest Formula One racing driver of all time you are likely to get a number of answers. Schumacher with his seven World titles is always mentioned, more studious observers may say Juan Manuel Fangio with his five titles and others may mention Niki Lauda or Jackie Stewart or John Sturtees. But if you ask the people who really know, the drivers or the team managers, they will all say Ayrton Senna. As a driver he may have won only, in comparison to Schumacher and Fangio, won three tiles but it is the fashion in which he won them, the way which he drove his machine and pushed the boundaries of what was logically possible, which singles him out as the greatest. It is what puts him up on a pedestal alongside the likes of Pele, Jack Nicklaus and Michael Jordan, men who dominated and who redefined their chosen sports.
The documentary starts with Senna whilst he is still racing go karts in Brazil, before he makes the move over to Europe to try his hand at firstly Formula Three and then the big league in Formula 1. There is poignancy about the whole documentary, the producers quite obviously went against the grain and chose not to make a film featuring a barrage of talking heads, and as such the film is solely about Senna. All of the contributions from people who lived, worked and raced with Senna come via voice over. The film features huge inputs from Senna’s family, from prominent Formula One personalities like Alain Prost and Ron Dennis and also from journalists who covered the sport at the time. His rivalry with Prost is examined rigorously, with both mens distinctive personalities coming to the fore, Prost as the exacting and meticulous professor and Senna as the aggressive and lightening quick upstart, polar opposites of each other in everything they did.

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Above all though it is Senna’s unique personality which shines through. The humility of the man, his unwavering faith in God, his devotion to his sport and to the fans who supported him and his incredible single minded focus on achieving number one every time he sat into a racing car are all hugely admirable traits. Senna never had any inclination to get involved in the politics which is part and parcel of the sport. Guys like Prost and Schumacher were much better at playing politics, Senna was just interested in coming first and in driving fast, driving ridiculously fast all the time. He was the fastest driver to ever set foot in a racing car. However, to purely view him as a racing driver is to do him a great disservice. In his native Brazil where a huge part of the population lived in poverty Senna became an icon. He raced for the people of Brazil and they loved him for it. His rise to become adored by the people of Brazil is even more astonishing when you consider that motorsport is shunned by most of the population because it is the sport of the rich, it is not the sport of the common man in Brazil, football holds that title, motorsport before and after Senna’s death barely registers a blip on the sporting conscience of the country. But Senna was different; he broke those cultural barriers through his incredible kindness and loyalty to the people of Brazil. In the film, after his death, there is footage of Senna’s funeral, millions turned out on the streets of Sao Paolo, three days of national mourning were observed and people wept in the streets. During the hardship of everyday life in Brazil, Senna had given the nation’s poor something to be joyful about, something to be proud off, but after his death that joy was stripped away.

The film shuns the controversy which surrounded his death and lays no blame on any of the parties involved. It does though document how Senna was persistently shot down by the hierarchy of Formula One when he demanded greater levels of driver safety, if there is one figure in the film who does not come out of the film well it is the Stalinesque figure of Jean Marie Balestre, who was the President of the sport during the Senna era. His domineering management style and apparent favouritism toward fellow Frenchman Prost clashes abrasively with the mild mannered and honest Senna.



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If there is one sports film which you watch this year I wholeheartedly encourage people to see Senna. No matter what your interest in sport the ideals and personality of the man will draw you in and you will only be able to marvel at what made him great. Senna is a film not just about a great sportsman but a great human being.

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Post by Ross McGuinness. You can follow Ross on twitter @rossmcguinness