Warning: This post contains spoilers for Senna.
On May 1, 1994, at the start of the sixth lap at Italy’s San Marino Grand Prix, 34-year-old Ayrton Senna Da Silva crashed his newly-designed Williams race car into a concrete wall at 145 miles per hour. Later that day, the Formula 1 driver, winner of three championships, would be pronounced dead at a local hospital, sending shockwaves throughout the racing world and his home country of Brazil.
The event makes up the first brief sequence in Senna, a new six-episode Netflix miniseries, which traces the majority of his adult racing life and his ascent to the top of his sport. In the process of achieving greatness on the track (he finished his 10-year career with 41 victories, 65 pole positions, and 80 podiums), Senna became one of the few drivers to transcend the sport itself—he was both a global superstar and a national hero to Brazilians, who gathered around televisions every time he strapped into his car and flipped down his helmet lid. When he drove, everyone watched.
Across the series, showrunner and co-director Vincente Amorim (Santo, Yakuza Princess) chronicles the creation of his almost-mythic celebrity and the challenging ladder he climbed to reach the sport’s ultimate heights. Like most elite athletes, Senna, played with fierce determination by Gabriel Leone, inherited an early love for racing and paired it with his inflexible determined personality, an unrelenting desire to be the best which shaped his relationships with family, teammates, and competitors. As he graduated from different levels of racing and made his way to F1 in 1984, he possessed extreme command in the driver’s seat, exhibited aggressiveness at every opportunity, and proved he could win at any level, on any surface, against any opponent.
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You might already know some of this journey and background if you watched the identically-titled Senna, director Asif Kapadia’s engrossing and award-winning 2010 documentary that’s (conveniently) also available on Netflix. In a break from typical documentary form, Kapadia exclusively used archival home and racing footage, sacrificing talking heads for a more intimate and immediate account of Senna’s driving prowess and quest for greatness as he moved between racing teams and navigated Formula 1’s politics. Though the miniseries dramatizes many of the same moments, it also fills in some of the off-track gaps that Kapadia leaves out, including Senna’s first marriage, his early racing career in the U.K., and the intricacies of his rivalry with French driver Alain Prost (Matt Mella).
Three decades after Senna’s untimely death, the Brazilian driver is still widely considered one of the best (and the fastest) drivers in Formula 1 racing history. Read more about the series, his prolific and influential 10-year career, and the legacy of a life cut short.
Senna’s Rise to F1 Glory
Even as a child, Senna had an irregular thirst for driving and began racing Go-Karts at age 13. Early success motivated him to move to the U.K. in 1981, race with real cars, and pursue Formula motorsports.
As Senna attempted a professional route, his native Brazil was in the midst of a 21-year military dictatorship, which left most of the country in poverty. As unemployment rose, Senna offered many Brazilian residents hope and pride. Amorim and co-director Júlia Rezende occasionally nod to Brazil’s economic and political struggles in various newspaper headlines and television reports, and during a few glimpses of a Brazilian father and son, who flock to the television when Senna races.
The majority of Senna’s first two episodes chronicle his growth as a driver in England. Though his win-first, aggressive tactics didn’t ingratiate him to his team, Senna still won the Formula Ford series championship in his first year. Senna initially retires to appease his wife Lillian and his parents, who want him to take over the family business, but his instant success pulls him back to England. It’s not long before he ditches a life in Brazil, separates from Lillian, and continues his climb up the Formula ladder.
In the midst of Senna’s migration between teams and racing levels, Amorim highlights some of the biases facing Latino athletes. After Senna wins the F3 championship, Formula 1 teams—specifically Lotus—begin taking notice. But no matter his impressive lap times, the majority of executives refuse to give Senna a fair shake. “He’s just not British,” says a higher-up at Imperial Tobacco, a Lotus title sponsor.
Eventually, Senna latched on with Toleman, a smaller racing outfit that didn’t have the car design or engine to compete with the top F1 brands. And yet, during his first year, he proved his skills to the world. “It’s like a drug,” Senna said after finding early success. “Once you experience it you keep searching for it all the time.”
The Rivalry Is Born
It’s difficult to capture the thrill and danger of Formula 1 and condense it onto the small screen, but Amorim effectively translates the feeling inside the cockpit. Leaning on a soundtrack of accelerating engines and gear changes, he deftly drops in archival overhead shots of races with the hyper-focused close-ups of his own camera, blending CGI and real cars to match the sport’s blistering pace and Senna’s stomach-turning corner hugging. At points during his championship runs, the Brazilian describes the experience of driving like he was “in another dimension,” and Senna commits to that out-of-body dimension with abstract, kinetic energy.
As Senna developed into first a feisty driver at Toleman and then a threatening one at Lotus, Prost had become the face of the racing world at McLaren. The pair would soon forge a rivalry, though their frosty relationship didn’t crystalize until they became McLaren teammates in 1988. At one point in the season, Senna shoved Prost towards a pitwall (a tempestuous act not featured in the miniseries), and their rivalry remained contentious as Senna’s star began to outshine Prost en route to the Brazilian’s first F1 championship.
The intensive public battle didn’t start until 1989, when Senna passed Prost at Imola during a restart, breaking what Prost believed to be a gentleman’s agreement. Over the next two years, each engaged in title-deciding crashes by cutting corners (one that earned Senna a disqualification and suspension) and tarnishing F1’s reputation, with Senna calling out Prost’s political maneuvering and Prost griping about Senna’s impulsive driving
The rivals would eventually become friendly once Prost left for a broadcasting role, but their relationship fueled F1 storylines for years and made their races must-watch events.
An End Forshadowed
At the beginning of the 1994 race season, Senna could foresee a tragedy on the horizon.
At the time, he was unhappy with his Williams car (which had recently lost its automatic suspensions and gearboxes thanks to a series-wide ban) and didn’t trust the San Marino track’s asphalt. His concerns before his final race grew during the Friday qualifier, when driver Rubens Barrichello, Senna’s friend and fellow Brazilian, flipped his car and hit a tire barrier, necessitating an airlift to a hospital where he was diagnosed with a broken nose and bruising. The next day, Austrian driver Roland Ratzenberger died instantly after ramming into a concrete barrier due to a front wing failure.
Senna felt the gravity of these moments. In the final episode, he calls for the F1 president to postpone the Grand Prix, one of many occasions that the Brazilian voiced frustrations about safety regulations and questioned Formula 1’s leadership. That same weekend, as depicted in the final episode, Prost urges him to lead the Driver’s Association because of the massive pull he has with other drivers and the leverage he has as the sport’s biggest name.
Ultimately, those tragedies didn’t dissuade Senna from competing. In a pivotal scene before the race, Senna’s doctor, Sid Watkins, asks him why he has to keep racing and can’t just “give it up and go fishing.” Senna responds: “Sid, there are certain things over which we have no control. I cannot quit, I have to go on.” In the wake of his death, Formula 1 made renewed efforts to improve its safety measures, which included limitations placed on the bodywork aerodynamics of cars and a pit lane speed limit. As a result, it was 21 years between Senna’s death and that of Jules Biachi, who died in 2015 from injuries incurred at the Japanese Grand Prix.
But Senna’s legacy extends beyond the track. After his death, his family established the Instituto Ayrton Senna, a charitable foundation he’d wanted to form with his sister, Vivianne, before competing in 1994. Throughout his career, he’d made large donations to aid impoverished Brazilian children and wanted a unified place to focus on education and human development for the next generation. Today, Vivianne is the non-profit’s president and is dedicated to helping disadvantaged youth in the memory of her brother.
