Senna, Netflix review - the life and legend of Brazil's greatest driver

Brazilian Formula One triple-champion Ayrton Senna was already legendary during his lifetime, but his fatal crash at Imola in 1994 brought him virtual deification in his home country. The Brazilian government declared three days of national mourning, and half a million people turned out for his funeral.

The Senna story was told to award-winning effect in Asif Kapadia’s documentary Senna (2010), but Netflix’s new series is the dramatised story of his life, produced by the Brazilian production company Gullane in collaboration with Senna Brands, the company created by the late driver’s family. You would hardly expect, therefore, that it would cast a harshly critical light over its subject, and sure enough, it doesn’t. It’s scarcely what you could describe as a forensic audit of the driver’s life and times, but it’s a pacy and accessible account of his single-minded pursuit of the pinnacle of motor racing, featuring fictionalised versions of motorsport luminaries who all played a part in the driver’s career trajectory.

Front and centre is Gabriel Leone’s portrayal of the single-minded race ace, who leaves the tropical skies of Brazil to seek his fortune in cold, grey England at the start of the 1980s. An early casualty of his ferocious dedication to racing is his marriage to Lilian, whom he’d known since childhood (“I was his second passion, his first passion was racing,” she later observed). Leone looks a little bit like Senna but not quite enough, which could also be said of Steven Mackintosh’s portrayal of team boss Frank Williams or Richard Clothier’s re-enactment of Lotus’s Peter Warr. Patrick Kennedy could scarcely look less like McLaren’s Ron Dennis.

On the other hand, Matt Mella makes a very plausible stab at Senna’s arch-rival Alain Prost, not least thanks to his ball of curly black hair, while Johannes Heinrichs is a dead ringer for Niki Lauda. Arnaud Viard is spot on as the conniving Jean-Marie Balestre. He was the French president of the sport’s governing body the FIA, and he is depicted as brazenly loading the dice in favour of his fellow-countryman Prost in his battles with Senna.

The racing sequences have been skilfully recreated, tracing Senna’s early exploits in karting and up through Formula Ford, Formula Three and thence to the rarified air of F1. Snippets of authentic archive race footage lend an aura of historical verisimilitude. Kaya Scodelario has been cast as journalist Laura Harrison (pictured above), a fictional character who’s used as a kind of moral compass and sounding board for Senna.

Several sequences whip up some genuine excitement, like Senna’s amazing charge through the rain-drenched field at Monaco in 1984, only to have a potential victory snatched away in exceedingly dubious circumstances, or his first win in his home race in Brazil in 1991 when his car was stuck in sixth gear for the final laps. A sprinkling of contemporary pop hits (“More Than A Feeling”, Bowie’s “Heroes”, “I Feel Love”, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, “Simply the Best” etc) trumpet Senna’s successes while also clueing us in to the unfolding timeline.

But sceptics may feel that the narrative sometimes succumbs to soapish hagiography, for instance in sentimental flashbacks to his childhood or scenes of Senna doing saintly good works back in Brazil. Also, while it helps to crank up the drama, Senna’s clashes with Prost always cast the Frenchman as the bad guy, when the truth was that Senna himself was far from blameless when it came to dirty tricks and on-track one-upmanship. Poor old Prost got similar treatment in the Kapadia film, so he can justifiably feel hard done by.

Still, there is a scene where Prost and Senna sit down and have a reconciling chat, putting the bad blood behind them, which really did take place during the terrible weekend of Senna’s lethal accident when Prost had stopped driving and was doing media commentary. Maybe Prost should get somebody to make a series about him, to show the flipside of the story.

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