Last weekend I watched the Monaco Grand Prix. I wasn’t really planning to, and was going to go out, but I got caught up in it. Although I find the constant rule change over refueling or not refuelling tiresome, and the introduction of DRS seems like using some kind of turbo-boost in a video game, the grand prix was exciting. There was overtaking, and there were incidents, and while forcing everyone to use different types of tyres during the race feels pointless, I can’t deny that it leads to good racing.
But racing is never safe, and there was a heart-in-mouth moment during the qualification period when Sergio Perez had crashed. And the race saw another serious incident when Vitaly Petrov crashed towards the end of the race. F1 might well be much safer than it once was, but it can never be 100% safe, and the drivers know that.
Then, this week came the news that the previously postponed Bahrain Grand Prix was being returned to the F1 calendar with other grand prixs being shaken up to fit everything into an ever extending calendar (no doubt because F1’s growth in revenues is being driven by these new races and the fees they pay to hold them). This in a country which is still seeing significant unrest and laws in place to prevent the public showing dissent in their leadership. F1 has no time for the Arab Spring it seems. It’s more concerned about the oil dollars that ensure that the circus comes to their town.
Both of these things came strongly to mind when I watched Senna. The film is bookended by comments from Ayrton Senna interviews about karting being a purer form of motor sport, with money not really making a difference, and there being no politics.
As we all by now know, whether we care about such things or not, there’s more politics in the average governing body of a sport than you’ll find in the Houses of Parliament. And that’s certainly the case for F1, which this revealing film makes very clear.
Senna is a superb documentary that tracks the motor racing life of Ayrton Senna from an overview of his karting days through to his time as a Formula One driver.
The films uses a really interesting technique of using only contemporary footage. That means not only race footage, but various home movies, interviews and commentary pieces. There are a series of fresh interviews, but these are used over the top of the vintage pictures.
I’ve never been a Formula One fan. I may or may not watch races depending on where I am and what I’m doing. The Prost/Senna period was not really one I spent a great deal of time with, since it coincided with my university and early-post university years. While I was interested in whether Nigel Mansell or Damon Hill did well, they weren’t people I was especially fond of, lacking characters I could in any way empathise with. And that was true for Senna and Prost. In particular he always felt quite cold to me, even though, as this documentary makes clear, he was worshipped as a god in his home country of Brazil. What’s more he did have a good sense of humour and mischievousness, as is made clear by some of the interviews that makers of this film have dug out.
The remarkable thing about F1 as a sport (and I must admit that at times, I’ve considered it more of an engineering challenge than an actual sport), is that it has been covered by so many cameras in such incredible depth. That means that there’s a ridiculous amount of footage that the makers have been able to call upon. When the film reaches its denouement at San Marino, we get to see so many reaction shots and footage from places inside the teams, that a fiction director couldn’t actually have come up with any more angles if wanted them. It’s all there.
Overall, an excellent documentary and well worth seeing on the big screen, if for no other reason than watching a lap at Monte Carlo from the driver’s perspective is an awesome sight.
My only very small grouch is that Globo TV, the Brazilian TV network that provides a significant amount of footage from that country, seems to have insisted that everything its supplied to the makers is digitally watermarked with their logo (indeed the original DOG has often been blurred out and replaced with a new version). Pathetically unnecessary, and not something I want to see in documentaries in the future.