Netflix’s New Senna Miniseries Captures the Thrilling Life and Tragic Death of the Auto Racing Star

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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 … Read More