The Ayrton formula

AWARD-WINNING director Asif Kapadia was shooting a film in the North Pole when a producer called to ask him to make a documentary about Formula One racing driver Ayrton Senna.

“It was one of those things where you say, ‘God, anything to get me out of the cold’,” he recalls. “I’m a drama director and never done a documentary before, so straight away I thought it was an interesting idea and something totally different.”

What he hadn’t reckoned with was just how powerful and charismatic figure three-times world champion Senna would prove to be. Kapadia fell in love with his subject.

He counts himself as a sports fan who watches everything, including Formula One, but without counting himself as an authority.

And he was not the biggest Senna fan.

That changed as the film began to take shape as he watched thousands of hours of film, including unprecedented access to the Formula One archive and home movies of the late Brazilian racing driver.

“The more I saw of Senna, the more I liked him,” he admits. “The worry when you make a film about a person or a subject is that, as you go along, you like it less and less and you end up faking it.

“But actually he’s amazing, and therefore I was quite glad to not know that much about him because I feel like I’ve been on this big journey that, in a way, I want a lot of non-Formula One fans to go on.

“He does transcend the sport and works on so many levels for the fans. I can totally see why he has so many children named after him, and why people really love Senna.”

Kapadia interviewed many of those who knew or raced with Senna – including rival Alain Prost, Senna’s family and racing journalists and broadcasters – but this is no talking heads film. They are only heard on the soundtrack. The film comprises entirely on archive footage, with Senna’s final lap at Imola on May 1, 1994, played in full until the moment his car crashed on the high-speed Tamburello corner during the San Marino grand prix, hitting a concrete wall at more than 130mph.

What emerges is a portrait of a man who loved his country and motor racing, fully aware that the industry was dominated by politics and personalities, but wasn’t afraid to speak up for drivers or indulge in rivalry with Prost.

In effect, Kapadia has made a documentary that plays like a drama. “There’s not a frame in there that I’ve shot. So the challenge was to be stupid enough or brave enough to not shoot anything and call yourself a director,” he jokes.

“I was a lone voice in a way. The only way was to go and cut the film and show people. The first cut was seven hours, then five, then three.

We had a really good two-hour cut, but it was still a bit too long for non-fans, I suppose, and we had a budget that would go to 90 minutes.

“The budget had been put together in a conventional documentary way, with 40 minutes of interviews and 40 minutes of archive. And I cut this film that was seven hours of archive.

Every minute over that 40 was something like £30,000 or something crazy. We were like £5m over budget.

“But everyone laughed in the right places and everyone was crying by the end.”

ONE of his favourite, and most emotional moments, is footage from the 1991 Brazilian grand prix because it meant so much to Senna to win in his homeland.

While his rivalry with Prost was well-known, the implications of his home win weren’t so familiar.

He actually completed the race in sixth gear after his gearbox broke. The strain of gripping the wheel left him barely able to move.

“We found the guy who went in there – basically jumped over the fence – with a video camera and filmed Senna in the car when he could not get out. That’s a VHS tape,” says Kapadia.

“And then we were able to get footage of him getting out of the car, not being able to move his arms and saying to his dad, ‘Touch me gently’ and his dad gives him a kiss and then to everyone else, ‘Don’t touch me’. It sums him up in a few seconds.”

But his favourite bit is Senna on the podium attempting to raise the trophy despite being in agony. “I’ve seen photo many times and didn’t really understand why it’s such a famous photo. But when you understand what he’s been through in that race, to win for the Brazilian crowd, to win at home and then that struggle to lift the trophy. He’s not going to quit – he’s not a quitter.

“The other thing I love about the race is, it’s not really a race with anyone else. It’s a race against himself. The car’s broken, the gearbox has gone, he’s in sixth gear. People didn’t believe him. They said it’s impossible, driving a Formula One car in sixth gear. Technically, the footage is really weak, but emotionally it’s really strong.”

HIS hope that non-F1 fans will find the film as enthralling is fulfilled as far as I’m concerned. “Formula One is fast, exciting, dangerous. The difficulty was always going to be how to make it emotional?” he says.

“How do you make anyone care about people driving round in circles in a giant cigarette packet for two hours? That was my worry. Then you spend more time with Senna and think, ‘actually, this is going to be all right. This guy is good, is amazing at what he does for a living and how he does it is very visceral’.

“The other side is that he can eloquently argue with three-times world champion Jackie Stewart and explain why Stewart’s wrong, and he’s right. He has all of these elements.”

He didn’t want to play down Senna’s religious side. “The spiritual element is almost the way he drove. It was an out of body experience.

And the way he thanked God when things happened.

When his engine goes, his gearbox blows, he says God gave me this race.

“Of course, the tragedy is that his accident is an act of God. It’s a freak accident when all those things came together at that moment at that speed on that corner. Something happened to make the car go straight. The fact that the wheel came off at a particular angle to him is just a one-in-a-million chance.

“So that’s part of his life and his death.”