Subject: Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna's race to the top
Director: Asif Kapadia
Race car driving is a strange sport. On the one hand, a machine is absolutely essential to the competition - if your machine is not as good as the other drivers, it is not likely that your driving skill will compensate. This makes me think of it as less of a sport - the machine's doing a lot of the work. On the other hand, it's the one sport whose activity I routinely do, except on a much lower level and (presumably) non-competitively - I still drive a car. I just don't do it at 200 km/h.
Senna, with its tremendous racing footage, shows us a glimpse of what it would take, mentally, to drive a car competitively for a living. It doesn't look so hard, really, except that you don't just go once around the track, you go 70 times. It's an endurance competition - whoever blinks first falls behind or crashes. While it's easy to think of this repetitive action as blissful nothing - I think of the Repo Man quote that the more you drive, the dumber you are - Senna and this film help cast it as a spiritual moment. The car is merely the vessel by which he experiences the divine.
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