Senna

Directed by Asif Kapadia 12A cert, lim release, 105 min

FOR THOSE of us uninterested in motor sports, the dramatis personaeof Formula One comprises a vast emulsion of South Americans, Germans and Englishmen that – their names screeched out over the unbearable din of vehicles that never seem to overtake one another – refuses to separate itself into recognisable goodies and baddies.

Whole Nebuchadnezzars of champagne should be sprayed towards Asif Kapadia, director of this terrific documentary, for going some way towards rectifying that situation.

It hardly needs to be said that Ayrton Senna, the Brazilian driver who crashed fatally in 1994, emerges as the hero of Kapadia’s lucid, elegantly structured film. A well-off chap whose recklessness was combined with a keen intelligence, Senna seemed, on this evidence, to bring a healthy surge of rebellion to a sport sickeningly in thrall to money and convention.

What of the villains? Well, Alain Prost, the more compliant French driver, is set up as a nagging antagonist. Prost, granted the ear of the authorities, comes across as a cynic with a talent for slipstreaming his way past any political obstacles. The two men eventually fell out, and Senna does a fine job of detailing the ebbs and flows of their increasingly bitter rivalry. But, in the film's final tragic moments, Kapadia, British director of The Warrior, makes it clear that the two drivers had much respect for one another.

In a week where another sporting authority is enduring much-deserved opprobrium, it is particularly bracing to note that Kapadia's real baddies are the blazered goons who run Formula One. Jean-Marie Balestre, then president of the governing body, will, one imagines, have had his lawyers prodding every second of Sennafor signs of defamatory infelicities. What remains is damning enough.

Senna,presented without voice- over and featuring undoctored, grainy footage, wisely avoids going too deeply into the intricacies of pit stops, passing strategies and tyres. The result is a film that should appeal equally to northern petrol heads and motor racing agnostics. Comparisons to When We Were Kingsare more than justified.