Books & films Books, films and culture

Senna, 2010

At the British Grand Prix of 1992, when his transmission failed, Senna walked back past a crowd that booed him, and passed a few feet below a spectator who shrugged. Senna gave him a slightly quizzical look. The spectator was Manish Pandey, an orthopaedic surgeon trained at Cambridge and a lifelong admirer, and it was the closest he ever came to his hero. Twelve years later, in November 2004, Pandey wrote the 10-page treatment of what became Senna.

The idea had come to the producer James Gay-Rees, who did not follow Formula One, after he read the articles marking the 10th anniversary of Senna’s death. Pandey insisted on the life as well as the death, in three acts: the rise to the title, the struggle once he was champion, and the death. In March 2006, after a 40-minute presentation in São Paulo, Viviane Senna told him, by his account, that he had really known her brother, and that May Bernie Ecclestone agreed in principle to open Formula One’s film archive. The contracts were not signed until March 2009, and by then Asif Kapadia had taken over as director from Kevin Macdonald.

Kapadia’s rule was that if they could not show it, it could not go in. The script came first; then researchers in London, Japan and Rio went looking for the pictures: in the archives of TV Globo and Fuji TV, on the tapes of his brother Leonardo’s VHS camera, and in Formula One’s television archive at Biggin Hill, where they found pit, paddock and drivers’ briefing footage no one had seen. There is no narrator, and no one speaks to the camera. Frank Williams, Sid Watkins, Alain Prost, Ron Dennis, Viviane Senna and others are heard over the pictures, and Senna, in the footage, speaks for himself.

The idea was quite early on, as we were working together, and with the editors, to try and find a way to make the film where Ayrton was the narrator of his own life story.

… And obviously there’s one key person we couldn’t interview which is Senna. And so what we didn’t want to do was make a film of everyone else’s opinions of him. We wanted to make his opinions.

The first cut ran for five hours; the film runs for about 105 minutes. It opened in Japan on 8 October 2010 and in Brazil on 12 November, months before Britain and the United States in 2011, and took about US$10–⁠11 million, nearly half of it in Britain. It won the World Cinema Audience Award for documentaries at Sundance in January 2011 and, on 12 February 2012, the BAFTAs for Best Documentary and Best Editing. It was never nominated for an Oscar: in November 2011 it failed even to make the Academy’s shortlist of 15 documentaries, an exclusion The Guardian called a surprise.

What it shows and what it leaves out

The film opens on karting and ends at Imola, with Sid Watkins’s account of that weekend, the funeral and an epilogue on safety and the Instituto. Between them come Monaco in 1984, Estoril in 1985, the Lotus years in brief, the McLaren years and the duel with Prost, with Jean-Marie Balestre in the drivers’ briefings, and the home win at Interlagos in 1991, which Kapadia has called his favourite part of the film.

Its subtitles say nothing of his years in the British junior formulae, from Formula Ford to Formula 3 and Macau, nor of his first marriage, and never name Nelson Piquet. Xuxa and Adriane Galisteu both appear briefly on screen, but the subtitles do not name them either. Donington in 1993 was in the five-hour cut and did not survive it. Gerhard Berger was never interviewed: time, Pandey said, ran out.

Prost still resents the film: in 2024 he told Motor Sport that it puts Balestre, a Frenchman, in the middle of everything. Pandey conceded as early as 2011 that they could have been fairer to Prost, and should have got 1989 more right, and in 2023 he pointed to the seven beats, as he counted them, of the two men’s reconciliation at the end. Even Motor Sport, listing Senna in 2025 among the best racing films ever made, allowed that some might find Senna deified in it and Prost cast as a pantomime villain.

Senna, 2024

Netflix announced the series in São Paulo on 3 September 2020 as the first drama about him, to be made by the Brazilian company Gullane with the active participation of his family. It arrived on 29 November 2024, six episodes released together, created by Vicente Amorim, who directed it with Júlia Rezende, and with Gabriel Leone as Senna. Variety called it the highest-budgeted Brazilian series ever, and the Associated Press reported that Netflix was said to have put more than US$170 million into it.

It was filmed in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, with about two dozen replica cars built by the Argentine firm Crespi; stunt drivers did the driving at speed, and Leone played the close-ups in front of LED screens. The journalist Laura Harrison, played by Kaya Scodelario, is invented: an amalgam, Amorim said, of people who existed around Senna.

In its second week it was the most watched non-English series on Netflix around the world, and it stayed in the Top 10 for five weeks, with about 14.5 million views in all. Critics were cooler. In The Guardian Jack Seale found that it made Senna seem a more straightforward character than he was and turned everyone in his life into a flat cartoon; James Elson, in Motor Sport, thought it an airbrushed version of him; the critic of Folha de S.Paulo thought it a waste to paint him as the good boy who beat the world. The biographer Ernesto Rodrigues said that its story of Balestre costing him a karting title would be news to every reporter who had covered Senna. In Brazil it won prizes all the same, among them the APCA award for best series.

Adriane Galisteu, his girlfriend when he died, is on screen for a few minutes at most. In 2023 she had said that no one had contacted her about the series. In November 2025 she gave her own account in Meu Ayrton por Adriane Galisteu, two episodes directed by João Wainer for HBO Max, in which the family declined to take part.

The principal cast

• Gabriel Leone as Ayrton Senna
• Matt Mella as Alain Prost
• Camila Márdila as Viviane Senna
• Marco Ricca as Milton da Silva
• Susana Ribeiro as Neyde Senna
• Alice Wegmann as Lilian de Vasconcellos Souza
• Pâmela Tomé as Xuxa Meneghel
• Julia Foti as Adriane Galisteu
• Kaya Scodelario as Laura Harrison
• Patrick Kennedy as Ron Dennis
• Steven Mackintosh as Frank Williams
• Hugo Bonemer as Nelson Piquet
• Arnaud Viard as Jean-Marie Balestre
• Gabriel Louchard as Galvão Bueno

Other films and documentaries

Among those made in his lifetime were Valeu Ayrton (1990), a tribute video from his sponsor, Banco Nacional, with the Globo commentator Galvão Bueno, and Duke Video’s Ayrton Senna: Racing Is in My Blood (about 1992), sold as endorsed by Senna himself. In the week of his death, by Paulo Scarduelli’s study of the coverage, 73 per cent of São Paulo’s television audience watched the lying in state and the funeral.

More followed: a British television film, Ayrton Senna (1995); The Right to Win (2004), for the 10th anniversary, with Rubens Barrichello and Berger; and, for Polyphony Digital, the short Ayrton’s Wish (2014), on the Instituto. The 30th anniversary brought Globoplay’s Senna por Ayrton, three episodes built from about 150 hours of his own interviews, released on 1 May 2024; Roberto Cabrini’s Senna 30 anos: o dia que ainda não terminou, for Record; and in France Prost, six episodes for Canal+, the last three almost entirely about Senna, in which, as Folha reported, Prost said he had never managed to understand him. In Joseph Kosinski’s F1 (2025), Senna appears, with the family’s permission, in a flashback as the great rival of the hero, Sonny Hayes.

Books

The books began in his lifetime, and eight of those below appeared in 1994 and 1995 alone. Adriane Galisteu’s memoir of their 405 days together had sold 310,000 copies in Brazil by October 1995. These are the significant ones, in the order of their first editions.

• Kenneth Wells, Ayrton Senna (Racing Drivers Guide; Wells & Kimberley’s, 1986): a slim driver profile.
• Christopher Hilton, Ayrton Senna: The Hard Edge of Genius (Patrick Stephens, 1990), expanded in 1994 as The Second Coming.
• Gerald Donaldson, Grand Prix People: Revelations from Inside the F1 Circus (Motor Racing Publications, 1990; some records give 1991), with a profile built on a long interview.
• Ayrton Senna, Ayrton Senna’s Principles of Race Driving (Hazleton, 1993): his own manual of technique.
• Adriane Galisteu with Nirlando Beirão, O Caminho das Borboletas – meus 405 dias ao lado de Ayrton Senna (Caras, 1994).
• Karin Sturm, Ayrton Senna: Goodbye Champion, Farewell Friend (Sportverlag, 1994; in English, Motorbooks, 1994–⁠95): a friend’s account of his last season.
• Alan Henry, Remembering Ayrton Senna (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994).
• Keith Sutton, Ayrton Senna (Osprey, 1994; later A Personal Tribute, Reed/Mitchell Beazley, 1998).
• Ivan Rendall, Ayrton Senna: A Tribute (Pavilion, 1995).
• Richard Williams, The Death of Ayrton Senna (Viking, 1995): the man and the Imola weekend.
• Edvaldo Pereira Lima, Ayrton Senna – Guerreiro de Aquário (Brasiliense, 1995): the Senna myth and what his death did to Brazil.
• Paulo Scarduelli, Ayrton Senna – Herói da Mídia (Brasiliense, 1995): the press and television coverage of his death.
• Sid Watkins, Life at the Limit: Triumph and Tragedy in Formula One (Macmillan, 1996).
• Christopher Hilton, Ayrton Senna: His Full Car Racing Record (Haynes, 1996).
• Lemyr Martins, Uma estrela chamada Senna (Panda Books, 2001).
• Sid Watkins, Beyond the Limit (Macmillan, 2001).
• Daniel Piza, Ayrton Senna, o eleito (Ediouro, 2003).
• Christopher Hilton, Memories of Ayrton (Haynes, 2003).
• Tom Rubython, with photographs by Keith Sutton, The Life of Senna (BusinessF1 Books, 2004).
• Ernesto Rodrigues, Ayrton: o herói revelado (Objetiva, 2004).
• Paul-Henri Cahier, Ayrton Senna Through My Eye (Autosports Marketing Associates, 2004): photographs.
• Jo Ramírez, Memoirs of a Racing Man (Haynes, 2005).
• Malcolm Folley, Senna Versus Prost: The Story of the Most Deadly Rivalry in Formula One (Century, 2009).
• Rodrigo França, Ayrton Senna e a mídia esportiva (Automotor, 2010).
• Richard Craig, Ayrton Senna: The Messiah of Motor Racing (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2012).
• Giorgio Terruzzi, Suite 200. L’ultima notte di Ayrton Senna (66thand2nd; the year of the first edition is uncertain): his last night before the race.
• Maurice Hamilton, Senna (Blink, 2014).
• Tony Dodgins with Martin Brundle, Ayrton Senna: All His Races (Evro, 2014).
• Bernard Chambaz, À tombeau ouvert (Stock, 2016): a novel.
• María Isabel Sánchez Vegara, Ayrton Senna (Little People, Big Dreams; Frances Lincoln, 2020): for young children.

Songs

The music Brazil most connects with him, the Tema da Vitória, was not written for him: it was TV Globo’s theme for its Formula One coverage, and its story is told in Senna and Brazil. The tributes began within days of his death. On 10 May 1994, five days after the funeral, 5,000 people at the Olympia in São Paulo heard Joey Ramone dedicate Blitzkrieg Bop to the memory of São Paulo’s champion. When the Instituto Ayrton Senna launched its first projects, on 21 March 1995, 35 years after his birth, Milton Nascimento was billed to sing Canção da América, which he had dedicated to Senna, with a choir of 80 children.

In Italy Lucio Dalla opened his album Canzoni (1996) with Ayrton, a song by the actor Paolo Montevecchi, dedicated to the last moments of Senna’s life. In England Chris Rea, who had watched Donington in 1993 through the fence and come home with its marks on his face, made Saudade his tribute.

Games and cartoons

Sega’s Ayrton Senna’s Super Monaco GP II (1992) was the first game to carry his name, and was made with his endorsement. Twenty-one years later Kazunori Yamauchi, the creator of Gran Turismo, said that without Senna he did not think his game would ever have been developed; in May 2014 a tribute update for Gran Turismo 6 added the Lotus 97T-⁠Renault, with part of the profits going to the Instituto. In 2015 the yellow bird of Angry Birds Go! became Senna Bird; Codemasters built the Legends Edition of F1 2019 round Senna and Prost; and in 2021 the Brazilian studio Aquiris released Senna Forever for Horizon Chase Turbo, again with part of the profits for the Instituto.

The comic hero he launched in January 1994, Senninha, outlived him in comics and cartoons. Since 2019 his name and Senninha’s have been managed by Senna Brands, run by Bianca Senna; Legacy tells the rest.

Murals, statues and photographs

Eduardo Kobra has painted him on four great walls, in São Paulo, at Imola, at Interlagos and in Miami. His statues and memorials, from Stefano Pierotti’s bronze at Imola and Melinda Garcia’s Velocidade, Alma e Emoção in São Paulo to the statues on Copacabana and at Wałbrzych, are described, with the murals, in Legacy.

Among the photographers who followed him, Keith Sutton pictured him from his second car race, in 1981, and was his first press officer. Senna told him then that he wanted him as his photographer in Formula One, and Sutton, by his own account, did not take him seriously. Angelo Orsi was a friend; Mirco Lazzari, Paul-Henri Cahier and Ercole Colombo photographed him too.

Stamps and coins

In 1995 Brazil’s central bank issued two proof coins in his honour, designed by Glória Ferreira Dias: 10,000 of a 2-real coin in silver, with his portrait and the years of his titles on one face and, on the other, the driver in his car, known by the stripes of his helmet; and 5,000 of a 20-real coin in gold, with the circuits of Interlagos and Monaco. They are solid silver and gold, not plated. For the 20th anniversary San Marino struck a silver €5 coin, issued on 22 July 2014, with his face and the Williams FW16-⁠Renault on its reverse, and announced a stamp issue with it.

Brazil’s post office, the Correios, put his third title on a stamp, and in 2017 Canada Post’s issue for 50 years of the Canadian Grand Prix gave him one of five stamps, one winner for each decade, with Jackie Stewart, Gilles Villeneuve, Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton. Many more stamps bearing his face are sold to collectors, most of them printed by small or distant states for that market; none of those has been verified for this book.

Exhibitions

Exhibitions have followed every anniversary. In 2024, the 30th, there were shows in Imola, Turin, São Paulo, Rio, at Silverstone and on the Sphere in Las Vegas, where his helmet was projected for a week. At Imola the museum of San Domenico showed Magic, 94 photographs by Angelo Orsi and Mirco Lazzari, among them one of Senna laughing with Gian Carlo Minardi and Pierluigi Martini at Aida in 1994. In Turin the Museo Nazionale dell’Automobile showed Ayrton Senna Forever, from his Formula Ford car to the Williams, and demand kept it open until 3 November, three weeks past its planned close.

The Silverstone Festival gathered three karts, three Tolemans, the Lotus 97T and six McLarens, with the trophies of Estoril in 1985 and of Macau in 1983. Since January 2024 TAG Heuer’s museum has held the prototype watch he took off his wrist in his motorhome at Imola, the day before the race, and gave to the company’s Mike Vogt, who drove home crying for most of the way. On 1 May 2026 a free Senna Experience opened at Interlagos, with the Lotus 98T-⁠Renault and gifts from his fans.

Collectibles

The market for his things keeps rising. The McLaren MP4/8-⁠Ford of his sixth and last Monaco win, in 1993, made €4,197,500 at Bonhams in Monaco on 11 May 2018, and at the same sale the Toleman TG184-⁠Hart of his second place there in 1984 made €1,610,000. A Shoei of 1992, matched by photographs to the Spa weekend when he stopped to help Érik Comas, made £720,000 in April 2025, then a record for a helmet worn in a race. Nigel Mansell’s Williams FW14, which carried Senna back to the pits at Silverstone in 1991, sold for €4,055,000 in 2022.

On 11 December 2025 Christie’s sold two letters he wrote in 1979, 25 pages with technical drawings, for £190,000; one of them describes a race told in The kart. Apart from his family’s letters, which will never be sold, Christie’s knew of only two or three others.

In 1992 he met the Japanese comedian Takaaki Ishibashi, who raced as Ayrton Taka on a Fuji TV variety show, and promised him a helmet. A year after Senna’s death, Honda staff who had visited his grave in São Paulo came back to Japan with a box for him: a letter from the Senna foundation, and the helmet from Senna’s last Japanese Grand Prix. In 2022 he said that he still kept it at home, its surface scarred by stones, and that, though he had often wanted to try it on, he had never once put his head inside it.