In this month’s TopGear magazine, executive producer Andy Wilman wrote on the thinking behind Sunday’s evocative Ayrton Senna film. Based on your feedback, it was clearly one of your favourite features we’ve done on the show. Here’s what he said:
Senna would have been 50 this year, and Lewis’s drive in the MP4/4 is one of the highlights in a film we’re making to mark the moment.
The finished piece won’t aim to be a rose-tinted celebration of the man, because that wouldn’t do justice to the complexities that made his character so interesting, and nor will it be a profile of Senna the man, because there is a stunning movie coming out later this year that does that job brilliantly.
Instead, our humble offering will be a bit more geeky, looking at why so many of his peers considered him to be the greatest driver of all time. And indeed many do. Autosport did a survey of 200 plus F1 drivers a while back, and around 40 per cent put Senna as their top man behind a wheel.
They were big names too – Schumacher, Hakkinen, Alonso, Massa, Barrichello – we talk to all of them in the film, including Bruno Senna, who remembers how his uncle could calculate tyre pressures in his head.
We also speak with drivers who fought wheel to wheel with the Brazilian. Nigel Mansell, one of his fiercest combatants, has massive respect for Senna, and he really brings Senna’s ruthlessness and skill to vivid life.
Also Martin Brundle, who battled so fiercely in F3 with him that he ended up with Senna’s car on his head, is superb at conveying to the layman the secrets of Senna’s immense speed – how he could arrive at a corner already knowing, via a sixth sense, how much grip there would be in the wet, how he could find a second in qualifying when everyone else could only find two tenths.
Then of course there’s the nine-year-old boy at a kart race who, on hearing of Senna’s death, went behind a shed and cried his eyes out. That boy became the man who you see driving Senna’s MP4/4 on these pages, and who you’ll be seeing bringing that car back to life on TopGear in a few weeks.
But enough of our film. The one you must see is the movie I mentioned earlier. It is a landmark piece of cinema for the petrolhead and indeed anyone fascinated by characters destined to be singled out for greatness. We’ll be back with more info about it in a future issue.
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