Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Chronicling the triumphant, truncated life of a three-time Formula One champion, Asif Kapadia’s 2010 documentary Senna was an arresting study of an intensely driven man and an exhilarating tribute to a legendary driver. Its unique archive-led approach — which allowed the late racer himself to comment on his career up to his fatal on-track accident — felt more personal and visceral than any other sports documentary at the time.A new Netflix show of the same name, by contrast, turns the Ayrton Senna story into a glossy, generic bio-drama. Slow, complacent, cautious . . . the six-part series has the traits that were anathema to its subject.After a brief prologue that glimpses ahead to the tragedy at Imola during the San Marino Grand Prix in May 1994, the series takes us back to São Paulo, where a four-year-old Ayrton is zooming around his father’s auto-parts factory, small hands clutching at an invisible steering wheel. Waiting for him in a room with his beaming parents is a go-kart; his destiny, the quasi-divine light and swelling music tells us.From there, the first three episodes available to preview trace the young speedster’s rise from amateur racer to breakout F1 star with all the expected teachable moments, record-smashing victories and personal epiphanies. “I know I can be a champion,” he promises his father, before moving to England for a formative Formula Ford campaign (a mountainous spot amusingly doubling for Norfolk).An engaging, well-cast Gabriel Leone occasionally gives a jump start to an inert script. But most attempts to consider the man under the helmet are clunky and contrived, revealing little beyond his relentless will to win. Other characters — like Kaya Scodelario’s British-Brazilian F1 journalist — largely exist to explain Senna’s talent in accessible terms (“bloody hell you were fast”).Although Senna is pedestrian as a drama and sterile as a biography — it steers well clear of his relationship with a 15-year-old while in his mid-twenties — it does produce some snarling-engine, tyre-burning thrills. Dynamic, immersive camera work during race sequences places us in the driver’s seat, by the pedals, on the wheels as Senna pushes the boundaries of what was thought possible in a car.“I felt like I had entered another dimension,” he says after the strikingly recreated Monaco Grand Prix in 1988, when his trance-like effort to lap teammate-turned-rival Alain Prost ends in an ominous crash. A shame Senna couldn’t find a third dimension in its off-circuit scenes.★★☆☆☆On Netflix from November 29
