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Arriving in the wake of Senna and Rush, this gripping documentary returns us to the life and death struggles of Formula One. Combining archive footage with latterday interviews, Paul Crowder's film uses sonorous narration by Michael Fassbender to lead us through the history of a sport that was once infamous for its catastrophically high mortality rate. As we trace the evolution of cars and competitors, we hear time and again tales of young lives cut short in the pursuit of speed, with the element of danger becoming both a nihilistic lure and a powerful selling point. Yet since the death of Ayrton Senna in 1994, F1 has cleaned up its act and Crowder is keen to emphasise how much safer the sport has become in an age in which tragedy sits uneasily with worldwide television coverage.
