Netflix’s Senna Stumbles Off the Track

Trailer, via Netflix.

The Man Who Could Not Stop Driving

Netflix’s Senna is a $170 million dollar portrait of a man who could not stop driving. Gabriel Leone plays Ayrton Senna, the Brazilian racing driver whose career was defined by speed, rivalry, and a tragic end. The series, created by Vicente Amorim and directed by Amorim and Júlia Rezende, traces Senna’s journey from karting champion to Formula 1 legend, through his rivalry with Alain Prost, his feud with federation president Jean-Marie Balestre, and his complicated relationship with the sensationalist press. It ends where the story ends: at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, where Senna died.

Spectacle vs. Storytelling

The series is built around spectacle, and it delivers on that front. The racing sequences are loud, kinetic, and shot with a sense of vertigo that mirrors Senna’s own daring. The production design is meticulous, from the garages to the pit lanes to the grandstands. The car models are exact, the crowds are thick, and the sound design makes the engines roar like living beasts. When the series commits to the track, it works.

But spectacle is not the same as storytelling. The series struggles to balance its ambition with its subject. Senna’s personal life — his relationship with his parents, his romance with Xuxa Meneghel — gets short shrift. The series touches on these threads but rarely digs deep enough to make them matter. The result is a portrait of a man who is driven by passion and principle, but whose inner world remains opaque.

The Cast’s Weak Supporting Role

Leone is excellent, giving Senna a quiet intensity that carries the weight of the story. He is the engine that drives the series, and when he is on screen, the show hums. But the supporting cast, which includes Matt Mella as Prost, Patrick Kennedy as Ron Dennis, and Arnaud Viard as Balestre, often feels like window dressing. Their arcs are sketched rather than drawn, and their conflicts feel less like character studies and more like set pieces.

The Flaw in the Framing

The series also bends history to fit its narrative. It presents Senna as a martyr to the sport, a man who was undone by forces beyond his control. That framing is debatable. Senna was a competitor, and competition has winners and losers. The series wants to make him a saint, but saints are not always interesting. The tension between reverence and truth is the show’s central problem.

What Works

Here is what the series gets right:

• The racing sequences, which are genuinely thrilling
• Leone’s performance, which anchors the whole enterprise
• The production design, which makes the world feel lived-in

What Falls Short

Here is what it gets wrong:

• The character development, which is thin and rushed
• The historical accuracy, which is compromised in service of a cleaner arc
• The pacing, which slows to a crawl in its middle stretch

The series is at its best when it lets the cars do the talking. The worst is when it tries to talk about the cars. The middle stretch, which covers Senna’s years in Formula 1, drags. The rivalries are established but not resolved. The politics are explained but not felt. The series rushes to its conclusion, and in doing so it loses some of the emotional weight that made Senna a legend in the first place.

Senna is a flawed but fascinating piece of television. It is too long, too reverent, and too willing to sacrifice nuance for clarity. But it is also a technically impressive series that captures the thrill of a man who was born to drive. The racing is the real star, and the series knows it. It just doesn’t know what to do with the rest of the story.

Formula 1 · Gabriel Leone · Netflix · Senna · TV Review