With all the commotion about a certain Netflix release that hit the screens recently, docuseries are quite the thing at the moment. So it’s timely that the latest offering from BAFTA-winning “Senna“ writer and producer Manish Pandey should drop at Christmas on Discovery+ and other platforms internationally.
Having dominated F1 for over 40 years, Bernie Ecclestone was moved aside in 2017 as Liberty Media stamped their ownership on the sport. But now Ecclestone, 92, is having his say. As the sole protagonist of this new eight-part docuseries, written and directed by Pandey, Ecclestone tells his story from 1950 up to the fateful day in 2017, when Liberty’s newly installed F1 CEO Chase Carey gave him his marching orders after over 35 years as the sport’s ringmaster.
The programs are incredibly rich in the archive, with spectacular footage from 1950 onwards, including the first Grand Prix at Silverstone, where Ecclestone was present. As a frontman for F1, Ecclestone was a man of few words, but here he is front and center and seemingly comfortable telling his narrative, with insights that are at times hilarious and, at other times, extremely sad.
The early programs, covering the ‘50s, ’60s, and ‘70s, inevitably feature many driver fatalities. The woefully inadequate safety of cars and race tracks in F1’s early days is depressingly familiar as the decades pass and more great names are lost: Hawthorn, Collins, Rindt, Cevert, Villeneuve. Ecclestone played his part in pushing safety, particularly when he got control of the sport in the 1980s, installing Prof Sid Watkins as F1’s medical supervisor and empowering him.
Ecclestone is at his best here when describing the behind-closed-doors deal-making, which was his stock in trade. As it is close to impossible to illustrate these anecdotes with an archive, the producers hit on an elegant solution with comic book-style animation that sounds cheesy but actually works well. That said, the archive researcher has played a blinder, and there is actual footage of race promoters handing wads of cash over to Ecclestone, who arranges them neatly in his briefcase and thanks them for their business. There is also wonderfully atmospheric footage of the kerbside second-hand car trading in London’s Warren Street, where Ecclestone cut his teeth as a dealmaker.
But the series must feature the largest F1 video archive purchase in history, and as well as racing action, there are some…
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