This very authorised-seeming Formula One documentary pulls up third behind recent films on the McLaren and Williams empires, which may explain why it often seems in such a rush. Of car company founder Enzo Ferrari himself, for one, there is next to naught: nothing on where he came from or how he got into the sport, just gnomic audioclips, choice onscreen quotes and biographical titbits that outline some vague philosophy about testing oneself against unknown forces.
The focus is almost exclusively on his star employees – those corner-cutting gadabouts of the company’s late 50s golden age – allowing director Daryl Goodrich to unspool reels of gleaming Kodachrome images of drivers in their trackside pomp. Where August’s probing Williams did so much to separate the fragile man from the fast machine, Goodrich’s more misty-eyed, nostalgic endeavour never really gets under its subject’s hood.
What the film instead seems drawn towards – or perhaps can’t avoid – are those horrendous pile-ups that blighted the sport’s early decades, yet their framing here feels naggingly cursory. Where Senna’s crashes formed the basis of a major tragedy, and those in 2013’s Life on the Limit informed a wider investigation into Formula One health and safety, Goodrich deploys his carnage as a punctuating spectacle, shrugged off with a few plaintive piano notes as part of the job.
It knows its target audience – hitting DVD shelves on Monday in time to fill Dad’s Christmas stocking – but as a film, it’s altogether keener to Turtle Wax the brand than stop for even a moment to examine what Ferrari the man, logo and company ever stood for.
