AT THE CANADIAN GRAND PRIX of 1994, the sixth race of the World Championship, Michael Schumacher said, “I was empty. Did not know what to think, did not know what to feel.... I was happy of my own achievement, but Senna was not there and it was not the same.”
That reveals a rather vulnerable side of human emotion, something you do not attribute to the overachieving, smug-faced Schumacher of the years to come.
Formula 1 changed forever in 1994. It saw the passing of one of the greats, Ayrton Senna da Silva, and the beginning of a new era—one that was dominated by a 25-year-old German from a working-class family, who would later be known as ‘The Kaiser’ of F1.
Schumacher ’94—The Birth of a Legend, a Netflix documentary, focuses on this critical year. The interview-to-footage-to-montage technique is woven expertly into it and I was hooked. The Schumacher I knew was considered the greatest of the era, and I watched when he won his record-setting seventh—and fifth back-to-back—World Championship in 2004. Watching Schumacher ’94 was a revelation, especially how Schumacher, with Benetton F1 then, was indeed the David who fought against the Goliath that was the Federation Internationale de I’Automobile and won the tragedy-ridden F1 championship that year. I never saw Schumacher from that lens. The Kaiser I knew was at the top of the game, finishing 58 and 67 points above the runners-up in 2001 and 2002 respectively, when I began watching the races.
What Netflix does with Schumacher ’94 is remove the very facade that made Schumacher a dominant force in racing—his impenetrable mind—by showing us who he is through the eyes of his 1994 teammates, and most important, his wife, Corinna. “One thing makes a difference—your mindset,” says Corinna, 57, while speaking about how Schumacher was good at shutting everything else out when it came to racing. The documentary shows a couple in love travelling the world. Some footage and recreations with Corinna’s voice in the background will make the toughest of F1 fans well up.
Corinna’s becomes the leading voice of the documentary, adding veracity to the accounts of RTL commentator and F1 journalist Heiko Wasser and German F1 journalist Kai Ebel. Other key voices include British motorsport engineer Pat Symonds, Flavio Briatore, responsible for bringing Schumacher to Benetton F1 as team principal, and Schumi’s then-manager Willi Weber. With their accounts and some inputs from Senna’s teammate at Williams F1 David Coulthard, director Christin Freitag reconstructs the energy from the 1994 F1 season in excellent fashion.
Many F1 fans regard 1994 as one of the most tragic years for motorsports. The San Marino Grand Prix, which began with Rubens Barrichello crashing in practice run, went on to take the life of Simtek racer Roland Ratzenberger in Saturday’s qualifier. And then came the Sunday race, which saw Senna lose control of his Williams FW16 on lap 16, resulting in a fatal crash. Yet, the race also saw Schumacher win, and it set him up for a roller-coaster second half of a season where he would come on top on a single point lead.
The 1994 season was not a passing of the torch in a traditional sense; it was more of a series of events in quick succession, where luck and forces outside human control impacted a sport based on pure automobile engineering excellence and the will to win against all odds. Schumacher ’94 is a homage to that human spirit.
