F1 safety: 1 to conjure with

Documentary film '1' has its London premiere on the evening of Friday January 10 2014.

Last year AUTOSPORT's Sam Tremayne had an advance preview of the movie and interviewed director Paul Chowder. Here's another chance to read our first-look review.

"Williamson is dead. No lap of honour, quiet presentation."

That terse instruction, issued to 1973 Dutch Grand Prix winner Jackie Stewart even as he sat in the cockpit of his Tyrrell, is almost unimaginable in the modern era of Formula 1.

The scenes of Roger Williamson's car on fire, of David Purley fighting with such animated and poignant helplessness, are thankfully totally incomprehensible.

But while there is perhaps no death more shamefully written into F1's legacy, Williamson's was of course no isolated incident. New film-documentary '1' is a fascinating and appalling testament to that, chronicling the sport's brutal history and the drivers who risked their lives for their passion.

Where Rush and Senna before it dealt with specific heroes, the scope of 1 is far wider, acting as a faithful narrative to eras when the fight to improve safety was met with apathy and even derision.

"If you think motor racing is dangerous, slow down a bit," ex-FIA president Max Mosley recalls being told during his days as a driver. "I thought, 'I cannot believe a world sport is run like this'."

It is impossible not to share his incredulity.

But what the film does so well, so expertly, is stitch together the gestation of F1 in a way that explains, even if it never attempts to justify, the massive discrepancies between modern attitudes and the zeitgeist of the 60s and 70s.

Hence it takes time to mention the advent of a constructors' championship in 1958 - "the evolution" of a mechanised arms-race according to 1978 champion Mario Andretti; identifies 1967 as the seminal moment when "the machines began to overtake the standards of the tracks"; and highlights the role both wings and sponsorships had on feeding the inexorable ethos that the car can, and must, always be improved.

Williamson's fatal accident is featured in '1' © LAT

Even as it does so, it also skilfully portrays all that was glamorous, all that was breathlessly irresistible, about the sport and its protagonists at a time when, as Stewart puts it, "motor racing was dangerous and sex was safe".

One montage from Monaco beautifully flicks from generation to generation as the cars flick from turn to turn, before returning us to 1966 and the sight of Stewart and Clark on holiday together with their partners - who formed the Doghouse club just as the drivers, significantly, were starting up the Grand Prix Drivers' Association.

The revelry is broken seconds later when the kaleidoscope of colour, noise and action fades into a silent grey. Hockenheim, 1968, and Jimmy - the greatest of his generation, and among the greatest of all time - is killed. "I think they thought we were gladiators," Stewart reflects of the sport's hierarchy. "They were blind to the reality. It was a thin line between survival and death."

It is a truism that underpins the remainder of the documentary, as the sport's reticence over safety is exposed - from deficiencies in the cars themselves to a lack of barriers and the almost total absence of proper medical procedures.

"There was an accident and someone was killed, that was all the world knew," says F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone, who alongside Andretti, Mosley and Stewart is just one of a multitude of interviewees. "No-one really looked behind it, and at whether it could have been prevented."

Hence the accidents - some near-misses, some fatalities - continue. There are genuinely haunting moments, like pitlane footage of Colin Chapman's reaction to news of Francois Cevert's death.

For those who felt Rush strayed too far and too often from the truth, this is a far more faithful recounting of events, all couched within a massively rich historical archive that ensures it stays compelling and inspiring even through scenes of such stark and unacceptable mortality.

If there is an area of the film that will grate with the hardcore contingent though, it is the timing. Too long is spent chronicling the James Hunt/Niki Lauda fight and, while there is genuine purpose rather than cheap piggybacking behind the decision, it forces a sudden acceleration of pace at the end that means the deaths of Tom Pryce, Ronnie Peterson, Gilles Villeneuve and Elio de Angelis - among others - are at best only fleetingly referenced.

"I'd have loved to do more on them - on Bruce McLaren, Jo Siffert, on Gilles, on Prost versus Senna," director Paul Chowder admits. "I have my own heroes, like Phil Hill, who I'd have loved to have covered. We didn't mention Cooper leading the rear-engine change, which was hugely important to the sport.

"We started out with several key moments on our story board, and Pryce and Villeneuve were on it. But by the time we got to them, we realised it wasn't going to help the story anymore; we'd made the point we needed to by then. It took a major look in the mirror to cut those sections, but there's always a danger in films that you can get wrapped up in what you have and not see the wood for the trees.

"With the Senna/Prost crash at Suzuka 1989 for example, we talked about the fact the drivers were so secure in their cars that a crash was able to determine the championship, and how different that was to past events. But we just didn't have time, and when it was gone I didn't miss it."

Though Lauda/Hunt does take up too much time, the film is equally right to treat the 1976 finale as another seminal moment. Establishing the context of Bernie's TV deal, and the advent of worldwide live coverage, it labels Lauda's decision not to race - much like Emerson Fittipaldi's call a year earlier at Montjuich Park - as a decision that changed the sport forever.

Professor Sid Watkins © XPB

As the film is being wrapped up, it also delivers a masterstroke by introducing Professor Sid Watkins. The indelible foundation to any true and accurate story about F1 safety, his inclusion is perhaps the biggest validation of 1 as a serious and faithful tribute to the sport's history.

As Ayrton Senna's haunting 1994 Imola onboard plays, 1 reaches its obvious conclusion and its raison d'etre. "The biggest difference between Jimmy and Ayrton," we are told following Senna's death, "is that the world now needed to know."

Bookending the film is Martin Brundle's airborne crash at Melbourne, 1996. The Briton's Jordan lands on its nose before ploughing upside down through the gravel. Brundle, though, is unhurt; more than that, he is able to return to the pits and - after being passed fit by Watkins - restart in the spare car.

"It is so powerful in the context of Jimmy, of Cevert, of Williamson," Chowder says. "It was the perfect representation of how far the sport had come.

"That was so important to us, to show how the sport got where it is today. These drivers all live on the shoulders of this great legacy, of these drivers who lived their passion in the face of danger and, amid their racing, also pushed for safety.

"That era made it exciting and sexy, and the sport's whole fan base developed from that. It was important to tell the story we have, in the way we have, in order for the modern fan to have respect for the past. When we spoke to Bernie, he said that if he was going to make an F1 film, this is the one he'd want to tell."

Perhaps 1's biggest success is that it never over-glamourises the sport, and never exploits the power of its tragic narrative or the testament of those who lived through such times.

Instead it judges its emotional pitch to perfection, creating a compelling, sensitive and powerful tribute to F1's 'golden era'.

***

1 comes out in select UK cinemas in Spring 2014.