Prost, BBC 4 review - life and times of the driver they called 'The Professor'

With Brad Pitt’s much-trumpeted F1 movie about to screech noisily into the multiplexes, it’s not a bad time to be reminded of the career of one of the sport’s indisputable greats.

Alain Prost doesn’t seem too fussed about bigging himself up on social media or reality TV (L’Île d’Amour perhaps), but he’s the only French racing driver to have won the Formula One world championship, a feat he accomplished four times between 1985 and 1993. Nicknamed “The Professor” for his strategic skills and smooth car control, it might even be argued that he was a finer driver than other prodigies such as Michael Schumacher or his great rival, Ayrton Senna. As Jackie Stewart describes his natural feel for his machinery, “the car was very sympathetic to Alain.”

This six-part documentary history of Prost’s life and times was made by French company Studiocanal, and tackles its task with a briskly pragmatic approach which is pretty much the exact opposite of the lavishly-budgeted and cunningly manipulative Drive to Survive formula. The six episodes barely run to half an hour each as they assess the various phases of Prost’s life and career, but with plenty of input from Prost himself and the participation of his family and various professional observers, it adds up to a revealing portrait of both the man and the era during which he raced (pictured below, Senna and Prost).

Prost speaks movingly about his older brother Daniel, who fought a long and painful battle with brain and lung cancer before he died in 1986, and sketches in the history of his parents, who ran a furniture business and were of Armenian descent. He drew enduring inspiration from his grandmother, Victoria, who saw her father and seven brothers murdered during the Armenian genocide but “still managed to be happy”.

Prost stumbled into his destiny almost by accident, when he had his first drive in a go-kart at a track near Cannes. Even though he was nursing a broken arm, it proved to be a duck-to-water moment, and he developed an obsession with karting that brought him over 100 trophies. “He was a brawler, he stood up for himself,” as his mother Rosa put it. He then worked his way up through the motorsport formulas, and in 1980 he was signed up for an F1 drive with McLaren.

This didn’t work out too well, and the following season he switched to Renault, but felt that the team always favoured his teammate, René Arnoux, even giving him a more powerful engine than Prost’s. “Renault betrayed me,” Prost declares darkly, suffering a little excessively from racing driver paranoia. “All the time, they betrayed me all my life.”

It was after he rejoined McLaren in 1984 that the pieces began to fall into place, not least because Prost benefited greatly from the wisdom and generosity of teammate Niki Lauda (“an embodiment of honesty in a field full of liars,” as Prost describes him). In 1998, Ayrton Senna’s arrival at McLaren set the scene for one of the most combustible partnerships in F1 history, as both drivers fought hammer and tongs for supremacy. Competitiveness degenerated into skulduggery and dirty tricks, with the pair of them taking each other off the track in championship-deciding collisions in Suzuka in Japan in 1989 and 1990.

They appeared to share a mutual loathing, until the fateful 1984 season in which Senna was driving for Williams and Prost was by now out of the car and into the commentary box. Senna suddenly became warmer and friendlier, and had found that without Prost to race against, he lost his focus and will to win. He seemed insecure and wasn’t happy with his Williams car. His instincts were proved correct when he died in a horrible crash at Imola, on one of F1’s darkest days.

Prost bailed out at the right time, and scenes of him gathered with his family to watch old home movies (pictured above) suggest a man coasting blissfully through a peaceful retirement. You’d have to reckon he still has a few nightmares and sleepless nights, though.

• All episodes of Prost are available on BBC iPlayer

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