1 (DVD)

Following in the tyre treads of Senna and Rush but with a distinct take all of its own, 1 is an exciting and engrossing history of Formula One motor racing since the official inception of the World Championship in 1950 (with a brief foray into the pre-war years) up to the modern day. The particular powerful focus for Paul Crowder's film is the glamorous but ultra-dangerous, indeed regularly deadly, years of racing in the 1960s and 1970s, and the charismatic characters who lived and died in the era (such as Jim Clark, Jochen Rindt, Francois Cevert, Ronnie Peterson and Gilles Villeneuve) before safety regulations were (slowly) introduced. Even so, it wasn't until 1996, in response to the death of racing icon Ayrton Senna two years earlier, that a reformed F1 emerged in which appalling accidents began to become survivable. With a stellar cast of past and present racing-driver superstars and other important figures in the sport and spectacular, often rare, archival footage, 1 is a well-told and very moving history.