Warning: This post contains spoilers for Senna.

On May 1, 1994, at the start of the sixth lap of the San Marino Grand Prix in Italy, 34-year-old Ayrton Senna Da Silva crashed his newly designed Williams race car into a concrete wall at 145 miles per hour. Later that day, the Formula One driver, winner of three championships, was pronounced dead at a local hospital, sending shockwaves across the racing world and his home country of Brazil.

The event forms the first short sequence in Senna, a new six-episode Netflix miniseries that chronicles most of his adult life as a racing driver and his rise to the top of his sport. En route to greatness on the race track (he finished his 10-year career with 41 wins, 65 pole positions and 80 podiums), Senna became one of the few drivers who transcended the sport itself – he was both a global superstar and To Brazilians, he was a national hero who gathered around the television every time he strapped himself into his car and lowered his helmet lid. As he drove, everyone watched.

Showrunner and co-director Vincente Amorim (Santo, Yakuza Princess) chronicles the emergence of his near-mythical fame and the challenging ladder he climbed to reach the sport’s ultimate heights. Like most top athletes, Senna, played with great determination by Gabriel Leone, inherited a love of racing at an early age and combined it with his inflexible, single-minded personality and unrelenting desire to be the best, which reinforced his relationships with family, teammates and others competitors. As he progressed through various stages of racing and entered Formula 1 in 1984, he mastered the driver’s seat with absolute confidence, showing aggression at every opportunity and proving that he could win at any level, on any surface and against any opponent.

Read more: Zak Brown, CEO of McLaren Racing, competes against Red Bull and Ferrari

Maybe you already know some of this journey and the background if you have watched the film of the same name Sennadirector Asif Kapadia’s captivating and award-winning 2010 documentary, which is also (conveniently) available on Netflix. In a departure from the typical documentary form, Kapadia used exclusively archival home and racing footage, sacrificing Talking Heads for a more intimate and immediate portrayal of Senna’s driving prowess and his quest for greatness as he moved between racing teams and navigated the politics of Formula One. Although the miniseries dramatizes many of the same moments, it also fills in some of the off-track gaps that Kapadia leaves out, including Senna’s first marriage, his early racing career in Britain and the intricacies of his rivalry with French driver Alain Prost (Matt Mella).

Three decades after Senna’s untimely death, the Brazilian driver is still widely regarded as one of the best (and fastest) drivers in the history of Formula 1 racing. Read more about the series, his prolific and influential decade-long career, and the legacy of a life cut short.

Senna’s rise to F1 glory

Even as a child, Senna felt an irregular urge to drive and began racing go-karts at the age of 13. The early success motivated him to move to Britain in 1981, race real cars and devote himself to formula motor racing.

When Senna embarked on a career path, his home country of Brazil was in the midst of a 21-year military dictatorship that left most of the country in poverty. As unemployment increased, Senna gave hope and pride to many Brazilian residents. Amorim and co-director Júlia Rezende occasionally point out Brazil’s economic and political struggles in various headlines and television reports, and in a few glimpses of a Brazilian father and son flocking to the television as Senna races.

Most SennaThe first two episodes document his development as a driver in England. Although his aggressive, winning tactics failed to ingratiate himself with his team, Senna still won the Formula Ford Series championship in his first year. Senna initially withdraws to appease his wife Lillian and his parents, who want him to take over the family business, but his immediate success draws him back to England. It doesn’t take long before he gives up his life in Brazil, breaks up with Lillian and continues his climb up the Formula rankings.

Amid Senna’s migration between teams and levels of racing, Amorim highlights some of the prejudices Latino athletes face. After Senna won the F3 championship, the Formula 1 teams – especially Lotus – took notice. But no matter how impressive his lap times are, the majority of executives refuse to give Senna a fair shake. “He’s just not British,” says a supervisor at Imperial Tobacco, a Lotus title sponsor.

Ultimately, Senna chose Toleman, a smaller racing team that didn’t have the car design or engine to compete with the top F1 brands. And yet in his first year he showed the world his skills. “It’s like a drug,” said Senna after his first successes. “Once you experience it, you’re constantly looking for it.”

The rivalry is born

It’s difficult to capture the thrill and danger of Formula 1 and bring it to the small screen, but Amorim effectively conveys the feeling in the cockpit. Based on a soundtrack of accelerating engines and gear changes, he deftly interpolates archival overhead footage of races with his own camera’s hyper-focused close-ups, mixing CGI and real cars to match the sport’s frantic pace and Senna’s stomach-churning embrace. At some points during his championship runs, the Brazilian describes the driving experience as if he was “in another dimension” and Senna travels to this out-of-body dimension with abstract, kinetic energy.

While Senna first developed into a resolute driver at Toleman and then into a menacing driver at Lotus, Prost had become the face of the racing world at McLaren. The pair soon developed a rivalry, but their frosty relationship only crystallized when they became McLaren teammates in 1988. At some point in the season, Senna pushed Prost towards a pit wall (a stormy act that did not appear in the miniseries) and their rivalry remained contentious as Senna’s star eclipsed Prost en route to the Brazilian’s first F1 championship.

The intense public battle only began in 1989, when Senna passed Prost on a restart at Imola, breaking what Prost believed to be a gentleman’s agreement. Over the next two years, each involved themselves in title-deciding crashes by cornering (one that earned Senna a disqualification and suspension) and tarnished Formula One’s reputation, with Senna denouncing Prost’s political maneuvers and Prost complaining about Senna’s impulsive driving

The rivals would eventually become friends once Prost accepted a role on television, but their relationship fueled F1 storylines for years and made their races a must-see event.

An announced end

At the start of the 1994 racing season, Senna could foresee tragedy on the horizon.

At the time, he was unhappy with his Williams car (which had recently lost its automatic suspensions and gearboxes due to a series-wide ban) and didn’t trust the asphalt of the San Marino track. His concerns ahead of his final race grew during Friday’s qualifying match when driver Rubens Barrichello, Senna’s friend and fellow Brazilian, rolled his car and hit a flat tire, requiring air transport to a hospital where he suffered a broken nose and Bruises were diagnosed. The next day, Austrian driver Roland Ratzenberger died instantly after crashing into a concrete barrier due to front wing damage.

Senna felt the weight of these moments. In the latest episode he calls on the F1 president to postpone the Grand Prix. This is one of many occasions where the Brazilian has expressed his frustration with safety regulations and questioned Formula 1’s leadership. That same weekend, as depicted in the final episode, Prost pushes him to run the Drivers’ Association because of the enormous appeal he has over other drivers and the influence he has as the biggest name in the sport.

Ultimately, these tragedies did not stop Senna from competing. In a crucial pre-race scene, Senna’s doctor Sid Watkins asks him why he has to keep racing and can’t just “give up and go fishing.” Senna replies: “Sid, there are certain things we have no control over. I can’t give up, I have to keep going.” After his death, Formula One made renewed efforts to improve its safety measures, including restrictions on car body aerodynamics and a pit lane speed limit. As a result, there were 21 years between Senna’s death and that of Jules Biachi, who died as a result of injuries sustained at the Japanese Grand Prix in 2015.

But Senna’s legacy goes beyond the racetrack. After his death, his family founded the Instituto Ayrton Senna, a charitable foundation that he planned to set up with his sister Vivianne before competing in 1994. Throughout his career, he had made large donations to help impoverished Brazilian children and wanted a unified place to focus on education and human development for the next generation. Today Vivianne is president of the nonprofit organization and is committed to supporting disadvantaged youth in memory of her brother.