A new feature-length film focusing on the lives of five motor racing legends will be unveiled this July, in the week leading up to the British Grand Prix. The film, , has been written and directed by Manish Pandey, who ten years ago wrote the screenplay for the award-winning Senna. This new movie - commissioned by the Motorsport Network - brings together drivers from F1, sportscars and rallying who tell their stories to each other over an evening in an English stately home. The four racers are two-time Formula 1 world champion Mika H�kkinen, former Ferrari grand prix ace Felipe Massa, nine-time Le Mans winner Tom Kristensen and World Rally Championship runner-up Mich�le Mouton. �I wanted to get racers of different ages and disciplines together but in a location that was out of their comfort zone,� says Pandey. �When you dig down into these characters, you discover - no matter what their background is - how much they have in common.� Though the motor racing disciplines differ, the stories they share across ten chapters in the film are broadly similar: their love of four wheels growing up, their big breaks, successes, failures, personal struggles and life-threatening accidents. Supplementing their narratives is a wealth of archive material, either gleaned from their personal collections or from the extensive library held at Formula 1 TV�s headquarters at Biggin Hill. has unearthed some previously unseen archive from key races such as Jerez 1997 (Mika H�kkinen�s first win), Interlagos 2008 (when Felipe Massa lost the world championship) and Monza 2006 (when Michael Schumacher�s retirement was announced). Of the 65 minutes of archive in the film, over three quarters of it is from the F1 library. �Movie-making is very technical and there is always a formula,� Pandey says, explaining the details of production. �There are three acts. After a short setup where you�re introduced to the characters, suddenly there is a twist. That sets you up for the next journey in the film before the final act, which is where everything changes. �There are techniques you can deploy. However, documentary film-makers have a responsibility when they tell the story of a living or deceased person because it needs to be the truth.� The final protagonist in the story is Michael Schumacher, who at some stage in his career has either worked or raced against the other four racers in the film. H�kkinen�s first experience of racing Schumacher was at Macau in F3, before those epic Suzuka showdowns in the late �90s and early 2000s. Massa gets his big break as Schumacher�s team-mate in 2006 and looked up to him as a father figure. After Tom Kristensen beat H�kkinen in the Formula Nordic A-Class karting championship in 1985, he raced alongside Schumacher in a handful of Formula 3 races - before encountering him again in the annual Race of Champions, an event organised and run by� Mich�le Mouton. �It became clear with the drivers we had that while they would tell the stories of their lives, they would also be able to shine a little light on different facets of Michael,� says Pandey. �All four of them have Michael in common and I wanted him to be the fifth story. In the years since his skiing accident I�ve begun to appreciate the immensity of what he achieved on the track and the absolute love that surrounded him - especially at Ferrari.�

Starring:

Mika H�kkinen, Tom Kristensen, Felipe Massa

Genre:

Sport, Documentary