Former champion Alain Prost is fed up with the online abuse he receives as a result of the Netflix series Senna. His rivalry with Ayrton Senna has led to the Frenchman often being portrayed as the antagonist in contemporary narratives about the life of the Brazilian driver. As Prost contemplates whether he should delete his online accounts, the FIA comes to his aid.
Last year, Senna, a six-part biopic about the Brazilian driver, premiered on Netflix. In the series, Alain Prost is portrayed as the villain through a number of fictional storylines. “Complete nonsense,” he described the series this week to the German Motorsport-Total.com. “Almost everything is completely fictionalized. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” Even before the series went online, Prost expressed his concerns to the French Canal+. After all, in an earlier documentary film about Ayrton Senna, he was also portrayed as the antagonist.
“There’s always a hero and a villain,” he said at the time. “I know that a number of stories are being inserted that are completely made up, simply untrue.” Yet many people take these projects about Ayrton Senna at face value. As a result, Alain Prost faces online abuse on social media every day. “I can’t stop thinking about Ayrton, in a good and a bad way. For example, I’m considering deleting my Instagram account because I still get messages about it every day. From time to time, there are also hate messages.”
Friendship, Not Rivalry
Prost explained that after his retirement in 1993, he became close friends with Ayrton Senna. In life after racing, there was absolutely no rivalry anymore. “When I retired, a different person emerged immediately, in a fraction of a second,” he recalled. “He (Senna) was just completely different. In the six months before his death, we spoke regularly on the phone, sometimes two or three times a week. He was not the same anymore, he even begged me to come back.”
When asked whether Alain Prost would ever want to produce a biopic about his own career, he responded with doubt: “I am more inclined to say: this is it, I have made my mark and I am gone. That is actually more my state of mind at the moment. I have other things to do in life than just talk about what happened with Ayrton. He told me things back then that I should never share with anyone, not even with his family. That’s what I take away from that time: my own secrets and certainties. I know how he was, I know it exactly. Enough.”
The FIA has since released a statement in response to Prost’s comments. “As a former world champion in his sport, Alain Prost should not be driven off social media due to online violence,” the message reads. “His experience highlights the harsh reality that athletes at all levels face: daily abuse, harassment, and even threats. The FIA is developing educational, technological, and regulatory solutions needed to protect participants, officials, and fans.”
