Rent Williams and Mansell: Red 5 (2023)

All Rev, No Insight - Williams and Mansell: Red 5 review by griggs

Watching Williams and Mansell: Red 5, I was hoping to tap back into that era of F1 that was so easy to get excited about – proper racing, big characters, danger baked in. Instead, this feels more like an extended TV special than a documentary with anything new to say.

We get the expected version of events: Nigel Mansell as the hugely talented, eternal underdog, always punching above his weight and somehow always the victim. Frank Williams and the team are sketched in, and the archive cars look fantastic, but the film rarely digs beneath the familiar anecdotes. You keep waiting for it to get into the garage politics, the engineering, the grudges – and it just doesn’t, beyond largely painting Nelson Piquet as the villain.

If you’ve seen Senna, this plays like the CliffsNotes from the other side of the paddock, sanitised and smoothed out. The roar of those engines still gives you a nostalgic twinge, but that’s history doing the heavy lifting, not the filmmaking. I wanted insight; I got a polished recap.