Of the many absences from the Netflix series “Senna”, the dramaturgy is perhaps the most notable. There are simply no protagonists hindering or, to a lesser extent, aiding the proverbial hero’s journey. At most there are stairs — the case of McLaren boss Ron Dennis, Ayrton’s father Miltão and the fictional construct of the Anglo-Brazilian reporter for Autosport magazine.
But, as journalist Enor Paiano noted in his Substack account, Nuno Cobra was also largely ignored. Cobra was Senna’s coach, in the best sense of the word, as he conditioned him physically and mentally for ten years.
It wasn’t enough to make someone who had a “small heart”, who “ran 25 minutes and passed out”, an athlete with a [sistema] abundant cardiovascular disease”, as Cobra told this columnist in 2017, in a profile for Poder magazine.
In an attempt to make Senna someone absolutely focused, invulnerable or almost so to the enormous tribulations and stress of training and long Formula 1 races, Cobra also placed great emphasis on mental preparation.
But, instead of meditation or yoga sessions, as one would imagine, the idea was to get there by taking care of Senna’s diet, sleep, idle time and what Cobra’s children, today heirs of the so-called “Nuno Method Cobra”, consider a type of active meditation, a physical activity that requires great concentration – slacklining, for example.
Throughout the decade they worked together, Senna always paid due tribute to his coach, which amplifies his absence in the series.
In an interview in 1993, the pilot summarized: “I improved all my parameters […] We managed to learn much more about our own limitations, both physical and psychological. [Cobra] has always been working on this, always trying to raise my limits, with the aim […] deep down also linked to my state of health, my future life.”
Even with his model and fame, Cobra has always been a “maverick”, someone outside the mainstream of the fitness market.
It’s true that he didn’t bother to submit the “Method” to the university —perhaps the university’s fault—, but it was replicated very little, despite more than a hundred reprints of his best seller “The Seed of Victory”, a mark completely out of the curve for the Brazilian editorial standard.
One of Cobra’s sons, also a physical trainer —or health philosopher, as he prefers— Nuno Cobra Jr. has been vocal in his networks in carrying out his own, but quite reverent, exegesis of his father’s method. Nuninho does so mainly by criticizing the “system”, the physical activity market in which a vision for especially aesthetic purposes predominates.
Nuninho deplores the “no pain, no gain” and the “new fashions” of physical training. For him, there is only salvation in “corporeal minimalism” — basically another name for the Method.
With all this, and although my days as a show critic have been left in the dust, I think it is pertinent to inform you that I liked “Senna”. The TikTok-style edition — I can imagine the newest generation watching “Russian Ark” — instills emotion and competitiveness into the production, essential attributes of the biographer.
For a few hours, Senna’s contemporaries relive, remember and, in my case, learn the driver’s enormous size.
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