Willi Weber, Michael Schumacher’s long-time manager, gets the line that will travel furthest from the film.
“The traction control was sitting in the car. And his name was Schumacher,” Weber says in the new Netflix documentary, which streams globally from 2 October 2026.
‘Schumacher ’94: The Birth of a Legend’ is directed by Christin Freitag and produced by LEONINE Documentaries, and it reopens a case that Formula 1 has never quite closed. Corinna Schumacher, Flavio Briatore, Bernie Ecclestone, David Coulthard and Weber all sit for interviews.
Aida is where the noise started
The suspicion did not begin in a scrutineering bay. It began at the second race of the 1994 season, at Aida in Japan, where Ayrton Senna crashed out and walked back down the circuit.
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“Senna finds himself at the side of the track and becomes convinced that he’s hearing something that resembles traction control,” says Steve Matchett, then a mechanic on Schumacher’s car, in the film.
Traction control had been banned for 1994 along with active suspension and ABS, part of a wider FIA cull of driver aids meant to hand the sport back to the driver. Senna, a three-time world champion by then, thought he could hear it working on the Benetton next to him.
Symonds does not concede an inch
Pat Symonds, Schumacher’s race engineer, does not budge on camera.
“This is a very interesting time in the season and one that I think is very misreported. Firstly, it didn’t have traction control,” Symonds says.
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That has been Benetton’s line for three decades. The FIA seized Benetton’s engine management software during the season and found a hidden launch-control routine that became known as Option 13, a fully automated start mode accessed by selecting the thirteenth item on a menu that only showed ten. The governing body could not prove the routine had been used in a race. Benetton was fined $100,000 for the delays in handing over the source code.
Briatore reframes the fight
Flavio Briatore, the Benetton team principal that season, does not argue the technical detail. He puts the whole row down to snobbery.
“All this suspicion, you know? Cheating, no cheating. Because Formula 1 is quite simple. If the big team is winning, no problem. If the new entry is winning, it’s cheating,” Briatore says.
That was Benetton in 1994: a clothing brand’s racing team, five years old at the top level, beating Williams-Renault with a 25-year-old German.
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A summer of disqualifications
The paddock’s suspicion did not have to rely on Option 13 to grow. It had the results sheet.
Schumacher was disqualified from second place at the 1994 British Grand Prix for overtaking Damon Hill on the formation lap and then ignoring the black flag that was shown to him, and he was handed a two-race ban on top. He then won the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa and was disqualified again when the plank under his Benetton was found to be worn beyond the legal limit. Benetton’s appeal was rejected.
By the time the season reached Adelaide, Schumacher had missed two races through the ban and been stripped of the points from two others, and he still led the championship. The title was settled when he collided with Hill in the finale and took both cars out, a moment the film flags as one that “still splits the paddock in half.”
Four witnesses, no verdict
Freitag’s film does not deliver a ruling. It puts the witnesses next to each other and leaves them there: Symonds says no, Matchett recounts what Senna heard, Weber says the driver was the real advantage, Briatore says the sport was jealous of an upstart.
The former ITV F1 commentator James Allen sums up why the year has stayed contested.
“Aida was where the problems really started to emerge around whether or not there were some issues with the Benetton car,” Allen says in the documentary.
‘Schumacher ’94: The Birth of a Legend’ is available on Netflix worldwide from 2 October 2026.
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