There’s a fascination and poignancy to this gripping sports documentary, about someone who deserves a kind of legendary status for the way he didn’t become a legend. This is motor racing’s bad boy Tommy Byrne, who rose from humble beginnings in Dundalk in Ireland to be one of the hottest prospects of early 1980s Formula One, mentioned in the same breath as Ayrton Senna. An interviewee says he could have been the George Best or Alex Higgins of the racing world, but somehow Byrne only did the Best downfall without the preceding success.

The film shows he was a brilliant, instinctive, aggressive driver who terrified everyone on the youth circuits (“I learned my craft by crashing”) but also cocky, mouthy and out of place in the money-orientated world of Formula One. He fell out with everyone, created enemies and infuriated friends, took to drink and drugs and wound up on the Mexican race circuit where his life boiled down, in the crisp words of another interviewee, to “partying and hoors – which he wasn’t paying for”. Nowadays, he teaches high-performance driving in Ohio and has come to terms – sort of – with the fact that he never made it. His hot temper and the sport’s snobbery were a lethal mix.