That movie is about competition and the differing approaches to it not lauda . You can do just as well substitute senna Schumacher with actually higher stakes frankly. The movie is a work of reality plus fiction anyway .
Yes it is about a rivalry that may as well be about fictional characters, but characters nonetheless. You can know how many times he won, and that he got in an accident, ect, those are stakes that can take a viewer by surprise if they don't know who Lauda was. You'll be surprised about how the film sells the story to people who never knew about racing. Since the film was about the rivalry with Hunt, knowing how both eventually won tells you something about how that rivalry ended. But someone completely ignorant of their lives may wonder until the very end if they ever got along again; or if one of them never achieved their goal, making it a zero sum game; ect. Just like any fictional character. It all depends on how the story is constructed, smaller details than life or death can be more important depending on the plot, that's how narrative works. A movie about Schumacher or Senna would be completely different beasts, and their accidents have to do with completely different points in a narrative, compared to one another, and to the Lauda/Hunt Story.
(Dude reason as person above you're sounding more and more elitist)
The opposite really. I would never vouch for the "you had your chance to experience this work when it was new, why haven't you?" line of thought. People are reading books that are new to them and watching films that are new to them everywhere in the world, and I would not think of them as "catching up", they are just experiencing the work like others may have done before them. That's why it would never just be a matter of time as a metric for me, it is not a "you are late" business. It is a "most plot points aren't actually spoilers, but true spoiler do exists, and they don't have time limit".
edit: ultimately everyone consumes a story differently , so knowing what an actual spoiler is is not a precise science. All we can do is think about our experience with the work and identify if any plot point had that much weigh resting on them to the point that ignorance of it through consumption really made that much of a difference.
