The Life of Senna

by Rubython, Tom

  Such a cool attitude certainly did not stem from any lack of excitement at the prospect of Formula One. Senna’s first Grand Prix support race was a big day for him and he was looking forward to meeting the stars. The biggest star in Brazil at the time was reigning world champion Nelson Piquet. Rushen recalls: “Ayrton said to me ‘I’m going to introduce myself to Nelson Piquet because I want to be like him’. He was so excited, just like a boy, and all I could say was ‘Yeah, okay’. But Piquet snubbed him and he took it personally – you do at that age. He was very angry and said ‘I’m going to beat him one day’.” He did.

  Senna predictably took pole for the race. He got away from the rest easily at the start and had soon clocked the fastest lap and was leading by over 13 seconds. Then the unthinkable happened. He spun off.

  It was the first time in his single-seater career that he had been put out of the race by his own mistake, and he had done it in front of his most important audience to date. He trudged back to the pits in a foul mood and muttered an apology to his team.

  Rushen recalls: “He lost concentration and just fell off the track. He was so far in the lead. It’s strange because he did exactly the same thing at Monaco in Formula One in 1988. He did it on a number of occasions. I never did figure it out.

  “I think maybe the reason he went off at Zolder was because he was distracted by everything. He’d had the offers from Toleman and McLaren that weekend and I don’t know if it went to his head. Then there was the Piquet thing. Also he’d met a girl. He wanted to go and meet her somewhere that evening but I had the only car. I told him if he won he could have the car and I’d make my own way back to the hotel, but if he lost he’d have to drive me all the way back. Of course when he lost I made him keep to the deal and he sulked all the way home.”

  Rushen and Senna were very good friends even by this early stage of the season. Rushen remembers him as a quiet young man who was often misunderstood. He says: “He was shy and he hated the cold. That was the main thing. He wouldn’t get into the car until his gloves and balaclava had been warmed up on the radiator and he really didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning. Some journalists wrote that he was arrogant, but he was shy. He only opened up with people he had known a while, his friends. And he really loved his family.”

  Rushen also has strong memories of Senna’s racing skills. He says: “You see a lot of impressive young drivers, but he was the most amazing young lad I’d ever seen. He was way above everyone else. He would go out and do a few practice laps and when he came back in he would say that the left rear needed another pound of pressure. And he would be right.

  “He once asked me ‘Who do you think’s the best? Me, Nelson Piquet or Chico Serra?’ I think I said ‘It’s you’. And he replied ‘It must be me. I’ve got so much more experience’. And he had, because he’d been racing in karts since he was four years old.”

  Senna’s next race was the British round at Oulton Park on 30th May. It was his worst to date: he missed pole, missed the fastest lap and retired with a puncture, although he did win the celebrity challenge in a Sunbeam Talbot later that afternoon. In the next four rounds of the series – Brands Hatch on Bank Holiday Monday 31st May, Mallory Park on 6th June, Brands again the week after that and Oulton Park on 26th June – he seemed to have lost his qualifying sparkle, although he brought home four fastest laps and four victories to make the championship all but his. In-between Brands Hatch and Oulton he went to Hockenheim for the next round of the Euroseries. He qualified on pole, but had a bad start and was caught up in a first-corner pile-up initiated by leader Cor Euser.

  At this stage of the season Senna had won 12 times in 16 races. He had only lost one round of the British championship and had a commanding lead in the title chase. In the European championship he had finished only one of the races, which he had won, and had clocked two fastest laps, leaving him in fourth. However, with Senna on 24 points – just 10 behind championship leader Jesper Villumsen of Denmark – and 20 points available for a win and two for a fastest lap, he didn’t consider his position bad at all.

  On the plane out to the Dutch Grand Prix support race at Zandvoort on 3rd July, Senna was sat next to none other than Frank Williams. It was the first time that the pair had met. Senna took the opportunity to introduce himself and tell Williams about his career. He stuck in the team owner’s memory enough for him to receive his very first Formula One test for Williams a year later. His list of Formula One team contacts was growing. Keith Sutton had been contacted by Bernie Ecclestone, then running Brabham, and Lotus boss Peter Warr, who had both expressed an interest in the young star. Fellow Brazilian and double world champion Emerson Fittipaldi could not offer him much from his struggling Formula One outfit, but was pleased to introduce him to all the team managers. He had also just done a test with fledgling Formula Three team Jordan.

  The Jordan test at Silverstone in late June was Senna’s first outing in a Formula Three car. Eddie Jordan had been impressed enough by the Brazilian’s talent to give him the test for free. Senna completed 20 laps, came back to the pits to make some adjustments, went out again and within another 10 laps had beaten the pole time set the previous weekend by Jordan driver James Weaver. Jordan was canny enough to keep Senna’s adjustments, and the team soon won with the car in that set-up in the European races at Nogaro in France and Jarama in Spain.

  At Zandvoort Senna missed first qualifying because of clutch problems, leaving him with just one 30-minute session to get to know the unfamiliar track. It didn’t stop him from taking pole. Despite another bad start, he slipped past leader Jaap van Slif Hoat on the second lap and led to the finish. It was a remarkable performance.

  The next day Senna had to be back in Norfolk to race in the British championship. The car was loaded onto a truck that took the ferry back to Lowestoft. Dennis Rushen remembers: “We used to do all that stuff back then. It was great fun! We didn’t test so much and racing was much better for the learning curve of the young drivers.”

  Snetterton was Senna’s home territory. He could again qualify only second, but when the race started the track was soaking wet. Senna snatched the lead from Calvin Fish on lap five and pulled away into the distance. The rain had stopped and the track was drying out. Frank Bradley, a 37-year-old jellied-eel salesman and Formula Ford enthusiast, had started the race on slick tyres, willing to make a gamble where the up-and-comers could not take the risk. On the water-logged track they were hopeless and he was almost lapped by lap five, but as the track dried he began to work his way back up through the field very, very quickly. He was an experienced Formula Ford racer and knew the track well enough to know that it dried very rapidly. He was third by lap 15 of the 20-lap race with only Fish and Senna ahead of him, 20 seconds up the road.

  He caught and passed Fish with two laps to go. On the drier track he was eight seconds faster than the rest. Senna, however, was a different problem. Although the tread had worn almost completely off his tyres and the car was all over the track, Senna was demonstrating superb car control to stay in the lead and somehow fend off Bradley. As they came up to the last lap, he was still there, fighting with the car. Bradley made a daring move at Sear corner. It surprised the Brazilian, who on the dry track had nowhere to go. Senna lost.

  It was the first time all season that he had not won a race he had finished, but he took it very well, probably sensing that Bradley was not a major rival and had had a great deal of luck with his gamble on slicks. As Rushen remembers: “He was incredibly gracious. He thought it was great.”

  The following weekend, at Castle Coombe in the British championship, Senna produced his familiar hat-trick of pole position, fastest lap and win. The result was a very early championship victory with the minimum amount of fuss. Dennis Rushen remembers: “It wasn’t that exciting. We all knew he was going to win so it was no big deal.”

  The next race was not until 1st August. It was another Snetterton affair and although Senna took fastest lap and race victory, it wa
s not without controversy. When Fish tried to take the lead, Senna pushed him onto the dirt. Both drivers were furious, blaming each other, although contemporary accounts concur that Senna was in the wrong. To Fish’s annoyance, he was fined £200 but allowed to keep his points. It was an unsavoury foreshadowing of later events in Senna’s career and a glimpse of the darker side of his personality.

  Next it was Hockenheim and the German Grand Prix support race in the Euroseries, which resulted in another pole, win and fastest lap. The Austrian Grand Prix support race was the following weekend. Senna and Rushen drove there together. Rushen recalls: “We were driving through the mountains on the way to Austria and we passed a waterfall. Ayrton told me to stop the car. I asked why and he said ‘I’m going to stand by that waterfall and I want you to take my picture so I can send a copy back to my mum in Brazil’. He was like that.”

  Rushen counts the race at Austria – another pole-position, fastest-lap, victory clean sweep – as Senna’s best of the season. He says: “It was amazing stuff. The old Österreichring was even more frightening than Spa. Ayrton came round after the first lap five seconds in the lead. That really made the Grand Prix guys pay attention.” Senna won the race by 24 seconds.

  Senna was virtually European champion; the next round of the series, at the Jyllandsring in Denmark, was tense but turned out to be a mere formality. He did his speciality – pole position, fastest lap and win – and was crowned champion.

  Rushen has extremely fond memories of that race. As he says: “It was incredible, just a lot of happiness. It was much more important to us than the British title.” Senna was moved to tears by his achievement. After the race he got drunk – Rushen believes for the first time – and did wheelies on a motorcycle in the street.

  Keith Sutton was also at the race that weekend. Senna had paid for his flight and hotel room because he wanted him to be there. As Senna crossed the line to take the chequered flag as champion, he waved his hands in the air and Sutton took a photograph that still hangs on the wall of Dennis Rushen’s office today. The picture is inscribed ‘To Dennis, Thanks for making my weekend in Denmark extra special, Keith’.

  While all this was happening Senna had not mentioned his wife to anyone, other than that she had decided to stay at home in Brazil and not come to England for the 1982 season. There was speculation that she was pregnant. Senna hated to fail but by August he had admitted to Keith Sutton and other friends that his marriage with Liliane was over. They quietly divorced and she eventually remarried and had two children. She has always refused to speak about her time with the man who became a legend. He also rarely mentioned the marriage, although several years later he reminisced: “I consider it to have been a very precious experience. I don’t think of it as a mistake because we didn’t have children and we both continued our lives with no ill effects.”

  Sutton clearly remembers the flight home with Senna. He says: “It was a marvellous weekend which I will never forget. On the return flight to England he told me about how he had split up with his wife and had met a Brazilian girl who studied in Brussels. We also discussed the idea of me being his photographer when he got into Formula One.” On the back of Senna’s European glory, Formula One seemed a certainty. His new girlfriend’s name was Maria and she would become a fixture during his Formula Three season the following year.

  From then on, with two championships wrapped up, Senna would be racing for fun and glory. In the British championship he scored another two wins and another two fastest laps at Thruxton and Silverstone on the subsequent two weekends. On 12th September he went to Mondello Park in Ireland for the final round of the Euroseries. He took pole, had a bad start, but retook the lead from local racer Joey Greenan on lap two and went on to set the fastest lap and win the 19m 32.7secs race by 18.5 seconds.

  But Senna’s season was not complete. He dearly wanted to win the elusive world karting championship, which was being held that year at Kalmar in Sweden on 15th-19th September. But all did not go well. A burst tyre on the first lap of timed practice put him right to the back of the grid for the heats. His performance was nothing short of brilliant – he made up 23 places in the third heat and 22 in the second with smoke pouring out of his engine – but the entry was large and in the final he could only make it to a lowly but well-fought 14th place. He was in such a bad mood that he refused to shake hands with the winners after the race.

  His mood had not abated by the time he arrived at Brands Hatch for another British championship Formula Ford 2000 race a week later. He wasted time adjusting his front wing during qualifying and as a result ended up just third on the grid, albeit with an identical time to the first- and second-placed drivers. Had he not spent so much time changing his settings he would have set the time first and been awarded pole. In the race he was sluggish, until several laps in when he began to speed up so significantly that he broke the lap record. By that time, however, Calvin Fish was too far ahead to be beaten and Senna finished second by just 0.08 seconds.

  It was a sour end to a spectacular season. As Dennis Rushen recalls: “Because he did the world karts and finished 14th he had a real sulk. I never saw him so cross. And then he only qualified third, which was not good by his standards. I was angry because it was as if halfway through the race he had suddenly decided he wanted to win it. It was the only time we had even a slight falling-out.”

  So Senna left his glorious Formula Ford career behind under a cloud. He returned to Brazil for a holiday, and when he arrived back in England it was to compete in the televised non-championship Formula Three race at Thruxton in mid-November with West Surrey Racing. He did not forget his friend and mentor Dennis Rushen, though, and the pair remained close throughout Senna’s career.

  Rushen loves to reminisce about Senna. He remembers: “He was always a very, very good friend. I continued to help him when he went on to Formula Three with Dick Bennetts at West Surrey. The last time I saw him was when he was testing for Williams in Portugal in 1994. He was different. His heart didn’t seem to be in it any more. The time I saw him before that was in Brazil, where he told me that he wanted to drive for Ferrari. I still miss him.”

  That was a long time in the future. At the end of 1982 Senna was still looking for his first Formula One drive, although his dominant Formula Ford performances had drawn a lot of attention from the right circles. In his first two seasons of car racing he had four championships and had taken 34 wins from 47 Formula Ford races. It was a phenomenal achievement. Why he wasn’t whisked off to Formula One at that point is an enduring mystery.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Decisive Year

  Formula Three on Ayrton Senna’s terms

  By the end of 1982 Ayrton Senna had won all he could in Formula Ford. Barely two years after arriving in Britain he had wrung everything he could out of the Formula, winning all the championships – in fact, almost every major prize – that the category had to offer. The ones he didn’t win were the ones he hadn’t entered.

  Nowadays he would probably have gone straight into Formula One. But that was then and this is now. By the traditional route, he still had two years of a traditional apprenticeship to serve. He was certain he would get into Formula One, but still uncertain how he would fare. He already had two offers on the table to finance his Formula Three career, from the McLaren and Toleman Formula One teams. In return for signing long contracts, he would be made ‘team slave’ as he often put it. Alex Hawkridge, boss of Toleman, and Ron Dennis, team principal of McLaren International, offered to give him the £100,000 necessary to finance a year in Formula Three, plus a salary. But it was the last thing he wanted.

  Ron Dennis was very impressed. But to his amazement, Senna turned him down. “Of course Formula One is my goal,” Senna said. “But I will tread very warily. I would be foolish to take the first offer to come my way. Better to wait until all the cards are on the table. Perhaps if something very good comes up I will take it before the end of the year. Whatever, I’d like to have somethin
g set up early so I can test. That is the key to success.”

  Formula Three was where he wanted to be in 1983 and the British championship was the finest in the world. By then he had enough money from his father and some Brazilian banks to finance a season. Two Formula Three teams were after his services: the fledgling Eddie Jordan-run team and the dominant entrant West Surrey Racing, run by Dick Bennetts.

  Senna had had his first experience of Formula Three at Silverstone in mid-June 1982, testing for Jordan’s outfit. Up-and-coming drivers, even of Senna’s talent, normally had to pay for a test session in a Formula Three car. But somewhat uncharacteristically, Jordan gave him the test for free.

  Racing for Rushen Green in Formula Ford 2000 was taking up most of Senna’s time, and he turned up at Silverstone on a Wednesday afternoon after a morning’s testing at the Mallory Park circuit 35 miles away.

  The Jordan team had been racing at the Silverstone club circuit in the European Formula Three championship a week earlier, and the benchmark for Senna was the 54.2 second pole time set by Jordan driver James Weaver in the morning session. He was already at a disadvantage, as the cooler mornings are generally the best stage to set a time at Silverstone in the summer. Senna did 20 laps in the Ralt Toyota, came in, made some tiny changes to the car, and took only another 10 laps to equal Weaver’s time. A further 10 laps and he had become one of a very select group of drivers to break the 54-second barrier on the club circuit. Eddie Jordan was hugely impressed with the way Senna had set up the car. His style was to come out of the car and lock himself away and make two or three pages of notes on what needed to be done by the engineers. This habit never changed throughout his career. So successful were the changes he recommended that the team kept Senna’s adjustments on the car, and Weaver won the next two races in the championship.