The Life of Senna

by Rubython, Tom

  It was a big occasion for German motorsport. The track was to hold the first European Grand Prix in October, and the promoters and organisers were keen that it should be seen as a major international circuit from the start. Mercedes eagerly provided a fleet of its new 190E saloon cars for the race, knowing that it could only result in good publicity. The Cosworth-engined 190E 2.3-litre, 16-valve saloon was Mercedes’ first foray into high-performance saloon cars in that category, and it wanted to show what it could do.

  There was the problem of getting all the stars together in the same place at the same time, but Mercedes had the upper hand. For several years the manufacturer had been running a scheme whereby Formula One drivers could receive discounted Mercedes cars ex-factory: some drivers were indebted to the manufacturer and willing to do something in return.

  Mercedes invited every one of the 14 living Formula One world champions. Only five would not drive: Emerson Fittipaldi and Mario Andretti because they were qualifying for the Indianapolis 500 that weekend; Jackie Stewart, because he had promised himself never to race after his retirement and the death of François Cevert in 1973; reigning world champion Nelson Piquet, the only one who declined to enter; and Juan Manuel Fangio, who, aged 72, had increasing health worries and was simply too old. But Fangio turned up for the celebrations at the Nürburgring in his capacity as a global Mercedes ambassador.

  Jack Brabham, Phil Hill, John Surtees, Denny Hulme, Niki Lauda, James Hunt, Jody Scheckter, Alan Jones and Keke Rosberg would race, and be joined by Formula One winners Stirling Moss, Carlos Reutemann, John Watson, Alain Prost, Jacques Laffite, and Elio de Angelis, as well as sportscar stars Klaus Ludwig, Manfred Schute and Udo Schutz.

  Senna was not part of the original selection. When the race was held on 12th May, he had competed in only three Grand Prix events for Toleman Hart, logging two sixth places and a retirement, and had failed to qualify for what would have been his fourth Grand Prix at San Marino a week earlier. He at least had the kudos of being crowned British and Macao Formula Three champion in the previous year, but that hardly put him on the same level as the rest of the illustrious line-up.

  He did, however, have friends in the right places. Senna had struck up a friendship with Gerd Kremer of Mercedes when they had met at a Formula Three race the previous year, and they would remain close until Senna’s death a decade later. Kremer also had strong faith in Senna’s ability, even when the Brazilian’s talent was as yet unproven. Kremer, who at the time was the manufacturer’s head of product placement in motorsport, was helping to organise the event: with the absent world champions, he found he had a spare place on the grid.

  Kremer remembers: “At the time Ayrton did not have all the success that he expected to have. I was organising the Nürburgring event and the idea was to invite world champions and Nürburgring winners from the past. So actually Ayrton did not qualify, but since I was very successful in organising all the world champions and the Nürburgring winners, I was able to insist that I could invite Ayrton for the event instead of Emerson Fittipaldi, who was busy qualifying for the Indy 500. Ayrton took it quite seriously. He was very excited to have been invited to the opening of the new Nürburgring track. At that time he was a no-name.”

  Over the years Kremer was one of the few people to see Senna’s private side. He recalls: “He was one of the finest people in the world. He cared about people and he was thoughtful. He never forgot birthdays or Christmas. He was not arrogant at all, more introverted. He was a Brazilian from his heart. He always needed to go back home to keep recharging his batteries, and he had a beautiful house out there in the middle of nature. And he was a person who believed in God.”

  Senna was very, very excited to get the chance to race against some of the world’s most famous drivers in equal equipment. While some of his rivals looked on the race as a fun day out, Senna saw it as an opportunity to prove himself against the toughest competition and study exactly what they could do.

  The drivers would be flying into Frankfurt airport, and ironically Kremer arranged for Senna to be collected at the airport by Alain Prost, as both would be arriving on the morning of qualifying. As Prost recalls: “It was the first time I met Ayrton. I picked him up at the airport as we arrived 15 minutes apart. On the way to the track, we chatted and he was very pleasant. We spent about half a day together like that. He didn’t know any of the other drivers, which was quite funny.”

  The drivers had the opportunity to sit around and chat and catch up on all the gossip. For the retired stars it was a particularly good opportunity to meet friends from the old days. As John Surtees recalls: “It was a social gathering. Some people had more experience than others in saloon cars and suchlike. It was a good gathering and it was nice, but at the same time disappointing to go back to a circuit of which you had very fond memories and find it changed. I remember seeing that the old Sport Hotel had disappeared. It always had an air about it and you could quite imagine the days of all those famous names from before the war. It was a shame in some ways, but it was progress and the new circuit was one which had a wonderful setting but somehow paled into insignificance. I think from my point of view I’d much rather the race had been on the old circuit. At least I would have remembered the track!”

  Qualifying saw Prost take pole position, with Senna lining up beside him on the grid. Of all the drivers they were probably the two with the most to prove and consequently the ones who took it most seriously. Senna was the unknown quantity and Prost was an undoubted future champion, already leading the 1984 title chase by 14 points (he would later lose the championship by half a point to Lauda). After the initial pleasantries, Senna’s mood had changed. As Prost remembers: “I took pole and Ayrton was just squeezed out into second and he didn’t like it. After that he didn’t talk to me any more. At the time I thought it was quite funny.”

  After a night of partying laid on by Mercedes, the race took place on the following afternoon. The weather had taken a turn for the worse and the drivers spent most of the day huddled in the hospitality lounge, chatting about the past. John Watson remembers the conditions as ‘bloody awful’ and several drivers complained that the 190E’s advanced ABS system didn’t work as well on a wet track as it did on dry. But it was perfect Senna weather.

  The field was divided between those who saw the 15-lap race as entertainment – principally James Hunt – and those, like Senna and Prost, who took it seriously. When the race began, Prost got off to the better start, with Senna tucking in behind him. But after half a lap, Senna decided he wanted to get past and pushed Prost wide to take the lead. As Prost regained the circuit, he tangled with Elio de Angelis and the pair dropped down to the back of the field. The Frenchman was extremely disgruntled by the episode.

  The wet weather, the steely determination of some drivers and the blasé attitude of others was a recipe for chaos. As John Surtees recalls: “Driving standard road saloon cars on a race circuit is never particularly interesting or exciting, but the little cars all performed well. Some people treated it seriously, some didn’t. I went about it in a way where I didn’t treat it too seriously but I certainly didn’t treat it with gay abandon either and I tried to make certain that I didn’t smash the car up. That was important. I’d taken part in many celebrity races and they were more like a demolition derby, which unfortunately stops manufacturers doing it.”

  The attitudes of the other drivers differed greatly. Surtees says: “Carlos Reutemann had two or three sets of tyres ready for his car and Ayrton was using all the track. I think it was particularly James Hunt who was using half the infield in order to cut corners. Somewhere around the circuit I had a big moment with Jack Brabham which nearly took me out of the race. Alan Jones was another one who went dirt-tracking. Him and a few others were not keeping to the circuit. There was a race going on which was on the circuit and [one] which had a short circuit where they cut out some of the corners.”

  John Watson was one of the drivers taking the race less seriously th
an some might have hoped. He explains: “In all fairness, it was not something that most of us saw as a positive career move. It was more of a family affair to thank Mercedes for the driver scheme. It didn’t clash with anything so we all turned up. The weather was not particularly brilliant and most of us just took it all as a bit of fun. It wasn’t going to make a career and it certainly wouldn’t have broken one. But Ayrton for sure was on a mission – not just to win, but to prove that he was an outstanding driver.”

  Amid the chaos, Senna took a steady lead and managed to impress everyone there, even though many of the other drivers had never heard of him before. Surtees recalls: “The most interesting thing that came out of it for me was actually seeing Ayrton Senna for the first time and thinking ‘Ah! There’s something special there’. I was so impressed when I saw him, by the way he positioned himself and the way he got it all together, that when I was talking to Ferrari not long after I told him that was the driver he should have.”

  Jack Brabham chuckles at the memory of the unknown star. He says: “He’d got approval from someone somewhere. That was really the first time the name Senna meant anything to me. He won the race, which was very difficult in the rain, and he won it quite comfortably. At the time I thought this guy’s going somewhere. And he did.”

  Stirling Moss was also impressed, as he says: “From that moment he just continued to rise until he got to where he was only equalled, in my opinion, by Fangio.” Watson ran at the better end of the pack for much of the race and remembers how impressed he was with Senna’s driving style. He says: “The main memory I have of it all is of Ayrton and how he attacked the circuit and in particular the chicane, which in those days was much quicker than today. He was just launching the car over the kerbs like a stone skimming across the water. He went to a different level. Everyone else was being very careful because the cars belonged to Mercedes. It was, I suppose, his calling card. That was the minimum accepted standard from him on display. He was clearly exceptionally gifted. Everyone else had turned up basically for the beer. It was a fun event, a thank you for Mercedes, a nice weekend in Germany in a nice hotel and nobody got stressed about it – except Ayrton, that is.”

  Senna was delighted to have won and proved himself against the highest competition. He left a lasting impression on many of his rivals, who had seen him race for the first time, which was probably worth a lot more to his career than the victory. He had arrived.

  The finishing order that day was Senna, Lauda, Reutemann, Rosberg, Watson, Hulme, Scheckter, Brabham, Ludwig, Hunt, Surtees, Hill, Schute, Moss, Prost, Schutz, Laffite, Hermann and de Angelis. Alan Jones failed to finish after suffering mechanical problems, probably brought on by his rough treatment of the car.

  Senna’s win was not popular in all quarters, especially with the top figures at Mercedes who had agreed that the winner’s car would be given pride of place in the Mercedes-Benz museum at Stuttgart, where it remains to this day. Gerd Kremer remembers: “Professor Werner Breitschwerdt, who was the chairman of Mercedes at the time, said he would have preferred it if John Watson, Carlos Reutemann or James Hunt had won the race if the car was to go in the museum. I said ‘Don’t worry about it. One day you will be very proud to have Ayrton Senna’s car in your museum’. And now we can say we have a car in our museum that was driven by Ayrton Senna. Sometimes Professor Breitschwerdt and I meet up in Stuttgart and he always tells me that I was right about the car.”

  CHAPTER 10

  1985: Lotus and the first

  Grand Prix win

  The search for perfection

  The move to Lotus took Ayrton Senna into the money. His Toleman salary was thought to be around $50,000 but the deal with Lotus took him over the $1 million mark; his income from personal sponsorship doubled that. Suddenly he needed management back-up in Europe, to handle the money and the deals that were being offered to him almost every day. It had all become too much for his existing manager, Brazilian Armando Botelho Texheriro, who had run his affairs on a part time basis.

  As he cast around for a manager, it seemed to Senna that every other driver he knew was managed by Mark McCormack’s International Management Group, a sports agency based in the United States but with offices all over the world. So he contacted IMG, which put him in touch with an executive at its Monaco office who ran its motorsport division. Julian Jakobi, an Oxford graduate, was a qualified accountant who had joined IMG in 1977. He had earned his spurs managing the interests of tennis players Bjorn Borg and Mats Wilander and golf stars Nick Faldo and Bernhard Langer. He then moved to Monte Carlo to open an IMG office that would concentrate on motor racing, an area which IMG boss Mark McCormack saw as having a promising future. One of McCormack’s earliest clients had been Jackie Stewart, and the duo became famous in sports marketing circles when McCormack made Stewart the first driver to earn more than $100,000 a year in 1969. Another positive was that Jakobi already managed Alain Prost. Whilst that would have been a definite turn-off a few years later, Senna saw it as an advantage in 1985.

  Jakobi was to become Senna’s closest business associate in Europe, and the pair became firm friends over the course of the next nine years.

  With the money flowing Senna could afford to move into a better house, and with the help of his former Formula Three boss Dick Bennetts, he found a mansion-like property near Esher in Surrey. He shared the house with his old friend Mauricio Gugelmin, who that season was competing in the British Formula Three championship for Bennetts’ West Surrey Racing.

  The Lotus team was based in Ketteringham Hall in leafy Norfolk. From Esher, Senna could cruise up there in his Mercedes saloon in less than an-hour-and-a-half, and also be at Heathrow within half-an-hour.

  The Lotus team had an illustrious history. Its founder, Colin Chapman had died four years previously and the team had been taken over by Peter Warr, a former Chapman sidekick.

  Even if the team did not know it, Lotus’s glory days were over. But it was still capable of winning races and had an array of familiar names in its employment. The team was owned by Chapman’s widow Hazel and her son Clive. Clive was Chapman’s heir, but he admitted he had inherited none of his father’s genius and was never in line to run the team. Hazel had called in Peter Warr and let him get on with it. The Lotus car factory was by then entirely separate from the team.

  By the time he got to Lotus, Senna was already three years too late. Had Colin Chapman not died in 1982, he and Senna might have reconstituted something like the partnership between the Lotus boss and Jim Clark in the 1960s, when they conquered the world with the best driving and ingenious engineering solutions. Chapman was a bold engineer, willing to take a risk to get an edge. Even after Clark’s fatal accident at Hockenheim in 1968, Chapman’s cars had carried Graham Hill, Jochen Rindt, Emerson Fittipaldi and Mario Andretti to the world title. But the founder’s death took away his company’s innovative genius, and neither Peter Warr nor his successors could prevent the gradual decline of the team that had once vied with Ferrari for ultimate supremacy.

  Luckily the John Player Special tobacco brand had remained a sponsor and the budget was generous, especially as Renault supplied free engines. But Formula One was moving on and Peter Warr had not noticed. Both McLaren and Williams were moving into new high-tech factories and raising the bar. Warr clung to cosy Ketteringham Hall and Team Lotus gradually lost its way.

  But Senna loved driving down to Ketteringham Hall and sitting alone in Colin Chapman’s old office, gazing out of the stone bay window and wondering what had gone before. He imagined Jochen Rindt, Graham Hill, Jim Clark, Mario Andretti and Emerson Fittipaldi passing by and chatting in that office with Chapman. The office had been preserved exactly the same as the day he died, and had not been used since except for formal occasions. On the wall was a black-and-white photograph of Chapman, from which he looked down on proceedings. Senna loved that room. He would sit there for hours.

  Senna had joined Lotus because he really rated the talent of Gerard Ducarouge, the e
quivalent of the team’s technical director. There was other talent there as well. Nigel Stepney, now a legend for bestowing reliability on Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari, was a mechanic; and Lotus veteran Bob Dance was chief mechanic. Pat Symonds, the Renault technical engineer, was also there, in his second year of Formula One.

  Senna’s team-mate was the charming Italian Elio de Angelis. He was into his fifth season as a Lotus driver, having originally been hired by Chapman.

  Senna impressed the Lotus team immediately. Peter Warr was astonished by his technical capacity as he said: “His approach was basically to sit down with the engineers, confirm that things he was expecting to be done to the cars had been done, and talk about the set-up. He would spend a lot of time on tyres and he would work out a programme, in conjunction with the engineers and myself, of what we wanted to try in practice, how we wanted to try it, when we wanted to run full tanks, how many laps we would do on this, that and the other and so on.”

  Nigel Stepney clearly remembers the first time he met Senna, when the Brazilian visited the Lotus factory over the winter of 1984. He says: “I didn’t really have a lot to do with him because I was working on Elio’s car and he was in the other one, but you could see when he was in his car he was totally oblivious to everyone else. He could wind himself up into a great intensity. You could watch him standing there or sitting in the car concentrating, and somehow he was completely different to anybody else you could meet.”

  Pat Symonds remembers expecting a rookie driver who needed guidance. He got a shock: “He was a young guy when he came to us – younger than our drivers had been before but he had an amazing maturity. He was very single-minded, very determined – racing was his career and he was going to be the best. We had obviously worked with a number of drivers over the years and we expected Ayrton, albeit with a very high reputation, to come to us needing training. But that was never the case – the guy was technical from day one.”