The Life of Senna

by Rubython, Tom

  “Peter Warr is a very ambitious man and a capable team manager, although perhaps he tries to do too much. It would not be difficult for Lotus to spread the workload more widely, and I don’t know why it doesn’t do that, because one day this situation could be very dangerous for the team.”

  Ironically, a year earlier it was Nigel Mansell who left the team because he felt unwelcome due to all the attention that was focused on de Angelis. The pair somehow remained friends, and when Mansell saw how de Angelis was being edged out in the same way that he had been, he even went to Warr to complain. But de Angelis felt that although the two situations were similar there were some crucial differences: “Although we received similar technical and psychological treatment, I think my situation was a little bit worse than Nigel’s. He had the advantage of being English, which made things better for him, easier for him to cope with. And sponsor-wise he had an advantage. Right to the end, he seemed to be enjoying his driving, while I must admit that I did not enjoy my last few races for Lotus.”

  With de Angelis out of the way and Senna given the promise of promotion to team number one in 1986, it was time for Lotus to find Senna a new team-mate. Warr traditionally ran a clear number one/number two driver operation and with Senna firmly ensconced as number one he began the search for a replacement for de Angelis. In reality he didn’t have to look far: he had always had his eye on Derek Warwick and there was plenty of pressure from Renault, which had disbanded its works team.

  It was no coincidence that between the European and South African Grand Prix races of 1985, Lotus tested Derek Warwick with Renault’s permission. The test, although no high-speed running was planned, had confirmed that Warwick would be the ideal replacement for de Angelis. He had five seasons of Formula One under his belt: three with Toleman during a period when the team for the most part was struggling to qualify; and more recently two with Renault, where he had often qualified well, only to be hit by reliability problems in the race. Embarrassed by the better job done by Senna and de Angelis with the customer-engined Lotus in 1985, Renault decided to pull the works team out at the end of the year, leaving Warwick stranded with all the top drives taken. In reality Warwick hadn’t tried very hard, as he knew he was a shoe-in for the Lotus seat. He had everything Lotus wanted. It would please Renault and please the sponsors, in particular John Player, which wanted a British driver in the car.

  Senna also knew what was about to happen – and it was the last thing he wanted. He knew and liked Derek Warwick and understood first hand that he was quick and had a reputation for getting a team to work well around him. But he had seen how the initial focus on the team’s number one driver had given Elio de Angelis a much faster car in 1985, and he wanted that attention for 1986. He knew that Warwick, as a popular Englishman with the ear of Renault, would dilute that. Senna didn’t fight battles he knew he couldn’t win, and he didn’t think he could win the hearts and minds of the team with Warwick around.

  Senna pointed out forcibly to Warr that when he had signed to join Lotus in 1984 the contract had clearly stipulated that the team’s focus would be on the number one driver. He said that he felt the team would struggle to run a two-car operation and therefore he wanted a team-mate who would be his back-up, someone who would not be a threat and would not be looking to challenge him once he had established himself within the team. Warwick did not fit the bill. At the time, people were talking about him as the next British world champion and Senna did not want any question over who was top dog.

  Warwick, after his experience at Renault, was popular with the French engine supplier. Mechanics liked him as he was fast and trouble-free. He was also regarded as a very nice man with an infectious sense of humour and a ‘Tom Cruise’ smile. But there was only one star at Lotus and that was Senna.

  Warr desperately wanted Warwick, and the sponsors wanted Warwick; but Senna stood firm and threatened to walk if he didn’t get his way. He also felt the team would be in breach of contract if Warwick was brought in on equal footing. Faced with what he saw as a contractual betrayal, he threatened to leave and began approaching other teams.

  Although Senna was bluffing and there were no other drives available, Warr buckled. Faced with even the possibility of losing his star driver, he agreed that Warwick would not be hired. The problem for Warr was that he had gone right down the line with Warwick – he had promised him the drive, issued a contract – all that was left was to sign it.

  Senna knew that he had to stop the Warwick bandwagon, and it all depended on sponsor John Player. He began barraging John Player with how bad it would be for the team if Warwick was signed. The tobacco company believed him. Senna won.

  Warwick later explained to journalist, Christopher Hilton that he had a contract ready to sign, but when he went to the Lotus headquarters at Ketteringham Hall just before Christmas he was met not by Peter Warr, as he expected, but by the team’s real boss, finance director Fred Bushell. Instead of the ceremonial signing he had expected in Colin Chapman’s old office, Warwick was ushered into Bushell’s office. Bushell was always the man to deliver the bad news at Lotus. Chapman had used him to great effect when he was alive, and Bushell later went to jail for doing Chapman’s dirty work. He didn’t beat about the bush. He simply told Warwick that he was sorry but Senna did not want him in the team. And that was that.

  Warwick was devastated and knew his career had been dealt a fatal blow. There were by that stage no other drives on offer. He later revealed that Senna had met with him and apologised for the situation. Warwick was impressed that he was not afraid to face him: “He apologised to me but said that he believed it was the right decision for him and the team. He stuck to his guns and got absolutely destroyed in the British press, but he still stuck to his guns.

  “You have to admire the guy for sticking to what he thought was right. I think it was right for him – I’m sure it was right for him. He was hated by a lot of fans and a lot of the press, but he stuck to his guns and those are the traits of a real champion. I would not have done that to another human being but that’s probably why I’m not a great champion.”

  Warwick turned to sportscar racing and signed with Tom Walkinshaw’s works Jaguar team. It was very much second best, and probably spelt the demise of his whole career. Although he later got a drive for the declining Brabham team after Elio de Angelis was killed, he was ruined, going on to drive for Arrows in 1987 as his career petered out.

  Peter Warr was totally honest about the situation: “Ayrton said he would leave the team if Warwick or any other established Grand Prix driver was signed. Any team that had Ayrton Senna driving for it would be silly not to recognise that their best chance in the championship was with him. We accepted that a number one and number two situation was likely to give a degree of concentration and effort on his racing programme, and his testing programme was most likely to produce results.”

  As soon as Warwick was rejected, a torrent of abuse came down on Senna’s head from the British press. Partisan journalists tried to change Warr’s mind. Senna, back home in Brazil, was oblivious to it all. He hardly knew the ruckus was going on and didn’t really care.

  Warwick may have had a problem getting a new drive but Warr also had to find a good driver to replace him. Warr, very late in the day, set about finding a replacement. Reigning British Formula Three champion Mauricio Gugelmin was strongly rumoured to have Senna’s support for the drive. But two Brazilians was impossible for the British Lotus team. The replacement for Warwick had to be British.

  In January it was announced that Senna’s team-mate for 1986 would be 25-year-old British aristocrat, Johnny Dumfries, whose real name was John Colom Crichton-Stuart, Earl of Dumfries. He was the son of the Marquess of Bute. Dumfries had a good record in the junior formulas – he had been British Formula Three champion in 1984 – and had just spent a year as Ferrari test driver, but Senna had raced against him before and did not rate him as highly as he did Warwick. Dumfries was naturally very pleased to get the o
pportunity to drive in Formula One, and recited on cue: “I will do my very best to help Ayrton win the title.”

  When the campaign to reinstate Warwick failed, the British press and fans were livid and Senna was portrayed as a ruthless Machiavellian villain, frightened into dirty tactics by the sheer speed of good old Warwick. The Brazilian became the journalists’ hate figure, and the image stayed with him throughout his career, only wavering in the last years with McLaren when he was the only driver with the skill to regularly take the challenge to the superior Williams machine. Warr concluded the sorry affair by saying: “I was disappointed that we didn’t have Warwick. He would have been a very solid number two and produced results for us. It would have been a very good mix.”

  At the launch of the new 1986 Lotus Renault, Senna expressed his public sadness that Warwick was without a drive, but had no regrets. When questioned by hostile journalists, he said he had signed a contract in 1984 that stipulated the team would concentrate on its leading driver. He told them he had been with Lotus for a year and was in a position to judge the team’s strengths and weaknesses.

  Senna said: “It was nothing to do with Derek personally, nor with my not wanting to have strong competition within the team.” He was totally convinced – with some justification – that Lotus would not be in a position to prepare two cars to an equally high standard, and was afraid that there would be internal struggles for resources if there was a strong English driver in the team. He said: “There were the first signs of something like that happening in 1985 with Elio de Angelis and me. I was convinced that if I was to have a chance of competing for the world championship with Lotus, then the major team effort had to be concentrated on one car. And that doesn’t work when you have a team-mate who also has pretensions to be number one.”

  Senna may not have shown it but he was deeply hurt by the accusations of cowardice. His relationship with the British press never returned to normal.

  The 1986 season began in Rio de Janeiro with the Brazilian Grand Prix in late March, and Senna knew that he had to prove himself on the track if he was to put the Warwick controversy behind him. The car to beat was clearly going to be the Williams Honda. It had won the last three races of 1985 and dominated winter testing. But the real story of winter testing – in those days largely held by the Paul Ricard circuit in southern France – was the tragic accident that had befallen Williams team boss Frank Williams. He had left a test session, for a flight from Nice back to London, driving a rented Ford Sierra with team manager Peter Windsor in the passenger seat. Williams always drove a road car too fast and the Ford Sierra was notable for its jelly-like characteristics in fast bends. He lost control, careered down a bank and ended up upside down. Windsor crawled away unharmed, but Williams had broken his neck in a quirk of fate that would leave him severely paralysed but with his brain intact.

  Senna was devastated by the news, as Williams had given him his first drive in a Formula One car and had been the first serious Formula One personality he had met after happening to sit next to him on a flight to Belgium.

  Williams’ wife Ginny nursed him back from almost certain death. The news that he would survive cheered Senna, who was in Brazil waiting for the first race of the season. With Warwick gone, he had been allocated Nigel Stepney as his mechanic. Stepney was to learn a lot that year from a very demanding driver.

  To the delight of the crowd, Senna promptly took pole by 0.765 seconds from fellow Brazilian Nelson Piquet, racing the Williams Honda for the first time. The new Williams was clearly the class of the field, and Piquet was seething at being humiliated in front of his home crowd. It was a clear demonstration of who was the new king.

  The pole lap had been devastating and Senna had given it everything, as Lotus engineer Steve Hallam recalled: “Ayrton went out on his second set of tyres and he gave everything for that lap. I remember seeing him slumped in the cockpit when he had done it – not slumped so much as hunched. He’d given absolutely everything.”

  In the race, however, the Williams Honda was clearly superior and Senna could not keep up the advantage, although he still finished second to Piquet. There was drama on the first lap when Nigel Mansell tried to pass him for first and spun off, but Senna’s race was otherwise uneventful. He later claimed that he could have caught and passed Piquet for the win, but blamed his inability to do so on the new fuel regulations, which had cut fuel allowance from 220 litres to 195 litres. He commented: “Since rules are approved by all parts, we have no other choice but to accept them. But I must say that the fear of running out of fuel at the dying stage of a race may reduce the excitement for the drivers and even the fans.” Fuel consumption was to become an even greater concern for Senna in the latter stages of the season. In 1985 he had run himself out of fuel twice whilst leading the race. This year, with the championship clearly within his grasp, he knew that seconds would count. The smaller amount of fuel would work against him.

  The next race was the first Spanish Grand Prix at Jerez. On the new track, Senna took another pole position, this time by over eight-tenths of a second from Piquet, and led without drama for the first 39 laps of the 72-lap race. But then Mansell, who had earlier struggled with a confusing fuel read-out, caught him up, and when Senna got stuck behind a backmarker he shot through into the lead. As the Williams pulled away into the distance it looked as if Senna’s chances of victory were over, but there was more drama to come. Mansell was struggling with blistered Goodyears, and his lead was slashed in the closing stages of the race. With just 10 laps to go, Senna passed him for the lead and Mansell made the risky decision to pit for new tyres, which dropped him back behind third-placed Prost.

  But the race did not end there. On fresh rubber, Mansell soon caught and passed Prost for second before bearing down on Senna. Senna’s tyres were also beginning to trouble him, but somehow he held Mansell off, ducking and weaving to gain every possible advantage. They crossed the finish line almost side by side, but it was Senna who took victory by just 0.014 seconds.

  It was, and still is, the second-closest finish in Formula One history, after the 0.01-second gap that separated Peter Gethin and Ronnie Peterson in the 1971 Italian Grand Prix. Someone estimated that 0.014 seconds was the equivalent of just 93cm on the track. It was all smiles on the podium as Senna and Mansell’s earlier disagreements were forgotten. “It was a hell of a fight,” said Senna. “It was very tiring, both mentally and physically. I have been racing in Formula One for three seasons, but this is the first win I have had to fight for. Physically I was at an end, but because I had won I recovered quickly. Winning is the best medicine to regain strength. In the evening I had fully recovered and drove the race again in my mind. I wanted to enjoy my victory once more.”

  The win also put Senna in the lead for the championship by six points from Piquet. It was the first time in his career he had topped the table, and although it was only the early stages of the season it was a great feeling.

  But Senna was feeling the heat from Mansell. Since his debut victory at Brands Hatch the previous year, Mansell, with better luck, could have won every subsequent race. In the event he had won two out of five. It was a massive career transformation – from mid-fielder to race winner – and had transformed the determined Mansell. He was also driving a vastly superior car, which was not obvious as Senna kept annexing pole position.

  Senna took his third pole position in a row at Imola, triggering ripples of disbelief around the Formula One paddock. As Lotus designer Gerard Ducarouge recalls: “I was in trouble. We were making pole position after pole position. I had a good friend at Williams, Patrick Head, who came to me and said ‘Gerard, you’re cheating!’ And he was telling everybody that. I was fed up because we weren’t. I went to FISA and said to their people ‘You stop the car just before it comes back to our pit and you check it for an hour and make all the measurements you bloody want. Patrick and anybody else who thinks I’m cheating can be there, even though I’m not happy with them seeing all the details o
f the car’. I was going on and on because I was so upset. I said ‘If you want to disqualify something, disqualify the bloody driver because he’s just too fast’. Nobody understood that it was not the car that we got these performances from – it was the driver.”

  In the race, Senna retired with a wheel-bearing failure after 12 laps as Prost came through to win. Surprisingly, at the Monaco Grand Prix his run of pole positions was broken, and after two scrappy qualifying sessions Senna was forced to settle for third as Prost took pole.

  That was where he finished in the race, as a result relinquishing the championship lead to Nelson Piquet. It seemed that what the Lotus Renault 98T had initially gained in reliability from its predecessor, it lacked in speed. Also, with fuel allowances reduced, the thirsty Lotus was suffering more than most and Senna was having to drive more cautiously than before. Senna no longer had a team-mate who could spur him on and use experience to develop the car. In four races, Dumfries had just one ninth place to his name and was suffering under the pressure of being wiped away so obviously by Senna. He was also hard on the car, destroying transmissions.

  A few days after Monaco, tragedy struck Formula One. On Wednesday 14th May during a well-attended test session at the Paul Ricard circuit in France, Senna’s former team-mate Elio de Angelis suffered a rear-wing failure on his Brabham BMW BT55 while entering the 180mph Verrerie curves. His car somersaulted over the catch fencing and came to rest upside-down on the verge, where it burst into flames.

  There were fewer marshals at the track as it was a test session, and it took around 10 minutes for a group of drivers, led by Alan Jones, Nigel Mansell and Alain Prost, to run to the burning wreckage to try and help de Angelis. The flames were intense and they could not get close enough to right the car or unfasten de Angelis’s seatbelts. Eventually a marshal turned up wearing nothing more than shorts and a T-shirt, carrying a fire extinguisher, but it proved difficult to put out the fire.