The Life of Senna

by Rubython, Tom

  The following day in final qualifying Senna produced another astonishing lap to take pole position. The shadow of Donnelly’s accident had created an indelible air of tension and Senna’s pole-position press conference was one of those magic, spellbinding affairs that only he could ever create. Watching him baring his soul was both humbling and uplifting. You listened, then left the room feeling you had been in the presence of true greatness.

  He went faster than ever, and won pole position as he said: “Yesterday was an amazing lap for me,” he said quietly, thinking through every word. “Unbelievable for me under the circumstances. No matter how I try to express my feelings, nobody can know and understand what I felt. Inside me. In the car. The way that I drove. It is something I am not able to express.”

  Senna rarely swore in public, but that afternoon he had been incensed by mutual blocking actions of Nelson Piquet and Olivier Grouillard, who were behaving as if Donnelly’s accident counted for nothing. “I saw the two cars fucking about, and it was totally unacceptable. If you are on a quick lap and somebody doesn’t see you, you have to control your feelings. Sure the instincts sometimes tell you to hit the brakes. But you yourself know that there could be somebody coming on you at 200kph more than you are going, and in blind corners this could be fatal. It is really sad, we have seen yesterday what an accident can cause us. If I had hit either car today I could have taken off. That would have been totally unacceptable. It is really crazy.”

  Donnelly recovered, but only ever drove a Formula One car once more. Senna never gave up his interest in the medical side of the sport and had frequent discussions with Sid Watkins, with whom he forged a close personal friendship. When Erik Comas crashed his Ligier at Spa in 1992, it was Senna who stopped his car to render assistance. “We’d talked about what to do for a driver in such circumstances,” Watkins recalls, “but only once or twice. Yet when I arrived at the scene Ayrton had done everything we had discussed, and he had done it perfectly.”

  But why had he done what he did that Friday in Jerez? Had he believed that Donnelly was dead, and tried to prove something to himself? Had he gone out and attacked Jerez to show that a mere track could not break the human spirit?

  Later that season, Senna gathered together a group of journalists in his hotel room in Adelaide and tried to put his thoughts into words. It was an enthralling moment, as raw emotion stripped away all cynicism and overrode whatever personal antagonism had risen from time to time towards a man who was so driven by his passion and self-belief. For a long time he sat immobile in an armchair, saying nothing. Reliving the day. Marshalling his thoughts. Long before he spoke, his eyes welled up with tears. At last, when he did speak, his voice was just a whisper. You had to crane forward to be sure of hearing every word.

  “For myself,” he began. “I did it because anything like that can happen to any of us. I didn’t see anything and I didn’t know how bad it was. I knew it was something bad, but people just go crazy and say all kinds of stupid things. I wanted to go to see for myself. I felt the need to know – if it was bad, how bad it was. The best way is to see for yourself and not to listen to other people. There was nothing I could do at that moment, but if I was there maybe there would be something I could do.”

  There was another, longer pause. The tears were now threatening to run down his cheeks as he pondered the question of whether he needed to be brave to do what he had done, to confront racing’s demons and then to overcome them so forcefully. “As a racing driver there are some things you have to go through, to cope with,” he replied finally.

  Whatever the personal tests were that Ayrton Senna put himself through that afternoon in Spain, he came through them with the honour and dignity that impressed the most vehement of his detractors.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Feud with Prost

  Six years of continual conflict

  It was probably Ayrton Senna’s long-standing feud with Alain Prost that was most responsible for creating his negative image in the media. While Prost manipulated the media, Senna was constantly at war with it.

  The feud started in a small way when Senna debuted in Formula One in 1984. That year the Monaco Grand Prix was held in the rain. Behind the wheel of his under-powered Toleman, Senna found himself in second place with the fastest car on the track. He was poised to overtake race leader Alain Prost in his McLaren when race director Jacky Ickx stopped the race and ‘caused’ Prost to win. Prost accidentally became Senna’s bête noire.

  The Lotus years were quiet ones and the feud did not build up until Senna replaced Stefan Johansson as Prost’s team-mate in 1988. Prost had been used to running with inferior number-two drivers and Rosberg openly admitted he could not get near him. When Senna finally arrived after Rosberg retired, the Finn did not expect him to bother Prost. Rosberg was absolutely stunned when Senna was faster. And so was Prost.

  When the animosity developed, Prost was supposed to fit into the ‘decent bloke’ category, and journalists assumed Senna was at fault. Typically, Senna’s side of the story was always different: “I have worked with Gerhard Berger, Michael Andretti, Elio de Angelis, Johnny Dumfries, Satoru Nakajima and Alain Prost, so I think it is necessary for everybody who looks into this particular matter to consider the reality: as far as team-mates are concerned, I have always got on very well with all of them except one. The only driver I have ever had problems with as a team-mate is Prost.”

  The chemistry between Senna and Prost was a volatile brew of contradictions, and melding their characters into a productive force was a delicate business – as McLaren team principal Ron Dennis discovered. He says handling Senna and Prost required a combination of disciplines ranging from ego manager to tightrope walker, juggler to marriage counsellor. As he explains: “The relationship between any two human beings is a very complicated thing, like in a marriage, and the drivers’ relationship is very, very complicated. But the negative aspects of having two such drivers can be turned to produce a motivating force. However, as in any finely-tuned situation, you walk a tightrope between falling off into failure and successfully getting to the other side.

  “The challenge was to try to understand their negative differences, try to isolate them, then turn them into positives. I’m not a marriage counsellor but I think guidance and support are the words to use when it comes to handling drivers. I had to support and guide them through racing problems and human problems.”

  The conflict was perhaps inevitable, and their feud continued far beyond their tenure as team-mates. The tension between Senna and Prost initially stemmed from real, or imagined, preferential treatment of one driver over another. In 1988 when Senna joined McLaren, where Prost had ruled for four years, it was obvious that Senna was the faster driver, but less obvious that he was the better driver.

  The slower driver needed to salvage his bruised ego and began to find fault with his equipment. McLaren provided both drivers with identical cars but when Senna became faster, Prost began insinuating that Honda was giving the Brazilian better engines. By the time Prost left McLaren, because of the personality clash with his team-mate, he was openly accusing the team of favouring Senna – and perhaps he was right.

  Soichiro Honda, the founder of the great car company, had developed a great relationship with Ayrton Senna from the days they had started working together in 1987 with Lotus. Senna was the first driver Honda was compatible with, and who gave the company the best and most reliable technical feedback. He was the driver who visited Honda in Japan and tended to its needs. The company had no relationship with Prost, who was not good at that sort of thing. In fact Prost’s one big weakness was his inability to foster corporate relationships in the long term. So if there was a better engine Senna got it. After all, he had brought the fantastic Honda engine with him. The team was at its peak and, with equal equipment at their disposal and the freedom for each driver to use it to his best advantage, the stage was set for a major confrontation.

  Prior to their coming together at McL
aren, Prost had won 26 races and claimed the 1985 and 1986 driving titles with the team. Senna, five years younger than Prost, had won six races with Lotus and was obviously destined for greatness.

  Both men hated to lose. As Keke Rosberg once famously said: “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser – period.” And since each man’s team-mate represented an impediment to winning – or, worse still, had the potential to turn the other into a loser – it was vital for both Prost and Senna to take immediate steps to gain the upper hand at McLaren.

  From a cautious mutual respect in its early stages, the relationship between Prost and Senna rapidly deteriorated into a mutual dislike that ultimately became what can only be called silent hatred. As Senna explained himself: “On the path to the summit, there isn’t room for two.” Prost said: “Nothing else was important. He just wanted to beat me and to beat me in a bad way sometimes. When I thought I was committed 100 per cent or just 99 per cent to Formula One, because the one per cent missing was maybe my family or my children, a different way of life, you know he was committed 110 per cent.”

  In 1988 the two were interviewed together in the McLaren motorhome and asked which of them would win the championship. Prost said: “Can we be equal?” Senna replied: “No there can only be one winner.” Prost thought it was all very funny but Senna took it deadly seriously.

  The war started, and came to a serious head at the 13th round, the Portuguese Grand Prix. Senna seemed to swerve deliberately in front of Prost, squeezing him so close to the Estoril pitwall that several signalling crews ducked for cover. Prost, who had been leading Senna at the time, and in fact went on to win, was livid.

  Even Ron Dennis could not fix this one: from then on it was open warfare. Dennis tried by constantly throwing the two men together. For instance, he made them travel in the same helicopter to races. It had no effect and they did not talk to each other, merely stepping from the helicopter stony-faced and walking apart, to the bemusement of onlookers.

  Senna ultimately won the 1988 world crown and Prost was second: as McLaren partners in 1988, they garnered a total of 15 victories. But Prost’s belief that his Brazilian team-mate was a dangerously disturbed madman grew when Senna revealed that he had found religion. When Senna announced that he believed in God, the press ridiculed him and Prost used it against him. “Ayrton has a small problem,” he said. “He thinks he can’t kill himself because he believes in God, and I think that’s very dangerous for the other drivers.”

  Journalists, sensing a colourful story, reported that Senna thought he was invincible because God was his co-pilot. “It’s unreal to say those things,” Senna responded angrily. “Of course I can get hurt or killed in a racing car, as anybody can, and this feeling, this knowledge, is absolutely necessary for self-preservation.”

  But 1988 was nothing compared to what was brewing for 1989. The season got off to a flying start at the San Marino Grand Prix when Senna, who went on to win the race, overtook Prost at the start. The disgusted Frenchman said the manoeuvre represented a sneaky breach of a previous agreement, instigated by Senna, that whoever was in the lead going into the first corner should be allowed to maintain it to avoid unnecessary risks. The basis of the first dispute was that Prost accused Senna of not respecting a ‘non-aggression pact’.

  After the Imola race, Senna and Prost traded what Japanese newspapers cutely called ‘honour-injuring remarks’.

  Senna won the race but Ron Dennis made him apologise to Prost. Senna admitted: “At that moment, the emotion made me cry. I said sorry, but I thought it was unfair. The world of Formula One has bent me like no person ever could for the rest of my life.”

  The war lasted six years, with constant sniping to favoured journalists. Senna said once: “Prost is a coward.” Prost responded: “He takes himself for a mystic, he thinks that nothing can happen to him. That he’s invulnerable. It’s a philosophy that puts the other drivers in jeopardy.”

  Although Prost let Senna by on that occasion, his open-door policy was definitely not in effect in the championship-deciding Japanese Grand Prix.

  Prost set the stage for the events in the race, saying: “A lot of times last year and this, I opened the door and if I did not open the door we would have crashed. This time I will not open the door.”

  Prost had the advantage because if both went out he would be crowned world champion. Senna, for all his intelligence, seemed not to have grasped this simple fact. When the two McLarens collided at the Suzuka chicane, Prost walked away from his car (which was later found to be undamaged) and although Senna recovered and went on to win the race, he was later disqualified (for missing part of the circuit) and Prost was declared world champion.

  It happened the next year, too, and again at Suzuka where Prost, by then with Ferrari, once more closed the door on Senna and the Brazilian again used his McLaren as a battering ram to open it. The incident, in the first corner on the first lap, put both the McLaren and the Ferrari out of the Japanese Grand Prix but Senna’s lead over Prost in the standings meant the 1990 championship went to the Brazilian. “I am at peace with myself,” he said afterwards, while the incensed Prost insisted his actions were ‘deliberate, unsporting and intimidating’.

  Senna retorted: “I never caused the accident in Suzuka. It was never my responsibility and you should see that from the video, not my own words. The way the whole affair has been treated is like I have total responsibility. I was blamed for everything, I was treated like a criminal! So of course I thought about stopping. Many things have gone through my mind, but I am a professional, and the values I have in my life are stronger than to be influenced by other people.”

  British TV commentator Murray Walker, for one, didn’t buy it: “There is no doubt at all that in 1990, if he did not drive into Prost, he had certainly made his mind up, as he subsequently admitted at that famous press conference. He had decided before the race, because in his view he was on the wrong side of the track. He believed that he should have been on the left-hand side, and because of the circumstances Prost was there. Senna bitterly resented that and said to himself before the race, as he subsequently admitted, ‘I am going to go for it and if Prost turns in on me that’s his hard luck’.”

  Occasionally the storm abated, and they would shake hands. Then it worsened still further. After the 1990 clash there was an attempt at reconciliation, as Senna said: “What happened between us in the past hasn’t been in any way pleasant, either for us or for anybody else. It has been a bad time for everybody. I don’t think we were ready to try to make friends a year ago. Now I have to try to believe that it will work. It may not work, because only time will tell: for him, for me, and so on. But you cannot say no, to yourself or anyone. You have to try under the conditions, under the circumstances. And I think we will try. We want to try and we will try. But only time will tell whether we can succeed.”

  Senna was right. The truce did not last long but he had tried, as he said: “I always try not to criticise him, or react to criticism from him. That doesn’t build anything, it is just destructive. What we have to be very aware of is words. We can build a lot, but we can also destroy a lot. I prefer to build than to destroy. So it is not necessary to go into details about any particular case or anything. It is just my philosophy of how to behave.”

  A year later, after he had won the 1991 world championship, Senna gave his version of what had happened the year before at Suzuka. “It was a sad championship, but that was a result of the 1989 championship. Remember, I won that race and it was taken away. I was so frustrated that I promised myself that I would go for it in the first corner. Regardless of the consequences, I would go for it. He [Senna by this time never used Prost’s name] just had to let me through. I didn’t care if we crashed. He took a chance, he turned, and we crashed. But what happened was a result of 1989. It was built up. It was unavoidable. It had to happen. I did contribute to it, yes. But it was not my responsibility.”

  There was more trouble in the German Grand
Prix in 1991. Prost poured all his venom out on Senna in a television interview, in which he accused him of deliberately weaving and brake-testing him. After the German Grand Prix, Prost made one of the most dangerous statements any Formula One driver has ever made: “He drove across me, braking in a strange way and weaving. If I find him doing the same thing again I will push him off, that’s for sure.” The inflammatory remarks later resulted in Prost being handed a suspended one-race ban. Senna took the threat calmly and spoke considerable truth when he said of his rival: “I think everybody knows Prost by now. He is always complaining about the car or the team or the circuit or the other drivers. It’s never his fault.”

  Senna was dismissive of Prost’s post-Hockenheim threat. He pointed to the fact that Patrese had got by him easily after two laps and was faster. He said Prost just could not get by: “We could have touched then at 300kph and if we had there would have been a big impact. He could have caused it. It was a desperate move by him.”

  Prost concluded by saying: “Now that my championship chances are over, I shall do my best to help Nigel and Williams Renault to win the title.”

  That was the end of the battles on the track. Prost retired for a season in 1992 and came back in 1993 with Williams. That started another off-track feud that simmered for two years during 1992 and 1993 over a drive at the dominant Williams Renault team. Senna basically wished to be Prost’s team-mate in 1993 in the best car. Prost would have none of it – it was reportedly written into his contract that Senna could not be his team-mate.