The Life of Senna

by Rubython, Tom

  When Senna had finished he was like an artist surveying a canvas. It was clear to the Brazilian TV crews and journalists who visited that he loved his farm. As he told them: “Being close to nature is wonderful. It really helps me relax.”

  He had also built 10 new houses on the estate for his farm workers. He explained that he wanted the people who worked for him to have a good way of life. He personally supervised their design and construction: “It is nice to see new things done properly, with the right shape, right design and right style,” he said.

  Senna got a lot of pleasure out of spending his vast fortune but his wealth troubled his conscience. He soothed it by giving away around $4 million a year to the poor of São Paulo. He said: “Brazil has lots of problems, lots of difficulties, but I try to focus on the good things it has to offer. It is a paradise – you can have peace, be close to nature, and enjoy life in your spare time. There is a beautiful ocean and beautiful vegetation – this is where I recharge my batteries before going back to my racing car, and once you experience that it is difficult to live without it. It is a way of finding your equilibrium. Whenever it is possible I like to get away from big cities and be close to nature, either by the sea or in the country.”

  Senna never had any doubt about the purpose of his farm at Tatui. It was not only for him but for his sister Viviane and her three children, his mother Neyde, father Milton and brother Leonardo. They were his family and they were sacred to him. In fact he told them that the farm was not his but theirs, and they were to treat it as their own without reference to him at all. He created it so perfectly to pay them back. He knew his father would enjoy the fishing; his mother the farm; his sister the tennis; his brother and nieces the swimming pool; and his nephew the go-kart track. He would enjoy watching them enjoy it. He was also desperate for them to be together as much as possible, and the farm was another way of ensuring that happened. Even today people do not appreciate how close he was to his family and what an incredibly tight bunch they were. As he said: “I am very fortunate because my father and mother gave me the fundamental feelings that I have today.”

  But as January 1993 drew to a close, his focus was back on racing and the forthcoming season. And the game of poker with Ron Dennis began.

  There was no precedent for the situation he found himself in. He had made the decision to leave the team in early 1992. As he said: “It is a decision I made. It was within myself. I didn’t share it with anyone. But I knew I had to move. I had to do something else. It was the right thing for me, and I feel confident I have made the right decision.” But making the decision and actually leaving were two different things.

  It was only because of his enormous clout as the best driver in the world that he knew he could get away with behaving as he did at McLaren. The team looked up to him, as Josef Leberer confirmed: “He was very hard on himself and he was very hard to the others and he was hard to himself as well, and that is why they respected him so much.”

  But Senna had increasing disrespect for his team principal, Ron Dennis. There had been frequent clashes with Dennis, minor in nature, but clashes nonetheless. He realised he had been with Dennis too long – they were simply too familiar with each other, and familiarity had bred contempt. Dennis annoyed him intensely in early February as they began to have discussions about salary if he did return to drive. Dennis had by then sensed Senna had nowhere else to go in 1993; his only rival was a sabbatical. As he had done to Niki Lauda in 1985, when he had sensed he had nowhere to go after his championship year (and later with Damon Hill in 1997 and Mika Häkkinen in 2001), he made an insulting lowball offer. He offered $5 million, plus performance bonuses. Senna told him he wanted a minimum of $15 million, which was $1 million less than he had earned in 1992. But Dennis was under pressure as well. His lowball offer was a bluff. He was being pushed by Marlboro boss John Hogan to sign Senna.

  The negotiations with Dennis made Senna realise he had made a huge mistake in 1990 when he had missed the opportunity to drive with Williams in 1991. Then he had decided his future lay with McLaren and Honda. But now Honda was gone, and McLaren faced an uncertain future as a non-works engine team. The 1992 season had been terrible and his McLaren Honda MP4/7A had not come close to the mighty Williams Renault FW14B driven by Nigel Mansell and Riccardo Patrese. In 1992 Senna had won just three races and taken only one pole position – by his standards it was a disaster, almost a return to the Lotus years of 1985-1987. But he knew he only had himself to blame and that he had to make the best of it.

  As he pondered his options at the beginning of 1993, he realised he had not spoken to Ron Dennis seriously since the final race of the season at Adelaide, when he had left without staying for McLaren’s traditional Sunday night party at the Adelaide Hilton. Before he left he had dangled a carrot in front of Dennis – if he could sort out a reasonable engine deal over the winter months, Senna would test the car in January or February and decide what to do then. As a three-time world champion, he was confident he could afford to keep his options open and leave things late, because there would always be someone wanting to offer him a drive. Some people still believed he would choose to take a year off, but most knew he would find it impossible to live without racing for that long.

  Speculation was wild. In the press, Senna was linked with all the top teams. The Italians were convinced that he would be heading to Ferrari, despite the contracts of Jean Alesi and Gerhard Berger, already in place for the following season. Prost’s public spat with FISA led to rumours that the Frenchman would have his licence revoked and Senna would get the Williams drive after all.

  He was aided by the fact that the entry list for the 1993 championship turned out to be a shambles, not only because of the Senna-McLaren wrangling. Williams Renault initially forgot to submit its entry form and its participation had to be agreed on by every other team before it could go ahead. Williams’ number-one driver, Alain Prost, fresh out of retirement, was also in doubt after he launched an astonishing assault on FISA in the French press over the winter.

  Even when McLaren announced a Ford engine deal at the beginning of December, it did nothing to quell the rumours. McLaren would only be a customer team, and it was expected that the engines would lack the power of the works units supplied to Benetton. Benetton would get the latest engine with pneumatic valves instead of springs. Senna’s would have springs and be 15-30 horsepower down.

  With that in mind Senna could see no reason to commit himself early to McLaren, and the Williams situation was promising enough to wait. Prost had got himself into a real mess when Max Mosley had taken over from Jean-Marie Balestre as FISA president at the end of 1991. Now the boot was on the other foot and Mosley had taken offence to some remarks Prost had made about FISA. FISA was no longer under Prost’s influence as it had been in the Balestre days, and Mosley had refused him and the team an entry. It was unsure at that stage whether the Williams team’s problems would even be resolved, although it was unthinkable they would not. Whilst that situation was fluid, Senna preferred to wait and see if Prost was ejected from Formula One.

  Meanwhile Ron Dennis was playing his own game. He had lured Mika Häkkinen from Lotus as test driver for 1993, and already had Mario Andretti’s son Michael signed as number two. If Senna didn’t drive, then Häkkinen would.

  It seemed as if McLaren had made Senna’s decision for him on 10th February, when the FISA entry list revealed that McLaren had named Michael Andretti and Mika Häkkinen as its drivers for the coming season, leaving Senna out in the cold.

  Dennis had taken the psychological advantage, and Senna’s office was by all accounts thrown into a state of confusion. His five years with McLaren had earned him $60 million, and another $60 million from his outside sponsors and businesses. He had spent some of it buying a 16-storey office building in the Edificio Vari suburb of São Paulo. His business empire, under the umbrella of Ayrton Senna Promotions, occupied the top seven floors. He appointed his father, his younger brother Leonardo and his c
ousin Fabio Machedo to run the business day-to-day so that he could focus on his racing.

  The attraction of the building was that he could have a pad on the roof to land his $1.2 million helicopter, which he flew himself. He had also bought a new HS125 jet at a cost of $7.9 million, which was kept in Europe. In addition he was funding the development of various new businesses, making sizeable charitable donations, and having to maintain no fewer than five homes. It had created huge overheads, which meant Senna needed to drive in 1993 to keep things ticking over. If he didn’t he would have to return a lot of money to sponsors, and cashflow would dry up. He would not be poor but he would be poorer, and would have to stop doing some of the things he had planned.

  The announcement of McLaren’s drivers, without Senna’s name on the entry sheet, literally panicked him into action. He was at his beach house in Angra when he got the news from his cousin Fabio Machedo at the Senna offices in São Paulo. Suddenly he was not sure if he held a strong hand or not. The telephone lines between Angra, São Paulo and Woking were sizzling after several long telephone calls between Senna and Dennis. The next day Senna’s name was officially added to the team entry, taking advantage of a new rule which said a team could nominate three drivers for two places, something that had clearly gone unnoticed by Senna’s advisers.

  Although Dennis held the advantage, knowing Senna wanted to race, under renewed pressure from Hogan, and irked by FISA’s 10th February announcement, he also knew he would have to pay him the going rate. Senna finally agreed to drive for McLaren in 1993, although only on a race-by-race basis. He told Dennis he would test the new McLaren Ford MP4/8 at the end of February, and if it was competitive he would drive at the first race of the season in South Africa.

  Even from his weakened position, Senna had got Dennis to agree to pay him a salary of $1 million to race at the Kyalami circuit. Dennis was sanguine about the situation. He knew that Senna would find the McLaren Ford a much better proposition than he thought. The new engine had prompted a new design and it featured all the latest electronic gizmos – including active suspension – that McLaren had got right first time out and which Dennis believed was better than the Williams version. This was no surprise, given its huge in-house electronics expertise and resources.

  Dennis was realistic enough to see that Senna’s loyalty owed everything to McLaren’s ability to supply him with equipment capable of winning. But underneath he resented Senna’s apparent willingness to desert McLaren so quickly when things were not going so well. When asked about the Senna situation, he always paused and chose his words carefully, as if he was still wrestling with the reasons for the effective disintegration of their relationship. “The relationship, obviously, has been a good one,” said Dennis, a faraway look in his eyes. “We’ve achieved a lot of good results together. But like all relationships, when things aren’t going the way you want them to, they become strained. And it’s at times like that, by desire, you hope you come closer together. But in reality – and this really applies to all people in Formula One, who are very competitive people – you tend to pull apart. You’re committed individuals who are focused on the tasks of winning and achieving, and when you’re not doing that you build up in yourself a range of reasons, based on logic, and then look to the situation to identify and apportion blame. Of course, if you are a proven world champion who has won lots of races, it’s quite obvious that why you’re not winning now is because you’ve not got the right equipment. And of course Ayrton hasn’t.”

  Dennis’s handling of the situation was deft. Rather than issuing fruitless denials and glossed-over press releases, he admitted the Ford engines had inferior power, and that the team was trailing the frontrunners in aerodynamics and other parts of the package. He also admitted the car was not reliable enough, as he said: “To overcome the disadvantages our cars have to be pushed harder, which puts greater stress on the components and creates problems of unreliability. All these things make for a frustrating time which, as a team, we have to bear... and share.”

  The only criticism Dennis was prepared to make of Senna was his reluctance to share the bad times along with the good. At the time Dennis wasn’t to know that the bad times were set to last four years. He knew (but Senna didn’t) that he would have works Peugeot engines for 1994 and thought the team would immediately bounce back. Dennis saw Senna’s reluctance to share the burden, and help get McLaren back on course, as a deficiency and suggested it was an unreasonable attitude. He said: “His main weakness is not being tolerant of uncompetitiveness, which is always going to exist in a racing team. You’re just not going to get it right every year. And if you are not winning, obviously you are not doing your job, you are not fulfilling the fundamental objective of the team. For us, and specifically for me, it is extremely painful to be uncompetitive. It is that pain which pushes us in our desire to be competitive. But there is no magic in it, and it takes time.”

  All in all, Senna could not complain about Dennis’s treatment of him in public, and the first test of the new McLaren Ford MP4/8 went better than Senna could have expected. He found himself happy to race it.

  Just a week after he had first driven the new McLaren Ford, Senna stepped off the overnight flight from London to Johannesburg on the Wednesday morning before the South African Grand Prix. “I feel tired,” he admitted. “But I am pleased to have made my decision and happy to be racing this weekend. It has all happened quickly. There has not been much time. But the car is reasonably good and I am sure it will be competitive. I would not be here otherwise, would I?”

  A press conference scheduled for the following day was promised to reveal everything. It didn’t. Senna said he wanted to fight for the championship and praised the MP4/8. Dennis said he was considering running a three-car team at some races that season.

  At first it looked as if the Williams team’s total domination of the previous season was no more. Prost took pole, but Senna was just 0.088 seconds behind, the pair of them one-and-a-half seconds ahead of the rest. At the start, Senna took the lead when Prost almost stalled. He bravely held the Frenchman off until lap 23, when Prost forced his way through in the clearly faster car. It was a good hard fight, but the rivals were set to have their first falling-out of the year on the very first weekend of Prost’s return to racing. In the final laps, a sudden storm passed over the circuit and Prost gesticulated wildly for the race to be stopped early, later explaining he believed that ‘for safety reasons they should have stopped the race – it could have been very dangerous’. It reminded some people of Monaco in 1984, when Prost had urged for the race to be stopped in the rain and Senna had lost out as a result. Senna shrugged: “I agree on safety reasons but not for competition. You have the choice to stop if you want. Or you can carry on.”

  Prost had returned to racing in the best car and had won the first race convincingly, but his off-track relationships were still causing him grief. In the week after Kyalami he was called to Paris to face the FISA world council over his anti-FISA stance. Most people expected he would be hit by a multiple-race ban – some even suggested that Senna would take advantage of his race-by-race contract to jump into the FW15C and replace him. But Prost, perhaps sensing Senna’s invisible hand on his shoulder, was full of righteous rhetoric to support his case. Playing the martyr, he said: “After being in motor racing for 20 years, in Formula One for 12 and winning 44 Grand Prix races and three world titles, I think I have the right to express my opinions.” On the day, he capitulated and told the world his remarks had been misinterpreted and he had never criticised FISA. Max Mosley let him off.

  With his last chance of joining Williams gone, Senna announced on the Wednesday before the Brazilian Grand Prix that he would be driving in his home event. “This is the same agreement we had for the South African Grand Prix and after the race we will talk about the rest of the season, which is our objective,” he said. On race day, the weather was changeable. Prost spun off and Senna took his second home victory, to the crowd’s deli
ght. He hugged Juan Manuel Fangio on the podium. The weekend also marked Senna’s first meeting with Adriane Galisteu, the 19-year-old blonde model who was working as a Shell publicity girl at the event. She remained his girlfriend for the rest of his life – a real love affair that was the most serious and public relationship he ever had.

  Senna won the wet one-off European Grand Prix at Donington two weeks later. But no one expected the performance he put in to do it. He overtook four cars on the first lap over 2.5 miles of track – a lap that has gone down in history as one of the greatest ever. Murray Walker, commentating for the BBC, said: “If I take one lap of all the Grand Prix events that I have seen over the years to my grave with me, it is the first lap of the European Grand Prix at Donington.” Senna simply said after the race: “It was great, we lapped everybody, we could have won the race with one lap over everybody. It did not happen in the end because we just slowed down but it could have been that way – I don’t remember a Grand Prix that was won in such style. It was one of those days when everything came together. The team and the circumstances on the circuit, the pitstops, the information, the strategy – together they created an incredible, fascinating result.”

  Against all odds, Senna had won two out of the first three races of the season and was heading the championship by 26 points to Prost’s 14. At the post-race press conference, the Frenchman, who had finished a lap down in third, grumbled: “I had gearbox problems, clutch problems and the tyre pressures were not correct. We took something off the wing too, which was not the right decision.” Senna smiled: “Maybe you should change cars with me.”

  After the race, Senna insisted that the championship was by no means within his reach and blamed Ford for his McLaren’s shortcomings. He said: “You only have to look at the stopwatch, under normal conditions, to see how much ahead Williams is. Part of it is the engine – and I think the situation with Ford is ridiculous. Its only chance to win Grand Prix races is with McLaren. Benetton may win a race, but only if Williams and McLaren are out. So, as it is, Benetton is stopping Ford from giving us a better engine, which is available. It is only a matter of fitting it in the back of our car. This is a ridiculous situation.