The Life of Senna

by Rubython, Tom

  Senna saw it as an asset even when it cost him a race win, as it did many times. Although most motor racing commentators attest to the fact that he rarely made a mistake, close examination of his record does not back it up. It also comes back to the fact he scored a third more poles than race wins. When his record is properly examined, not only in races but practice and qualifying, it is clear that Senna made plenty of mistakes, mostly going faster than he should have been. But he was always unrepentant: “The main thing is to be yourself and not allow people to disturb you and change you. You have got to be yourself, even though many times you make a mistake due to your own personality. You learn, and you must learn through your mistakes and get better.

  “I believe if you have the ability to focus strongly on something then you have the ability to gain from it. It’s been like that all my life – it’s always been a question of improving. There is no end, as you go through you just keep finding more and more, it’s fascinating. We are made of emotions and we are all looking for emotions – it’s just a question of finding a way to experience them.”

  The Brazilian hated making mistakes and admitted they got to him afterwards. The most public was Monaco in 1988. He once said: “Those things can get to you if you’re not careful because you really see how fragile you are - you have no power, you are just there. You can be gone in a fraction of a second so you realise suddenly you are nobody and your life can have a sudden end.”

  He claimed he had always confronted problems and never run away from them: “You are faced with some unexpected situations and you have to face them – it is part of your life and you either face it or you just drop it and don’t do it any more. I happen to like what I do so much, I can’t drop it.”

  Jackie Stewart believed this absolutely and says he often saw an imprisoned look in Senna’s eyes. “I never thought he looked like he was getting the degree of pleasure he deserved because he worked as hard as any man could work at mastering his art. I’ve seen a lot of other people who while doing that have also had a quality of life and an appreciation of life that might have been fuller than Ayrton gave himself the privilege of having. I think that’s what made the difference because in all the great drivers they’ve all been given a gift from God. Some have manicured and massaged that gift to the highest level of their potential. Ayrton did it more recognisably through sheer hard work and it would almost seem aggravation to him. He had his ego factor, which everybody has but it looked like it wasn’t a pleasure. He was sometimes what I would call a rushed driver. He didn’t look as though he had the same time in the cockpit as Jim Clark to do things. Everything was more hurried, more abrupt, more nervous. I don’t think his reactions were faster – or braver. It’s just that he drove right on the limit. And I believe he went closer to the limit than a lot of other people would. He survived them all but I was always waiting for the accident. Not the kind of accident that happened at Imola. I was waiting for the type of accident where he would use too much of the kerb and the thing would flick on him.”

  That comment strikes right at the heart of what Senna was. He believed in his ultimate superiority over any man and any machine. He believed it was his divine right to win in Formula One from 1988 onwards and when he didn’t he always looked for the answer. It was his inquisitiveness that stood him apart from other men. And it made him one of the most unpredictable men alive. No one ever knew where they stood when he was around. He said in 1990: “The newest machine in the world will never match the human being. Therefore, really, what we are all looking for is how we function, how we operate: why this, why that? There is a logical way of looking at it, there is the spiritual way of looking at it – through religion, through God, and it’s a process with no end.”

  Senna rethought the process of life more often than any other driver of his era and possibly ever in Formula One. He was constantly not only trying to learn about his cars but also about himself. He called it a ‘non-stop process’. But he admitted there were many things about the way he behaved and how he could drive faster than others that he simply didn’t understand. He didn’t understand why he could never accept coming second and why he won far less races than he won pole for. He said: “There are so many things to which you just cannot find the answers.”

  His religion gave him some of the answers he craved. He read the Bible primarily to find answers and in religion found a new way of life. He said in 1989, after he lost the championship that year to Alain Prost: “I still want lots of answers but I think I have a new road where I am finding those answers slowly. I believe there are many things about which you’re not aware, human qualities that were given to you by God. If you get to understand just a little bit, it makes so much more sense: it makes things so much more peaceful to understand the difficulties - particularly - and to better enjoy the good moments. Unfortunately, I had not experienced that before: I wish I had.”

  In Montreal in 1991, Senna told journalists: “Winning is like a drug. Do I think I am totally addicted? Maybe, I don’t know the meaning correctly in English, but I am totally dependent at this moment on winning.” It was that philosophy that made him what he was – the good and the bad. He was like a drug addict who would commit any crime to get his fix. It was the single thing that drove everything he did.

  Ayrton Senna was a hugely contrasting and complex man. One minute absorbed and lost in the Bible, the next ruthlessly disposing of fellow competitors on the race track, sometimes to the extreme unpopularity of the journalists who observed his every move. Only his vast talent and intelligence excused his behaviour on many occasions. Senna’s formidable intellect was one of the secrets of his speed. His career was a triumph of mind over matter and his philosophy of life and words of wisdom are among his most important legacies. Senna believed there was some truth in the old saying that the ideal would be to have two lives because in the first life you would learn how to live and then you would use that experience to live the second life to the full. But, typically, that wasn’t enough for Senna. He said: “You need a third life and a fourth because you wouldn’t ever get to the bottom of it.” His wisdom went far beyond his years, and he managed to pack more into his short lifetime than most people achieve in a longer life. He was able to do this because he applied his exceptional intelligence to thinking about the whole business of living, not just racing.

  However, his passion for his sport was so all-consuming that it was inevitable that his greatest insights about life would come from racing. With Formula One as the catalyst his powers of reasoning were honed and the framework created for the development of his personal philosophy. His superior intellect was ideally suited to the fast-paced world of Formula One, where quick-thinking is a way of life, and his racing experiences sharpened his senses and accelerated his intellectual development.

  He once said: “One thing that happens in our lives as racing drivers is that we do a lot of things in a short period of time. So we have to live our lives very intensely. And by living very intensely, everything happens so fast. The difficulty is doing it right all the time. With so much pressure and stress it’s quite easy to get it wrong. That is the major challenge. To do it properly, do it right, positively, constructively. You don’t always manage it but in the end the aim is really to do the best you can all the time. Because then you are at peace.”

  Senna said that as a young boy he didn’t even know who he was, a knowing observation that in itself reveals the concern for self-understanding which went on throughout his life. For Senna, his relentless quest to explore himself, to push his personal limits and discover how far he could go was key to becoming one of the greatest racing drivers in history. Beyond that, his search to find himself was a prime reason for living, a motivational force that went far beyond his fundamental need to win races. “I think I am a complex person,” he said, “because I am never convinced that ‘this is it’. I don’t sit and wait for things to happen. I’m always searching for more, particularly within myself. In this area it i
s infinite. Because where do you stop? You don’t know what capability you have in your mind. What you read, what you can learn about - we only use a fraction of our capabilities, our competence. So this research is fascinating. It’s a continuous feeling that ‘there’s more, there’s more’.

  Wherever and whenever he found more, Senna, like a true explorer, became excited by his discovery, especially if the revelation came behind the wheel of a Formula One car. “This situation takes you to a different world,” he said. “You have this desire to go into places where you have never been before. It is the challenge of doing better all the time.”

  When a racing driver continually pushes himself he is also exposing himself to greater danger. It is the nature of drivers to take one of three approaches to this most difficult of dilemmas. The easiest way, and the most common, is to slow down, to never exceed the personal limits of safety they feel comfortable with. Obviously that would never work for Senna, a man who once said: “The motivating factor is the discoveries that I keep having every time I am driving. When I push, I go and find something more. I go again and I find something more. That is perhaps the most fascinating motivating factor for me.”

  The second way drivers handle the danger factor is to virtually ignore it. They do this either through having a lack of imagination (or deliberately repressing it) about what might happen to them in a big accident, or refusing to believe they could ever be seriously injured or killed in a racing car. Unfortunately, drivers who are ignorant of danger or believe they are invincible tend not to last long.

  Like most thinking drivers Senna was fully aware of the dangers and he was not afraid to admit he was fearful of them. Typically he used this as a way to improve his driving. “The danger of getting hurt or getting killed is there because any racing driver lives very close to it all the time. It’s important to know what fear is because it will keep you more switched on, more alert. On many occasions it will determine your limits.”

  But just as he went faster than nearly anyone else, perhaps in order to be able to get his mind in gear to be able to do that, he went further than anyone else when dealing with the fear factor. He was fascinated by it and chose to meet it head on.

  “Because we are in a close relationship with the experience of fear and danger we learn how to live with it better than other people. In the process of learning to live with it you have extraordinary feelings and emotions when you come near an accident. There is the feeling of almost going over the limit. It’s fascinating and even attractive in a way. But it’s a challenge to control it and not exceed it. The feeling of living in that narrow band, of overdoing it, is very small. The challenge to stay within that band is very much a motivation.”

  Senna had a highly developed sense of personal values, which he attributed to his parents giving him the proper upbringing and to his religion. “I can put my hand on the Bible and say that everything I have done, everything I have said and everything I believe has been done in the straight way of life. This is the honest way, the professional way, the sporting way. It respects people and it respects their way of life.”

  When others contravened his personal code of conduct, or committed what he felt was an injustice – to himself or others – Senna was never afraid to speak out. After Roberto Moreno was unceremoniously fired by Benetton to make way for Michael Schumacher in 1991, Senna was the only driver to speak out against what he considered was a morally corrupt and ethically incorrect act by Benetton.

  As much as he devoted his life to racing Senna thought his sport paled in comparison to the plight of the poor and the oppressed people and the environmental problems of the world. “Formula One is nothing compared to those things,” he said. “People have to have a chance, a basic chance at least, for education, nutrition, medical care. If this does not begin to happen then there is little hope for the future and little wonder that the problems become greater and that violence arises. Unfortunately, I am not blessed with the powers to solve the problems. But it touches me deeply and worries me considerably.”

  Though he refused to talk about it publicly, he spent millions of dollars of his own money to help the poor children in Brazil. In the last year of his life he spent over $5 million developing his ‘Senninha’ (little Senna) project and publishing comic books detailing the adventures of the crusading cartoon character, patterned on himself and dedicated to fraternity, good sportsmanship and the defeat of wickedness.

  As for such problems as drugs he thought he could contribute on another level: by setting an example. “The best way to help, if you are in a position that gives you credibility, is to do your own activity in a way that is consistent with good values. In other words, I don’t need drugs to be successful. I don’t need drugs to go fast. I don’t need drugs to have feelings or happiness or emotions.”

  Experiencing the full range of emotions was one of the major satisfactions Senna found in racing. “Life would be very boring without feelings, without emotions. And there are some feelings that only we can experience. It’s a fortunate and unique position to be in, but it’s stressful at the same time. Either winning, or breaking a record, losing, going through a corner at a speed that a few seconds before you didn’t think you could, failing, feeling luck, feeling anger, enthusiasm, stress or pain – only we can experience the feeling and the level of it. Nobody else can, considering that in our profession we deal with ego a lot, with danger, with our health, continuously, second after second, not just day after day or month after month or year after year. Our life goes by in seconds or milliseconds.”

  Because he thought so deeply about his profession, Senna was able to find in it greater rewards than most drivers. But his profound commitment also brought him more than his share of despair. While he found driving immensely stimulating he also acknowledged that there was a negative side to this essentially solitary pursuit. “Once you get in a car on a circuit, it is you and the car, nothing else. It is very lonely in a way.”

  Just as he was in a class by himself in the car, Senna’s superior intellect set him apart from others out of it. It was lonely at the top and sometimes his sense of isolation made him feel vulnerable so he turned to others for help and strength. His family in Brazil was a great source of inspiration and comfort. He was closest to his father Milton and his brother Leonardo but once described his sister Viviane and his mother Neyde as his two best friends. He had faith in the family unit as a way of life, loved children – ‘they are the honest ones’ - and wanted to have his own, probably with his last girlfriend Adriane Galisteu, because he ‘needed someone to share his life’.

  But Senna also sought, and found, inner peace and spiritual nourishment through his belief in a superior being. “Psychologically or physically you can be the strongest man in the world but, especially in my profession, you cannot do it on your own. It’s such a fight all the time, such a stress, such a tension, there are moments when you need help. You’ve got to have the source of power. And the only source of power that is with you all the time is God.”

  His relationship with journalists was far from good. His original confidants, Brazilian Reginaldo Leme and photographer Keith Sutton, worked closely with Senna in the early days but later became disillusioned. Both men gave him everything early in his career when he was an unknown and then found themselves frozen out when they would not bend to his will once he was famous and successful. He often ranted at the press when they failed to take his side and it was something that dwelled on his mind. He often took it too seriously and thought about it too deeply, especially when he tried to explain to a group of journalists the problem: “I really want it to be properly understood, because... it means automatically that this is going to go through, and flow through, the system – which is where you guys are responsible – in order that it gets to the other end. And that is one of the small contributions that, from time to time, I feel I can give, and that I feel strongly about. And I feel really unhappy, or frustrated, when I see that it doesn’t get thro
ugh, or if it gets through, it gets completely wrong. Sometimes I am angry with myself, not necessarily with you guys ... with myself, because I see afterwards that the way I did it wasn’t right, I made a mistake the way I put it, because I wasn’t clear enough, or ... the way it was passed to you guys gave you an opportunity to interpret it the wrong way. So it’s not only your responsibility to have got it wrong there. I am also responsible because I should have done different, to get you to understand what I was trying to say.”

  Because he was such a deep thinker he found it hard to answer a question simply. They were always long answers but usually worth listening to.

  He found the continual demands on his time very stressful but didn’t shirk his duties. As he said: “It’s not just being a racing driver that is stressful, the stress comes from... yesterday, when I arrived at the circuit, and I was there at 11.30am. And before 2.30pm I could not sit with my engineers to talk about racing, talk about my racing car... I couldn’t, because I had to attend to a certain amount of requests. There was no end. And I couldn’t cope, I couldn’t fulfil the need, no matter how hard I tried... I got out after three hours of work, not only tired and totally down, with no energy, but also frustrated because I felt that I couldn’t cooperate the way I would like and would wish... with everyone. And yet it wasn’t over, because at 4pm I was in a press conference. And after the press conference was over, a number of people were still around me. And today I am here, for a half-hour interview, and I don’t know how long we have been here. And no matter how long we remain here, there is still so much. I tell you, it takes a helluva lot out of me to do that.”