The Life of Senna

by Rubython, Tom

  At 9.1 seconds into the lap, Senna’s foot was flat to the floor as he entered Tamburello. Beyond it was a small area of grass, then a smaller area of tarmac, then a wall. If something went wrong, a driver was in a lot of trouble with nowhere to go. A 1994 Formula One car had the ability to corner at almost unbelievable speed, on sticky slick tyres, dominated by sophisticated aerodynamics. The car’s bottom ran millimetres from the surface of the road. In 1993, sophisticated active-ride systems had kept the cars stable, along with other electronic aids such as traction control. In 1994, these aids were banned and it all had to be done mechanically. In hindsight it was highly dangerous to ban the electronic aids without introducing other measures to combat bottoming.

  At close to 200mph, 11 seconds into lap seven, Senna’s car was on the very edge, and the aerodynamics were so efficient that it was almost being crushed into the tarmac by nearly four times its own weight in downforce. It generated huge grip, enabling the Tamburello bend to be taken flat out. In fact, the car was set up in such a way that the bend was safer taken flat out. Anything else could have been simply dangerous. Some people say that the worst thing a driver could have done in 1994 was lift off. It could throw the aerodynamics out of kilter, and on the limit the car could not be guaranteed to steer properly. Sensors on board indicated a force of 3.62G at Tamburello. If something went wrong now, the car could literally fly off the road.

  But at that exact moment something did go wrong. At 12.6 seconds into the lap, 1.6 seconds before impact, something had reduced the ride height of the Williams. Television viewers saw an intermittent flash of sparks from Senna’s car. This was normal behaviour for a car in 1994. Whatever happened, it appeared to cause Senna’s car to scrape along the track, with could have caused a huge loss of grip and much-reduced downforce.

  The telemetry showed that Ayrton Senna had lifted off the throttle momentarily. The back of the car appeared to step out. With lightning reactions, reacting exactly as would be expected, Senna appeared to steer into the slide. The car gripped and turned it to the right – whether or not this was under Senna’s control is debatable. But then it went wrong. The telemetry shows the brakes were hard on, with the driver appearing to try and keep the car on the track. But other forces had taken over: other than trying to slow the car by urgently downshifting the gears, he was a passenger. In any case, his focus was keeping the car on the track and winning the race, not saving his life. But Tamburello was the one unforgiving part of the Imola circuit, where there was the least road and no tyre wall.

  Because the accident took less than two seconds from start to finish, few saw him leave the track and did not notice the accident until he had bounced off the wall and was coming to a halt. He went into the concrete wall at a 45-degree angle and the car immediately ricocheted back on to the run-off area. All in all it had taken 1.8 seconds from leaving the track to coming to rest. His head twitched and there was a pause as everyone, including the marshals, froze. It transpired a wheel had become trapped between the chassis and the wall before catapulting up and hitting the Brazilian in the head, forcing it back hard against the carbon-fibre headrest. At the same time, part of the suspension block on one of the wheels snapped off and broke through his visor, hitting his forehead like a bullet. The FOCA TV onboard camera caught the whole incident, bar the last 0.9 seconds of impact.

  The day after the accident, Williams technical director Patrick Head was besieged by journalists anxious to know what had caused Senna to go off. He told them that the telemetry the team had been able to retrieve from the Renault box showed only what Senna had done: “We have checked the telemetry. He slightly lifted his foot just at that dip in the place where the tarmac changes. That caused a loss of grip from the car.”

  But what caused him to lift off is the enduring question that has perplexed every investigator. Plenty of people claim to know the answer – a trial court in Bologna, numerous documentary programme-makers, newspaper investigative teams, the Williams team, eminent scientists and everyone who inhabited the Formula One paddock in 1994. Did his car pick up a piece of debris from an earlier accident and get trapped in, or affect, the suspension, causing it to fail? Did the steering column break? Did the power steering fail? Did the car bottom on low tyre pressures, and cause Senna to back off and lower the car momentarily onto its flat bottom and suspension mounts, after which it slid into the wall? Was Senna holding his breath to heighten his senses for a quick lap and black out? And, of course, there’s the conspiracy theory. Were mysterious eastern European forces at work, interfering with his electronics with a telemetric beam? There is also the question of Senna’s helmet. It was a special lightweight model, but was it legal? Many people thought not, but it wasn’t a contributor to the accident.

  The Bologna court investigators were adamant that the steering column had broken. The authors of this book believe the power steering probably failed. Patrick Head and the Williams team believe the car, bottomed and slid off. Most journalists believe the car picked up track debris which affected the car’s suspension. Others believe it was simply a momentary reaction by the driver, who believed he sensed a problem and instinctively lifted off the throttle and destabilised the car. Undoubtedly Ayrton Senna’s competitiveness contributed to his own death. His actions right up to when he hit the wall indicate he was not trying to avoid a fatal accident but trying to keep his car on the track to win the race.

  In truth, no one knows what really happened.

  What most people do agree on was that the accident was not caused by driver error. Although Senna backed off the throttle, something caused him to. The late Michele Alboreto, a very close friend of Senna’s and a key witness at the Bologna trial, remembered: “It’s a very dangerous corner, if something did go wrong on the car it was the wall, very close and at a very high speed. But I am sure because I know, I had the same accident as Ayr ton did, that the only way you can go out at this corner is if you have a mechanical failure.”

  There was also confusion later about exactly what Head had meant when he told journalists that Senna had taken his foot off the throttle. Many assumed he was calling the cause driver error. It caused a frenzy. The Williams PR team went into overdrive and later denied that Head said Senna had made a mistake. Head had not of course said why he lifted, because he did not know.

  The Williams team has always believed that the tyres were not warmed up, and that the consequently lower tyre pressures affected the ride height, causing instability that prompted Senna to lift the throttle thereby combining to create catastrophic instability. That the lifting of the throttle caused aerodynamic instability is undeniable.

  The lower tyre temperatures were caused by the safety car leading the cars around slowly. The safety car at Imola was a modified Opel estate car. It could not go anywhere near fast enough for Formula One cars. The procedure had desperately worried Senna already in 1994 and he wanted it stopped. The safety car was a new innovation and had only been used once before in 1994, in dry conditions. In Imola, an accident at the start had brought the safety car out for the second time. The cars lined up behind and travelled at a much lower speed, lowering the tyre pressures and consequently the ride height. The car was unable to generate grip it needed, as the downforce would theoretically have been severely decreased.

  But that theory is partially discounted by the fast lap Senna drove on lap six and the fact that by then he had used up 20 kilos of fuel and the car must have been riding substantially higher than at the start.

  A British television documentary of the accident, ‘Going Critical’, first aired on 25th September 2001, concluded that the car bottoming out caused the accident rather than any steering problem. The programme investigators came to this conclusion by some new analysis of the telemetry and the onboard camera footage. It told them that Senna was still applying torsional force to the steering column of his FW16 when he went off at Tamburello. The programme-makers appeared to have been given help by the Williams team, and the programme fitted
the team’s own conclusion that the car bottomed out and started to slide on the suspension mounts. The telemetry shows that Senna reacted within a 10th of a second, and began to compensate with the steering at the moment when the car regained grip. Unfortunately, only the front wheels gained grip and this snapped the car hard right and into the wall.

  What this programme had to offer in terms of insight and factual reporting, however, was far from clear. But its hypothesis was as credible as the Bologna prosecutors’.

  It was the Italian magazine Autosprint that first raised the suspicion, presumably tipped off by Bologna court investigators, one week after the accident, that the steering column had broken. According to the Italians the fracture occurred, or was beginning to occur, in the few seconds before the Williams ran off the road.

  If the steering column had broken as the prosecution alleged, then the characteristics of the accident would have been very different, because Senna did appear to have some control of the car right up to the impact with the wall.

  The breakage theory would have been easier to prove or dismiss if the memory for detail of the people first at the scene had been better. None of the doctors or marshals could remember having removed the steering wheel, but photographs of the car after the accident indicate that the wheel was not removed from the column by releasing the catch, which allows the driver to get in and out of the cramped cockpit. The steering column was undoubtedly broken at the accident.

  At the subsequent trial, the prosecution’s case rested on the fact that Williams had modified the steering column in the middle of March before the season started. After the initial tests of the new Williams Renault FW16, Senna wanted more room in the cockpit and figured this could be done by lengthening the steering column by about 12mm. The modifications were ready by the first race of the season in Brazil.

  But the modifications had been done in such a way that did no credit to the Williams factory. The modifications were described in legal documents as ‘badly designed and badly implemented’. Formula One experts who have seen the pictures, post crash, agree with this statement. It is a stinging condemnation of the capabilities of the Williams engineers who did the modifications. The way the steering column was altered also caused plenty of trauma at the Williams factory.

  In 1994 the modification of the steering column was the direct responsibility of young Williams engineers Alan Young and Gavin Fisher, who maintained that it wasn’t a rush job, but was planned and executed at the factory according to internal procedures; they stated firmly that they did not believe the modifications were the cause of the accident. But even influential Williams insiders admit the way the work was done was a problem for the team.

  The way the modifications were done certainly caused chief designer Adrian Newey much anguish. Years later he told F1 Racing magazine: “I asked myself quite sincerely whether I should carry on. A driver had just died at the wheel of a car designed by me. I went through a really bad time. And then I did decide to carry on, but the pain is still there. I was just getting to know him when he left us. It was awful. We’ll never know whether the accident was down to design error or something else altogether.”

  But the steering column modification was an easy place to pin the blame for legal prosecutors. If the charge against Newey, Patrick Head and Frank Williams at the trial had been one of bad workmanship, a guilty verdict would have undoubtedly ensued. But the broken steering column almost certainly did not cause the accident, so it was always irrelevant.

  Although it did not cause the accident, it was easy for the Italian prosecutors to make a case against the team based on it. The personal trauma was heavy. Frank Williams admitted the team awaited the outcome of the trial with great trepidation. He said: “It could take many months, even years. God forbid that it should go on so long. “That accident has affected everyone here. It was a tragedy which left us all in the depths of despair. Make no mistake about that. Patrick said to me just the other day that many of our people are still badly marked by the loss of Ayrton. We’ve got very many things to occupy our minds just now, but losing the man who drives your car is significant and the people who make the car feel it most.”

  The problem for Williams was that the bad workmanship had coloured the minds of the Italian prosecutors. No one could ever say whether the steering broke before or after the accident. It was impossible. The telemetry clearly said it didn’t, but it was not infallible. It all steered the court’s spotlight away from other, likely causes of the accident.

  If the steering was to blame it was far more likely a power steering failure. This was Patrick Head’s first theory, later discounted by the telemetry and the reason he ordered Damon Hill to turn off the power steering on the grid of the restart. If the power steering had failed, one would have expected the hydraulic pressure to fall to zero. But the telemetry showed the hydraulic pressure first rising abnormally and then falling abnormally in the seconds before the accident. No one ever explained why.

  Williams was using power steering for the first time in 1994 and it had been very troublesome. Imola was its third race. Getting it right was very difficult – some Formula One teams only got around to installing power steering in the 2001 season, and it was still causing problems then.

  Further credence is given to the power-steering failure theory by widespread allegations that, at the time of the crash, people in the Williams garage heard Head, who was standing in front of the TV monitors when Senna started to go straight on, shouting the words ‘steering power’. Head is an incredibly quick-witted engineer, they say, and he followed that up by asking people around him, just after the impact: “What happened to the steering?”

  No one in the Williams garage that afternoon has ever discussed publicly what happened in the minutes during and after the accident. Jabby Crombac, the veteran journalist, was in the garage but would not even speak to friends about events.

  Although no one from Williams was ever allowed to examine the FW16 chassis until it was returned to the factory in early 2002, Patrick Head had full access from the start to the Renault telemetry that survived the accident. He contends strongly that power-steering failure did not match that data, believing that the accident was caused by lower tyre pressures – either by a deflating tyre after Senna ran over some debris, or by a tyre that had cooled after the safety car went out. The glitch in that theory is that on the sixth lap of the race, as the safety car withdrew, Senna recorded the third-fastest lap of the race. Hardly the work of a driver whose car is any less than perfect. But that doesn’t discount the theory either. Senna was such a great driver that he could simply drive around such problems.

  The debris theory, which claims Senna picked up a piece of track debris from a Benetton car involved in the startline accident has been well argued, mostly by journalists. On the eve of the opening of the Bologna trial, the London Sunday Times published a new photograph of a small piece of blue bodywork on the track, with Senna’s car about to run over it on the way to Tamburello on lap seven. The debris could have damaged the car or become attached to it, altering its aerodynamics. But no one can say for sure that it did.

  Patrick Head has discounted a suspension breakage or debris-induced interference. He said that with an aerodynamic load at that speed of some 2,600kg (plus the weight of the car), of which some 65 per cent would have been on the right-hand side on a left curve, the car would have crashed and dragged along the ground far more violently, if that had happened.

  French TV reporter Jean-Louis Moncet studied the view from the camera in Michael Schumacher’s Benetton, which was around 10 metres behind Senna’s car on lap seven. Moncet maintains a small piece of bodywork could be seen dangling from underneath the Williams momentarily, and flew off immediately after.

  The quality of the viewed footage varied. Only FOCA Television, which operated the onboard cameras, had the original and it chose not to get involved unless compelled by the authorities. There was a great deal of compelling going on when Bologna
police arrived to arrest Alan Woollard, then the FOCA camera operator, at the following year’s race. If Bernie Ecclestone hadn’t been on hand to sort it out, Woollard would have been carted off.

  Karl Wendlinger, who was driving a Sauber in the race, described that year’s breed of car: “The aerodynamics don’t work any more if a speck of dust gets on the wing.” Former Lotus designer and Senna’s close friend, Gérard Ducarouge, who he drove for in the mid-1980s, said: “If only a small part of the front wing breaks on a Tamburello bend at those speeds, with a G-force of 4.5, you instantly lose 500 kilos of downforce. That is a fundamental problem with modern racing cars.”

  Other drivers’ comments seem to sum up what probably happened: some momentary aerodynamic instability that Senna detected caused him to lift his right foot; that error, caused by responding to the sophisticated aerodynamics, caused the accident. Like all fatal accidents in Formula One, it was a combination of events that made the tragedy happen, coming together at once in an unlikely scenario. Tamburello was simply the worst place in the world for it to happen.

  Driver error in whatever form, regardless of the emotion it sparks, is still a credible theory, as well as the debate as to what exactly driver error is in a situation like this. There are many who support the Williams team theory that the aerodynamic balance of the car changed quickly in the corner and Senna lost partial control after his instincts told him to come off the throttle. If obeying this instinct is regarded as a driver mistake, then the accident was due to driver error. But this is an explanation no current or former Formula One driver who was around in 1994 can even begin to accept. Gerhard Berger said: “This is not a place where you get driver error. The bend is flat out, you can’t do anything wrong.” Former world champion and Williams team member Keke Rosberg agrees: “You can drive through there with your eyes closed. It’s not a corner.”