The Life of Senna

by Rubython, Tom

  The service was conducted by the pastor Sabatini Lali who had presided over the earlier service. After he had finished, Viviane rose to speak. She said: “Brazil is going through a very bad time. No one feels like helping anyone any more. People just live for themselves. My brother had a mission, and our family is in deep emotion today because we didn’t realise it had made him so greatly loved. I saw how the ordinary people showed their feelings. Some of them were shoeless; others dressed in silk. He united them, even through his death. I think that my brother is not down there but up in the heavens.” Finally Viviane threw up her right arm, in imitation of her brother’s victory salute. “Valeu Senna!” she cried. And the 500 mourners responded: “Valeu Senna!”

  Her address was in danger of being drowned out by the clatter of helicopters overhead. As she finished, the aerobatic team traced a big heart and a giant S in white smoke against the deep blue sky.

  Adriane looked at her boyfriend’s coffin for the last time, and she said in silence: “I love you, but you left me. I miss you. From now on my life will be a misery.” The ceremony had lasted for 30 minutes in bright sunlight, under a perfect blue sky.

  After the service, the coffin was lowered and covered with earth. Workmen arranged the flowers carefully around the grave, making sure the wreaths did not cover the plaque set into the freshly laid turf. The plaque, in Brazilian tradition, read ‘Ayrton Senna da Silva 21.3.1960 – 1.5.94. Nada pode me separar do amor de Deus.’ In translation: “Nothing can separate me from the love of God.”

  Then the family stood up in front of the small canopied area and all the mourners filed by to pay their respects.

  The mourners were in no hurry to leave, but gradually withdrew to their helicopters and coaches. Pointedly, Xuxa Meneghel left in an official family limousine. Adriane Galisteu appeared to attempt to join a family limousine and was turned away. Later she denied that she had, and said she was simply saying goodbye to the family. Whatever happened, afterwards, Adriane was not welcome at the family reception, and left in the bus she arrived in to join the Bragas at their farm.

  The apparent rejection appeared cruel, but reflected the majority of the family’s view of Adriane and the reason why Leonardo’s last conversation with his brother had been adversarial. It later became clear that Leonardo’s mission in Imola had been to appeal to his brother to give up Adriane. It was the reason she had not attended the race.

  After everyone had gone, vans arrived to unload the flowers from Ibirapuera Park. By 1:30pm they were all laid out, apart from one late-arriving floral tribute from the American singer Tina Turner.

  Alain Prost, the reigning world champion, was the last to leave. He was a magnet for TV cameras and radio microphones, and he obliged all requests to talk about Senna’s accident. He said: “I was shocked. He was the kind of guy you really think it won’t happen to. He was the master of his job. For sure, something happened with the car. Motor racing is always dangerous, but we must minimise the risks wherever possible. I think it’s time for changing a lot of things. It’s not a question of rules. It’s a question of philosophy, of whether you have respect for drivers.”

  He talked about how he and Senna had become reconciled and were enjoying a growing warmth towards each other, culminating in an embrace at Imola on the eve of the crash. He continued: “For 10 years it was Prost and Senna. Now it’s just Prost. Half of my career has gone today.”

  The funeral had attracted over 400 regular members of the Formula One community. Many had not known Senna very well at all, and some had never even met him. And some who had known him very well did not come.

  Three significant figures had elected not to come. Nigel Mansell was in the middle of the Indianapolis 500 race programme, a serious event in America. Instead Mansell sent a letter to the family. He wrote that he fought many races with Ayrton, lost most of the fights, but even when he won he knew that he had had the honour to defeat the best driver of all time. He also wrote that he knew that Ayrton had the habit of anonymously helping needy organisations and people. Therefore, if Ayrton’s family was thinking about starting a foundation or something like it, they should please not consider the amount but the feeling – and he enclosed a cheque for $5,000 to kick the fund off. His $5,000 was the start of the Ayrton Senna Foundation.

  The current world championship leader, Michael Schumacher, did not go because he simply did not care for funerals. He said: “I can’t do something like that in public, in front of everyone. I went to his grave two years later, before the Brazilian Grand Prix. But on my own. Only my wife was with me.”

  Nelson Piquet was not a friend of Senna’s in life, and refused in his death to attend his funeral, hypocritically. He said: “I’ve never liked going to funerals and I didn’t want to act like Prost did, pretending he was Senna’s friend when they had actually spent all their lives fighting with each other.”

  Neither did Max Mosley, president of FISA, attend. He had been the subject of much criticism in Brazil for allowing the race to be restarted after Senna’s accident. The da Silva family thought it an outrage and a massive show of disrespect. The family simply did not realise that the race always went on in Formula One, regardless. After all, death had been absent from the sport for so long.

  Bernie Ecclestone was also missing from the funeral service but was holed up in the Intercontinental hotel. The family had asked him not to attend. Later in the day he visited the grave. Ecclestone was very close to Senna, who had stayed with him at his London home many times. Ecclestone’s two young daughters Petra and Tamara regarded Senna as an uncle. Ecclestone later met with the state governor, Luiz Antonio Fleury, to brief him on what had happened in Imola. A year later there was a rapprochement with the family after emotions had cooled.

  As the day wound down, Josef Leberer summed it up, saying he didn’t believe his friend would have been afraid of death. He said: “I remember a test in Hockenheim once and he says to me, ‘Isn’t it, Josef, that we have a fantastic life. Haven’t we a good life?’ I said to him, ‘Are you afraid that this is going to stop one day. He replied: ‘No, because I have such a good life now so whatever comes, comes.’”

  The da Silva family went back to their farm at Tatui to rebuild their shattered lives. The Bragas and Adriane went to the Braga farm in Campinas. On Friday she got a surprise when Neyde Da Saliva arrived. She wanted to talk to the people who had spent time with her son. Of the family, Adriane got on best with Neyde. After chatting, Neyde arranged to meet her at Senna’s apartment at Rua Paraguai, where they had lived together, so that Adriane could collect her things. Adriane had a lot of stuff there. She had lived with Senna for a year, and for the last month alone whilst he was in Europe.

  Galvao Bueno spent four days thinking a lot about his career and whether he could carry on now Senna was dead. He decided to carry on because of the young Brazilian drivers Rubens Barrichello and Christian Fittipaldi.

  Josef Leberer also had to decide whether he wanted to continue. He stayed with Williams to look after Damon Hill until the end of the season, then rejoined McLaren.

  Alain Prost was relieved that he had taken the decision to come to Brazil. The big question was whether Prost would come out of retirement and take Senna’s seat at Williams. He firmly discounted that: “Out of respect for him, I would never, never, never take the seat in his car.”

  Prost remains a favourite of the Senna family. On Friday of that week, Milton and Neyde invited him to join them at the family farm in Tatui. Strangely they found the presence of their son’s greatest track rival reassuring. Over the weekend, Prost and Milton da Silva talked about his son’s last weekend and his life. Prost told his father that he believed he and his son would have become good friends once they had retired. The reasons for acrimony between them did not exist outside competition in a race car. Prost said: “I think it’s not impossible that in time we might have become friends. We shared an awful lot, after all, and one thing never changed – even when our relationship was at its w
orst – was our great respect for each other as drivers. I don’t think either of us worried too much about anyone else. And there were those times we did have fun together, you know.”

  Gerhard Berger and Johnny Herbert were soon gone from Brazil. They were due to attend the funeral of Roland Ratzenberger, the forgotten victim of the Imola weekend. Berger had his own demons to confront; he was unsure whether he ever wanted to race again.

  Derek Warwick simply went home. His career was over, ended by the man he had come to mourn. Afterwards Neyde da Silva wrote him a letter. It was all so unexpected but Warwick says, trying to explain: “I think he knew what he did to me and my career but still felt it was done for the right reasons. I don’t know whether he was awkward with it or whether he just knew he had to squash something in order to survive himself. With hindsight I don’t bear him any malice for that. I’m actually more angry with myself for not being tougher in certain situations. But you know, I am my character and I’m proud of what I am – but that went against me at the end of the day.”

  Julian Jakobi had to pick up the pieces of Senna’s growing business empire. $47 million had been committed to investment in the future. There were a lot of decisions to make. His three-year contract with Williams would be paid out in full by insurers. Also his personal sponsorships would be covered. After the business was concluded Jakobi finally had time for his personal grief. He had been stunned by the funeral and had no idea his driver had been so revered by his people. He said: “I remember watching John F Kennedy’s funeral in Washington in 1963, and even Winston Churchill’s when I was a young boy. I’d never seen anything like this. The Senna funeral in Brazil was just quite something. You wouldn’t want to be part of it because of what happened, but on the other hand, being there, it kind of put everything into perspective. Here was a guy from Brazil, which has a fledgling motor industry, who could take on and beat the industrialised world. Here was somebody, rather like Pelé, who was a world figure, who was universally respected. And, during the nine years that I worked for him, I didn’t understand, being based here in Europe, just how much he was revered in Brazil.”

  But it was Adriane Galisteu who had the most pieces to pick up. She was the person closest to Senna at the end of his life, and was left with nothing. Despite the opposition of Senna’s family, it was thought they would eventually marry. It is possible Senna had already told his family what his intentions were, and that was the reason for the friction between him and Leonardo on that last weekend.

  For nearly two weeks Adriane recuperated with the Bragas on the farm. Betise Assumpção came for a visit. They talked non stop about Senna’s life. It seemed to make things easier to bear.

  Ten days later Adriane went to collect her things from Senna’s flat. It was her first visit to São Paulo since the funeral. She found had grown scared of going out, and cowered in the car during the journey. She remembered: “The sight of the city scared me.”

  At the apartment Neyde da Silva was waiting. Adriane said: “I took the elevator and went up. The door was half open. Everything looked the same – and at the same time it was so different. There was no sign of us there. Everything was in its place. There was no life there anymore. His mother and I sat on the sofa and talked for about 40 minutes.”

  Afterwards she threw her things in four large suitcases. She asked Neyde if she could keep his toothbrush.”

  When the time came to leave, both women cried and cried.

  Outside it was raining.

  CHAPTER 33

  The Trial

  The worst country to die in a race car

  When a racing driver is killed in Italy there is always the threat of a trial, but only if a prosecutor can find someone to blame. It is the nature of the country. Italy is the one place that Formula One team-owners fear going to because of the legal ramifications if anything happens to their drivers. From a legal point of view the San Marino Grand Prix was the worst place for Ayrton Senna to meet his end.

  It gave zealous state prosecutor Maurizio Passarini a chance to make life hell for the Williams team, the FIA and Imola circuit officials for over five years as he found plenty of people to blame for the death of Ayrton Senna.

  When 39-year-old Passarini lost, he was still not content and appealed against the decision. If he had been successful, he could have destroyed motor racing in Italy, perhaps for ever. That was an outcome the country, home of Ferrari, was not prepared to accept and therefore the verdict was a fudge. But not before a legal circus had left Formula One bemused and confused.

  Passarini’s zealousness and sometimes poor judgement saw him accuse honest men of being liars and lost any hope of finding the reason for the accident which took the great champion took to his grave. A few men may have known what it was, but any admission could have labelled them guilty of manslaughter in Passarini’s unusual court.

  His actions certainly put pressure on Williams, Renault and FOCA TV personnel who endured serious trauma in court including being branded liars by the prosecution. In end it didn’t change anything. Peter Goodman, Williams’ English lawyer who masterminded the team’s defence, said of Passarini: “He did do some things which annoyed us but, as far as I know, he did nothing that was not permissible under the legal system in which he was operating.” And that was the problem for the defendants in that the rules were very different to English law. At virtually every hearing there was detailed comment in newspapers and on television, some of it hysterical and clearly by English standards prejudicial. Goodman said: “There was a great deal of television in Italy both before and during the trial which left the whole of Italy apparently convinced that the English team had killed the great Ayrton Senna and were getting away with it by means of an Anglo Saxon conspiracy.”

  The Williams lawyers always contended that the car hit a series of four bumps in Tamburello one after the other in a random pattern never done before and never repeated since in a freak incident that had a million to one chance of happening. They maintained it caused the car to go down on its suspension and sledge, understeering off the track out of Senna’s control.

  In the opinion of many, Passarini lost credibility because of tricks. He had not allowed either Patrick Head or Adrian Newey of Williams to examine the wreck of the car from the moment of the accident to the date of the trial. He had also interviewed Adrian Newey and FIA circuit director Roland Bruynseraede as witnesses, without warning them they could be charged. It was a disregard of the law and abuse of power, and took away the atmosphere of a balanced court room and a realisation that there would be little fairness in the trial from the prosecution.

  It took two years for six people to be charged with ‘culpable homicide’. Three members of the Williams team were singled out as being responsible – team principal Frank Williams, technical director Patrick Head and the car’s designer Adrian Newey. By the time of the trial Newey had decided to go and work for the McLaren team and had been placed on gardening leave by Williams. It made life difficult for the Williams defence as Newey had engaged a separate lawyer to defend himself against the charges. Three others faced different charges for the same offence: Roland Bruynseraede, the FIA circuit director at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix; Giorgio Poggi, the director of the Imola circuit; and Federico Bendinelli, head of Sagis SpA, the company that operated the Imola track.

  All in all, five lawyers represented the six men and not only did they have to disprove the charges, it was the nature of the legal situation that they also were obliged to shift the blame among themselves. Initially the lawyers for Williams, Head and Newey were forced to blame the circuit for the death as part of their defence, and the lawyers for Poggi and Bendinelli needed to blame the car. This suited Maurizio Passarini but seriously handicapped the defence. By the middle of the proceedings Peter Goodman had persuaded all the defendants’ lawyers to work together, much to the annoyance of Passarini.

  The FIA itself was also effectively on trial through its representative, Roland Bruynseraede. A g
uilty verdict for him would have been a guilty verdict for the FIA. It would almost certainly have meant the FIA would have withdrawn its endorsement of any motor racing in Italy, making the whole country a motorsport backwater. No one wanted that. Formula One needed Italy almost as much as Italy needed Formula One. The country was a crucial part of the commercial and sporting jigsaw. No one could foresee what would happen without it. As FIA president Max Mosley explained: “The difficulty is that in Italy a small degree of blame in someone’s death is still a criminal offence – that means involving either a gross degree of negligence or some deliberate act that was likely to lead to the death, but not serious enough to lead to a charge of murder. The problem is that although culpable homicide in Italy is seen as a relatively small thing, when it is reported in other countries – particularly in countries where an English-style legal system prevails – it is like manslaughter, which nobody wants to be accused of, and it becomes front-page news. So I think there is a feeling now in Formula One that it is not even a question of whether the accused are acquitted or not. Nobody wants to be put on trial for what is really an honest sporting mistake. A lot of people find it very difficult that such a thing can result in criminal prosecution. So the whole situation is under discussion at the moment, irrespective of the outcome of the trial.”

  Mosley and the FIA were powerless to prevent the trial going ahead – they simply had to go along with the Italian legal process and hope that good sense would prevail; as it had in; all the other fatal accidents in Italy over the years. “Clearly one cannot have a situation where any perfectly ordinary person pursuing a sport in an honest and decent way can expose themselves to criminal proceedings,” said Mosley. “They cannot be blamed for anything on moral grounds. It is absurd to think that any of them would deliberately do anything to jeopardise the life of a racing driver.”