The Life of Senna

by Rubython, Tom

  Peter Goodman, the Williams team solicitor who had observed the whole proceedings at the front of the courtroom, said: “We had a good hearing, all the facts came out and I’m sure the right verdict was reached.”

  Roland Bruynseraede’s lawyer, Roberto Causo, said: “By this verdict the judge has recognised that Formula One is an extremely dangerous sport.” Giovanni Carcaterra, representing the Senna family, said: “The Senna family only wanted to discover what actually happened – they were not interested in sentences.” Passarini said he looked forward to reading the judge’s report: “I need to see whether the judge ruled that the incident was due to the breaking of Senna’s steering column, although there was no criminal responsibility, or if he felt that the column did not break. In that case I would be even more disappointed.” Few doubted the verdict was right. A guilty verdict may have ended top-line motor racing in Italy, perhaps for ever. The FIA issued a statement: “The FIA has noted today’s decision of the Imola court, but will not comment until it has examined the full text of the decision and studied its implications.”

  Williams as a team said: “Williams Grand Prix Engineering is pleased to confirm that Frank Williams, Patrick Head and Adrian Newey have been acquitted of all charges which were the subject of the Imola trial. Our legal advisers inform us that the prosecution has an automatic right of appeal. Clearly we would hope that this matter will not be pursued any further.”

  Even Ferrari team principal Jean Todt got in on the act. “I haven’t commented during the trial because I felt I should wait until the verdict – it has been rather laborious and lengthy, and is therefore a judgement of conscience which has to be accepted and respected. It is not easy to give an opinion on a motor race when you know of the dangers and risks involved. My comments are positive because the fact is there has been a very careful examination of all the events, and because of the outcome of the trial,” he said.

  Damon Hill said he believed the judge’s decision would help Formula One’s image after the recent controversies: “I know this trial has been hanging over Williams and this vindication expresses a feeling about the team’s utter integrity and the standard of its engineering. I never had any doubts about either.”

  Veteran team-owner Ken Tyrrell expressed his pleasure on behalf of the other team-owners: “I, like other team bosses, am delighted that they brought in the correct verdict. The idea that Williams, the most successful team with probably the best engineered car in Formula One, would have made a mistake was unthinkable,” he said. “I would have been apprehensive racing in Italy if this decision had found Williams guilty of manslaughter. I realise that in Italy someone has to be held responsible in the event of a death, but it is a quirk of the law and the authorities need to look at that.”

  In the 381-page written report published on 15th June 1998, six months after the verdict, Antonio Costanzo cited the reason for Ayrton Senna’s crash at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix as the breaking of the ‘modified’ steering column fitted to his Williams-Renault FW16B. He stated that without that condition Ayrton Senna’s car would not have left the track at the Tamburello bend.

  With the publication of the official report the chief prosecutor, Maurizio Passarini, could appeal against the judge’s decision to find the defendants ‘not guilty’. No one thought he would seek an appeal after all that had happened and the dangers for Italian motorsport if he succeeded. But he did. For him it had become a vendetta. He wanted what he saw as the bad design and workmanship of the steering-column modifications carried out on Ayrton Senna’s Williams-Renault to be punished. In response Williams also appealed against the factual finding.

  The appeal proved a waste of time – Passarini was out of step with the public mood and that of his own colleagues in the Italian judiciary – it was heard in Bologna on 19th November 1999. Three days later the appeal court absolved Patrick Head and Adrian Newey of all charges related to the death of Ayrton Senna. The decision was based on paragraph two of Article 530 of the Italian penal code – ‘when no more evidence is presented during an Appeal session, and when the first session has concluded with full absolution, the accusation has to be declared as non-existent’. The defence simply utilised the knowledge that the prosecution would have no chance of submitting new evidence. Williams’s appeal was rather more successful on the findings of fact and it also reversed the original judge’s view that the actual steering was broken, which meant the team and defendants were completely vindicated. Peter Goodman says: “We don’t consider it to be a mystery any more. It was not a failure in the car.”

  But the matter of the death of Ayrton Senna was not finally concluded until 14th March 2002, when Peter Goodman arranged for the wreck of the Williams Renault FW16, in which he lost his life, to be recovered from Bologna police station and returned to the factory of Williams Grand Prix Engineering some eight years after he died. The car is believed to have been destroyed and the engine was returned to Renault.

  CHAPTER 34

  The Aftermath for Brazil

  The consequences of Sunday 1st May 1994

  Fifty miles away across the sprawling São Paulo skyline, on the 10th floor of an innocuous building on Rua Dr Olava Edigio, an eerie calm replaces the commotion of a Formula One weekend taking place in the nearby district of Interlagos. Looking out of her office window, Viviane Lalli can just make out the ant-like figures leaving the Interlagos circuit in their thousands. The weekend, as it does every year, brings back the awful memories of Imola in 1994. The tears will flow again for her and for so many ordinary Brazilians still moved by the death of Ayrton Senna.

  For Viviane Lalli, one thought fills her head as she sheds those tears: “Yes, Brazil lost a hero. But I lost a brother.” In the eight years that have passed, it is the champion’s sister who has captured the hearts of a nation ravaged by poverty and desperate for heroes. For many Brazilians, Viviane Lalli has filled the vacuum created by her brother’s death.

  She says Brazil’s love affair with her brother started in June 1986 when France knocked Brazil out of the World Cup. That same day, Ayrton Senna won the French Grand Prix and on the grid proudly held aloft a Brazilian flag. She says now: “Up to then most people only saw Ayrton as a racing driver, but there was something beyond that. There was a human being, with an extraordinary personality that went far beyond motor racing. Over the years since his death, other people have started to see more of what the real Ayrton was about. That is why, as time passes, the legend of Ayrton Senna grows. It means different things to different people, but it means something to everyone. Whether you have done something great with your life, or done nothing at all, Ayrton believed you could always do better.”

  The connection between Senna’s Formula One racing and Brazil’s footballing exploits remained until the end. When Brazil took its fourth World Cup at USA’94, goalkeeper Claudio Taffarel declared: “From the bottom of our hearts we dedicate this victory to our friend Ayrton Senna. He too was heading for his fourth title.”

  The people of Brazil refer to Viviane as a new ‘Mother Theresa’. Since her brother’s death she has completely devoted her life to improving the lives of others. Ayrton Senna earned more in death than he did alive, and everything made now goes back to the Senna Foundation in São Paulo – from where his sister distributes it back to the millions of Brazilian children without the hope of a future.

  Licensing from the Senna trademark brings in $6 million a year and other products add around $47 million. From Senna sunglasses to pens and watches, and the cartoon character Senninha, the Senna Foundation is now a hugely successful non-profit organisation, growing at 25 per cent a year. Nearly 200,000 Brazilians have Senna credit cards.

  The elegant 46-year-old mother of three is now arguably Brazil’s most famous woman. The country’s political leaders have wooed her to stand for high office, the beauty magazines to choose life in front of the lens and business bosses to lend her genial marketing skills to their companies.

  For Viviane Lall
i, however, seven days a week from 9am to 9pm, life has only one purpose: helping others. “Before Ayrton died we had a brief conversation in São Paulo about it,” she says. “He said he wanted to put his fortune to good use, so he could give others a chance to make something of their lives – the people who don’t get a chance. But that was it – just a conversation. I came with a couple of ideas that I was going to show him after the Imola race in Europe, but never got the chance. I think he would be proud though.”

  The Ayrton Senna Foundation is officially advised by Bernie Ecclestone, Frank Williams, Alain Prost and Gerhard Berger, and that is the only connection to modern-day Formula One. Viviane has been to only two Grand Prix races since her brother’s death – two years ago in São Paulo and Australia – and has no plans to do it ever again. She rarely attended races when he was alive and does not enjoy it, although her whole life has seemingly revolved around it. She says: “It’s too difficult, too painful to go. Not just when Interlagos comes round, but any Formula One weekend. That was his world, not mine, and I don’t want to be reminded of it.

  “Everyone talks about the great Ayrton Senna, the legend, Brazil’s hero – this international star. For me none of that mattered when he died. I lost a brother, my parents a son. Just because he was famous doesn’t make the pain of his death any less, and it doesn’t make it any less now.”

  Viviane and Ayrton Senna were very close for most of their lives together. They grew up in a wealthy family, looked after by servants and sheltered from the outside world by high walls and steel gates. When Ayrton married at 20, then divorced at 21, Viviane became a motherly figure to her younger brother at the same time as she started raising her own children.

  She recalls those times: “The thing that I remember most about him was his determination, and he usually got what he wanted. He just couldn’t sit still – even at school, he was always quarrelling with other boys. I used to intervene when we were kids, then one day I got knocked out in a fight so I never bothered again. I think the most important thing I ever taught him was that to be a winner you need self-control. He didn’t always have that.”

  By 1994, the last year of Ayrton’s life, Viviane was busy raising her three children, whilst keeping her full-time job as a child therapist. Despite having a famous brother, she had managed to completely stay out of the limelight until the Imola tragedy. “For 20 years I worked in the clinic as a children’s therapist. It was just me and the receptionist. No one had ever heard of me and I liked it that way. But the image of Ayrton was very public and people demanded that someone from the family represented the name. I had to do it, as the rest of the family wouldn’t come forward.

  “As the days and weeks passed after he died, and the country went from mourning to being proud of the Ayrton Senna they knew, for me it was different. Suddenly there was a huge responsibility to carry his name. Nobody asked me if I was still mourning. I didn’t have a choice,” she says.

  She may have had no choice, but few can argue with the results she has achieved. The foundation is run as a business with quarterly targets and sales forecasts like any other organisation – except all the profit goes to charity. The results are produced in an annual report like any other public company, and they make impressive reading: last year 288,000 children were helped in some direct way and $7 million of official investments made.

  For Ayrton Senna, being based in Europe highlighted the problems suffered in Brazil. It made him realise there was a big difference between the rich and the poor in his home country. As he once said: “The rich cannot live on an island surrounded by a sea of poverty. We all breathe the same air. We should give ever yone a chance, at least a fundamental chance.” In death Senna had that chance.

  The potentially massive income stream he left behind has been his legacy. Deciding the exact mission was Viviane Senna’s hardest task: “I had great difficulty deciding what to do in a country where there are so many necessities, so many difficulties. But by September 1994 I had decided on a mission to work with children and adolescents.” By 1997 she had also made education a top priority. One of the driving forces was that she remembered something her brother once said: “If we really want to change something, we should start with the children through their education.”

  She herself has taken to the road, campaigning fiercely for changes in the law on controversial social issues. It’s a dangerous business, particularly in Brazil. But for her, fate seems to have determined that she play this role for the rest of her life.

  Seven years ago, after coming to terms with the loss of her brother, another tragedy struck. Her husband Flavio Lalli was killed in a motorcycle accident. Ironically he was trying out one of the new ‘Ayrton Senna Motorcycles’ that were being sold to charity. His death came only 10 months after her brother’s. Their three children, now aged 24, 22 and 18, work for the foundation, living with the memory of their uncle and their father.

  “I will go on with this forever, if life will let me,” says Viviane. “Everyone wants me to run for mayor, run for this and run for that political party. Oh no, never. To change the world, by whatever small amount, you don’t have to be a politician or a lawyer. Ayrton taught me that you should do what comes naturally – and if you do it well, it will make a difference. That’s what I am trying to do here.”

  The odds are she will keep performing at an extraordinary rate – aided by her devotion to her job and, equally significant, to the legend of her brother, Ayrton Senna.

  As she says: “I never look for sponsors, they always come to me.” She does not accept every company – she has an image to maintain that is closely guarded. “The companies have to have an acceptable way of operating. They must have certain morals such as not encouraging traffic,” she says. Computer company Compaq and Brazilian petrol company Petrobras were the first to donate to the charity. The following year a further three joined. By 1999, 10 companies were giving their support, including Audi, Mattel and Microsoft. Texaco has also recently signed up.

  The most important project for Brazil is the education project known as Acelera Brasil, which is designed to help children with their education and keep them off the streets. “In that way they can be better prepared for the workplace,” says Viviane. “To date more than 100,000 children in public schools in 240 cities around Brazil have taken part in the Acelera programme. One of Brazil’s greatest problems is the low quality of education. Every year 40 per cent of the children fail in their first year. Elementary school lasts eight years but only four per cent of children complete the eight years. This costs the country US$3 billion. But the cost is not just monetary – it is social. After failing several times, the adolescents grow ill-prepared for the labour market. If they are not prepared for the labour market they go into prostitution and crime. There is also a political cost. Without a good education they are unable to make wise voting decisions when the time comes. At best they might be able to make an uneducated decision. At worst they could be subjected to bribery – in exchange for food or money they might give up their voting rights. Cases of farm workers being collected in trucks and taken to polling stations to vote for a preferred candidate in exchange for as little as a plate of food are not unheard of.”

  Viviane Lalli is hoping her methods will be adopted by other schools and organisations across Brazil. “The idea is social technology, where the concept can be applied by others. Just like a tape that does not have to be used in one tape recorder, but all tape recorders all over the world.”

  She is convinced that the foundation has helped fuel change in the social consciousness of the Brazilian people. To prove her point, she cites an example of an architect who, on hearing her give a speech on the radio, decided to redesign the local orphanage and turn it from a run-down building into a modern and bright one.

  She says: “People used to think these social matters were for the government. But now they feel co-responsible. The reason for the change in people’s attitudes is because they have realised it is
no good being critical about the lack of change – they have to make it themselves.”

  Senna admits that she helps encourage this change in mentality through the use of her brother’s image: “I use it to encourage a feeling of co-responsibility. We have many examples of doing something, but the image makes people feel co-responsible.” Partly because she can make such a difference to people’s lives, Viviane Lalli is becoming a zealot herself and showing the same determination her father and brother did to rise to the top. She confesses that a feeling of underachievement helps push her forward. “I always feel like there is more to do. It is not an obligation, rather a consciousness that by doing more I can save more people,” she says.

  In another part of São Paulo a small plastic Brazilian flag waves over a neatly tended grave. Unlike other tragedies and loss of heroes, Senna’s death is no easier for Brazilians to accept now than it was in 1994. Many more years have to pass before that happens.

  CHAPTER 35

  Senna’s Legacy to the Drivers

  More consequences of Sunday 1st May 1994

  As practice begins for the 2002 San Marino Grand Prix, the modern generation of Formula One cars leave the pitlane on their grooved tyres with the drivers peeping over the edge of the high cockpit sides. With a splutter of legalised traction control, they take to the 3.064-mile anti-clockwise track, passing the distinctive Marlboro tower and flying past the lines of greenery at 190mph before slowing to just 85mph for the first corner, the Tamburello Chicane.

  Behind the barrier on the inside of the corner stands a statue of Ayrton Senna. During the Grand Prix weekend it is fenced off from the public, but at other times of year visitors are free to leave flowers and sit on the adjacent bench to contemplate the past. At the other side of Tamburello, the wall still stands, edged as far away from the track as is possible before the ground inclines steeply to make way for the stream which runs beneath the corner and joins the Santerno River a few feet away, where the fans pitch their tents on its banks. Once the wall was decorated with paintings and graffiti of Formula One’s lost hero, but that section has since been removed, out of the way of the elements.