Senna may have been leading the championship, but no one was really giving him much of a chance at Donington. Only the possibility of rain undermined the certainty of a Williams walkover. In the dry, the power of the French engines plus the excellence of the Williams team’s active suspension system and other computer-controlled driver aids would be enough to settle the race. But if it rained, Prost’s well-known aversion to the wet and Hill’s lack of self-confidence might become the determining factors. Still, Schumacher’s outstandingly fast and confident performance in the rain to win his first grand prix at Spa the previous year suggested that under no conditions would Senna’s task be straightforward.
It was an awful day: cold, grey and wet. Not at all the setting for the kind of glamour circus that Formula One’s marketing men have tried to promote since television became its worldwide medium. And, in the April murk, fewer than 50,000 turned up at Donington: a third of a decent grand prix gate at Silverstone in high summer. Most fans had already booked their seats for July’s British Grand Prix at the converted airfield fifty miles down the M1, and were not anxious to double their investment in Formula One by finding another £60 or £70 a head for Donington. So Tom Wheatcroft, it was said, was financing this race to the tune of five million pounds.
The Princess of Wales and King Hussein of Jordan toured the pit lane on race morning, squired by Jackie Stewart. All of them tried hard to pretend that this was Monaco, but the anthracite skies of the afternoon looked down on blank spaces yawning in the mud-banks above the treacherous Old Hairpin, there were huge gaps in the grandstands facing the hairpin before the finishing straight, and entire blocks of seats were left vacant in the terraces above the spectacular Craner Curves.
The rain eased off just before the start, but the track surface was still soaking when the cars came out. Only one driver, J.J. Lehto in one of the all-black Saubers, took the chance of opting for ungrooved dry tyres – a gamble that had worked spectacularly well for his fellow Finn and mentor Keke Rosberg at Monaco ten years earlier, when Rosberg’s Williams had simply jumped up and run away from a field of faster cars. No such luck this time: there was just too much water on the track. And there was Senna, hands and feet and brain working together as perhaps never before, at a pitch that made it seem as though this day was the consummation of all the thousands of hours of hard work and mental preparation he had given to the job since, as a poorly co-ordinated four-year-old, he sat in his first go-kart.
The red light turned to green, burning through the murk. Prost got off well, immediately assuming his station in front of Hill. Senna started poorly, and had dropped a place to fifth by the end of the short straight leading into the first corner, Redgate. He had been forced wide, over to the left of the track at the end of the pit wall, by Schumacher, who had been pushed off his own line by Karl Wendlinger in the other Sauber. His left-side tyres running off the track, Senna braked carefully, turned the wheel, and dived inside Schumacher going into the long right-hander. Biting at Wendlinger’s heels, clinging to the racing line, Senna held off Schumacher, who could not risk an attack using a part of the track that had not been even partially dried by the passage of the field during the parade laps.
Sweeping out of Redgate, heading downhill into the Craner Curves, Senna took his own big risk: looming in Wendlinger’s mirrors, he chose to drive around the outside of the Austrian in a wide left-handed arc that took him on to the wettest part of the track. Wendlinger, knowing that this was only the first lap of a long race, and recognizing the yellow helmet in his mirrors, prudently chose to let Senna go, but not without a gasp of awe and admiration inside his own helmet as the red and white car floated around the tightening right-hander at the bottom of the curves and sprinted up the incline in pursuit of its next quarry.
Coming up behind Hill’s Williams, the two cars throwing up thin streamers of fine spray, Senna positioned himself again to the inside as they approached the Old Hairpin, a right-hander. Here, close to the spot at which Tazio Nuvolari’s Auto Union had hit and killed a stag in practice for the 1938 race, the Brazilian claimed another victim, with the sudden conclusiveness of his inside pass astonishing Hill, who lacked the wherewithal to resist. But the Englishman was then in the box seat to watch through the spray as Senna screamed down the back straight, preparing the next incident in this tumultuous mini-drama.
Prost, despite enjoying the advantage of being able to see where he was going, could do nothing to hold back Senna’s advance. By the time they reached the Esses, the start of the circuit’s final loop, the McLaren was on the tail of the leader’s Williams. When they reached the Melbourne hairpin, a panoramic 180-degree job, Senna took the inside, again off the racing line, but delayed his braking long enough to gain possession of the corner. Both cars wavered and twitched, but only one gave in. It was Prost, who knew what the cost would be if he disputed Senna’s right to take the corner. Senna knew that Prost knew. And knew that Prost would let him go.
Up above the pit in the press room, where correspondents follow the race on TV monitors, experienced people were looking at each other with awe in their eyes. History had just been made. In one minute and 35.843 seconds, Ayrton Senna had written another paragraph in the story of motor racing. Something, it seemed clear, to rank with Fangio at the Nürburgring. Which meant the greatest of all time.
In simple terms, it was a race decided first by that opening lap and then by Senna’s mastery of pit-stop strategy in the changing conditions.
But it was not as straightforward as that. After twenty laps or so I left the press room and walked through the tunnel that leads under the grandstand and to the back leg of the circuit. There, from the vast empty spaces of the spectator terracing, I looked down on the majestic uphill sweeps, and saw grand prix racing as it was meant to be.
Vainly pursued by Hill, Barrichello and Prost (who got himself tied up in a sequence of seven botched pit stops that owed more to Jacques Tati than standard grand prix practice), Senna blasted majestically through the murk, plunging down through the curves and sweeping up the hill as Rudi Caracciola and Bernd Rosemeyer must have done in the thirties, no longer worried about what was happening to anybody else. He might as well have been all alone out there.
With Prost condemned to an afternoon of almost ritualistic humiliation, the conclusion was simple: Senna was profiting from a decade spent exploring the limits of physical and psychological domination within his sport. The Frenchman was not the only one to know how it felt.
Chapter Four
There is another Brazilian word that takes some explaining in English: ginga. The first g soft, the second hard, it defines a certain quality of grace in movement. In a woman, it is usually summoned to suggest a kind of sensuality. In a businessman, it can be a gift for tricky, perhaps devious, negotiation. It has to do with equilibrium, but also with originality and flair. A capoeira dancer, performing a sort of martial art with knives attached to his heels, needs plenty of ginga: nimbleness, balance, fluidity, continuity, a sort of arrogant courage.
There were Brazilian world champions in Formula One before Ayrton Senna, but he was the one who brought to it the quality of the capoeira dancer. Nigel Mansell and Alain Prost probably would not have put a name to it, but that was what they faced on numerous occasions when they raced head to head with Senna and came off worst – Mansell at Spa in 1987, Prost at Estoril in ’88 and Suzuka in 1990, or Mansell again at Adelaide in ’92.
These were incidents through which the very nature of grand prix racing was changed utterly, and probably for good; and since Senna was not only their common denominator but also their catalyst, we can say that he was responsible for this great and disturbing change – by which a sport which had always depended on the inherent chivalry of its participants suddenly came to accommodate the possibility of the systematic application of controlled violence.
All of these individual incidents are worth examination, but the one at Adelaide in 1992 was the last such of Senna’s career. It was t
he final round of the season, with the championship already Mansell’s, and the decision taken that the Englishman would be leaving for America at the end of the season, removed from his seat with the Williams team by Prost’s subtle backstage manoeuvres. Mansell wanted to end his Formula One career and his championship season with a win, and he jumped straight into the lead, with Senna on his tail. But on lap nineteen something happened, and the McLaren went into the back of the Williams, both cars spinning off the track and out of the race. Mansell ran away from the scene, straight across the track towards the pits; afterwards he told reporters that he’d done it to stop himself punching Senna. ‘All I know is that someone hit me up the back when I was turning into the corner,’ Mansell said. ‘It seems that certain people in Formula One can get away with anything. I didn’t go near him afterwards because if I had there would have been a big fight and I don’t think that’s the right way to leave Formula One.’ For his part, Senna claimed that Mansell knew he was close behind, but had braked early for no apparent reason.
Commentating for BBC television, James Hunt immediately took Mansell’s side. ‘Nigel Mansell is absolutely the innocent party,’ the former world champion announced as the cameras lingered on the two ruined cars. Back home, Mansell’s huge informal fan club rose up in fury against the wicked South American whose characteristic trickery had ended their man’s chance of closing his grand prix career with another champagne shower.
But what else did they expect? It was, after all, just like Senna. Remember Spa, when he pushed Mansell off the track, and the burly Nigel grabbed the slight Senna by the throat in the pits afterwards, and had to be dragged away by three mechanics? Or Estoril, when Senna had made his car lunge across the track at Prost (his team mate, for goodness’ sake) while they were both doing 190 m.p.h. in their McLarens down the main straight, right in front of the pits? Or Suzuka, where he rammed Prost from behind at 100-plus in the first corner, knowing the Frenchman had to win the race to keep alive his hope of the world title? So when Senna crunched his McLaren into the back of Mansell’s Williams at Adelaide, it simply seemed like part of the Brazilian’s established pattern of behaviour. The extension of this line of reasoning was a stab at guessing Senna’s motivation. Perhaps he just wanted to deprive Mansell of the satisfaction of ending his world championship season with a win. Perhaps he wanted to hoist a signal for the next season, one announcing that while he might have lost his title, he was nevertheless still not a man to trifle with.
But that’s not how all Englishmen saw it. ‘Mansell ran away because he knew it was his fault,’ Dave Coyne said the next morning. ‘He’d given Senna a brake test. It’s the kind of thing only another driver could see. The stewards wouldn’t have a clue.’
Rick Morris agreed. ‘Mansell braked early,’ he said. ‘Of course, in a situation like that it has to be the fault of the guy who’s behind if he hits the guy in front. But at 170 miles an hour, if someone’s that close behind and you lift your foot even a hair, there’s nothing he can do. And if he hadn’t been that close, he wouldn’t have been Senna.’
Dave Coyne and Rick Morris are not household names in motor racing. What made them different from most other middle-aged Home Counties motor traders rewinding the video of the Australian Grand Prix was that they had both raced against Ayrton Senna before the world knew about him. And each of them could fit the events of Adelaide into another, perhaps truer pattern of behaviour.
‘I’ve had accidents with Senna,’ Coyne said, remembering the 1981 season, when he and Morris competed with the Brazilian in the British Formula Ford championships. ‘He was always aggressive. He had a very strong belief in himself. He believed he was the best. His life was a hundred per cent motor racing.’
At the time Coyne was twenty-three, hoping for a career as a top-line driver; Senna was twenty, and just out of go-karts. Morris, on the other hand, was thirty-four, a comparative veteran, and he remembered with special clarity an accident on the opening lap of a race at Oulton Park in Cheshire that year. ‘I was on pole position, considerably the quickest in practice,’ he said. ‘At Oulton, you go up the hill and into a right-hander with a double apex. It’s not one of the accepted passing places, and going into it on the first lap I thought I had a good lead when suddenly he came up and banged me out of the way. I got back on the track in tenth place. He won the race.’ It was one of twelve wins in twenty starts for Senna that year, his maiden season in racing cars. As early as that, people were talking about his talent in a special tone of voice, but to some the incident with Morris and several others like it seemed to set the mould for his future behaviour. Senna, it appeared, thought he had a divine right to win, and woe betide anyone who got in his way; even when, like Mansell at Adelaide, his opponent had a faster car.
Right from the beginning, Senna had what they call natural speed, but the ability to drive a car round a circuit faster than anyone else isn’t the hardest part of being a racing driver. What is more difficult is the bit that actually makes it racing as opposed to high-speed driving: the overtaking. And although Senna’s sixty-five pole positions in 161 grands prix attested to his pure speed, the overtaking was what he was best at. Better, perhaps, than any man who ever sat behind the wheel of a racing car.
During successive seasons graduating through the junior single-seater categories – Ford 1600, Ford 2000 and Formula Three – other drivers quickly became accustomed to giving Senna room. When they didn’t – as his Formula Three rival Martin Brundle refused to on several occasions during 1983 – they often ended up on the grass or in the sand trap. Nor did it take the world of Formula One long to get the idea. Right from the occasion of his début in a Toleman-Hart at Rio de Janeiro in 1984, Senna made it clear that he wasn’t scared to hold the inside line of a corner against pressure from more experienced men. Once he had established himself as a frontrunner, slicing past dozing backmarkers became a particularly emphatic component of his repertoire. Some slow men kept an eye on their mirrors, and knew to get out of the way when the yellow helmet showed up; when he came across one who wasn’t paying attention, he showed an astonishing gift for getting by without wasting time. He never held back, and most of the time he brought his manoeuvres off. It was a form of psychological pressure: other drivers got used to moving over when they saw that helmet. Whether they would admit it to themselves or not, they had done half of his job for him. ‘He took no prisoners,’ Brundle was to say ten years after their Formula Three duels. ‘He had that brightly coloured helmet, and you could clearly see him coming up behind you. He left you to decide whether or not you wanted to have an accident with him. What you did depended on how badly you wanted to finish the motor race.’
All this was to become most starkly evident during the course of the 1989 and 1990 seasons, when Alain Prost, his chief rival, was so emasculated by the Brazilian’s superiority – no, not just by that superiority but by an unhesitating willingness to brandish it before the world’s audience, a willingness that would have seemed sadistic had it not been self-evidently the product of his conception of destiny – that he seemed to lose the capacity to overtake not just Senna but anyone at all.
Motor racing, at whatever level, takes the competitive urge to an extreme further than any other sport. It might not dismantle a player’s psyche in public in the naked and sometimes unbearably protracted way that a tennis match can do; it might not take him as far beyond his physical limits as a third consecutive day in the Alps during the Tour de France, when drugs become less of a method of gaining an unfair advantage than a necessity to deaden the pain; it might not require the mad courage of a downhill skier, who throws himself out of the start-hut and down a glass wall without any form of protection; barring accidents, it will certainly not hurt as much as any run-of-the-mill boxing match. More than any of these, however, motor racing, head to head and in hot blood, presents a test of manhood. Uniquely, the car becomes a weapon: encasing the driver, armour-plating him, it responds exactly to his bidding. Its capabilit
ies are a direct reflection of his power – either his purchasing power, in the case of a road car, or the power of his talent and reputation, in the case of a Formula One car. Even after a century of motoring, and in an era when all sensible people recognize the internal combustion engine’s threat to the environment, the car remains the clearest and most potent symbol of self hood. And if such factors can lead the drivers of saloon cars in the morning rush hour to mad rage, with nothing at stake beyond momentary pride, it does not take much to imagine the degree of emotional intensity involved when the contest – the race – becomes the whole point of existence.
Usually these rivalries, whether momentary or long-term, are clear enough to the observer. But sometimes they are expressed in the form of hidden trials-within-trials whose existence is known only to the participants. Not even a James Hunt, with all his privileged insider’s understanding of the men and the event, could be certain to spot it. Which is where Dave Coyne’s ‘brake test’ came in.
The informal brake test is something you can see in its mundane form on an overcrowded motorway: two men in company cars travelling too close together in the fast lane, jousting, getting overheated, and the one in front dabs the brake pedal just to give the other a fright. At ninety on a public road it’s stupid and dangerous; at 190 on a racetrack it sometimes becomes a tactic.
There are two reasons why a racing driver might use it. The first, a bit like the speedsters on the motorway, is to teach someone a lesson – usually a novice obstructing a faster man, who then cuts in front and gives his opponent a character-forming experience to ensure that he makes room next time. The second is less blatant but more profound in intention. In a fight between equals, what it may do is force the close pursuer to lift his own foot off the throttle in response, which unsettles the balance of his car. Executed in the run-up to a corner, before the accepted braking zone, it can make the second man lift, brake, accelerate and then brake again for the corner: four improvised decisions whose effect might cost the driver a vital length or two at a time when he could have been positioning himself to come out of the slipstream and overtake. Done with cunning, as Coyne suggested, it can be undetectable to the naked eye in the grandstands (or the stewards’ observation window), its effect known only to the victim. Misjudged, it can at best give the pursuer a clear overtaking opportunity; at worst it can end with two cars tangling and spinning off the track.
The Death of Ayrton Senna Page 4
