The Death of Ayrton Senna

by Richard Williams

  He tried a Formula Three car twice in 1982. The first outing came during the summer when Eddie Jordan, then a fledgling team owner but already a talent scout of proven perspicacity, called to invite him to a day’s testing at Silverstone, where after a few laps Senna managed to suggest a few small adjustments which subsequently carried Jordan’s regular number one, the Englishman James Weaver, to a string of victories. Then, in November, he took part in an end-of-season non-championship race at Brands Hatch, borrowing the Ralt-Toyota which Enrique Mansilla, his team mate of the previous season, had been driving for the West Surrey Racing team with some success. According to the team principal, Dick Bennetts, Senna reasoned that if Mansilla had been winning races in the West Surrey car, then he would be able to do even better, because the results of the previous season had told him he was a more talented driver than the Argentinian. Senna took pole position, beat the lap record, and won the race by thirteen seconds. In January he signed with Bennetts, taking his sponsors with him.

  Contrary to his habit, Senna did not claim pole position for his first race in the 1983 British Formula Three championship, at Silver-stone. He lined up alongside a British driver, David Leslie, who had set the fastest qualifying time. But Senna was in the lead by the time they reached Copse Corner, the first bend, and won the race by thirteen seconds.

  It was the first of nine consecutive victories, achieved under increasing pressure from a similar Ralt-Toyota in the hands of Eddie Jordan’s protégé, the Norfolk driver Martin Brundle. Then aged twenty-three, nine months older than Senna, Brundle would have walked away with the championship had the Brazilian not been there. As it was, he failed to profit from a fire extinguisher going off in his rival’s car at Silverstone (after Senna had overtaken him around the outside at the ultra-fast Stowe Corner) and from a missed gear at the start at Thruxton, while a downpour at Brands Hatch merely allowed Senna to display his precocious mastery of a wet track. Brundle had to wait until the tenth race of the season, the first round of the European championship at Silverstone, before he could profit from a series of spins caused by the Brazilian’s poor choice of tyres. A week later Senna crashed in practice at Cadwell Park, writing off the car, putting himself out of the race and handing a second victory to Brundle. In the next race, at Snetterton, Senna chased Brundle so hard that they clashed on the penultimate lap when the Englishman closed the door, claiming the racing line as Senna tried to force his way through on the inside and went flying backwards into the barrier. Senna’s heated protest to the clerk of the course cut no ice in the face of verbal testimony from the spectators at Brundle’s home track.

  Senna reasserted his supremacy at Silverstone, but then wobbled at Donington, where Brundle beat him fair and square by less than half a second – although the West Surrey camp were by now convinced that Brundle was getting more powerful engines from the Italian tuning shop which serviced both teams. Hostilities resumed at Oulton Park, where Brundle led until Senna tried a wild charge up the inside late in the race and took them both off. Senna defended himself to the stewards, but he was fined and his competition licence endorsed. Returning to Silverstone, he beat Brundle into second place but then found his suspicions of a British conspiracy confirmed when Brundle was allowed to keep his points despite an infringement of the technical rules – post-race scrutineering revealed that his sidepod was mounted one millimetre too low, a tiny discrepancy but nevertheless an illegality.

  The lingering sense of injustice may have come into play at Oulton in mid-September, when Senna went off trying to take Brundle around the outside again. ‘It appears he can’t accept finishing second,’ Brundle said, pointing out that a string of second places in the remaining rounds would still give Senna the title. He did not even manage that at Thruxton, his engine blowing up while he and Brundle were engaged in a dogfight. He avoided trouble at Silverstone, settling for second place under Brundle’s rear wing, and wrapped up the title by winning at Thruxton in the final round, having driven to Italy and back to supervise the rebuilding of his engine to a specification matching that of Brundle’s. Here Senna also took the risk of trying to warm up the engine more quickly by taping up the oil radiator; late in the race, with the temperature climbing dangerously, he found himself having to unbuckle his safety harness and lean out of the cockpit to remove the tape, a piece of spontaneous ingenuity more reminiscent of Nuvolari and the thirties than the high-tech world of contemporary racing.

  It had been an enthralling championship, and one that provided the impetus for a pair of grand prix careers, but despite the occasional sign of vulnerability under pressure it was obvious which of the two drivers was going to do pretty well in a Formula One car, and which was a potential world champion. Davy Jones, then only eighteen years old, was one of the few men able to mount any sort of challenge to the two leaders during the course of the year. ‘Senna was four or five years older,’ the American said, ‘and I felt he was already mature as far as being able to hold his concentration throughout a race. He didn’t make mistakes. He was very quick wherever we went, and he was able to maintain a constant pattern. It was up to Martin Brundle and myself to try and match his pace.’

  Jones also remembered how Senna raised the standard of performance for the whole field, or at least those members of it capable of learning from him. ‘Here’s an example,’ Jones recalled. ‘At Silverstone in ’83, going down the long back straight and down to Stowe, we were changing down to fourth gear, taking it flat.’ (‘Flat’ in this context being driver-talk for having the foot hard down on the throttle.) ‘Senna was much quicker. He was flat in fifth. It made the rest of us go from what we were comfortable with to flat in the next gear up.’

  Nowadays, Jones observed, the cars work better the faster they go, thanks to developments in aerodynamics. ‘You have to keep your foot on it. It’s a confidence thing.’ Senna was the one with the confidence not just to know that, but to exploit it. And, Jones added, ‘He was very, very tough. He would do anything he had to do to make his car as wide as possible. If you did challenge him, it was up to you to make sure of a clean pass.’ He remembered watching the Oulton Park incident in which the Ralts of Senna and Brundle ended up in a heap. ‘It was so competitive … you drove with your mirrors as much as anything. Basically, it was blocking. And it’s the same in Formula One. You don’t make it easy for someone to get by. I didn’t think Senna could settle for anything other than being in front. Mind you, I think all racers feel the same way. He’s going to try to get by, no matter what it takes. Some of it was a little uncalled for, I guess.’

  Jones also echoed the personal views of many drivers who raced against the Brazilian in his first three seasons in England: ‘He was quiet, he kept himself to himself.’ Senna’s English was improving, thanks to lengthy technical conversations with Bennetts and his mechanics, but he seldom put himself out to open a conversation with his rivals, preferring to fill spare paddock hours playing with one of his collection of radio-controlled model aeroplanes.

  It was as if even the mildest level of friendship with a competitor would add something that might get in the way when they were fighting hand to hand. As he was to prove in more exalted circumstances, he could be quite capable of showing his generosity towards another driver – but only when that driver no longer represented any sort of a threat.

  Between the last two rounds of the British championship, Senna had travelled to Macau for the Formula Three race run through the streets of the former Portuguese colony. A Far Eastern replica of the race around the houses of Monaco, the Macau Grand Prix offered not just unusually good starting and prize money, de luxe accommodation and many parties, but also precious exposure to the attention of the Formula One bosses.

  When Senna claimed pole position, saw off an early challenge from Roberto Guerrero, a Colombian driver already in his second season on the grand prix scene, and won the race – his first on a street circuit, a very different discipline from the wide open spaces of the converted aerodromes of En
glish club racing – with ease, he was saying: I’m here. And his message was heard.

  Chapter Six

  There is a framed photograph of Ayrton Senna on the desk of Frank Williams’s office in the modern factory building that stands in the looming shadow of Didcot power station. Senna died in his third race for Williams, in a car that left this factory in one of the huge blue and white transporters parked outside. But the driver and the team principal had been friends for more than ten years.

  In 1983, during his year with Dick Bennetts in Formula Three, Senna had a home near Reading. Williams, who lived only a few miles away, invited him round to dinner two or three times, offering his thoughts and advice for the future. With the 1982 world champion, Keke Rosberg, and the popular Jacques Laffite committed to his team for that year and the next, Williams had nothing specific to put before the young Brazilian; for all their success, the team was not yet well enough established to justify such a risk. But Frank Williams loves motor racing with an intensity that few can match, and although he is notoriously parsimonious with drivers’ salaries (a legacy of his early days of scuffling at the back of the grid, watching the pennies), he has always enjoyed encouraging young driving talent. That July, he became the first man to invite Ayrton Senna to drive a Formula One car.

  Covering seventy laps in a day’s testing at Donington Park, Senna took things steadily but nevertheless impressed the team by his speed and confidence in a car more than twice as powerful as anything he had driven before. The subtext of Williams’s gesture was a feeling that although no partnership was immediately possible, perhaps in years to come Senna would not forget which of the big-time teams had first extended the hand of friendship.

  McLaren were the next. Enduring a mediocre season with Ford engines and two veteran drivers, Niki Lauda and John Watson, the team had just suffered the humiliation of failing to qualify either car for the Monaco Grand Prix, a severe blow to their fastidious principal, Ron Dennis. Approvingly described by Lauda as ‘a manager with courage and ideas’, Dennis was planning to drop Watson, hoping to attract Alain Prost from Renault as a partner for Lauda in 1984. But he was also on the lookout for fresh talent, since Lauda himself was planning only one more season. McLaren had big plans on the technical front: the new car would be designed by John Barnard, one of Dennis’s partners, already famous for his unorthodox ideas, and powered by new Porsche turbo engines financed by another partner, the businessman Mansour Ojjeh, son of the boss of TAG (Technique d’Avant Garde), a Franco-Saudi high-tech engineering company. In his search for a junior driver, Dennis arranged a sort of beauty contest: a test day at Silverstone, during which he could compare the talents of Senna, Brundle and Stefan Bellof, a very fast young German making an impression in Formula Two. Watson, ironically enough, was asked to take the McLaren out first, making small adjustments to set it up and recording a target time against which the young hopefuls could be judged.

  In the cold-eyed opinion of Formula One insiders, who quickly got to hear about it, Senna’s behaviour that day went a long way towards establishing his absolute commitment to success. Of the trio, he went first. And went fast, quickly getting under Watson’s time. On his fastest lap, however, the engine blew up. Back at the pits, he asked Dennis what his lap time had been. In Brundle’s recollection, Dennis informed the young man that he was not inclined to think about pressing the button on a stopwatch when one of his cars was going past him with highly expensive smoke pouring out of the back. Once a new engine had been fitted, Brundle and Bellof took their turns, recording similarly impressive times. But then, to their astonishment, Senna buckled up his helmet, pulled on his gloves and went out for another session. While they were out having a go, he had been working on persuading Dennis that he should be allowed to run another few laps, on the grounds that Dennis’s car had let him down the first time. Impressed by his persistence, Dennis sent him out, to be rewarded by the fastest times of the day – not surprisingly, since Senna had been given more of a chance to become acquainted with the car – and a matched pair of old-fashioned looks from the Englishman and the German, whose thunder had been stolen. An offer from McLaren duly arrived; but since it did not contain the guarantees Senna wanted, requiring him to spend another season in one of the lower formulas (subsidized by McLaren), before stepping up to Formula One, he had no hesitation in turning it down.

  An interested observer at Silverstone on the day of the McLaren test – a spy, in effect, since he remained incognito at the back of the circuit – was Herbie Blash, manager of the Brabham outfit on behalf of its then owner, Bernie Ecclestone. On the face of it, Brabham were in much better shape than McLaren. Using BMW’s enormously powerful four-cylinder engine and a secret petrol mixture enviously described by rivals as ‘rocket fuel’, the team was carrying Nelson Piquet towards his second championship title, with Riccardo Patrese in support. Seeing Senna as a likelier prospect than Patrese, whose talent seemed to have reached a plateau, Ecclestone invited him to a test on the high-speed circuit built by the French pastis millionaire Paul Ricard at Le Castellet, in the hills of Provence. This was Senna’s first opportunity to try a turbocharged Formula One car. Revelling in its power, he demonstrated his gifts in the dart-shaped Brabham as successfully as he had in the obsolescent non-turbo Williams and McLaren, but when Ecclestone subsequently tried to make him a firm offer it was blocked by Piquet, who exercised a veto strengthened by his relationship with the team’s main sponsor, the Italian dairy company Parmalat. Piquet didn’t want Senna: not another Brazilian, not a Paulista and especially not one who might turn out to be as fast as himself, or even faster.

  Senna bit his lip and listened instead to overtures from the Lotus team, recovering from the death the previous year of its founder and presiding genius, Colin Chapman. Peter Warr, Chapman’s former right-hand man, had assumed control, and wanted to put Senna alongside Elio De Angelis, the team leader, replacing Nigel Mansell, who was thought to be a bit of a tiresome chap and anyway not very promising. But again the sponsors were to have their say. At Brands Hatch in late September Mansell put his car on the second row of the grid for the European Grand Prix, stealing the headlines in the British morning papers from De Angelis, who had qualified fastest. Lotus’s sponsors, the makers of John Player Special cigarettes, saw the value of a successful Englishman to their marketing effort, and insisted that Mansell be retained.

  His options closing down fast despite the admiration of practically every good judge in Formula One, Senna started paying serious attention to persistent advances from the small but ambitious outfit run by Ted Toleman, an English trucking magnate who had taken the plunge into Formula One in 1982 with a car powered by Brian Hart’s turbo engine and driven by Derek Warwick. They had done well, for a brand-new team, but not well enough for Warwick, who announced his intention to join Renault, where he felt there would be a better chance of challenging for the championship. Faced with rebuilding a team on limited resources, Toleman’s team manager, Alex Hawkridge, was confronted by two possibilities: to opt for an experienced driver on the way down, or to take a chance on the potential of a rising star. For his second driver, he chose Johnny Cecotto, a Venezuelan who had been a teenage prodigy in motorcycle racing in the seventies and still enjoyed a big following in Italy, the country of Toleman’s chief sponsors. For his team leader, Hawkridge was keen to gamble on the rich promise of Ayrton Senna. And when Senna tested a Toleman-Hart at Silverstone, it took only two flying laps for the Brazilian to improve the best time ever set by a Toleman at the circuit.

  Hawkridge made him an offer. Not a bad one, either: something like five times the money Brabham had proposed. But a Formula One driver’s market value depends on many factors. His own inherent ability is only one of them. The standing of the team ranged on the other side of the bargaining table is another. At any given time, only two or three drivers will be able to command the very top money from one of the élite teams. For the remainder, their reward will be assessed according to a shifting e
quation determined more by need than anything else: a driver’s need for a particular car, a team’s need for a particular combination of driving talent and sponsor-friendliness. Or, in either case, simply a need for money. And driving a Toleman was less likely to increase Senna’s earning power, in terms of winning championship points, than a Brabham. But Toleman, on the way up and struggling for every foothold, needed him five times more urgently than the well-established Brabham, and would perhaps work five times as hard for him.

  Senna signed a three-year deal, but not until he had got something he wanted even more than the salary: a special get-out clause giving him the right to leave the team and go elsewhere at any time if he was unhappy with the equipment provided, as long as he paid Toleman a specified sum of money before he made contact with other teams. During the negotiations, Senna made it clear that this arrangement, which was haggled over long and hard, was vital to him; he would sooner leave motor racing altogether, he told Hawkridge, than see his destiny slip away while he struggled on with a hopelessly uncompetitive car. Hawkridge saw his point; he had to, otherwise he would have lost his man.

  When he arrived on the starting grid at the Jacarepaguá circuit in Rio de Janeiro on 25 March 1984, for the first round of the new season, he became the thirteenth Brazilian driver to compete in the world championship, two of whom had already claimed the title.

  In the early post-war years, the most prominent South American drivers came from Argentina: the omnipotent Fangio was swiftly followed by José Froilan Gonzalez, Onofre Marimon, Roberto Mieres and Carlos Menditeguy. Chico Landi was the first Brazilian, making his début in a Ferrari at Monza in 1951; over the next four seasons he raced Maseratis in five further grands prix, achieving nothing more than a lucky fourth place in an attritional race at Buenos Aires in 1956, at the age of forty-nine. History has little to say about Landi and even less about the next Brazilian, Gino Bianco, who raced a Maserati at four events in 1952 without scoring a point. Hernando ‘Nano’ da Silva Ramos was a figure of more substance, a Franco-Brazilian who raced Amedée Gordini’s delicate little pale blue sports cars in the mid fifties and appeared seven times in Gordini’s agile but underpowered Formula One machines in 1955–6, registering two points for a fifth place at Monaco in the latter year behind Moss, Collins, Behra and Fangio. The twenty-one-year-old Fritz d’Orey raced three times in 1959 at the wheel of an outdated Maserati entered by Scuderia Centro Sud, a private Italian team; two years later he was dead.