In Senna’s eyes, Warwick was too quick, too experienced, and too likely to divert the team’s attention from what was, to him, its only real task: preparing a car in which he could win the world championship. To Senna, Lotus did not have the resources to match what McLaren were doing for Prost and Lauda. He put his foot down and, at the age of twenty-five and with only two grand prix victories behind him, he prevailed over the wishes of a team that had been a fixture since 1958 and had seventy-five wins to its name. Back-pedalling at high speed, Warr instead signed Johnny Dumfries, who had graduated through Formula Ford and Formula Three but was in no position to get in Senna’s way either on or off the track. As for Senna, this was his first experience of the righteous wrath of the British motor racing press, which was collectively fond of Warwick (so much more congenial in their eyes than Mansell, whom they perceived as a humourless whinger). They wanted to see Warwick in a good car, and went for the Brazilian in a big way when he seemed to be exercising a seigneurial right at the expense of their man.
Senna had always seemed slightly aloof, certainly towards those he considered his rivals. Now, as he explained why he thought that Lotus couldn’t cope with two star drivers, his measured articulacy in a foreign language served not to convince the reporters (and, by extension, their readers), so much as to harden a growing view of him as a ruthless, high-handed man whose ambition was running amok.
Frustratingly, 1986 went much the way of 1985: eight pole positions and two more wins, at Jerez and Detroit, but the chances of more were again spoilt by the Renault engine’s insistence on gulping down its fuel. Yet at Jerez, Senna provided one of the most exciting finishes in grand prix history. Mansell, with whom he had been jousting throughout the race, found himself having to make almost twenty seconds back on Senna in the last eight laps after a pit stop, failing to catch the Brazilian by only 0.014 sec.; only once had a smaller winning margin been recorded. There was another memorable duel in the inaugural Hungarian Grand Prix in Budapest, this time against Piquet, who made angry protests against what he considered to be Senna’s over-aggressive tactics.
But the car was running out of petrol all over the place, which disillusioned Renault, who hated seeing vehicles with their name on the side limping to a halt in front of many millions of television spectators. That was why they had disbanded their own team at the end of the previous season; now, at the end of 1986, they withdrew their engines from Formula One altogether.
Prost won his second successive championship in the thrifty McLaren-TAG Porsche, but his new partner, Keke Rosberg, had proved a spent force. Mansell and Piquet were second and third, their combined efforts amassing enough points to give Williams the constructors’ title even though by fighting each other to the death for the drivers’ championship they had effectively killed off each other’s chances. Senna was again fourth: for him, not good enough.
With one year left on his Lotus contract, he was encouraged by the news that Warr had secured the same Honda engines as Williams for 1987. This was something of a negative victory, since the Japanese company’s relationship with Williams had deteriorated.
Honda were displeased with Frank Williams’s apparent inability to impose team orders on Mansell and Piquet. Unquestionably, such liberal treatment had cost them the drivers’ title: a reward carrying far more prestige than the constructors’ cup. And Honda’s view of the team was also coloured by the mid-season car accident which had befallen Frank Williams. Hurrying back to Nice airport from a testing session at Le Castellet, he had rolled his hire car and damaged his spine to such an extent that he would never again have the use of his arms and legs. Maybe they thought that this would finish him; they should have asked Ron Dennis, who believed that the consequences of the accident, and the restrictions on Williams’s range of activities, would only serve to concentrate his mind more closely on the job of winning races.
At any rate, now Williams would lose their exclusive use of Honda’s enormously powerful engines. And arriving at Lotus as part of the deal came, at the manufacturer’s behest, a new teammate for Senna. Satoru Nakajima was the first Japanese driver to take a regular part in Formula One. Another in the Dumfries mould, he would provide loyal, competent, reliable and unspectacular support, as well as useful experience gained from his stint as a Honda test driver. Out of the scene along with Renault went the team’s main sponsors, Imperial Tobacco, ending a relationship stretching back to 1968. In came another brand of cigarettes, Camel.
The new all-yellow livery provided a poor sort of setting for the yellow helmet, an apt reflection of a season in which the team made their last real attempt to live up to Chapman’s standards of innovation in engineering. The new Lotus-Honda 99T incorporated the first computer-controlled ‘active’ suspension system, created to dictate the behaviour of the chassis in relation to the track in a way that made the car’s passage more efficient and therefore, or so it was intended, faster. Here was the birth of the generation of computerized driver-aids that within six years would lead to fears that the human pilot could be dispensed with altogether (and to rumours that at least one leading Formula One team boss was actively pursuing the possibility, anxious to reduce his wage bill and eliminate the time spent negotiating with prima donnas). Chapman would have loved all that. But he would have hated the fact that, unlike his own lightweight designs, the 99T was as sleek as a double-decker bus.
In fact it needed the human skills of an Ayrton Senna to make it function at anything like a competitive level. All the benefits of the Japanese horsepower were undermined by its bulk and poor aerodynamics. Nevertheless he managed to lead the opening race at Rio briefly, before something broke. At Imola he took pole but could not hold off the Williams of Mansell, to whom he finished second.
The two of them battled again at Imola, until they touched wheels and spun off. Mansell got back on to the circuit, but when he retired a few laps later he leapt from his car and muscled his way into Senna’s pit, where he had to be pulled away by the Lotus mechanics, some of whom had worked with the Englishman during his time with the team. ‘When a man holds you round the throat, I do not think he has come to apologize,’ Senna said drily afterwards. Their versions of the incident differed wildly, as so many would throughout the remainder of Senna’s career. ‘I was pushed off the circuit,’ Mansell said. ‘I couldn’t believe what he was trying to do – overtake at a place like that,’ Senna countered.
They were together again on the front row at Monaco, but a turbo failure on Mansell’s car handed Senna the first of his two wins that season. The second came in Detroit, where Mansell, after leading, was slowed by various problems. Now Senna was leading the championship, but it was already clear that the Williams was making better use of the Honda power than the Lotus. Over the rest of the season Senna could claim only three second places and two thirds as other teams made progress and the Lotus gradually became less competitive. By the time they got to Mexico City in October, he was so frustrated that when he spun off during a battle with Piquet, he clouted an official who had tried to prevent him getting an illegal push start and was fined $15,000.
As is the way in Formula One, where most business is done behind the back of the hand, Senna had been talking to Ron Dennis about a move to McLaren since before the season’s halfway point. And when Peter Warr opened a letter from the Brazilian’s representatives early in August, announcing his intention to go elsewhere for the next year, the Lotus boss decided to move quickly to stage a pre-emptive strike and thereby prevent Senna’s negotiations with other teams dictating the movement of the entire driver market.
Piquet, heading for his third world championship in a Williams set-up where he now held sway, was not intending to stay with the team. He knew that they were finally losing their Honda engines altogether, and that Honda wanted him to maintain their relationship by moving to Lotus. So, encouraged by the Japanese, Warr signed him up and announced his swift coup straight away, without telling Senna privately first. It was a very public sla
p in the face for Senna, who was quick to broadcast his distaste for what he considered a breach of etiquette. He had a point, although he had been guilty of something similar at Toleman and could hardly complain. But what really irked him was that he had been outmanoeuvred. Instead of appearing to dictate his own destiny, he had been made to look foolish – as if he were being replaced by a more valuable property, the reigning world champion.
As with the Toleman punishment, however, there was never much doubt over who would really feel the pain. Senna was moving to McLaren, where Prost’s authority appeared to be undisputed after his back-to-back championships (the first since Brabham a quarter of a century earlier), but which would also be receiving the prized Honda engines for 1988. And Senna, too, now had a good relationship with Honda, which would help neutralize the advantage of Prost’s familiarity with the McLaren team. The Japanese, with a Brazilian ace at each team, were on to a winner either way.
And at McLaren, Senna also got the chance to develop a rapport with Ron Dennis, who felt that his failure to offer the young driver a tempting deal back in 1983 represented the biggest mistake of his career. Dennis and Senna were made for each other: both eloquent, clear-eyed, persuasive, proud, fastidious, utterly committed to whatever success required, either in commercial or engineering terms.
Dennis is, however, a hard man to love; or at least his team can sometimes be. The aura of corporate success, the obsession with order and neatness, can be off-putting. Nothing could be further from the old Battle of Britain pit culture of oily rags and greasy chips. Spend an hour in the McLaren pit while the mechanics are working flat-out, and you will not see a single drop of oil. Presumably the sponsors wouldn’t like it; or maybe the cars don’t need oil any more.
Dennis tells a story about their negotiations over the 1988 contract that says something about the world in which he and Senna were moving. Eventually, he explains, the difference between them boiled down to a matter of half a million dollars. They couldn’t agree. They went on disagreeing. And finally, to break the deadlock, Dennis suggested that they toss a coin for it. Senna, he says, didn’t understand the concept of tossing coins. Dennis explained it to him, with some difficulty. Eventually it got through. Senna called, and called wrong. So Dennis was better off by half a million dollars.
But what Senna hadn’t realized, Dennis says with cool relish, is that it was half a million dollars a season. So the gamble had, in fact, cost Senna a million and a half. Dennis gives his cool, thin-lipped smile. What a joke. A rich man’s joke. The kind of thing you might overhear in the lounge at Sandy Lane or the bar at San Lorenzo, late at night. Doesn’t necessarily transfer well to the world outside.
John Watson, too, has a story about a conversation with Senna just before the start of the 1988 season. You raced for McLaren with Prost, Senna said. Tell me about him. Well, Watson replied, you’d do well to bear in mind that the whole team think of Prost as the number one, and they work the way he wants them to work. If you take my advice, you’ll have a close look at his methods, because that’s how the team function. Senna paused a moment, thinking about it. No, he said finally, that’s not how I’m going to do it. I’m going to make him come to me. ‘I’m going to blitz him,’ Senna concluded.
He blitzed him all right. Six pole positions in a row, starting with the first race of the season, gave Alain Prost the message. Ayrton Senna was now unquestionably the world’s fastest driver, a claim that can rarely be made with much confidence, given the difficulty of making direct comparisons between men in different teams.
Neither man’s car had turned a wheel before leaving the pit lane for the first practice session at the newly rechristened Autódromo Nelson Piquet in Rio; even the spare car had done only 300 miles. The McLaren-Honda MP4/4 was an untested commodity. Yet by Saturday night Senna was on pole, ahead of Mansell, with Prost third.
On the warm-up lap, Senna’s gear linkage played up. He drove into the pits, jumped into the spare car, and started the race from the pit lane, at the back of the field. After fighting his way up to second place, a flat battery dropped him to sixth. He was girding himself for another assault when he was told that a change of car after the parade lap was against the rules. He was disqualified, leaving Prost to motor serenely on to victory, as he had so often done. The greatest battle of their lives had begun.
Chapter Seven
It was just before the Rio meeting that an interview with Nelson Piquet appeared in a local paper, in which he suggested that Senna was the sort of fellow who wasn’t keen on girls. Piquet mentioned that he knew it for a fact, because his current girlfriend had gone out with Senna and would testify to his preferences.
The general impression was that Piquet had gone beyond the limits of acceptable insult. Then, however, he went practically out of sight. During the course of a second interview, in the Brazilian edition of Playboy published just as the teams were gathering in Rio, Piquet made a further series of gratuitously unpleasant comments about some of his fellow racers. Mansell, he said, was ‘an uneducated fool with a stupid and ugly wife’. Piquet’s naughty-boy charm suddenly looked like brattishness. Something rather nasty was happening to Formula One.
Senna was all for taking legal action on the basis of the first interview, until a quiet word from a sponsor persuaded him that it would do more harm than good.
Several women came forward to dispel the shadow cast by Piquet’s insults. ‘If that man is gay, then I’d like to have a gay in my bed every night,’ said twenty-four-year-old Surama Castro, a model who spent some time with Senna after meeting him at Milan’s Malpensa airport. ‘Piquet just wants all the girls Senna has that he can’t get,’ added Maria Cristina Mendes Caldeira, a longtime platonic friend in São Paulo.
Later in the year Senna embarked on a two-year affair with Xuxa Meneghel, a hugely popular singer and presenter of children’s television shows in Brazil. This appears to have been the most serious of his relationships during the time between Liliane Vasconcelos Souza, his wife, and Adriane Galisteu, the girlfriend of his last year.
His family liked Xuxa, but the nation’s immoderate enthusiasm may not have helped. She was the woman Brazil wanted him to marry: they were Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, or Paul McCartney and Jane Asher. And similarly destined to disappoint a sentimental public.
His other girlfriends occupied much shorter spans of his time than the three big relationships. Among those with whom his name was linked were Virgínia Nowicki, Marjorie Andrade, Patrícia Mach-ado, Cristine Ferraciu, Marcella Prado and the actress Carol Alt. Meneghel and Alt apart, he did not appear to care for the companionship of fellow celebrities; although he was sometimes glimpsed with them in gossip magazines, in general he stayed out of the paparazzi’s way. And only once was there a real scandal: when Marcella Prado, a Rio model, claimed that during the course of their single date she had conceived his daughter, whom she called Vitoria.
What the fuss did achieve was to add a further layer of mystery to the deepening impression of Senna as an unusually complex character among the community of sports stars, most of whom are not noted for their ability to distinguish, as he certainly was, between introspection and self-obsession.
In pure sports terms, his motivation – his ‘focusing’, to use the jargon – was unsurpassed not just in its intensity but in its consistency. Senna never cruised, never backed off, never settled for what fate had given him that afternoon. But there was a remoteness about him that compelled a different degree of attention. The level of personal control was fascinating. ‘Friday, Saturday, the eve of a grand prix,’ his last girlfriend was to say, ‘Ayrton would put on his helmet and overalls and turn into Senna.’ The control was even more riveting, and sometimes chilling, when it started to fray. However reprehensible the cause or the response, it revealed the existence of his humanity.
His religion was at the centre of all this. On long-haul flights to and from the races, he would sit in the first-class compartment with his head buried in the Bi
ble.
‘I am able to experience God’s presence on earth,’ he once said. But his faith was not part of a collective manifestation. ‘If I go to church, I go on my own and I like to be there alone. I find more peace that way.’
His Christianity had nothing to do with smiling, back-slapping, born-again evangelism. It needed work, like everything else. Inevitably, it was misunderstood and mocked: ‘It hurts me if things come out such as I have a feeling that I am unbeatable or even immortal because of my belief in God. What I said was that God gives me strength, but also that life is a present that God has given to us and that we are obliged to keep it, to handle it carefully.’
His faith was about individual self-realization, and it did not exclude feelings of anger, resentment and revenge. What it did was provide him with an armour of self-belief so effective that while it could not prevent him feeling the pain of insults, it ensured that no wound was deep enough to shake his composure or force him to doubt the decisions he had taken.
Perhaps this made him appear more aloof than he really was. Brazil represented his sanctuary; only there could he relax completely. He had moved his European base from a house in Esher, acquired during his time with Toleman, to an apartment in Monaco, a predictable choice for an established grand prix driver, given the tax breaks and the geographical convenience. But his absolute priority was to fly back to São Paulo at every opportunity. At home with his family on the farm at Goiás, with his nephew and nieces, with his girlfriends, serenity came easily in tennis, water-skiing, go-karting, listening to Phil Collins, Genesis, Freddie Mercury and Tina Turner, collecting belts (bought by the dozen from airport duty-free shops), flying his model aeroplanes and helicopters. Later he would have his own apartment in São Paulo, and beach houses in Portugal and Brazil.
The Death of Ayrton Senna Page 9
