Apart from the amount of money they cost, these are simple, ordinary, undemanding things: banal enough to embody the aspirations of his fans. Only in its spiritual and philosophical dimensions did the surface of his life betray the existence of a complex, unique and demanding talent.
At Imola, he quickly readjusted the position within his own team, leading Prost home in the first of ten McLaren one-twos that season, a degree of domination that recalled the days of Fangio, Moss and the omnipotent Mercedes team of the mid-fifties. Both cars lapped the rest of the field. And then they came to Monaco, his new adopted home, where he set out to dominate a meeting which was to provide a turning point in the development of his personal philosophy.
His experience that weekend only became known two years later, when he described it to the Canadian journalist Gerald Donaldson. People have tried to get metaphysical about motor racing in the past, but here Senna took it into a new realm. Which was where it had taken him.
‘Sometimes I think I know some of the reasons why I do the things the way I do in a car and sometimes I think I don’t know why,’ he was telling Donaldson. ‘There are some moments that seem to be the natural instinct that is in me. Whether I have been born with it or whether this feeling has grown in me more than other people I don’t know, but it is inside me and it takes over with a great amount of space and intensity. When I am competing against the watch and against other competitors, the feeling of expectation, of getting it done and doing the best I can gives me a kind of power that some moments when I am driving actually detaches me completely from anything else as I am doing it … corner after corner, lap after lap. I can give you a true example.
‘Monte Carlo ’88, the last qualifying session. I was already on pole and I was going faster and faster. One lap after the other, quicker and quicker and quicker. I was at one stage just on pole, then by half a second and then one second and I just kept going. Suddenly I was nearly two seconds faster than anybody else, including my team mate with the same car. And suddenly I realized that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel. Not only the tunnel under the hotel but the whole circuit was a tunnel. I was just going and going, more and more and more and more. I was way over the limit but still able to find even more.
‘Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realized that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down. I drove back slowly to the pits and I didn’t want to go out any more that day. It frightened me because I was well beyond my conscious understanding. It happens rarely but I keep these experiences very much alive inside me because it is something that is important for self-preservation.’
You can listen to that, and dismiss it. Or you can say, yes, perhaps this is the sort of thing that happens to people who operate at a very high level of mental and physical activity, where the intellect and the body combine and it becomes hard to say which is pulling the strings. To me Senna’s words recall the sensation experienced by an improvising musician who reaches the point at which technique falls away and the execution becomes virtually automatic, leaving no barrier between the artist and the expression. The distinguished American saxophonist Steve Lacy took on the burden of putting it into words in conversation with another improviser, the English guitarist Derek Bailey, and his description has many parallels with Senna’s. ‘I’m attracted to improvisation because of something I value,’ Lacy said. ‘That is a freshness, a certain quality, which can only be obtained by improvisation, something you cannot possibly get from writing. It is something to do with the “edge”. Always being on the brink of the unknown and being prepared for the leap. And when you go on out there you have all your years of preparation and all your sensibilities and your prepared means, but it is a leap into the unknown. If through that leap you find something, then it has a value which I don’t think can be found any other way. I place a higher value on that than on what you can prepare. But I am also hooked into what you can prepare, especially in the way that it can take you to the edge. What I write is to take you to the edge safely so that you can go out there and find this other stuff …’
Stuck with their printed scores, the other competitors recognized something beyond the normal realms of great skill in Senna’s speed, although they would probably have avoided discussion of the mystical dimension. ‘The attitude of most people,’ the pragmatic Denis Jenkinson wrote in Motor Sport, describing the mood on the eve of the race, ‘was to try not to be lapped by Senna too often.’ And when the race started on a warm and dry afternoon, Senna and the McLaren simply drove off into the distance, leaving the remaining cars – including Prost, who had also started from the front row – to race among themselves. With twenty-five laps to go the red and white cars were first and second again, separated by a large gap, and Ron Dennis sent an order over the radio for them to ease off. But slowing down, as somebody once said, was not in Senna’s vocabulary, and the mere introduction of the idea may have contributed to what happened next.
On lap sixty-seven, with eleven left to the certainty of his second Monaco win, Senna flicked the McLaren nimbly through the left and right of Casino Square, hustled it down the short, bumpy chute to Mirabeau and tweaked it around the Loews Hotel hairpin. Then, just as he had done with perfect ease sixty-six times that afternoon, he dropped the car down towards the seafront, and the sharp right-handed corner called Portier, where the coast road enters the long, dark tunnel, the fastest part of the circuit. And for once, his mind wandered. He groped for the edge, and lost it.
What he did was turn in too tightly, allowing his right nose-fin to clip the barrier on the apex of the corner; this threw him across the track, where his left front wheel hit the opposite barrier with enough force to bend back the suspension and stop the car. The TV camera that caught the next few moments showed him leaping angrily from the machine, pushing away the track marshals, pulling off his helmet, tossing his earplugs to the ground and stalking out of the circuit as Prost motored by to take, yet again, the race around the houses that should have been Senna’s.
He didn’t go back to the pits, or to the McLaren garage in the paddock. He disappeared. All evening, in his apartment, the phone was answered by his housekeeper, who refused to put callers through. When, long after nightfall, she relented, the friend who spoke to him discovered that he was still in tears.
To most drivers, an accident that does not involve personal injury is just an accident, even when it costs them a grand prix. It is something to be forgotten. Not by Senna, though. When he had an accident, it became an event with a real meaning, with a subtext beneath its narrative significance. Of Monaco 1989 he was to say: ‘It has changed my life.’
No driver played mind games with more commitment and ferocity than Senna, who drew on his older sister, Viviane, a psychologist, for counsel. ‘I am the same person,’ he said after Monaco, ‘but my mental strength has changed.’ He knew that in a sport such as motor racing, where willingness to risk life and limb in straight combat is the essence of the whole thing, an ability to put his opponents at a psychological disadvantage would be worth as much as a few extra horsepower. ‘You have to be strong psychologically speaking, very tough, to go through the kind of war that goes on sometimes,’ he observed on another occasion, speaking with the limpid intensity that characterized his pronouncements.
That’s what he meant in later years when, analysing his own rise, he claimed that ‘nothing had come easy’ to him. In his view, such a statement was not in conflict with his privileged background, or with his father’s material and spiritual support, since it referred to the mental struggle he had undergone in order to become as good as he was, and then to maintain the exercise of his supremacy. This meant an unremitting engagement in mental battles: to lose any fight, whether to a rival on the track or to his own team manager during a contract negotiation, put him at risk of dulling t
he edge of his gift.
As the years went by, Senna spoke more and more freely about the mental side of racing. His ability to bring his intellect to bear on the preparation of a racing car was already legendary: the mechanics at Toleman and Lotus had been sorry to see him go, because he cared as much as they did, he worked as hard, and he thanked them at the end of a long day. They knew, too, that if they found something, some little adjustment, that would give him another half-second a lap, his talent would turn it into a full second. When he focused on their problems, nothing – no intrusion from the glamorous side of a racing driver’s life – would be allowed to distract him. That told them that he knew how important they were. And to them he was the answer to a prayer. He could tell his race engineers about the behaviour of each of the car’s four wheels at every corner on all the laps of a practice session; once the engineers had come to understand the degree of his total recall and the accuracy of his impressions, they could compare his subjective views with the cold data accumulated from the car’s telemetry, its onboard computers, and then plot their technical solutions in response to both types of input. Best of all, unlike some of his contemporaries, he never blamed his own failures on imaginary mechanical faults, or exaggerated the problems that did exist in order to put his own performance in a better light.
Senna and McLaren were still finding out about each other, but the Brazilian won in Detroit and then reeled off four victories in a row: at Silverstone, Hockenheim, the Hungaroring and Spa-Francorchamps. The British race became the first of the season at which a McLaren had not led on the opening lap when Berger’s Ferrari came round first in heavy rain and stayed there until Senna overtook him after fourteen laps. Prost, not enjoying the conditions, pulled off before half-distance and gave up, leaving the crowd to enjoy an extended demonstration of Senna’s touch and commitment on the wet track. In Germany there was rain again on race day, but Prost, stung by criticism in the French newspapers of his Silverstone performance, stuck to his task and finished fourteen seconds behind.
By the time they got to Monza, the rivalry was building to a crescendo. Senna took his ninth pole of the season, beating one of Jim Clark’s long-standing records, and set off with victory in mind. Prost retired early and it was left to the home team, the Ferraris of Gerhard Berger and Michele Alboreto, to attempt to put pressure on the surviving McLaren. This was the first grand prix to be held since the death of the Old Man, Enzo Ferrari, who, rightly or wrongly, had come to be revered around the world as the embodiment of motor racing’s romantic tradition. All around the circuit, 80,000 Italian fans waved their flags to urge the red cars on. But with two laps to go it seemed that Senna was in no danger as, well in the lead, he came up to lap the Williams of Jean-Louis Schlesser at the first chicane after the pits.
Schlesser, an experienced driver but now making his first appearance in Formula One as a temporary replacement for the absent Mansell, would have been less aware than anyone in the field of the meaning of the yellow helmet in his mirrors. He might have been aware that it was Senna, but he could have no experience of the rate at which Senna would be catching him up. As the McLaren loomed behind him, Schlesser was anyway otherwise engaged in the business of trying to overtake Mauricio Gugelmin’s March. Unusually, Senna failed to appreciate the implications. He dived for the inside, intending to outbrake the Williams, Schlesser turned in, the McLaren slid off into the sand, and with it went Ron Dennis’s hopes of winning all sixteen races that season. The astonished Ferrari drivers screamed over the line and took the race, with the fans in delirium.
In Hungary Senna and Prost fought hand to hand, the Brazilian just hanging on. In Belgium Senna led from start to finish. Now the championship was poised: Senna with seventy-five points, Prost seventy-two, the rest nowhere.
It was at Estoril that the relationship – characterized by Senna only a couple of months earlier as an example of ‘harmony, not friction’ – began to turn nasty. Here Prost outqualified Senna, but the Brazilian took the lead off the line. Coming round at the end of the first lap, however, Prost slipped out from Senna’s slipstream in a classic high-speed overtaking manoeuvre, only to find Senna squeezing him right over to the pit wall. The crews, leaning over to watch the cars go by, flinched as Prost brushed the concrete. The moment was bloodcurdling, unbelievable in real life.
‘It was dangerous,’ a horrified Prost said afterwards, hardly mollified by the fact that he had won the race after various problems pushed Senna down to sixth. ‘If he wants the world championship that badly, he can have it.’
Senna virtually ignored his complaints, suggesting only that he had been angered by Prost forcing him on to the grass at the start. But of all the examples of Senna’s aggressive behaviour in his Formula One career to date, this was the one which most clearly carried into the grown-up world the Formula Ford playground tactics of weaving, crowding, barging and general intimidation. Had the cars touched at that moment in Estoril, the great crash at Le Mans in 1955 might have looked like a minor affair. Still, they didn’t. Senna had not yet turned grand prix racing into a contact sport. That would come later.
So ended the co-operation between the two drivers. In Senna’s mind, the harmony had never been real. He needed to dominate the thoughts of the team, to have them working solely for him. Now they knew not only which of the two was the faster driver, but also which was the more determined to go to the limit.
By the time they came to the last two races, at Suzuka and Adelaide, the way the championship worked out was that Senna needed only to win the first of them to take the title. If Prost won, the contest would continue to Adelaide. Given the ill feeling now simmering between the two, the president of Honda felt it necessary to issue a statement, in the form of an open letter to Jean-Marie Balestre, president of the FIA, reassuring the world’s Formula One fans that his company would see fair play by giving Prost and Senna equal equipment, and an even chance to win.
When the red light turned to green at Suzuka, sitting on the pole with a greasy track ahead of him, the hyped-up Senna committed a novice’s mistake: he stalled the engine. The field streamed past him as he raised his arms in the air to alert those coming from the back. But the start line at Suzuka is on a slight downslope, and as the car rolled forwards he got it restarted in time to enter the first corner in fourteenth place. By the end of the lap, he was eighth. On lap twenty-seven he was overtaking Prost, the leader, as they came on to the finishing straight. But the Frenchman stayed with him, and as the rain began again Senna was suddenly pointing to the sky as he passed the pits, a clear attempt to tell the officials that the race should be stopped. Prost, who had just beaten him at Monaco in 1984 as the result of a famously disputed stoppage, did not have time to smile at the irony. They were racing as fast as the track and their fuel consumption would let them, one man knowing that victory would give him the title, the other knowing that if he won, it would keep him in with a chance.
Senna stayed ahead. And as he accelerated out of the chicane towards the chequered flag and his first world championship, many thousands of miles from home and twenty-four years from the day his father gave him his first little go-kart, he raised his eyes from the grey tarmac and saw something. According to his own later account, he saw God.
The season over, Senna went home to celebrate his championship. There were formal receptions to attend, and days playing the go-karts on the family farm. But already he and Prost, with whom he was scheduled to resume a troubled relationship, had been testing the new McLaren-Honda MP4/5, which was to give Senna his first experience of a non-turbo Formula One car since the brief tests with Williams and McLaren six years earlier.
A lucky win for Mansell on his Ferrari début opened the 1989 season at Rio. Senna collided with Berger’s Ferrari at the first corner as the two of them and Patrese’s Williams all tried to occupy the same piece of track. ‘Senna chopped across twice to try to make me back off,’ Berger said, ‘but he shouldn’t try that with me. Never in my life will I b
ack off in that situation.’
There was more controversy at Imola. First Berger disastrously lost control at Tamburello, probably as a result of losing part of his front wing. He crossed the narrow strip of grass and the few yards of tarmac, and hit the wall at 170 m.p.h. The car was immediately engulfed by flames. Berger sat in the inferno for twenty-three and a half seconds before astonishingly effective work by the Italian marshals put the fire out, enabling the Austrian to discharge himself the next day from the Ospedale Maggiore in Bologna with nothing more grave than a broken shoulder blade, a cracked rib and sternum, and harsh burns to his hands and chest.
The result of the race, which had to be restarted, was another McLaren demonstration: Senna first, Prost second. But the predictability of the result hid a conflict which flared into the open afterwards. The two of them, it was revealed, had made a perfectly sensible pact that whoever led into the first corner should not be challenged by the other during the opening laps. Ron Dennis, like Enzo Ferrari and Frank Williams, was not in the habit of issuing team orders, partly because a bit of creative tension never did a superstar any harm; nor is curbing natural aggression the best way to realize a promising youngster’s potential. This informal ‘accord’, Prost said afterwards, had been Senna’s idea. At the first start, the Brazilian had led and held his advantage, but when Prost got away quickest on the restart, Senna had whipped past him halfway round the first lap. The Frenchman’s furious pursuit of him for the rest of the race was the product of pique, of the feeling that the Brazilian had cheated him. Prost left the circuit in a rage, skipping the mandatory press conference, and that was the end not merely of co-operation but of communication between the McLaren drivers. By comparison with what was to come, however, it was a squabble in a playpen.
First, Ron Dennis announced that all was well again, because Senna had apologized to Prost. Then Senna himself gave a long explanation in which he suggested that he had apologized only at Dennis’s behest, and now considered he had been wrong to do so. He alleged that a similar agreement had been in force the previous year, but that Prost had broken it on several occasions as the season went on. But they had patched it up over the winter, and when he had asked what Prost wanted to do about the first bend at Imola in 1989, the Frenchman had replied: ‘The same as ’88.’ Then Senna explained how he had indeed lagged behind at the start, but had gained speed faster and could hardly have been expected to slow down at that point in order to let Prost go, and in any case the agreement only covered overtaking under braking: ‘We’re in races, yes or no?’ Yes, in which case no ‘accord’ is worth the breath with which it is spoken. But Dennis had said to him that if he apologized, it would be all over. ‘And I did it. It was stupid because it meant I had changed my opinion on the concept of our accord and on the overtaking move. Now, I have never changed my opinion. I said sorry for the good of the team, to calm it down, because I was almost compelled to. I wiped away a tear because at that moment it was harming me.’
The Death of Ayrton Senna Page 10
