Prost’s retort was instant: ‘At the level of technical discussion I shall not close the door completely, but for the rest I no longer wish to have any business with him. I appreciate honesty and he is not honest.’
In Monaco, Senna managed quite well without his team-mate’s conversation, leading all the way, with Prost almost a minute behind. In Mexico, Senna turned away from his team-mate’s attempt at a rapprochement and won again, with Prost fifth. At Phoenix he beat Jim Clark’s twenty-one-year-old career record of thirty-three pole positions but retired from the lead, handing Prost the race. At Montreal, in a storm, he drove through the field and was heading for one of his greatest victories when he felt his engine faltering with three laps to go. Prost won at Paul Ricard, and again at Silverstone – where the British fans cheered when Senna spun out of the lead early on. They had admired Senna’s sheer talent in his early years, but now they were starting to react against what they perceived to be a cold, manipulative personality, a profile which gained definition in contrast with Prost’s relatively sunny, co-operative temperament.
To satisfy the requirements of the newspapers, who saw the circulation value of an old-fashioned shoot-out, particularly one that could be prolonged over a period of several months, the rivalry needed to be susceptible to simple moral judgements: Black Hat v White Hat. The casting was obvious. Senna, who rarely smiled in public and approached his task with a Jesuitical concentration, versus Prost, the family man with the crooked nose and funny corkscrew hair who had a bit of the Henri Leconte about him and looked as if he might not be averse to a Gauloise and a glass of Burgundy after the show. That they functioned in a world of uncertainties, of fragile etiquette, opaque rules and unfathomable technology, made the storyline all the more compelling.
Senna won at Hockenheim and dominated a wet Spa. At that point, the disillusioned Prost announced that he would be leaving McLaren at the end of the season to join Ferrari. At Monza he was welcomed with open arms by the Italian crowd, but Senna, the new villain, outqualified him by almost two seconds, a humiliation that led the Frenchman to charge his team with favouritism. ‘You have to understand they don’t make engines like this for Ayrton,’ he said, raising again the spectre of Honda’s technicians inserting different microchips in each motor, or perhaps – and people were beginning to believe this sort of thing, because it could be done – adjusting them during the race, maybe even via satellite transmission from the engine laboratory in Japan. Dennis issued a denial which gathered credibility when Senna’s engine blew near the end and Prost took the victory. Nevertheless the Frenchman could not resist expressing his distaste for the team he was leaving by leaning down from the podium and handing the trophy to the adoring fans. Dennis, proud of his trophy cabinet, was livid.
Portugal was the race at which Mansell overshot his pit, reversed, and failed to see the black flags indicating his disqualification. Unfortunately he was still in ignorance of the futility of his effort when he came up to overtake Senna, with predictable results. Dennis was just in the act of telling Senna over the radio that Mansell had been disqualified and was no longer a factor in the race when the two of them collided and spun off, Mansell having tried to force himself through on the inside line. The usual post-race disagreements were coloured by the belief that not only should Mansell not have been on the inside line, he should not have been on the track at all.
An unchallenged win for Senna in the next race, at Jerez, set up the last two races for the championship. Prost was twenty-four points ahead on aggregate, but could still be caught under the scoring system if Senna won both the remaining events.
Prost drove with the brilliance of his best years at Suzuka, holding the lead against Senna’s sustained attack until lap forty-seven, when the Brazilian tried a run down the inside into the ridiculously tight chicane. As they braked together, Prost began to pull across, turning in late, not quite on the line he would have used in practice, say, with no other traffic around. But Senna was alongside, practically level, and the two of them slid idiotically, uselessly, interlocked at a pathetically low speed, off the racing surface and on to the escape road behind the chicane’s barriers.
Time stopped for a moment as they looked across at each other. Prost thought: if we’re both out, the title is mine. He flipped open the catch of his safety straps, jumped out and walked away. Senna thought: if I’m out, it’s over. Let’s keep going. Waving the marshals to push him round, he turned the car back on to the track and headed for the pits, where a new nosecone was fitted and he resumed the desperate pursuit of victory.
Given the way their respective characters were being represented, the general belief in the aftermath was that Senna had taken a typically arrogant risk, and that Prost had behaved with complete correctness, if not prudence. But in the light of their words and actions in later years, when time and events had loosened their tongues, it seemed that Prost had indeed decided that having an accident – a nice civilized low-speed one – was the way to end the duel, if that was how Senna wanted to play it.
The chicane, Senna said afterwards, was ‘the only place where I could overtake, and somebody who shouldn’t have been there just closed the door and that was that.’
Whatever the rights and wrongs, Senna’s choice of language was highly revealing. ‘Somebody who shouldn’t have been there’: if he shouldn’t have been there, then he didn’t exist, so he didn’t even have the right to a name, an identity. And if he didn’t exist, then he couldn’t have been there in the first place, so …
‘You know Ayrton’s problem?’ Prost asked. ‘He can’t accept not winning, and because of that he can’t accept someone resisting his overtaking manoeuvres. Too many times he tries to intimidate someone out of his way.’ Now the tactics of Formula Ford had not only come to Formula One, but had taken over.
Senna regained the lead in the race, but was disqualified afterwards for missing out the chicane when he restarted. He lodged an appeal, on the basis that others had missed chicanes during the season with impunity. ‘The results as they stand provisionally do not reflect the truth of the race in either the sporting sense or the sense of the regulations,’ he said.
His action kept the championship notionally alive until Adelaide. But before the race FISA, the governing body, announced that he had been given a six-month suspended sentence and a $100,000 fine. He was distraught. ‘When everything goes against you, you ask yourself why you carry on, particularly when you have not been fairly treated.’ But, he added, he would continue to drive the way he had driven all his career. ‘I am supposed to be a lunatic, a dangerous man breaking all the rules, but people have the wrong impression. What happened at Suzuka reflects the political situation in the sport. I’m prepared to fight to the end for my values, for justice.’
At Adelaide, in clouds of rain and spray, Prost had no qualms about pulling out on the second lap, winning the championship with a perfectly sound car in his garage. Senna took the lead, but hit the rear of Martin Brundle’s slow Brabham as he came up to lap it, lost a wheel and was forced to retire. The rear-view TV camera in Brundle’s car caught the incident perfectly as the nose of the McLaren suddenly appeared, like a shark in murky waters.
The close season was taken up with arguments over the appeal against Senna’s sentence, enlivened by FISA’s anger at some of his responses. Eventually, they said that if he did not retract his insults and pay his fine by mid-February, he would lose his Formula One ‘superlicence’.
Senna’s response, with its combination of icy clarity and bogus humility, must have appealed to the samurai sense of ethics. ‘I asked myself about continuing to race,’ he said. ‘I was perfectly calm and I discussed the matter with Honda and McLaren. I said to them that I was only a driver and that McLaren and Honda would continue after me. I said that I did not want to compromise their efforts and those of the people who work to run the cars. I asked Nobuhiko Kawamoto and Ron Dennis to decide in my place. I said I would completely respect their wishes, that
I was ready to retire or fight on as they thought fit.’
Too much was at stake, on all sides. A compromise emerged: Dennis paid the fine, Senna said that he now thought nobody had tried to cheat him out of the title, and Jean-Marie Balestre, the president of FISA, sent him his new licence, along with good wishes for the 1990 season.
Senna turned up at Phoenix looking wan and complaining that the events of the winter had removed his motivation, but he still managed to win, fending off the challenge of a twenty-three-year-old Frenchman of Sicilian descent, Jean Alesi, who had the disrespect, when passed by Senna, to hurl his humble Tyrrell past the world champion at the next corner. It didn’t last beyond another few seconds, but nothing like that had happened before. Perhaps the generations were moving on. Senna had turned thirty that month.
His new team mate was Gerhard Berger, who had switched from Ferrari in the hope of challenging Senna on an equal footing. He was soon to learn the truth about that. However much commitment you give, he discovered, Senna will give more. And that is before the question of innate talent comes into the equation.
‘Gerhard has difficult times, sure … so do I,’ Senna said at one point during their collaboration. ‘He’s very competitive, he tries his maximum all the time. And by using the same equipment together, as we do, you have a very close picture of what the other guy is doing. In such an atmosphere it’s so difficult to be friends or even to have respect. It is possible to have respect of each other; we have a good understanding.’
Berger’s difficult times included the problem of getting McLaren to construct a car to accommodate his long frame, rather than Senna’s shorter build. That took two years, and taught him where the team’s priorities were. Later he and Senna became close friends, but not until Berger had got the message from the ‘very close picture of what the other guy is doing’. Once he had accepted that what Senna was doing was beyond his own capacity, the friendship could be established – to the point of Senna going along with Berger’s practical jokes, such as throwing expensive briefcases out of helicopters or replacing passport photographs with snapshots of gorillas.
There were enough second, third and fourth places for Berger that season to give him fourth place in the final championship table, but there were no wins: the Marlboro McLaren team now belonged to Ayrton Senna, for whom there were further victories in Monaco, Canada, Germany, Belgium and Italy on the way to another showdown with Prost, who himself had won four races in the Ferrari by the time they went back to Suzuka.
At Monza, where Senna and Prost finished first and second, they attended the same post-race press conference and were asked when they might start talking to each other again. Well, Prost said, I offered to shake hands with him at Phoenix, at the beginning of the season. ‘I did not think he was sincere about it,’ Senna said. ‘When he is able to say he is sincere in front of everyone, I will accept it.’ And slowly, awkwardly, they did indeed shake hands, to applause from the representatives of the media.
A meaningless response to a meaningless gesture, as it turned out. The tension rose again at Estoril, where Mansell squeezed Prost against the pit wall at the start, and at Jerez, where the Friday afternoon accident to Martin Donnelly shook all the drivers, but none more than Senna. The young Irishman had hit a barrier at almost 150 m.p.h. and as his Lotus disintegrated he was left prone in the middle of the track, with injuries that were to end his Formula One career. The session was halted, and Senna went straight to the place of the accident, where he remained for twenty minutes before locking himself away in the McLaren motorhome. That evening he visited Donnelly in hospital. On the question of danger in motor racing, he had once said: ‘It’s very strong in my mind. It gives you the right feeling for self-preservation. At moments when you’re dealing with danger very near, it’s attractive … and being attractive, it could go a little bit too far.’ Whatever his thoughts as he meditated on Donnelly’s accident, the worst he had seen during his time in Formula One so far, at the next race he himself took the danger a little bit too far.
‘Not only unsporting, but disgusting,’ Alain Prost said after being pushed off the track at something over 130 m.p.h. by Senna at the first corner of the first lap of the Japanese Grand Prix, meaning that the championship race was over and Senna had won his third title while both of them sat stuck in the sand-trap. Half a lap or so from where Senna had seen God two years earlier, now he had executed a truly diabolical manoeuvre. ‘He saw I had made a better start,’ Prost continued, ‘and so he pushed me off. I am not prepared to fight against irresponsible people who are not afraid to die.’
‘It was simply two cars trying to make the first corner together,’ Senna retorted from behind a façade of implacable calm. ‘I had been asking the officials to move pole position to the other side of the track all weekend, and their refusal to do it created so many problems that I suppose this accident was likely to happen. He knew I was going to come down the inside. He made the biggest mistake by closing the door. He knows I always go for the gap. I know what I can do and I am happy inside.’
The depth of feeling against Senna was illustrated in a considered remark by Jackie Stewart, another three-time world champion: ‘I don’t doubt that Senna always genuinely believes he’s in the right, but, well, Hitler believed he was in the right. “I don’t run into people,” he said. “Come on, Ayrton,” I said, “it can’t always be the other guy who’s at fault …” but no, he wouldn’t have it. It’s a great mistake, deluding yourself.’
Later, we discovered that he hadn’t been deluding himself. He’d been lying. But it was possible, as it always is in motor racing, to construct an argument from the other standpoint. Knowing Senna’s psychological hold over Prost, it was possible to watch the tape of the rush down to the first right-hand bend and see Prost going slightly wide, perhaps hesitating on the turn-in, possibly even backing off the throttle a fraction as one might, almost subconsciously, if one were preoccupied by what was happening in one’s mirrors. Was Senna in fact the casualty of a psyched-out Prost’s timidity?
No, not exactly. The point was this, and it did not emerge for more than a year, until Senna had wrapped up his third world championship and was relaxing after the clinching race, again at Suzuka. He went through the explanation of how, the previous year, the pole position had been switched to the inside of the circuit, off the racing line, where the surface was covered with dust and rubber. Quite reasonably, he asked for it to be changed back to the outside, to restore the pole man’s rightful advantage. He thought he had won his case, but it turned out that he had not. The stewards, he claimed, had been overruled by Jean-Marie Balestre, who he believed bore a grudge against him. So then he made his mind up. ‘I said to myself, “OK, you try to work cleanly and do the job properly and then you get fucked by certain people. All right, if tomorrow Prost beats me off the line, at the first corner I will go for it … and he’d better not turn in because he’s not going to make it.” And it just happened.’
His phrase of the previous year came back: someone who shouldn’t have been there. Since he shouldn’t have been there, he didn’t exist. And if he didn’t exist, he can’t have been there …
When he continued, though, his words made better sense: ‘I wish it hadn’t happened. We were both off and it was a shit end to the world championship. It was not good for me and not good for Formula One. It was the result of wrong decisions and partiality by the people making them. I won the championship. So what? It was a bad example for everyone.’
‘He has completely destroyed everything,’ Prost said at the time of the crash. ‘Everything that has happened here has shown his real face. For him it is much more important to win the championship than it is for me. It is the only thing he has in life. He is completely screwed up. This man has no value.’
For 1991 Senna would receive $15 million from Marlboro McLaren: almost a million dollars a race, under the terms of a new deal negotiated in many long sessions with Ron Dennis. Plus his personal sponsorship
deal with Banco Nacional. Plus many other bits and bobs. He kept his end of the bargain by winning the first four races of the year, including a victory in Brazil, where he finished with only sixth gear left in the MP4/6’s gearbox: ‘God gave me this race,’ he said.
God also let him off, when he had the biggest crash of his career in qualifying for the Mexican Grand Prix. It happened at Peralta, an enormous high-speed banked right-hander that turned through 180 degrees to bring the cars on to the finishing straight. As if Peralta’s linear contour were not sufficiently fearsome, it also featured a surface bumpy enough to require the drivers to brace themselves against forces coming from every direction. Oh, and (like Tamburello) practically nothing in the way of a run-off area to allow errant cars to reduce their speed before hitting something solid.
The Death of Ayrton Senna Page 11
