On the Friday, Senna went out and wound himself up for a quick one. Coming into Peralta flat in sixth, he tried to change down to fifth halfway through the bend. The movement, possibly combined with the unevenness of the tarmac, threw the car off balance and off line, and into a spin that took it into the tyre wall on the outside of the track. The McLaren flicked straight over on to its back. Unbelievably, within moments Senna was unclipping his belts, dropping out of the cockpit and walking away unscathed. It was further evidence of the high degree of safety built into modern grand prix cars; after Piquet and Berger at Imola and now Senna in Mexico City, it became harder for those outside the cockpit – officials and spectators – to remember that Formula One was a potentially lethal activity. For drivers too, maybe.
Mexico City, coming during a run of five races without a win, was when he started fretting in private and in public about the amount of power the Honda engines were now delivering, compared with the Ferrari of Prost and, most of all, the new Renault propelling Mansell’s and Patrese’s Williams. ‘Unless we change our own equipment pretty fast,’ he predicted, ‘we’re going to have trouble later in the season.’ Honda listened, and worked harder. Senna won in Hungary and Belgium and then picked up enough points to win the title with a second at Suzuka before wrapping up the season with a win at Adelaide. The race in Spain, in which Senna came fifth after a spin, contained an unforgettable sequence in which Senna and Mansell raced wheel to wheel down the long finishing straight at more than 180 m.p.h., Senna on the outside, Mansell challenging, Senna glancing across, sparks flying from the magnesium undertrays, their wheels no more than an inch apart, Mansell looking ahead and taking the corner from Senna with a display of courage and commitment that left the audience breathless and the Brazilian with an enhanced respect for his old adversary.
The second place in Japan, giving him the six points with which he took the title ahead of Mansell, was a contrived and rather unsavoury affair. Berger, without a win in almost two seasons with McLaren (to Senna’s dozen in the same period), had led from the start. Senna took over, but then received a radio message from Dennis asking him to let Berger win. So he did, but in the most disingenuous way possible, leading up to the last corner and then slowing dramatically, pulling over to the side, and practically throwing down his cloak for the Austrian to walk over. No one among the watching millions could be in any doubt that this was a gesture de haut en bas, publicly expressing a patronizing attitude towards his team-mate (who had, after all, already won five grands prix for Benetton and Ferrari without such assistance).
Old-timers remembered that when Fangio had let Moss win the Englishman’s home grand prix in 1955, the maestro had ensured that it looked as though he had been beaten fair and square. Even Moss was not sure. If you had to lose a race as a gesture of fraternity, that was the way to do it. That was sportsmanship – or an older version of it, at any rate.
Amazingly, the friendship between Senna and Berger survived, as – for one more season – did Berger’s tenure with McLaren.
Senna’s revelations at the Suzuka press conference were sparked off by the replacement of Balestre at the head of the international automobile federation by Max Mosley, an English lawyer (and son of Sir Oswald Mosley) who had worked closely with Bernie Ecclestone for many years. Historically, Senna had seen Balestre as pro-Prost; now, in a lengthy outburst laced (unusually for him) with emphatic obscenities, he got his complaints off his chest. A few days later, after consultations with Mosley, he issued a statement claiming that his remarks, clearly heard and tape-recorded or written down by a roomful of experienced reporters, had been ‘misinterpreted’. When I use a word, as Humpty Dumpty said to Alice, it means exactly what I want it to mean: Lewis Carroll would have had fun with the systematic use of doublespeak in the Formula One paddock.
But 1992 was a year of increasing desperation for Senna. Not only had Honda fallen behind in the power race, but the MP4/7 could not match the new Williams. Patrick Head’s FW14B made devastatingly effective use of the new technology of computer-controlled active suspension to smooth the passage of the car around the circuit, adjusting its balance and attitude to maximize the efficiency of the aerodynamics. This produced the downforce which allowed the driver to brake later on the entrance to a corner and to floor the throttle earlier and more positively on the exit. It was Williams’s year, and Nigel Mansell’s: when the first three races ended in one-twos for Williams, with Patrese faithfully shadowing his team leader, Senna knew he was in for a season of trial.
Ominously, too, there was another car and driver apparently able to make a stronger challenge to Williams than Senna and McLaren could muster. The combination of the Benetton B192 and Michael Schumacher was clearly the best of the rest. A year before, aged twenty-two, Schumacher had made a blazing début when he stepped into the humble Jordan and put it into seventh spot on the grid at Spa. Now a string of seconds and thirds culminated in a brilliant victory on his return to Spa in only his eighteenth grand prix. What was more, the nature of the win, earned not just by speed but by tactical intelligence and panache, invited a clear comparison with Senna himself.
Even before that, Schumacher had earned a chance to compare himself with the presiding genius. At Interlagos, on Senna’s home turf, they were trailing the Williams pair when Schumacher took advantage of a misfire in the McLaren’s Honda engine to pass the world champion on the outside of the uphill left-hand bend leading to the finishing straight. The way Senna muscled back past him on the entrance to the next bend later drew a disgusted response from the German, almost ten years his junior. ‘I was quicker than him,’ Schumacher said, ‘but he was playing some kind of game, which surprised me. I wouldn’t have expected this kind of driving from a three-times world champion.’
Senna won at Monaco again, fighting off a charging Mansell in a torrid last lap which saw the Brazilian taking occupation of the road-width to the very limit of acceptability, the two cars finishing with 0.21 sec. between them. (Mansell, who could see the title coming up for him six months away, accepted the nature of his first defeat of the season with good grace.)
Senna won in Hungary, too, which for the sake of decency towards his team he probably had to do, since he had announced to the world before the race, via the BBC’s James Hunt, that he had offered his services to Frank Williams next season for nothing. Not a penny. Never mind a million dollars a race. Never mind a million pounds a race, which is what Senna claimed Mansell was demanding for his services at Williams in 1993. Through Hunt, he told Williams and the world that he would drive for a million pounds a race less than Mansell. That was the measure of how badly Ayrton Senna hated not having the best equipment. Banco Nacional would have been happy to make sure that his income did not fall below that of the average São Paulo favela-dweller. But the fourth title was what counted.
Mansell was world champion by mid-August, and Senna was on the phone to Frank Williams once, twice, three times a week, trying to persuade him, trying to put together a deal that would get him into the Williams-Renault in time for the next season. Three wins and fourth place in the world championship table were not what he was all about. ‘I am not designed to be second or third,’ he had once said. ‘I am designed to win.’
The problem was Prost, who had taken 1992 off after falling out with Ferrari and being sacked from the team before the end of the 1991 season. He spent the year talking to Renault, his old employers, and it was at their behest (and expense) that Williams signed the Frenchman. Mansell was world champion, and the British public wanted him to stay with the top British team. But he had no desire to share another motorhome with Prost, whom he considered to have queered his pitch at Ferrari by ensuring that the cars were developed to suit the Frenchman’s conservative driving style at the expense of his own more flamboyant, combative approach. For all his popularity with the Italian fans, Mansell never commanded the political skills necessary to survive in the intrigue-riddled atmosphere of Maranello; Prost, by contrast, wo
uld have been at home as a Papal consigliere of the sixteenth century.
Williams, Senna’s long-time admirer, would far rather have had the Brazilian in one of his cars than either of the other drivers; but he was committed to Prost, at Renault’s bidding, and Prost would not have Senna. Senna, naturally, felt he had nothing to fear from Prost in equal equipment, which enabled him to issue lofty dismissals of the Frenchman’s attitude to the threat of competition.
‘If Prost wants to come back and win another title, he should be sportive,’ Senna said at the press conference after the race at Estoril, with Mansell and Berger at his side. ‘The way he is doing it, he is behaving like a coward. He must be prepared to race anybody in any conditions, on equal terms, and not the way he wants to win the championship. It’s like if you go into a 100-metre sprint and you want to have running shoes and everybody else should have lead shoes. That’s the way he wants to race. That is not racing.’ The change in his peers’ attitude towards Prost over the years could be measured in the broad smiles of Mansell and Berger.
On the other hand, somebody like Derek Warwick, whose potential as a grand prix winner was probably wrecked by Senna’s veto in 1986, must have felt sick when he heard the stuff about being ‘prepared to race anybody in any conditions, on equal terms’. But Senna was right: a true champion must fight for everything, just as he always had. Not merely for the first corner, or the finish line. For the best car, the best contract, the best conditions. When he insulted Prost in that way, when he became the first world champion ever to accuse another of cowardice, Senna was actually paying his opponent the highest compliment: he was fighting him with every weapon he could find, even handfuls of mud from the gutter.
Prost saw Mansell off easily enough in the battle for a Williams seat. The team bosses, never enamoured of the Englishman’s endless complaining and his readiness to transfer the blame for failure, found it relatively easy to decline the opportunity to boost his bank balance by another $16 million or so. In their terms, that was $16 million that could be spent on research and development, on new wind-tunnel facilities and exotic metals and the salaries of a few more software programmers. Mansell left for America, where he would win the Indycar series at his first attempt – and, for that historic deed, earn no more than a fraction of the sum he had demanded from Williams. Instead the team promoted Damon Hill, who had performed well as their test driver in the previous year. Hill cost practically nothing, and he never complained about a thing.
Then Prost almost did Senna’s job for him. An outspoken interview in a French newspaper, in which he criticized the activities of the governing body over the preceding seasons, brought down wrath and the threat of a disciplinary hearing that could lead to suspension. ‘I’d be surprised if serious action wasn’t taken against Prost,’ Bernie Ecclestone said. ‘One race? Two races? I don’t know.’ Frank Williams was equally pessimistic: ‘I fear he could be out for two or three races. But I hope that reason will win the day.’ Prost himself told a French reporter: ‘I don’t want a polemic. The only thing I can say is that I don’t see why I should be punished. Other people have done worse things. What’s more, FISA have read what was in the press, but they have not heard a cassette recording of this famous interview. I will make the World Council listen to it. And I’m not worried. But if ever I get sanctioned, I will stop racing.’
Senna sat back and licked his lips, hopeful that Prost had signed his own expulsion order. Refusing to put his name to a new contract with McLaren, Senna accepted an offer from Emerson Fittipaldi and Roger Penske to try an Indy car at Phoenix’s Firebird Raceway, which led to rumours that he might be following Mansell into American racing. But he was just teasing, really. He kept the line open to Frank Williams, and he kept Ron Dennis waiting, and he prepared himself to play the long game.
With his appearance before the World Council pending, Prost arrived at Kyalami in time to join Hill at a pre-race photocall on the grid, posing on either side of one of the team’s new sponsors: Sonic the Hedgehog, a giant blue cartoon creature whose image had been painted overnight on the flanks of the Williams FW15s. Maybe Nuvolari and Fangio would have gone along with such a scheme; maybe not.
Ron Dennis, interestingly, was said to have turned down the Sonic sponsorship because he didn’t fancy the idea of seeing a blue hedgehog painted on the side of his cars. Dennis’s enthusiasm for clean lines and crisp edges is a keynote of his team, whose devotion to neatness is so obsessive that the cutting up of the coloured tape for the pit-stop markings on the pits apron is performed not with a pair of scissors or a Stanley knife but a surgeon’s scalpel.
Senna was in the McLaren pit at South Africa, too, turning up at the last minute to take the wheel of the new Ford-powered MP4/8, which he had tested briefly at Silverstone. So late had he left his decision that Dennis found himself with three drivers for two cars: he had hired Michael Andretti, son of the former world champion Mario Andretti; and then, still fearing Senna’s defection to Williams, he had brought in Mika Hakkinen, a fast young Finn, from Lotus. Dennis called a press conference at Kyalami to explain what was going on. Senna and Andretti would start the season, he said, but Senna was working on a race to race basis, and Hakkinen would be held in reserve.
Senna used the event to launch his offensive against Ford, who were supplying McLaren with last year’s engines, having made a deal with Benetton as their major clients. ‘Ultimately the engine doesn’t have the power that you need if you really want to win,’ he said. ‘We know they have a better engine because our engine here is two steps down from Benetton’s. I hope the team can have that as soon as possible. That will help not only the team but Formula One, which needs urgently to improve the show. For the remainder of the season, it’s not only my personal desire but the goal of the team that we should continue. But this decision isn’t only for one person.’
The belief in the paddock was that McLaren now had a ‘thinking’ gearbox, programmed to every corner of a particular circuit, making the gear-changing decisions for the driver and allowing him to concentrate on steering, accelerating and braking. The real bonus would be that, in combination with active suspension, the new transmission would keep the car smooth and efficient.
Senna was fascinated by these developments, but as a racing driver he did not welcome them because he knew that they tended to ‘level up’ the abilities of the drivers as well as increase the costs of development and manufacture. ‘The machines have taken away the character,’ he had said the previous year, ‘and it is the character that the sponsors and public are looking for. At the top, you have a few characters of conflicting personality; the rest, without good results, don’t have any credibility. We must reduce costs so that we return to an era when the emphasis is on people, not computers.’ He wanted to be challenged by his own limits, ‘and by someone who is born of the same skin and bone and where the difference is between brain and experience and adaptation to the course. I do not want to be challenged by someone else’s computer. If I give 100 per cent to my driving, which is my hobby as well as my profession, I can compete with anyone, but not computers.’
Where McLaren’s technology could help was over the question of the Ford engine’s power deficiency, some 80 horsepower down on the Renault’s. But the electronic throttle and automatic gearbox could help Senna get off the line at Kyalami. ‘I’d like to be the first into the first corner, that’s for sure,’ he said. ‘After the start, I’ll tell you how clever is my computer.’
And sure enough as Prost, the poleman, bogged down when the green light came on, Senna leapt into the lead. Suddenly all pre-season doubts about his motivation were shown to be nonsense. He was in a racing car, and instinct had taken over. The strength of his desire was apparent as soon as Prost gathered himself together for a challenge. Once Prost had got past the second-placed Schumacher, he spent a dozen bloodcurdling laps trying to find a way past Senna’s full repertoire of feints, dives and outright blocks, some of them executed with a brutal fin
ality that suggested he knew exactly how much humiliation Prost was prepared to take. But after a year out of the cockpit, Prost stuck doggedly to the daunting task and at last, holding his breath and probably closing his eyes, squeezed by into a lead that he held until the end, eventually extending the gap to more than a minute.
With four laps to go, however, the light had turned strange and silvery and suddenly there were big drops of rain on the hospitality box windows. With two laps left, a loud crack announced the opening of the heavens over the back of the circuit. Immediately, the rain mixed with the fine red dust of the high veldt to produce a surface on which cars started falling off all over the place. With a lap to go, Prost crossed the finishing line almost at a crawl, waving his arm: stop it now!
At the winner’s press conference, Prost explained his problems at the start with the car’s clutch and mentioned that he had the wrong pressure in his first set of tyres, that the front end of the car wasn’t working properly, and that he had finished the race with a broken seat. Then he started to talk about the weather, and about the new rule stipulating that, in the event of rain, a race should not be stopped ‘unless the circuit is blocked or it is dangerous to continue’.
‘It was very slippery towards the end, with two laps to go,’ he said. ‘One more lap and it would have been very difficult. I think it would have been better to stop it with two laps to go. Nobody’s going to stop for rain tyres at that stage. I think for the future we should know that.’
The microphone was handed to Senna. Did the rainmaster agree? He sat silently, and the longer he sat, the more certain we became that something good was coming.
‘Yes and no,’ he said finally, and the room hummed with gleeful anticipation of another chapter to add to the long rivalry. ‘For safety reasons, yes, we should stop. But for competitive reasons, no, because the race has a number of laps and a distance to be covered, and it’s the same for everybody. It’s a question of whether to stop and put wet tyres on to come across the finish line or take a gamble and not stop and maybe not come around. It’s a situation which makes life extremely difficult, but it comes down also to each individual to make a decision. If you just think about safety, sure, stop the race. But we know the rules, and they are made not to stop … you can stop, if you like, but you just don’t if you don’t. So it’s a question of point of view.’
The Death of Ayrton Senna Page 12
