The Death of Ayrton Senna

by Richard Williams

  Trailing Schumacher in the championship by twenty points to nil, Senna pushed the team even harder. By comparison with the Benetton, the FW16 lacked grip in slow corners, its front wing was inefficient, and the way the air flowed beneath its body made it over-sensitive to changes in pitch (the fore-and-aft shifts of balance caused by accelerating and braking). It was a twitchy car, not trustworthy; ‘horrible’, in Hill’s word. Not, in fact, the kind of car to be taken by the scruff of its neck and overdriven in the manner of which Senna had shown his mastery the previous season with the underpowered but high-spirited and responsive MP4/8. But even this, in Senna’s eyes, didn’t quite explain the success of Schumacher and the Benetton, on the face of it nothing more than an exceptionally gifted and ambitious young pilot at the wheel of a carefully developed but perfectly standard combination of machinery (with a Ford engine certifiably less powerful than the Renault). That, Senna felt, shouldn’t have been enough.

  All through the early weeks of the season there had been fears that someone would find a way of circumventing the new regulations, which had been devised to close up the performance gaps between the cars and put the racing back in the hands of the drivers. Before Interlagos, Mosley had threatened ‘draconian’ punishments: anyone caught cheating would be thrown out of the championship. But finding the limit of the rules is, after all, what racing-car designers are for, and no one was very surprised when Larini’s slip of the tongue in Japan led the FIA’s technical inspectors to discover some sort of a traction control programme hidden away in the Ferrari’s engine management software. What was a surprise, at least to the unworldly, was the reluctance of the authorities to impose the promised sanction. A slap on the wrist was felt to be enough. But then what value would a season without Ferrari have at the box office?

  Senna’s thoughts were all on the next race, at Imola on 1 May, but ten days earlier he was fulfilling a patriotic duty at the Parc des Princes in Paris, kicking off a friendly soccer match between Brazil and Paris Saint-Germain, the club of Rai de Oliveira and Ricardo Rocha, two members of the Brazilian squad. Wearing a grey jumper and black slacks on a pleasant spring evening, he acknowledged the applause of the massed ranks of the city’s Brazilian exiles, all dressed in yellow and green, draped with the bandeira and playing samba tunes on drums and pipes. Sadly, their enthusiasm was rewarded with nothing more than a sterile goalless draw and afterwards the Brazilian coach, the endlessly patient Carlos Alberto Parreira, was pinned to the wall of the dressing room by the sixty-odd football reporters who had followed him across the Atlantic and now were keen to know, on behalf of the 150 million experts back home, how on earth he expected to win the World Cup with that bunch of deadbeats.

  Senna slipped away into the night, to a dinner date at La Coupole with his friend António Braga. Both the racing driver and the soccer team were favourites to land a fourth world championship in 1994, and both were in trouble.

  When he arrived at Imola by helicopter on the afternoon of the following Thursday, 28 April, it was to discover that Head, Newey and the Williams technicians had been hard at work. The front wheels had been moved back, as had the front wing, which had also been raised. Together, these changes improved the aerodynamic balance, although developments later in the season showed that there was still plenty wrong with the behaviour of the Williams at this stage.

  The front cover of that week’s Autosport carried a picture of the Brazilian looking pensive and the banner headline: ‘Senna: Can he take the heat?’ A tabloid-style simplification, and something of an insult to a triple world champion, but a good indication of the degree to which motor racing, like most other modern sports with a television following, had grown to depend on a constantly rising level of hype. And, after a spin and a crash in two races, a question just about worth asking.

  The Williams was a little better as a result of the work at Didcot, and that weekend he set the fastest practice time yet again, his third in three races that season, and the sixty-fifth and last of his career.

  On the first day of qualifying his time was half a second faster than Schumacher’s, the day disrupted by a spectacular accident to Rubens Barrichello, whose Jordan flew through the air at 146 m.p.h. like a jet fighter before spearing the tyre wall at the Variante Bassa and rolling twice. When the young Brazilian regained consciousness in the pits, Senna was standing over him. Then, having ascertained that his compatriot was not badly injured, he returned to complete the practice session, and to spend most of the afternoon in an intense debriefing session with his race engineer, David Brown.

  Some time during the Friday afternoon he saw his pilot, Owen O’Mahony, who had flown him into Forli airport in his $12m eight-seater British Aerospace HS125 jet. O’Mahony was surprised when Senna handed him three signed photographs of himself with O’Mahony. ‘I’d never had a picture of the two of us together,’ the pilot recalled five days later, as he stood in the arrivals area of São Paulo airport waiting for his employer’s coffin to arrive. ‘I’d been meaning to ask him for ages. And suddenly, in the middle of a grand prix meeting, he fished around in his briefcase and pulled them out. I don’t know why it should have been then.’

  On Saturday afternoon, eighteen minutes into the second qualifying session, the Austrian driver Roland Ratzenberger left the track at the Villeneuve kink, possibly as a result of damage sustained to the front wing of his Simtek when he went over a kerb on the previous lap. He was travelling at something approaching 200 m.p.h. when he hit the concrete wall bordering that part of the circuit, and suffered injuries that killed him instantly.

  Ratzenberger was the thirty-second driver to be killed in post-war Formula One, but he was also the first fatality in twelve years, since Ricardo Paletti had died after driving straight into the back of another car on the grid at Montreal in 1982. That made Ratzenberger’s death all the more resonant to a generation of drivers who had never experienced such a loss, at least at that level. (By contrast, during Stirling Moss’s time in Formula One, from 1954 to 1961, seven drivers were killed at grand prix meetings.) Senna was particularly deeply affected, and when the session had been halted he commandeered a safety car to take him to the scene, where he examined the track and the wreckage before returning to the pits. There he was reprimanded by the race director, John Corsmit, for taking the car without asking permission. Corsmit was right, at least by the book: the car might have been needed elsewhere. But Senna’s mind was on other imperatives, and there was a lengthy argument. ‘At least someone is concerned about safety,’ he shouted at Corsmit. Those who were around Senna that afternoon remember a look they hadn’t seen in his face before; not surprising, since it was the first time he had needed to face up to the implications of the death of a Formula One colleague.

  That night, at his hotel in Castel San Pietro, ten kilometres from Imola, he called Adriane twice, either side of dinner. She had arrived from Brazil at their home in the Algarve the previous day. In the first call, he told her that he didn’t want to race the next day. He had never said such a thing to her before. He was crying.

  Later, after a meal with friends and a conversation with Frank Williams, who was staying in the same hotel, he called her again, and this time his voice was calmer and his attitude different. It was OK now, he said. He was going to race. His last words to her: ‘Come and pick me up at Faro airport at eight-thirty tomorrow night. I can’t wait to see you.’

  The mellower mood was still in evidence the next morning, race day, when he was fastest in the warm-up session and then recorded a lap for the French television station TF1, for which Prost was providing commentary. Over the in-car radio link, Senna sent a greeting: ‘I would like to say welcome to my old friend, Alain Prost. Tell him we miss him very much.’ Later, he and Prost talked warmly in the paddock. ‘I miss you,’ Senna repeated to the rival who no longer represented a threat.

  Senna and Berger had talked with Niki Lauda, now a special consultant to Ferrari, about the accidents and the issues they raised. They discus
sed the idea of holding a meeting at Monaco, the next race, to revive the old concept of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, a body set up in the mid-sixties at the instigation of Jo Bonnier, and whose initiatives had improved the security of circuits and cars in a relatively primitive era before withering during the eighties, partly as a result of its own success in reducing the level of danger. Later in the morning, at the regular pre-race drivers’ briefing, they stood and observed a minute’s silence for Ratzenberger. Acting at Senna’s behest, Berger raised a reservation about the use of a safety car, to be brought on to the circuit after accidents to pace the field until the track was clear. They were worried that making the cars hold station at low speed would allow their tyres to cool down, making them inefficient and possibly dangerous in the moments after racing resumed. Senna added a few words. He, Berger and Schumacher left the meeting deep in conversation.

  Race time. And a few good examples of how a death does funny things to the memories of witnesses. Someone says that they saw Senna walking round the back of his car just before the race, looking at it suspiciously. Someone else, who knew him as well as anybody outside his family, says that even the way he pulled on his fireproof balaclava was different. Another points out, as if it were deeply significant, that he departed from his usual practice by taking his helmet off while the car was on the grid before the start at Imola, something he never did (wrong: he sometimes did). Damon Hill, on the other hand, says he was in a normal state of mental preparation for the race: ‘totally focused’.

  Adriane was watching on TV in Portugal. ‘To me,’ she wrote in her awkward but touching memoir, ‘at that moment of tense expression and hands firmly gripping the car, he was just thinking. For the first time in his career, he felt the fragility of the machine and the fragility of the human being. A man had just died in front of him. A friend had hurt himself against the wall. Until then, the driver Ayrton Senna had sat in his car and driven on the limits. Suddenly other feelings had interfered in his life: surprise, fear …’

  A fair guess, from a few hundred miles away. Nothing mysterious or mystical about any of it. But when the race started, the racing driver took over.

  He led from the start, with Schumacher close behind. Before the field had all crossed the starting line, however, there was chaos. J. J. Lehto stalled his Benetton, and was hit from behind by Pedro Lamy. A wheel from Lamy’s Lotus was ripped off and flew into the crowd, injuring eight spectators and a policeman. As the twenty-four remaining cars howled round the back of the circuit, John Corsmit sent out the safety car.

  This was what Senna and Berger had been anxious about. A measure borrowed that season from Indycar racing, the safety car’s job is to come in at the head of the field, just in front of the leader, slowing them down and circulating until crash debris has been cleared away and spilt oil covered up. In America, it serves the secondary function of allowing the field to bunch up, artificially enhancing the excitement. There is little doubt that this was in the minds of Mosley and Ecclestone when the FIA adopted the idea. Terrified of the danger of falling ratings after years of processional racing during the McLaren and Williams eras, they were looking for anything that might boost the thrill factor. Refuelling stops were one notion, only a decade after they had been banned on safety grounds; the safety car was another. But what worried Senna and Berger was that when the cars’ tyres cooled down, the lack of heat would lower the pressure inside the tyre, the rubber would contract, and the tyres’ diameter would be reduced. In cars running with a ground clearance so finely adjusted that a couple of millimetres could ruin the handling, this might be a critical factor.

  For five laps, Senna trailed round behind the black saloon, Schumacher and the rest droning along in his wake. Out on the start line, course marshals worked fast to clear the debris from the cars of Lamy and Lehto. Then, with the field approaching the finishing straight at the end of the fifth lap, the safety car peeled off into the pit lane, releasing the racers to resume their combat.

  As they entered Tamburello, the flat-out left-hander after the pits, Schumacher noticed that Senna was taking a tight line, the car jiggling on the bumps, sparks coming up from the magnesium skid-plates under the car. Nothing particularly extraordinary about that, although later it emerged that Senna had warned Hill of the bumps at Tamburello, telling him to stay wide.

  They crossed the line at the end of lap six with Senna still in the lead, Schumacher close behind, Hill already five seconds further back, his car feeling twitchy on its cold tyres.

  Schumacher with two wins and twenty points, Senna with nothing. People talking about Schumacher as the new Senna, maybe even faster and fitter than the old one. Ten years younger, for sure. Adriane knew Ayrton took him seriously, because of the way he referred to him only as ‘the German’, in the way he had spoken of Prost as ‘the Frenchman’ during their years of poisoned rivalry.

  ‘Our season starts here,’ Senna had told a television reporter before the race. Now, at 190 m.p.h. he went into Tamburello for the seventh time.

  Frank Williams watched it from the TV monitor in the Williams pit. A helicopter-borne camera focused on the wreckage, as orange-overalled marshals fussed around the yellow helmet. Alone in all the world, the camera held an unflinching gaze.

  ‘Three minutes … five minutes …’ In his office at the Didcot factory many months later, strapped to the standing frame which he sometimes uses instead of a wheelchair, Williams recalled how it had seemed to last for ever. ‘Those good old Italian TV cameras never left him alone.’ A laugh with all the humour erased, a flash of his startling jade eyes. ‘Television is a major reason for the sport’s success, but it’s also a problem we have to face. When Ayrton was killed, it was immensely public. Terrible. But we can’t have it all ways.’

  Even when eighty people died at Le Mans in 1955, the race went on. It always has. Damon Hill had to drive past the accident as it was happening, knowing that it was Senna, knowing that it was a big one, not knowing whether he was alive or dead.

  I thought of something Phil Hill, the first American world champion, had said in the early sixties, when he drove his Ferrari past the scene of a bad accident involving a team-mate: ‘What did it do to me? Nothing. Do I sound callous? I used to go to pieces. I’d see an accident like that and feel so weak inside that I wanted to quit, to stop the car and get out. I could hardly make myself go past it. But I’m older now. When I see something horrible I put my foot down, because I know everyone else is lifting his.’

  In the case of Senna’s accident, it was different. The red flags came out as the cars went through the Acque Minerali turn on the back leg of the circuit. They slowed, and Schumacher brought them to a halt at the entrance to the pit lane. Had they been told of Senna’s death then, probably none of them would have wanted to resume. Senna’s death was of another order. He was the best of them, and they thought him indestructible. Later, most of them would have the same response: if it could happen to him, it could happen to me. But, waiting in the pit lane for the instruction to go out and form up for the restart, they didn’t know.

  They didn’t know because it hadn’t been certified on the spot. If it had, the Italian police would have taken charge and begun their investigations, questioning witnesses, impounding equipment and preventing the race taking place. Remember: ‘Television is a major reason for the sport’s success …’

  Senna’s body was lifted from the crumpled Williams and laid on the ground, where Professor Watkins and his crew went through the motions of a tracheotomy to clear his airways, and cardiac massage to revive him. He was still officially alive when he was lifted away on a journey to the Ospedale Maggiore by a helicopter whose gentle, balletic take-off was caught by the camera in the TV chopper.

  In the paddock, there was confusion and a babble of Chinese whispers. Had Professor Watkins told Ecclestone ‘It’s his head’ or ‘He’s dead’? And what had Ecclestone said to Leonardo da Silva, Senna’s brother? At 2.55 p.m., thirty-eight minutes aft
er the crash, the race resumed. Berger led for a few laps to the wild cheers of Ferrari’s home crowd, and then pulled off: something wrong with the left rear corner of the car, his team said. Perhaps it was indeed so.

  Schumacher won, commandingly, from Larini and Hakkinen. On the podium, still not really knowing what was going on, the three of them smiled and waved and gave the crowd a champagne shower, looking very young.

  When she saw the accident, Adriane’s first thought was, ‘Oh good, he’ll be home early tonight.’ Then she realized it was serious. The radio told her that he’d regained consciousness. Her friend Luiza Braga, the wife of António, rang to say that a chartered jet was waiting on the tarmac to carry her to Bologna, a three-hour flight.

  She was sitting waiting for take-off when António got through from Imola to say that Ayrton was dead. His heart had still been beating under artificial stimulation when Berger visited the hospital after the race, but there was no activity in his brain and at 6.40 p.m. the doctors decided that it was over. The jet taxied back to the terminal, and the two women drove off to the Bragas’ villa in Sintra, to make new plans for a flight to São Paulo.