As Passarini’s men resumed their task and argued among themselves about what their findings meant, others watched the videotape over and over again. Patrick Head said he’d seen something significant in it, but wouldn’t elaborate. Steve Nichols wasn’t sure. ‘There are no obvious signs of panic,’ he said. ‘People have said that his head seemed to be bent down, that he might have been looking at something. I don’t know if you can draw that conclusion. His head was bouncing up and down a lot anyway, because of the bumps.’
Might the final 1.4 seconds have told us something?
‘Maybe. It’s a bit like the missing eighteen minutes in the Watergate tape, isn’t it?’
As the months went by, the minds of Formula One people turned away from the details of the tragedy at Imola as they became reabsorbed in their own pressing problems during a season of unparalleled turmoil and upheaval. But still the Senna accident remained a topic of conversation in and out of the paddock. Why, really, are we so concerned with the minutiae of a single accident in a sport that its practitioners necessarily accept as potentially lethal?
‘Everybody wants to know what happened to the biggest figure in the sport,’ Steve Nichols observed. ‘But there’s another thing. If there were technical reasons for the crash, the rest of us should be told. Any kind of failure – hydraulic, metallurgical, software – could tell us something. I’d just like an answer, you know?’
At the end of February, the search for the truth took a step forward when Maurizio Passarini received a 500-page report containing a technical analysis of the accidents at Imola. Its conclusions were widely leaked, and offered few surprises. Ratzenberger, the analysts wrote, appeared to have lost control as a result of damage to his front wing. As for Senna, the report concentrated on modifications to the steering of the FW16B carried out between the races at São Paulo and Imola. A fracture in one of the welds of the steering-column extension, the report suggested, was the most likely cause of the accident.
Passarini sent a copy of the findings to Didcot, from where Patrick Head immediately issued a brisk rebuttal. ‘We presented documentation within a month of the accident which pretty much showed that we couldn’t have got any of the data that was recorded without the wheel being attached to the column,’ he said. Head complained that his submission, and a subsequent report carefully written in layman’s language, appeared to have been ignored by the investigators.
The magistrate invited the Williams team to a meeting in Bologna, but with every day that passed the prospect of a definitive verdict on the Senna accident seemed to recede.
Chapter Ten
Michael Schumacher went on to win five more races in 1994, becoming the first German driver to win the world championship, by a single point from Damon Hill. And the way he did it raised more questions about the circumstances and meaning of Ayrton Senna’s death.
On that day in March when Schumacher and Verstappen were putting the finishing touches to their cars before leaving for Interlagos, Ross Brawn had leaned back in the chair of his office at the Benetton racing-car factory, a low white structure carefully blended into the gently rolling Oxfordshire countryside. He blinked behind his big round spectacles and smiled his enigmatic owlish smile as he considered his response to a question about compliance with Formula One’s ban on computerized driver-aids.
Do you feel, I asked Benetton’s technical director, that you’re likely to stray into any of these new grey areas of illegality?
‘I don’t think so, no. I’m fairly confident we’re kosher.’
What about the other teams?
‘Well, so much depends on what results other people are getting. Ferrari, for instance. They’ve got a new front suspension system. Some people think it’s legal, others don’t. If they start to run away with the races, I’m sure the other teams would become more vociferous in their objections. But if they aren’t competitive, people will tend to overlook it.’
Ten days later, nobody was thinking about Ferrari’s front suspension system as Ross Brawn stood, still smiling owlishly, on the fringe of the festivities in the Benetton pit at Interlagos, waiting for Michael Schumacher to return from the podium and join the team in a glass of champagne to celebrate a conclusive victory.
Three doors up the pit lane, Ayrton Senna was contemplating what he had seen, evaluating the ease with which Schumacher had used the Benetton to blow him away. It was a thought that would preoccupy him for the last five weeks of his life. And by mid-summer, it would rival Senna’s death as the defining factor of the season.
At the French Grand Prix in late June, Schumacher beat Hill off the line with a start so flawless that it hardened the suspicions lurking in many minds. This was the kind of get-away that had been seen many times in the previous two seasons, when the top teams had enjoyed the benefit of the now proscribed traction control systems and fully automatic gearboxes.
Announcing its ban on most kinds of computer-controlled devices, the FIA had been loud in its insistence that the new regulations would be regularly and strictly policed. And in July, shortly after the British Grand Prix, the FIA’s technical commission produced the findings from a software analysis company, LDRA of Liverpool, which it had hired to conduct its spot checks into the computer programmes being used by three teams: Ferrari, McLaren and Benetton.
To enable these checks to be made, the teams had first to agree to surrender their source codes: the means of access to their computer programmes. Ferrari, spooked by the unpunished discovery of their use of a variation on traction control at Aida, readily complied; their cars were found to be clean. McLaren and Benetton, however, refused to produce the source codes, claiming that to do so would first compromise the commercial confidentiality and second infringe the ‘intellectual copyright’ of their software suppliers. When it was pointed out to them that LDRA is often enlisted by the British government to look into military software whose confidentiality is covered by the Official Secrets Act and carries weightier consequences than a silver cup, a few bottles of champagne and the further inflation of a few already oversized egos, they gave in.
Both teams were fined $100,000 for attempting to obstruct the course of justice. And, when the findings emerged, both appeared to have had something to hide. In McLaren’s case it was a gearbox programme permitting automatic shifts. After much deliberating, and to the surprise of many, the FIA eventually decided that this was not illegal. But Benetton had something far more exciting up their sleeves.
When LDRA’s people finally got into the B194’s computer software, they discovered a hidden programme, and it was dynamite: something which allowed Schumacher to make perfect starts merely by flooring the throttle and holding it there, the computer taking over to determine the correct matching of gear-changes to engine speed, ensuring that the car reached the first corner in the least possible time, with no wheel spin or sideslip, all its energy concentrated into forward motion. Before the winter, this combination of traction control and gearbox automation would have been legal. Now, although explicitly outlawed by the regulations, it was still there. If you knew how to find it. Because it was invisible.
It took even LDRA’s people a while. What you had to do was call up the software’s menu of programmes, scroll down beyond the bottom line, put the cursor on an apparently blank line, press a particular key (no clues to that, either) – and, hey presto, without anything showing on the screen, the special programme was there.
They called it ‘launch control’, and LDRA’s computer detectives also discovered the means by which the driver could activate it on his way to the starting grid. It involved a sequence of commands using the throttle and clutch pedals and the gear-shift ‘paddles’ under the steering wheel. Benetton couldn’t deny its existence, but they did claim that it hadn’t been used since it had been banned. So why was it still there, and why had its existence been so carefully disguised?
It had remained in the software, they said, because to remove it would be too difficult. The danger was th
at in the purging of one programme, others might become corrupted. Best to leave it be. But, so that the driver couldn’t accidentally engage it and thereby unintentionally break the new rules, ‘launch control’ had been hidden carefully away behind a series of masking procedures.
‘That’s enough to make me believe they were cheating,’ an experienced software programmer with another Formula One team told me. ‘Look, we purged our own software of all illegal systems during the winter. I did it myself. OK, our car isn’t quite as sophisticated as the Benetton. But it only took me two days. That’s all. Perfectly straightforward. And the fact that they disguised it was very suspicious.’
Then he told me the most interesting thing I heard all year.
Here’s what you can do, he said, if you really want to get away with something. You write an illegal programme – an off spring of traction control, say, such as a prescription for rev limits in each gear for a particular circuit – and you build into it a self-liquidating facility. This is how it works. The car leaves the pits before the race without the programme in its software. The driver stops the car on the grid, and gets out. His race engineer comes up and, as they do in the pre-race period before the grid is cleared, he plugs his little laptop computer into the car – and presses the key that downloads the illegal programme. For the next hour and a half the driver makes unrestricted use of it. Thanks to its efficiency, he wins the race. He takes his lap of honour, he drives back down the pit lane, he steers through the cheering crowds into the parc fermé where the scrutineers are waiting to establish the winning car’s legality, and he switches off the engine. And the programme disappears, leaving not a trace of its existence.
‘It’s easy,’ the software man said. ‘In fact we use it all the time in testing, when we just want to try something out without having it hanging around to clutter up the system. And it’s just about impossible to police. The FIA came round the teams early in the season, asking advice on what to do. But they’re totally out of their depth here, not surprisingly. It’s like crime. There’s always more at stake for the criminals than for the police, so the criminals are always a step ahead. It’s a nightmare, really.’
The whole season was a nightmare. The deaths of Ratzenberger and Senna triggered an agony of introspection within the sport and a frenzy of comment from the world outside. What the Heysel and Hillsborough tragedies had been to soccer, Imola was to motor racing: all the hidden self-doubts, inadequacies and contradictions were brought to the surface and held up to general inspection.
At Monaco two weeks later, Karl Wendlinger lost control at high speed and crashed on the approach to the harbour-front chicane, suffering head injuries that put him into a deep coma. The drivers met to agree on a formal revival of the GPDA, the drivers’ association, with Berger, Schumacher, Christian Fittipaldi and Niki Lauda as their committee. Berger remembered his own accident at Tamburello, how he asked the owners of the circuit if the concrete wall could be moved back to give more of a run-off area, and had been told, no, sorry, there’s a river behind it and we can hardly move that, can we? Berger accepted their verdict. ‘I was a bloody idiot,’ he said five years later. Now it would be different. After Ratzenberger and Senna, all circuits would be visited by GPDA delegations in time for safety recommendations to be carried out. Suddenly the glorious history of such challenging corners as Spa’s Eau Rouge and Monza’s Lesmo complex was no defence in the face of the most intense wave of safety-consciousness since the mid-fifties.
At the FIA headquarters in Paris, Mosley and Ecclestone rushed to implement a series of measures designed to slow the cars down and protect the drivers from the consequences of accidents. From mid-season, there would be a mandatory use of regular pump petrol, a 50 m.p.h. limit in the pit lane and new aerodynamic restrictions; most intriguingly, all cars would have to carry a ‘skidblock’ bolted to their undersides – a plank made of a hard wood composite which must not be worn down beyond a certain depth. Intended to ensure that the cars maintained a certain ride height – the gap between the bottom of the car and the road surface – thereby limiting the creation of downforce, it was simultaneously acclaimed as an elegantly simple solution to a complex problem and derided as a ridiculously crude half-measure that had no place in a high-tech sport. From the start of the 1995 season the bottoms of the cars would have a ‘step’, making the airflow harder to manage; engine capacity would be reduced to three litres; and the bodywork would be built up around the driver’s shoulders, giving protection from static and flying objects.
All this issued, essentially, from the shock waves sent out by Senna’s death, as did the circus surrounding the return from America of Nigel Mansell. Disaffected with Indycar racing after his one history-making season, Mansell was readily seduced by Ecclestone into the idea of a return to Williams, taking over Senna’s car. Ecclestone believed that after the retirements of Piquet, Mansell and Prost, Formula One’s appeal to the mass audience could not survive the removal of Senna before the younger men – Alesi, Hakkinen, Barrichello and especially Schumacher – had been given time to establish themselves in the mind of the public. The return of the old box-office star was his solution, and won a ready response from Renault, who agreed to pay Mansell the same fee as Senna: a million dollars a race. The fact that the idea could come from Ecclestone rather than the principals of the Williams team was a powerful illustration of his influence over the sport.
At the time Ecclestone thought this up, the Williams personnel were still in their post-accident trauma. Damon Hill had told Frank Williams and Patrick Head that he wanted to take over the number one’s role, and asked for their backing. They weren’t so sure. Eventually David Coulthard, their regular test driver, took the seat for eight races, at a bargain fee of around £5,000 a race, with Mansell returning for the rounds at Magny-Cours, Jerez, Suzuka and Adelaide, amid a firestorm of hype that was no longer quite so urgently needed thanks to the gathering intensity of the Schumacher v Hill contest, but must nevertheless have gratified Ecclestone.
Still, if one team was at the centre of the nightmare, it was not Williams but Benetton. At Silverstone, Schumacher caused outrage when he tried to unsettle Hill, the pole man, in front of his home crowd by overtaking him twice on the parade lap, a clear act of provocation and explicitly prohibited by the rules. Coulthard, Hill’s new team-mate, then stalled on the grid, leading to a repeat of the starting procedure. And on the second parade lap, Schumacher did it again. When he was shown the black flag during the race by stewards intending to subject him to a ten-second stop-and-go penalty, Schumacher ignored it for three laps – a cardinal sin which he tried to explain away by saying that he couldn’t see the flag properly against the low sun. Others believed he had been encouraged to turn a blind eye by radio messages from his team, whose bosses were frantically arguing with the stewards against the penalty. At Hockenheim, the intensifying personal rivalry between Schumacher and Hill took on a darker tone when an anonymous fan telephoned the Williams driver to announce that he would be shot if he took the lead from Schumacher on the German’s home track. And during that race, in a pit stop, Verstappen’s Benetton was engulfed in an orange ball of flame when petrol escaped from the refuelling rig and ignited on the hot engine. The twenty-one-year-old Dutchman and his crew escaped with minor burns, a miracle to match that experienced by Berger at Imola in 1989.
But then an inspection of the rig, standard equipment supplied to FIA specifications by a French manufacturer of aircraft refuelling systems and given to the teams on the statutory basis that it be left alone, revealed that Benetton had removed a filter in order to speed up the flow of petrol. Careful calculations revealed that this might save them one second at each pit stop, an estimate that would have interested Senna, had he been alive to hear it, since that was almost exactly the margin by which Schumacher’s crew had beaten his own pit workers during their two sets of refuelling stops at Interlagos in March.
And in Belgium, at the scene of his spectacular Formula One d�
�but in 1991 and his first grand prix victory in 1992, Schumacher was disqualified from victory when the wooden plank under his car was found to have worn away by more than the permitted amount.
Whatever ‘draconian’ had meant to Max Mosley at the beginning of the season, the definition did not seem to apply now. Schumacher was given a two-race suspension for the black flag incident at Silverstone, while the team were fined $500,000 for their part in it, but the FIA decided that the ‘best evidence’ suggested that Benetton had not used the ‘launch control’ programme at Imola, and, to widespread astonishment, accepted as justification for the refuelling fire the team’s submission that the removal of the filter had been done by a junior member acting on his own initiative, without authorization.
The bad feeling between Benetton and Williams intensified when Flavio Briatore, Benetton’s managing director, persuaded Renault to break their exclusive deal with Williams and give his team the same engines in 1995, dangling before them the prospect of a link-up with Schumacher, the new superstar, in the marketing of their road cars around the world and particularly in Germany. The cold, hard decision to replace a dead superstar with a living one was made by an industrial company with an international reach, a business plan to fulfil and units of product to shift. The loss of Senna had cost Frank Williams his chief bargaining counter; now he needed Renault, on almost any terms, more than they needed him. Senna, had he lived, would never have let the French company get away with it. But then, of course, had he lived they would not have needed Michael Schumacher.
In public, too, relationships turned sour as Schumacher prepared to return from suspension for the last three races of the season. He had watched from the sidelines as Hill worked hard to close the gap by winning both the races during his absence; now he attempted to undermine the Englishman’s precarious confidence by suggesting that had Senna not been killed, the Brazilian would already be world champion and would have been running rings around his team-mate, whom he described as a second-rate driver and ‘a little man’. Hill spat back, giving Ecclestone the chance to pull off a cheap public-relations coup by having the pair of them mark Schumacher’s comeback with a ceremonial shaking of hands in front of the pits at Jerez.
The Death of Ayrton Senna Page 16
