The Death of Ayrton Senna

by Richard Williams

  Just how cheap was revealed by Hill in his diary of the season. ‘Come on, Michael,’ he said as they sat on the pit-lane wall, fixing their best smiles on a couple of hundred photographers, ‘let’s forget all the bullshit.’

  ‘Yes,’ Schumacher replied, his smile unwavering, ‘after the championship.’

  They went to Adelaide for the last race of a gloomy and chaotic season with Schumacher leading Hill by one point in the contest for what would be, now and for ever, a tainted championship. Nevertheless, the showdown captured the world’s imagination. Single combat. Head to head, wheel to wheel. The brash German prodigy, symbol of the economic miracle, confident of his destiny, versus the quiet Englishman, eight years older, a late developer, struggling to find his place in the scheme of things, wrestling his way out of the shadows of two world champions – his father, killed in an air crash when he was fifteen, and his late team leader.

  Lap 36. Schumacher first, Hill in his wake. They approach turns three and four, a left and right. As Schumacher runs wide on the first of the two sharp bends, his right front wheel hits the wall and throws him into the middle of the track. Hill sees what has happened, and goes to pass him on the left. Schumacher, who says later that his steering was damaged, goes left, blocking Hill. His car is moving unsteadily. Hill switches, dives right, taking the inside line for turn four. Schumacher too goes for the inside, blocking Hill again. But this time the Williams is overlapping the Benetton, and the cars collide, throwing Schumacher into the air and off the track. Hill limps round to the pits, where Patrick Head sees that the left front suspension wishbone is so badly bent that it would be unsafe to continue. Replacing it would take too long.

  Schumacher, parked on the grass at turn four, gets out, takes off his helmet, and is told by a marshal that Hill has retired. He is the 1994 world champion. He can’t help himself. He smiles. As he walks along the edge of the track between the steel barrier and the chain-link fence, acknowledging the fans, perhaps he is already preparing the speech in which he will offer his title to the memory of Ayrton Senna.

  This was 1989 and 1990 all over again. Everybody saw it, over and over again on the video replay, but although we all had an opinion no one could say what had really happened. Until we had a closer look, and slept on it, and listened to what Stewart or Lauda had to say, and looked again …

  Schumacher’s suggestion that damaged steering removed his control of the car was put in doubt by the fact that, although his car was moving erratically, it did not prevent him from effectively blocking Hill twice, first to the left and then to the right, inside a couple of seconds.

  Hitting the wall certainly had some observable effect on the Benetton, which led many to question the wisdom of Hill’s decision to go for the pass at the earliest opportunity. Foot off the throttle, a dab on the brake, two or three seconds to see what was going to happen next, and he would have succeeded to his father’s crown.

  What he did was take the racer’s option. For six months he had been chasing Schumacher around the world, and the German had made few mistakes on the track. Here was one, at the season’s moment of truth. It looked gift-wrapped, but all Hill’s training would have told him that there are no free gifts in motor racing. He had to seize the chance. And if he had considered any other decision, he would not have been there in the first place.

  Hill saw no point in making a fuss. The season had given, and it had taken away. That was something he knew about much better than Schumacher did. How could you complain about the loss of a bauble in the face of the loss of a man?

  And Schumacher, too, had done what a racer would. You’re in the lead. Everything is at stake. Give nothing away. Hold the line at all costs, put the car where you want to put it, let the other fellow worry about it. Some words come back: ‘He left you to decide whether or not you wanted to have an accident with him.’

  After all, the precedents were highly respectable. You did it, you got out, and you walked away to claim your prize. The other fellow might as well not have been there at all.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘From the bottom of our hearts,’ said Claudio Taffarel, Brazil’s goalkeeper, ‘we dedicate this victory to our friend Ayrton Senna. He too was heading for his fourth title.’

  Brazil won the World Cup, the long awaited tetracampeonato, to the sound of 150 million people exploding with joy and relief. At every one of their games during USA ’94, in the Rose Bowl and Stanford Stadium and the Silverdome, the yellow and green multitude carried special banners saluting the man whose fourth championship had been won in their hearts: ‘Valeu campeão! Este é o seu Tetra!’

  At Estoril on the morning of the Portuguese Grand Prix, a small crowd gathered for the unveiling of a memorial erected on an infield mound, overlooking the big right-hander before the finishing straight: a white marble obelisk with a brass needle, bearing an inscription.

  Ayrton disse um dia

  A morte

  ‘O dia que chegar …

  Chegou.

  Pode ser hoje …

  Ou daqui a 50 anos.

  A única coisa certa,

  é que ela vai chegar …’

  Ayrton once said

  concerning death

  ‘The day it comes,

  it comes.

  It could be today …

  or not for fifty years.

  The only certainty

  is that it will come.’

  But with Senna, no one was expecting it; in part because people had become used to the idea that racing drivers nowadays die of old age, and also because of his own particular qualities. ‘He was the one driver so perfect that nobody thought anything could happen to him,’ his friend Gerhard Berger said, summing up the reaction among his colleagues.

  Outside the world of motor racing, the ripple of emotion extended around the world, among all types and classes. Even people who never cared much for motor racing found themselves affected. It wasn’t just that a young man pre-eminent in a glamorous world had died in a tragic accident (this wasn’t a James Dean job). It was suddenly clear to many people that there were other dimensions to Ayrton Senna, that the aspirations which guided his life had a meaning in terms of something other than his chosen sport. Here was a man born to an easy, privileged existence, who had chosen to make it more difficult in order to find some sort of truth for himself, because that truth could not be attained without the experience of struggle. And if, in the process, he had become the best in the world at what he did, perhaps even the best there has ever been, that had not been enough for him. One world championship or half a dozen: they may have been the target, but they were never the point.

  This was why even those of us who harboured ambivalent feelings towards him in life found ourselves shaken into a reconsideration of his meaning and value, and discovering – perhaps to our surprise – how moved we were by the removal of a figure whose actions had so often been the cause of rancorous argument.

  Was this the usual process of posthumous sentimentalization accorded to dead heroes? I don’t think so. When Senna was alive, he was always on the move, always thinking, always changing the equation, always making everybody else question their own positions and readjust to his movements. Only when he died were we able to look objectively at his achievements: to balance the intention, the method and the outcome. And what the read-out said was that he wouldn’t be replaced, because such complexity of character and technical skill rarely coexist within a single human being.

  ‘There is no end to the knowledge that you can get or the understanding or the peace by going deeper and deeper,’ Senna once said. ‘I pray regularly, not because it is a habit but because it has innovated my life. I hardly go to church because the only time I feel really good in a church is when there’s nobody there.’

  Like his sexual preferences or his taste in breakfast cereal, Senna’s theology was his own business. But it seemed to provide him with the right kind of support for a man in his solitary trade, where many people wo
rk with great imagination and unstinting effort to provide the individual with the opportunity to put his life (and the happiness of those close to him) at hazard. ‘If you have God on your side,’ he said, ‘everything becomes clear. I have a blessing from Him. But, of course, I can get hurt or killed, as anyone can.’

  Because he chose to speak of these things, of God and morality, it was easy to get him wrong. Even easier to take a dislike to his piousness, or poke fun at his pretensions. Sports people are supposed to go no further in philosophical terms than the practised one-liner. But the more you saw of him (and, maybe, the older and wiser he grew), the easier it became to appreciate his qualities as a man. Occasionally he had lied and cheated, which made it impossible not to have mixed feelings about him. But he knew the meaning of Browning’s words: ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what’s a heaven for?’ This was his version: ‘Many times I find myself in a comfortable position, and I don’t feel happy about it. It is … an enormous desire to go further, to travel beyond my own limits.’ For him the last enemy was not death, or the opponent next to him on the grid, but himself.

  ‘I have had all my life a very strong and good education,’ he once said, ‘and from that I have got clear and strong principles … and I use these principles to move as a man and as a professional. I don’t regret anything. I believe I am doing things for the right reasons. Some understand, some don’t. In the end you’ll never get everybody to understand, to agree and to accept …’

  The sound of Brazilians speaking Portuguese is as close to music as human speech gets: all those soft, frictionless zzzhhhaow and onnng noises, and the falling cadences. Even in English, Senna’s voice carried a special lyricism. As he collected his thoughts, mentally translated them and launched into a lucid, fantastically detailed description of some minor technical problem during a race, sometimes it made you drift away from attention to the words, the better to enjoy the music.

  His willingness to confront inquisitors and deal fully and politely with them was a source of constant surprise and pleasure. After a press conference, he would often be waylaid by reporters en route to the motorhome, and would stand for an hour or more – in the sweat of his thick driving suit, at the end of an afternoon of intense physical and mental effort – until all questions had been answered in full.

  Sometimes, when he was explaining why he had just squeezed Prost into the pit wall or tried to run him off the road, he could sound like a prize hypocrite. There can be no denying that he did more than anyone to bring crude dodgem tactics to Formula One, his initiative rendered relatively risk-free by the fat rubber tyres and immensely strong survival cells of the current cars. Had Fangio and Moss and Hawthorn, in their frail, spindly, unprotected vehicles, tried such things as regularly went on between Senna and Prost and Mansell, they would have killed themselves straightaway. So Senna was able to change the mood and style of the sport, with consequences that outlived him: as the best of his time he became, for good or ill, the example for ambitious young drivers to follow.

  Nor was his defence always guaranteed to win the heart of the sceptic. Once, while arguing with somebody who had done something he didn’t like, he was told that he too had been known to block an opponent or two in his time. ‘But I am Senna,’ he said. Which sounded preposterous, until you thought about it. He was indeed Senna, and the cultivation of humility in his working life would not have taken him to the places he found. And for all the occasionally dubious nature of his intimidatory manoeuvres, it also has to be said that on many occasions his sheer brilliance deformed the behaviour of his competitors, which could hardly have been held to his account.

  A rich man in a Third World country, he gave a lot of his earnings to charity, quietly. Maybe the donations – $100 million to a children’s hospital in São Paulo, $75 million to an organization devoted to the health care of Indians and rubber-plantation workers in the hinterland – were conscience money. But that must have been quite a conscience. ‘It cannot go on like this,’ he said of his country. ‘The wealthy can no longer continue to live on an island in a sea of poverty. We are all breathing the same air. People have to have a chance, a basic chance at least. A chance of education, nutrition, medical care.’ The good he did in this respect was not interred with him: the Senna Foundation, run by his sister and his former associates, became the conduit for his financial legacy, concentrating its efforts on helping children.

  You could forgive him a lot. On the track, for his refusal to coast, to rest on his many laurels, to take the money and, just occasionally, run a little bit slower. He lived in the present tense, looking ahead. ‘I see only the future,’ he said. ‘The past is just data – information to consider.’ Ignore the terminology. He wasn’t talking about computer telemetry, but about the real flesh-and-blood proof of talent: you win something, and then go back and win it again, and again.

  At Interlagos in his last season, during a practice session, I watched him in the pits, in conversation with Damon Hill and Patrick Head. Hill, who had done most of the testing on the latest car and knew much more about Williams technology than the newcomer, was doing the talking. He was describing some aspect of the FW16’s behaviour, his two hands held out in front of him, palms down, moving left and right, up and down, imitating the attitude of the two sides of the car. Head was listening, occasionally saying something. But Senna was listening at some other level. Looking hard at Hill, not talking at all. Absorbing whatever information the younger man had to impart, feeding it in, making sense of it, turning it into winning data.

  He wasn’t impervious to fantasy. Adriane Galisteu said he talked about wanting to finish his career at Ferrari, ‘even if the car is as slow as a Beetle’. It was one of the few purely romantic notions that ever escaped the privacy of his dreams. It wouldn’t have happened, I guess; the Ferrari he wanted to drive was the one built under Enzo’s eye. He must have fancied dropping himself into the seat once occupied by Ascari, Fangio, Gonzalez, Collins, von Trips, Surtees, Lauda and Villeneuve, but the battle of wits with the old Ingegnere would have been even more fun. And in that he might just have come out ahead of Fangio, whether or not he ever made it to a fifth championship, or the sixth that would have added statistical proof to the largest of all the claims made on his behalf.

  ‘Senna was the greatest driver ever,’ observed Niki Lauda, a stranger to sentimental exaggeration. ‘And when someone like that is killed, you have to ask yourself what is the point of it all.’

  One day, the boy told his father as they drove home, Jim Clark will be the champion of the world. That night he lay on his bed and read the race programme over and over again. For the next few years the boy traced Clark’s ascent with pride. The twenty-five grand prix wins and two world championships. The historic invasion of Indianapolis.

  And then, of course, Sunday 7 April 1968, the day of Clark’s death in a meaningless race in Germany. His Lotus flew off the track and into the trees, for reasons nobody could ever explain. A burst tyre, perhaps. A broken suspension arm. Steering failure. He couldn’t have made a mistake.

  The man stands on tiptoe to reach a brown cardboard box at the top of some bookshelves. He pulls out a small pamphlet and carries it carefully back to his desk. The cover has come away from the rusting single staple; otherwise it is intact.

  He looks at the results, completed in his father’s familiar sloping hand. From that grey Easter Monday in 1959, his thoughts spin forward to a drizzly April afternoon in 1993, when he stood on a muddy bank and watched the yellow helmet go by.

  Epilogue

  ‘My name is Damon Hill. I am a racing driver.’ The world champion leaned back in his courtroom chair, turned towards a rookery of lawyers, and awaited the first question. Three hours later, the rest of us – in the unremarkable upstairs room at the Casa Dopolavoro Imola, a social club turned into a temporary court – were still waiting for answers that might shed light on the death, just down the road, of another world champion.

  Th
is was 2 June 1997. Three years and one month after his team mate’s fatal accident, Hill had been invited back to Imola to give evidence to an inquiry which, under the Italian legal system, lay in procedural terms between an inquest and a trial. Somewhere en route, however, he seemed to have left part of his memory behind.

  A local judge, Antonio Costanzo, had been listening since late February to evidence that would determine, or so he hoped, responsibility for what happened at the start of the seventh lap of the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. After two years of Maurizio Passarini’s inquiry, and months of rumours, an examining judge, Diego Di Marco, had looked at Passarini’s 700-page report and agreed to bring a charge of omicidio colposo – culpable homicide, the Italian version of manslaughter – against six men: Frank Williams, the team boss; Patrick Head and Adrian Newey, designers of the FW16B; Federico Bendinelli, the managing director of the company owning the Imola autodrome; Giorgio Poggi, the circuit manager; and Roland Bruynseraede, the race director. The notion of charging four of the Williams team’s pit-lane personnel (chief mechanic David Brown, gearbox technician Carl Gaden, chassis man Gary Woodward and tyre mechanic Steve Coates) had been abandoned. Although none of the accused was present to hear Hill’s evidence, their lawyers certainly were.

  Passarini opened the proceedings with what was intended to be a searching examination of Hill, the only other man driving a Williams-Renault FW16B and sharing its secrets with Senna that day in 1994. Passarini had long since come to the conclusion that the accident had been caused by an impact fracture in the steering column, which had at some previous stage been cut, extended and rewelded in order to give Senna more room in the cramped cockpit. But the investigating magistrate was also having to explore theories that the car had been thrown off the road at 190 m.p.h. either by a fault in its power-steering system or by the combined effect of low tyre pressures and ripples on the track surface on the inside of Tamburello. A further complication had arisen a month earlier when Passarini suddenly went public with an accusation that someone had tampered with the videotape from the camera on Senna’s car.