But it almost makes more sense to pick Imola, 1989, precisely because of the discord and rancour which accompanied it. That was the thing with Senna. However brilliant a driver he was, however much he embellished his reputation with his otherworldliness, his devotion to winning, his sheer conviction, there was something unwholesome, dangerously unethical, about it all. Fangio (still around, like a profoundly respected, but ageing, pope) summed it up by declaring that Senna was a great champion, but not a great sportsman. It was a slightly uneasy precedent that the Brazilian appeared to be setting: the notion that winning justified anything, anything at all.
The season went on, Prost and Senna grimly blanking each other in the McLaren pits. Senna took three GPs in a row (San Marino, Monaco and Mexico), but Prost, showing terrific cunning and toughness, fought back, with the US, French and British GPs. Back in ’82, the wretched Villeneuve, unable to deal with Pironi’s ethical depravity, had lost control of himself, with fatal results. Prost, however, turned out to be a steelier personality. By the time he won again, at Monza, in September, he was well in contention, having stashed away some useful second places to add to his wins – in contrast to Senna’s dazzling but inconsistent assortment of pole positions, wins, retirements and out-of-the-points finishes.
And at Suzuka, for the Japanese Grand Prix, Prost very nearly had his third title in the bag. The pressure was showing (he had used his ‘spoiled brat’ taunt against Senna not long before the race), but Senna unquivocally had to win in order to give himself any chance of thieving the title from his team-mate. As it turned out, he was spectacularly on form: his pole position was a second and a half quicker than Prost’s number two time, and, despite a crummy start and a duff pit stop, he managed to get back up through the field and right back behind Prost, well before the end of the race. He could sense Destiny working for him; his genius was at full stretch; the title shimmered before him.
Which is where it all went wrong. Senna, about to make history, lunged out to take Prost at the chicane; Prost moved over to cover; Senna, believing himself to have the advantage, refused to give way; the cars made contact, and the two drivers went off. Prost, thinking that it was all over, got out of his car and wandered negligently back to the pits. But Senna saw it differently. In a Villeneuve-like passion, he drove back onto the circuit, made it round to the pits, had his nose-cone changed, fell back into the race, and won it, from an absolutely flabbergasted Alessandro Nannini, driving a Benetton. And then, after all this, Senna was disqualified for missing out the chicane on the lap of the accident, and Nannini was handed the win in his place.
Senna appealed to the FIA. They reaffirmed the disqualification, suspended his licence for six months (although the suspension was, as it were, suspended) and fined him $100,000. Prost got to keep his third title, while setting his detestation of Senna in stone. ‘Senna,’ he said, ‘is a man who just lives for and thinks about competition. He has abandoned everything else, every human relationship. He feels sustained by God and he is capable of taking every risk because he thinks he is immortal.’
It was all very odd. On the one hand, the McLaren team was so monumentally efficient at winning races, it was in danger of crushing the life out of the sport which gave it being (Australia, ’89, being an event of real freakishness: neither McLaren finished). On the other hand, it had somehow allowed the two best drivers in the world to get to the point where they loathed one another so badly that they were in danger of destroying each on and off the track.
We have indeed come a long way from the effortless, strife-free superiority of Mercedes/Fangio/Moss/1955 – or, for that matter, from Lotus/Clark/Chapman/1965, when Jim Clark won five Grands Prix in succession and took the Championship by winning six out of a possible ten races. (The ’65 season was so predictable that even The Times, normally 100 per cent patriotic, complained that ‘The onesidedness of G.P. racing in 1965 has tended to remove some of the tension and drama which one likes to associate with motor racing’s corps d’élite’.) But then, Lotus had a clear team hierarchy (Clark’s team-mate Mike Spence being there mainly to make up the numbers) with no room for argument (except, possibly, between Clark and Chapman) and a correspondingly clear sense of purpose. Mercedes were the same, only better. So how could McLaren have got themselves into a position where, at the height of their success, anarchy beckoned?
In a sense, Senna was doing no more than embodying the larger social changes that had taken place in the twenty-five years separating him from Jim Clark. The culture of deference had gone comprehensively out of the window, while self-interest – the driving compulsion of unique personal destiny – was what made the world go round. At the same time, highly paid, commercially visible, sporting personalities (of all flavours) had become a lot more sensitive to the kind of authority they commanded. When Senna was being given his suspension and his $100,000 fine, he found it almost impossible to understand that there was a sovereign body – FISA – which actually had authority over him. Virtually in tears, he complained, ‘I am supposed to be a lunatic, a dangerous man breaking all the rules, but people have the wrong impression.’
And then, just to add to this modern blend of dissent and autonomy-at-all-costs, there was a new element, specific to Formula One: the cars were now much harder to destroy in a crash. By 1990, it was possible to stand up for what you believed were your inalienable rights by taking a swipe at someone, at speed, and hope to walk away from the subsequent mess. Which was an altogether new, and sinister, development.
Incredibly, Senna and Prost did almost exactly the same thing at Suzuka in 1990 as they’d done in 1989 – the differences being that it happened on the first corner of the first lap, rather than in the final stages of the race; that Senna said it was going to happen; and he would be champion if it did happen. Boiling with petulance because he didn’t like the side of the track on which the organisers had set pole position (which he held, by the way), and looking to avenge the crash of ’89, he announced that he would lunge at the first bend as if there were no other cars on the track, in order to claim the advantage he believed to be his by divine ordinance. From there on, it was a case of sauve qui peut, as Prost might have put it.
So he did that, and Prost didn’t give way, and the two crashed out of the race, and Senna took the Championship. Prost had finally had enough. ‘I thought he was one of the human race,’ he said of his team-mate. ‘What he did is disgusting. I am not ready to fight against irresponsible people who are not afraid to die.’ He then quit McLaren.
Senna, on the other hand, argued that Prost ‘made a big mistake to close the door on me, because he took a chance that went wrong.’ He admitted (with all the blinkered logic of a six-year-old) that ‘I contributed to it, but it was not my responsibility.’ He also claimed (despite having clearly won the psychological battle at McLaren) that Prost was ‘always trying to destroy people. He tried to destroy me in the past on different occasions and he hasn’t managed. He –’ Senna by now could no longer bring himself to say the word Prost ‘– will not manage because I know who I am and where I want to go.’ When, in a TV interview, Jackie Stewart taxed Senna with the proposition that he alone had made contact on the track with more cars than the rest of the preceding world champion drivers put together, Senna bridled and then brushed the accusation off as it simply didn’t matter: ‘I find amazing [sic] for you to make such a question, Stewart.’ It made you wonder what sort of monsters Formula One was creating. Away from the heat of battle, it was starting to look like this: Senna’s egomania, his cataracts of paranoia, his monumental lack of concern for the interests of others were all permissible because he was a great driver. In any other walk of life, he would have been called a nut. But in Formula One, he was not just indulged, but fêted. Was this really the way forward?
Prost, meanwhile, having turned his back on Senna and McLaren, fell straight into the greedy arms of Ferrari: a poor decision for both parties. In his first year with the Scuderia (a year in which Senna blithel
y added the 1991 Championship to the one he took in 1990), he bitched away at team-mate Nigel Mansell, forcing him out of the team. In his second year, he bitched away at Ferrari itself, and got the sack before the end of the season. ‘I’ve pointed out and underlined the defects of Ferrari throughout the season,’ he said, by way of self-justification, ‘but no one really listened to a word I said.’
He even managed to get into yet another asinine, controversy-ridden, crash with Senna, at Hockenheim. The usual story: both attacking a chicane, Prost tries to overtake Senna, Senna doesn’t give way, Prost goes off, Prost complains vociferously, Senna replies with a protracted sneer. ‘I think everyone knows Prost by now,’ Senna explained. ‘He is always complaining about the car or the tyres or the team or the mechanics or the other drivers or the circuit. It’s always somebody else to blame. It’s never his fault.’
Senna was triumphant, and apparently with good reason. So low had Prost sunk by the end of 1991 that he gave up racing altogether and took a sabbatical year, finding work as a pundit and commentator. Even then, he managed to get up people’s noses. Max Mosley, head of the FIA – which had reabsorbed FISA early in the 1990s – growled that Prost ‘really thinks he should be running everything’, and that, during his sabbatical, he ‘pontificated about things he does not understand and he describes the entire governing body in contemptuous and offensive terms.’ Well, no one would ever accuse Max Mosley of mincing his words, but even so: is that any way to talk about a three-times world champion? McLaren, and all those victories, must have seemed a very long way away.
Just about the only thing to cheer Prost up during those fruitless years, was a win for Ferrari in Brazil, 1990, in front of Senna’s home crowd. Senna had dominated both practice and the race, but banged into a back-marker (no surprise, there) about halfway through the race, and ruined his chances. Prost swanned through, finishing nearly fourteen seconds ahead of Gerhard Berger in the other McLaren. ‘They don’t come much sweeter than that,’ crowed Prost. ‘Beating Senna in São Paulo made it a fantastic day for Ferrari, but especially for me.’ Team-mates, eh? And there the matter rested. For a while.
22
WHAT STRANGE NAMES ARE THESE? PART I
There was another world, somewhere away from Ferrari, McLaren, Williams – the dominant outfits of the 1980s and 1990s. Down in the pit lane and among the transporters and motorhomes were other names, other ambitions.
Such as?
Well, Lotus were still soldiering on, increasingly frayed at the edges, but working their way through some great drivers like an ageing cocotte, still just about able to attract virile young men, but unable to hang on to them. Ayrton Senna, Nelson Piquet, Nigel Mansell, Johnny Herbert, Mika Hakkinen all came and went, while Lotus dressed itself up in the sponsor’s regalia of John Player, then Camel cigarettes, then Komatsu, the earth-mover company, and Tamiya, the plastic toy kit people – who once reverently produced 1/12th scale models of the Lotus 49, and were now doing their best to stop the team from collapsing altogether.
Brabham were in a worse state. Having enjoyed their final taste of success with Nelson Piquet, they had been sold off by Bernie Ecclestone at the end of the 1980s and ran their last Grande Épreuve in Hungary in 1992. Tyrrell, likewise, were living off their capital – Ken Tyrrell’s prestige as Grand Old Man of the pit lane, past glories with Jackie Stewart – but were disqualified from the 1984 Championship as a consequence of various shenanigans involving illicit fuels and underweight cars topped up with lead shot (some of which escaped from the fuel tank vents of one of their cars, and came down like hail on the other pits). They never quite got over this and eventually disappeared into the maw of British American Racing in the 1990s.
Which left a mass of minor players, minnows, dreamers, struggling away in the lower half of the grid, battling for the odd point here or there, perhaps a podium place if they were really lucky. Consider the list: RAM (a mid-1980s British micro-outfit, best placing, eighth); Toleman (whose fame rests mainly on the fact that Ayrton Senna took second place at Monaco); Osella/Fondmetal (quixotic Italian chancers, lent significance by an engine deal with Alfa Romeo); Zakspeed (German saloon car racers by nature, using an engine out of Ford Capri in their doomed F1 car); AGS (a tiny French outfit with a legendary minuscule staff); Leyton House (short-lived reworking of the old March team); EuroBrun (Milanese team with a genius for failing to qualify – twenty-one starts from seventy-six entries); Coloni (still going in motor racing at the time of writing, but not Formula One, on account of being even less successful than EuroBrun – fourteen starts from eighty-two entries); Onyx (British team who actually took third place in the 1989 Portuguese GP, but were rapidly stuffed by the interventions of oddball car maker Peter Monteverdi); Life (yet another suck-it-and-see Italian outfit, who lasted precisely one season – 1990 – entered fourteen out of a possible sixteen races and failed to qualify for any of them).
* * *
Depressing, no? And yet, among these apparent down-and-outs were other, better-thought-through, livelier, more hopeful prospects, whose successes were the justification and inspiration for anyone who wanted to try their hand among the lower orders – the keepers of the flame, in fact.
Take the Arrows team. They started out in 1977, and were still (just) going at the turn of the century. Based round a group of refuseniks from the Shadow F1 team, they knocked out a brand-new Grand Prix car in less than two months, with a Ford Cosworth DFV engine on the back and Riccardo Patrese driving, and managed to get a second place at the Swedish Grand Prix in their first year, 1978. Patrese managed another second, two years later at the United States Grand Prix West, in Long Beach, and again, the following year, at San Marino. By 1988, they were using the preposterously named Megatron engine (actually a sensible BMW turbo) and had their best year, clocking twenty-three points in the season and coming an impressive fourth in the Constructors’ Championship. Bernie Ecclestone’s system of payments and rewards to racing teams – built round an occult formula involving the length of time a team had been in existence, and its past record of success – meant that, as well as getting money from their sponsors (USF&G Financial Services Group), Arrows were being kept afloat courtesy of Bernie, who made it his business to ensure a mixed grid at the start of every race, by helping the smaller teams to survive, day to day.
And, who knows, they could have made it as another Williams, if the chemistry had been right. The cars weren’t too bad; the drivers – Patrese, Thierry Boutsen, Damon Hill – had promise. Money and management were always going to be tricky, that was a given.
But the real headache, as for so many of the smaller teams, was the engine.
When the Ford Cosworth 3-litre – the most succesful F1 engine ever, with 155 Championship wins to its name, the last being in 1983 – faded into the sunset it took with it one of the lifelines of the smaller constructor. We know that the DFVs being used by, say, the Politoys-Fords or the Bellasi-Fords, were not quite as peppy as those in the Tyrrell-Fords or the McLaren-Fords, but they were at least in a similar league. With that great leveller gone, however, an outfit like Arrows was forced into a much more rackety, contingent, situation. First, they had to blag a BMW engine; then an under-the-counter rebadged BMW engine; then a new 3.5-litre Ford V8; then a Porsche V12; then a Mugen-Honda V10; then a Ford again; then a Hart V8; then a Yamaha V10; and so on. With no chance to build up a relationship with an engine supplier (a new make every year, quite often), Arrows were forever doing their best just to keep up, let alone win.
Which was also the case at Jordan, the difference being that, somehow, Jordan Grand Prix (building on a sound base of success in F3 and F3000) managed to get competitive in their first season (thirteen points and fifth place in the 1991 Constructors’ Championship), give Michael Schumacher his first F1 drive (same year), scrounge enough money together to keep going (‘We’ve been through some horrific times’: Eddie Jordan) and then, by the end of the, admittedly cash-drenched, 1990s, become poster-boys for the
Financial Times, who swooned that Jordan Grand Prix had ‘edged out established rivals on and off the race track’, and that Eddie himself ‘has been described as the king of the deal’.
Which was not far from the truth. Whatever else he may have had, Eddie Jordan definitely had a genius for promotion. He had his genial larrikin/madcap rock ‘n’ roller schtick worked out to a nicety, and gave it further definition with a tarty yellow paint scheme for the cars, plus nose-cone paintings like the ones on Second World War bombers, plus some breathtakingly underdressed girls dancing around the paddock, plus real partying after the races. In rock terms, he was Keith Moon to Ron Dennis’s Chris Rea. At the same time (and proof that Jordan were only madcap when they needed to be), the team managed to hang on to Peugeot as engine suppliers for three whole years, before getting Honda engines, with whom they stayed for five seasons, in the course of which they clocked an extremely satisfying one-two at the 1998 Belgian GP (their first win, Damon Hill driving) and two more wins the next year. This put them a startling third in the Constructors’ table, and caused the FT to break out in its rash of adoration. By now they also had serious sponsorship money coming in from Benson & Hedges and Deutsche Post and a staff of 250 people working for them. And the Jordan 199 was a nice car – conventional enough, with its carbon-fibre chassis, six-speed semi-automatic gearbox and high-nose aerodynamics – but it was reliable and reasonably good-natured, and it did most of what was asked of it. ‘Our target has to be to make progress,’ Jordan said, cautiously enough, ‘but we have to be patient and see what other teams have done.’
Perhaps the most important thing about Jordan (cf. Williams) was that Eddie himself was not an engineer or former driver (cf. the begetters of Arrows, AGS, Zakspeed, Life) with all the intellectual and emotional baggage that entailed. He was, instead, a fantastic hustler, moneyman and irrepressible motivator of people. He was a pure fan of the sport who, having realised that he was never to be a great driver, let alone car designer, could give all his energies to the financial and human resources that his team would consume. The fact that the money gradually ran out as the twentieth century became the twenty-first, and that the team dwindled away with it is, was, in a sense, neither here nor there. ‘At the end of the day,’ as he put it, a couple of years after packing it in, in 2004, ‘we delivered. Only five teams in the last twenty-five years have won multiple grand prix races. They are Ferrari, McLaren, Williams, Renault and Jordan. That’s a fact. I mean, Jesus, Toyota and Honda now spend billions and can’t even get on the podium.’ Well, if you’re prepared to overlook the absence of Benetton in this list (or merely regard them as an alternative Renault), you have to give him his due. The Jordan adventure was still an object lesson (of sorts) in how to be brave, and succeed at the highest level.
Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One Page 18
