The Life of Senna

by Rubython, Tom

  At Donington on 24th July, Senna got pole and fastest lap, but Brundle was quicker off the line and won the race – the lead was back down to 18 points. Two weeks later Senna struggled with the car at Oulton Park and lost pole to Brundle. Brundle led, but in the closing stages the two collided heavily as Senna tried to overtake and both went out of the race. At the instigation of his rivals and the stewards, Senna had his licence endorsed, but took a point for fastest lap and opened out his lead to 19 points. A fortnight later, West Surrey Racing tried to take revenge at Silverstone when Brundle’s ride height was found to be too low, but the stewards took no action. Bennetts felt that was the only time in the season when the situation got close to nasty: “The rivalry got a little bit heated. We believed they were fiddling the rules a bit. The ride height of the skirts failed. I wasn’t that close to Silverstone and Eddie [Jordan] was based there. But every other time it was just good hard racing.”

  Senna won but missed fastest lap. Brundle was second, but the gap was now a more comfortable 22 points. At the next round at Oulton Park, Senna crashed heavily while trying to overtake Brundle, who went on to win, pushing the gap between them down to 13 points. At Thruxton, Brundle won and set fastest lap, when Senna’s engine gave up after two laps, the first-ever mechanical failure in a race for a car run by West Surrey Racing. The gap was three points. At Silverstone, Senna misjudged the rain in qualifying and was back in fourth place on the grid. He fought back to second place, less than a second behind Brundle, but he lost and Brundle also scored fastest lap.

  For the first time in the season, Senna was not leading the championship, and there was only one race left. Brundle had 123 points to Senna’s 122 and was the man of the moment. As Bennetts remembers: “We thought we’d have to go out and buy some number two [decals]. The pressure was on. Everything hinged on that last round at Thruxton.”

  Because of his consistency, Brundle would have to drop points; Senna couldn’t. All Senna had to do was win. But over the second half of the season, that had proved far from easy.

  However, Dick Bennetts had a trick up his sleeve. He had discovered a very important piece of information that would put West Surrey Racing back on a par with the Jordan-run cars. He recalls: “I possibly didn’t get on the case quick enough. We both had Toyota engines, both built by the Novamotor company in Italy, but Martin’s were being rebuilt in Italy and ours were being rebuilt in England. And ours didn’t get the evolution. The chassis was good but we were losing it in straight-line speed. That meant we were running less downforce at the wing, so we had to fight harder through the corners. That’s why accidents happened and Ayrton was getting frustrated because he knew he was as good as he had been before but Martin was challenging him. We were a bit slow on the uptake.

  “Before the final round we sent our engine back to Novamotor in Italy as well. Ayrton drove out to Italy with it and spent three or four days with Mr Pedrazani, the boss of Novamotor. Plus Ralt had two chassis modifications and there was one for us and one for Eddie Jordan – Ron Tauranac was being fair. We chose the sidepods and they chose a different front geometry or something. We went to Snetterton for a test prior to the final round, both teams at one end of the pits to the other, and we were flying with this new engine. If we’d had it six or seven races before, we wouldn’t have had half the accidents. So in the final round we just left Martin for dead again. With the new engine and the better aerodynamics, we got pole position, fastest lap and the win.”

  It was a remarkably simple and one-sided end to a thrilling season. Brundle never looked like he could beat Senna that weekend. West Surrey Racing was back at its best.

  One of the best innovations of the weekend had been Senna’s decision to tape up the oil radiator outlet to enable the engine to heat up more quickly and allow him to run faster in the crucial opening laps. The problem was that by lap six the engine had begun to overheat. Senna, however, had thought of this. He could not reach the tape from the cockpit wearing his seatbelts, so had practised unfastening his seatbelts and reaching out of the car on the straight to remove the tape. Just behind him, Brundle saw the Brazilian reach out of the car and almost lose it at the chicane. But once his seatbelts had been rebuckled he began to pull away again until he crossed the line seven seconds ahead.

  Eddie Jordan complained that West Surrey Racing had got the better part of the aerodynamic packages from Ralt, but Bennetts laughs it off. He says: “Ralt made two options – we got one part and he got the other. We didn’t ask for that one. We didn’t know before we entered which one had the biggest gain. So of course afterwards Eddie would complain that we got the better aerodynamics, but he had the better engine for six, seven, eight races.”

  Senna was champion, but that was not the end of his Formula Three career. A month later he was entered to compete in the Formula Three Grand Prix at Macao. The event had previously been run for Formula Atlantic cars, and this was the first time the prestigious Formula Three event was being held. Top international competition would be present from all the major Formula Three series in the world.

  Senna arrived late to the Portuguese colony because on the Monday he had been testing for Bernie Ecclestone’s Brabham Formula One team at Paul Ricard, which had followed shortly on from a test with Toleman. He was a man in demand. On Monday evening he flew back to England with Ecclestone in his Learjet, where he caught a flight out to the Far East the following day. Senna did not arrive in Hong Kong until Wednesday night, after a 13-hour flight.

  Bennetts recalls: “He was pretty cool. He’d been racing professionally since he was very young and that helped him a lot. He was going to arrive in Hong Kong and I told him when he got off the plane which way to go to the town. He said ‘I know. I came here when I was 16 for the world kart championship’. It was our first time there and we’d arrived four or five days earlier, so we thought we could give him some help on where to go.”

  As well as regular opponent Martin Brundle and some of the other British runners, Senna would face Colombian Roberto Guerrero, who had already completed two seasons of Formula One, and a host of international competition headed by Gerhard Berger. No one had raced in Macao before and the cars would be shod with the unfamiliar Yokohama tyres that Senna had used once, at the European Formula Three round at Silverstone. Senna, Brundle and Guerrero would officially be competing for the Marlboro-backed Theodore team, though Senna would be run by Bennetts, Brundle by Jordan and Guerrero by the familiar faces who had backed him in the Theodore F1 team.

  First qualifying was on Thursday and Senna was suffering from jetlag. He still managed joint second in the order, behind Guerrero and equal with Brundle. It was his first time on a street circuit and he learnt about the dangers the hard way when he clipped the wall and ended his session after just three laps.

  On Friday, in second qualifying, he struggled with a damaged gear selector and could only complete another three laps. It gave him pole in 2m 22.02secs, almost a 10th of a second ahead of Guerrero. As Saturday was a free day, he went out on the town with the other drivers that night to celebrate his pole position.

  Saturday might have been a free day, but it was not one without work. As Bennetts recalls: “I’d arranged to do a debrief with him on Saturday and he didn’t turn up when we’d agreed. I got told later he was out at a nightclub on Friday, apparently drinking just water or orange juice. Then someone else told me that Tommy Byrne had laced his drinks with vodka. So he didn’t turn up for the debrief and I had to take all the decisions myself. We’d finished preparing it all by about six on Saturday night so when Ayrton walked up to the workshop I said ‘Too late, mate’ and that was that.”

  Senna had found out that jetlag and hangovers don’t mix, and had spent most of the day running, trying to clear his head. By the Sunday morning warm-up session, he was still feeling out of sorts and completed just two runs before handing the car back to his mechanics, unusually telling them that everything was perfect and nothing needed to be changed. He was soaked in
sweat and went back to the hotel to sleep for two hours before the afternoon’s two heats that would decide the champion of Macao.

  When he awoke he felt fine. In the first heat Guerrero got ahead at the start, but at the second corner Senna was through in a move that Guerrero didn’t believe was possible on cold tyres. In the second heat Senna didn’t even have that distraction and he led from lights to flag. He was champion and that night he celebrated with the team at the Lisboa Hotel until the early hours of the morning.

  It was the perfect end to a glorious Formula Three career and one which did his Formula One aspirations a great deal of good. Even at that stage, he looked head and shoulders above the rest. Over the years, some of the best drivers in the world have passed through the training school of West Surrey Racing – Mika Häkkinen, Rubens Barrichello, Eddie Irvine, Allan McNish, Pedro de la Rosa, Christian Fittipaldi, Cristiano da Matta and Mauricio Gugelmin among them – but Dick Bennetts remembers Senna as the best. He says: “They weren’t big then, they were small. I wasn’t into management in those days – if I had been I’d have been a very wealthy man now. You’ve got to gauge each driver by that year and how tough the competition is, but Ayrton did stand out for sure. To this day I’ll say that Ayrton and Mika were the two most raw-talented drivers. Ayrton would stand out above Mika because of his technical feedback and so on, because whereas Mika had a lot of raw talent, Ayrton could tell you more about the car. He was like a mobile computer.”

  Over the following few years, Bennetts kept in touch with Senna after he had recommended Gugelmin to him for a Formula Three drive in 1985. Senna was very interested in his friend’s career and even came to races to offer his support. Bennetts thinks he got to know him better in those days, when he had made the transition to Formula One.

  He says: “It came to the crunch and Mauricio was about to win the championship. He was sitting on pole position and Ayrton was looking round all the other cars and saying ‘You haven’t got enough wing on, you haven’t got enough wing on’. We’d done two full days of hard testing and we knew where we were going. And he kept looking at the tyres to make sure they were all right. He was really helpful, but I kept him away from Mauricio because he was panicking about not having enough downforce. But once he got ahead he was gone.”

  There were also some less tense moments, such as the time in 1985 when Senna was looking for a house in England, where Gugelmin would also stay. Bennetts explains: “Ayrton stayed for quite a while at a mansion down in Esher. When he first moved there, I was his front man to avoid using his name. I had to sort out the agents, go round the houses and say what I thought. He briefed me on what he wanted in the price range. Of course, he’s there at 25 in a tracksuit and wants to buy this 40-roomed house and the owner just didn’t take him seriously. So I’d go along with the tie on, because they didn’t think it could be the blokes in tracksuits. Senna and Gugelmin were both looking round saying ‘We like this, we like that’.

  “They’d look at the garden and say ‘We like this, we can fly our radio-controlled planes’. One woman said ‘Is that bloke gonna buy it?’ I said yes. ‘Has he got the money?’ she asked. I said ‘Don’t worry about the money, believe me’. We never told them who he was. One of them recognised him, but we never mentioned his name. They’d just wander round, prodding things and say ‘Ooh, that looks nice’ or ‘No, I don’t like that’. I couldn’t keep a straight face some days. That went on for about a month.

  “We kept in touch for the first few years. Mauricio told me at Rockingham that he still goes to the Chinese restaurant in Shepperton, the Forum, which they both loved. We used to go there once or twice a year. They used to take the mickey out of each other, about who was the tightest money-wise. Their grasp of the English language was amazing. Ayrton said to Mauricio ‘You could swim across the Thames with an Alka Seltzer in your hand and it wouldn’t melt because your fist is so tight’. I would just crack up laughing. Where do they pick up all that? But as soon as there was a TV camera around Senna would immediately back off and be quiet. There was his private life and then there was his professional life.”

  At the West Surrey Racing factory, Bennetts has a display of crash helmets from most of his drivers, and four out of five of his British Formula Three champions. The missing face is Senna. Bennetts remembers sadly his last meeting with the Brazilian. He says: “I last saw him at the McLaren Autosport awards at the end of 1993. I’d arranged to get one of his helmets at the British Grand Prix in 1994. When I heard that he’d died we were racing at Silverstone with another Brazilian driver, Gualter Salles. In those days we had two races and Gualter didn’t want to do race two. I had to really sit him down and say ‘Look son, it’s the only thing you can do’. It was hard. I couldn’t believe it. I got calls from all over the world: Brazil, Australia, Europe. I couldn’t go to the funeral because we were racing in England at the time.”

  Bennetts hopes that he will be able to get hold of at least a replica of Senna’s famous yellow helmet one day to complete his collection, as a reminder of the Brazilian’s time in Formula Three. It was a stunning season, and most of Senna’s records remained unbeaten until Jan Magnussen’s shatteringly dominant season in 1994. Senna had without a doubt made his mark and there was only one place left for him to go – Formula One.

  CHAPTER 6

  Senna vs Brundle

  When careers collided and divided

  The talent was similar but the execution was of a whole different order. To understand what Ayrton Senna did right in his career, it is also necessary to understand what Martin Brundle did wrong.

  The history of Formula One is littered with tales of under-achieving drivers who before they reached Formula One matched men who would later go on to become champions, and yet who never managed to make a success of their own careers. A classic modern case is Brundle and Senna.

  Brundle challenged Senna strongly during an electrifying year of Formula Three racing in 1983, and there was little to choose between them. But Senna went on to achieve immortality with 41 wins, three world championships and 65 poles, while Brundle only stepped onto the podium a few times before becoming a TV commentator. How did so much change after 1983?

  Both men entered Formula One is 1984. Arguably Brundle had the more promising start, securing a berth with the Tyrrell team while Senna joined the miserable Toleman outfit. But whilst Senna clearly saw Toleman as a stepping stone, only Brundle saw Tyrrell as the start of a long-term relationship and his career. It was the first sign of the different judgement skills displayed by both men.

  Ken Tyrrell was ecstatic and believed he had secured the more talented driver for the following three years. As he said at the start of the 1984 season: “We believe that signing Martin will help because, as I said to Jackie, I think we’ve found a new JYS.”

  Likening any Formula Three driver to triple world champion Jackie Stewart was praise indeed, and for Brundle this was the crest of a very large wave that carried him into Formula One. But it was better even than that for the 24-year-old from King’s Lynn. Tyrrell had no reason to think he had signed a lesser star. The previous year, Brundle had run Brazilian Ayrton Senna very close for the British Formula Three title. Winning Formula Three in the 1980s meant almost certain promotion to Formula One without having to graduate through Formula Two (the equivalent to Formula 3000). But so evenly matched were they that both Senna and Brundle were launched into Formula One in 1984. However, there the comparisons ended. The moment he stepped into a racing car, Senna had future world champion stamped all over him.

  Senna was different straight away. He had charisma, an inner confidence, intensity and desire that was unsettling to some, but distinctly appealing to those who knew the signs of greatness. He had arrived in Britain in 1981 with his young wife to race Formula Ford. By other people’s standards he was successful, but not by his. He was ruthlessly hard on himself and at the end of that Formula Ford season, he announced he was retiring. He returned to Brazil for a cold, hard asse
ssment of his life and ambitions. The conclusion was clear. He needed to wipe the slate of all emotional attachments and distractions and start again.

  The new Ayrton Senna returned to Europe, having left his wife, but with continued financial support from loyal Brazilian sponsors, and set out on an intensely focused course to become the greatest racing driver ever. It was do or die. In his confidantes, friends and team members he expected total loyalty and commitment. For him there was nothing else in life, and he would do whatever it took to recruit the necessary people to help him achieve his goal. His natural magnetism, aura and skill attracted believers – they knew what he could do. His mindset had few weaknesses.

  By comparison, for Martin Brundle, England was home and there was a job to be done in the family business – there was no need to leave home. His family provided support and stability. He needed to keep working because sponsorship in the UK for British drivers was always tight, and he had to support himself. Of course he wanted to become world champion – it was the reason he raced, but his education and culture were vastly different from Senna’s. Ayrton Senna and Martin Brundle had the same ambition, competed for the same rewards, but with different armoury and tools, both psychologically and physically. When their paths crossed in 1983, everything appeared to favour the 23-year-old from São Paulo. He had won all there was to win in Formula Ford 1600 and in Formula Ford 2000 in 1982. His Formula Three debut, at Thruxton’s end-of-season non-championship thrash that year, had yielded pole position, fastest lap and a dominant victory.

  By contrast Brundle was not feared, rather envied in his first season of Formula Three in 1982. And though he was the pre-season favourite, he got blown away initially by Irishman Tommy Byrne.