The Life of Senna

by Rubython, Tom

  Renault was not used to a driver becoming so absorbed with an engine. Renault designer Bernard Dudot was greatly impressed: “Ayrton was keenly interested in the engine. Right from the start of his co-operation with us, he spent a lot of time with me and [development engineer] Bruno Mauduit, learning how it worked and what parameters governed its operating temperatures, combustion rates and boost pressures – and also how those parameters interact with one another. That’s a lot of data to absorb but he grasped it all. He had real insight into the realities, and he expressed himself easily with the engineers. He got so involved with the engine that it became his own. For us it was fascinating and extremely productive. What he gave us was like a method for constructive improvements to be made to the engine.”

  Mauduit says: “He was pointing out what was good and what was not, and suggesting what we should set our sights on. We realised he had never been wrong and had always steered us in the right direction. He was very keen on turbos, to such an extent that I checked all of them, with him behind me measuring them. He checked everything and tried to understand it all. The worst thing was meeting him in the hotel at 11pm, when we all wanted to sleep.”

  But it wasn’t all serious business. As Warr recalls: “I have hundreds of nice memories but I think the one that characterises the Team Lotus and Senna relationship was the very first day he came to the factory. He arrived quite proudly in a Mercedes 2.3 16V, which he had been given as a prize for winning a celebrity saloon car race at the Nürburgring the previous year. Team Lotus mechanics are notorious for not letting egos get any bigger than they were, so they put a jack under the car and a block under the differential. When it came to the time for him to leave, of course it had to be the race driver’s exit with lots of revs and lots of first gear. But when his foot came off the clutch the wheels turned but the car went nowhere. This was not only a joke but a little bit of a tester to see the nature of the animal we were dealing with. He took it in very good spirit. In Rio de Janeiro a few weeks later, he came into our garage and handed round some sweets. He made sure that Bob Dance got the one that turned his mouth – and his urine – blue. He peed blue for two days. That was the type of guy he was, and I think that even though he was young and at the beginning of his career, he was more than just a racing driver. He was a wonderful person and a terrific human being.”

  Senna spent most of the 1984/85 winter back in Brazil, where he picked up a viral infection of the inner ear called Bells Palsy. His face was inflamed and he was unable to blink his right eye. The condition eventually passed, but it led him to philosophical reflection. As he explained: “It helps you realise how weak you are. How inadequate you can be. You control yourself more, be careful, give more attention to yourself, your mental and physical condition-everything.”

  He also took the opportunity to respond to questions about his fitness, concerns which were raised after his collapse in the aftermath of the South African Grand Prix in 1984. He said: “I have had two months without any exercise so I am trying hard to compensate for the enforced lay-off. I am training hard but in the end what I really need is to drive the car. Fortunately the season is starting late. The virus had nothing to do with poor health – anyone could have caught it. But from my experience during the season I realise that I was trying to drive 100 per cent the whole distance just as I had been used to doing in Formula Three and Formula Ford events. Now I don’t think that’s possible. I don’t care how strong or fit the driver, you can’t drive flat out for the whole distance.”

  Senna was determined to make it to the very top, and the transition from a mid-grid outfit like Toleman to a legendary team capable of winning races was an important one. He tested the new Lotus 97T Renault for the first time at the Rio de Janeiro track in early February and was quick from the start. It was the perfect opportunity for him and things looked good for his home race, the first of the season at the Rio circuit. But after qualifying, for the first time in his life, he found himself playing second fiddle to his team-mate. Every other team-mate had been blown off at the first race of a new season. But not Elio de Angelis. Senna could only qualify fourth on the grid, a strong position, but one place and over three-tenths of a second behind de Angelis. It was an eye-opener for him – the game had moved up to a whole different level.

  Senna adjusted accordingly and passed de Angelis at the start, but Alain Prost’s McLaren TAG passed both of them. Senna was running in third place when his fuel injection failed on lap 49. It was a good debut for his new team, but he had not set the world alight.

  Two weeks later the Formula One circus headed to Estoril for the Portuguese Grand Prix. It was a weekend that would show Senna not just the makings of a champion, but the look of a legend.

  It rained for most of the weekend. At the start of the first qualifying session on Friday, the track was still damp from an earlier storm. But Lotus judged the weather perfectly and Senna and de Angelis left the pits when the track was at its driest, just minutes before another storm. De Angelis threw in a best of 1m 22.306secs for provisional pole, but seconds later Senna came past the line and set 1m 21.708secs. Then it began to rain.

  De Angelis, like everyone else, was astonished. His own time had been sensational – 1.3 seconds better than Niki Lauda’s third best time – but Senna made it look ordinary. The usually unflappable Italian demanded that a fresh set of tyres be fitted to his car, but the rain prevented him from setting a quick time. Gerard Ducarouge remembered that he was concerned: “I felt that I shouldn’t let him out when the track was slippery like that. Trying to outdo your own team-mate in those conditions is asking for trouble.”

  De Angelis was still determined when it came to Saturday’s qualifying session, when the conditions had improved. While Senna stood in the garage, watching the action on a TV screen, de Angelis failed to pull out more than two-tenths of a second on his Friday time. It was only in the dying minutes of the session, spurred by a 1m 21.42secs from Prost, that Senna decided to make an effort. His 1m 21.007secs was easily good enough for the first pole position of his Formula One career. De Angelis could only look on in sheer wonder.

  Come Sunday morning everyone was still wondering what they were going to do about Senna. It was still raining and was predicted to last all day. Brian Hart, who had built the engines for Senna’s Toleman the year before, was walking round the paddock telling anyone who would listen that they might as well go home – Senna would win. The winds were strong and warm-up had to be delayed by half-an-hour because the medical helicopter was unable to take off. Senna had earlier complained that his engine was short of power and it was changed for the afternoon’s race.

  The Brazilian seemed unruffled by the morning’s dramas, as Warr recalls: “The build-up to the race itself was not very complicated. We did not have that many problems. Senna was quite relaxed and at ease. I would have thought most racing drivers would have been completely fazed by these terrible conditions, and so my lasting memory was that it did not faze him at all. All he wanted to do was talk about how to set the car up for the wet, how to get the best out of it, how to get the engine running so that it could be as smooth and responsive as it could, and so on.”

  Just before the race began, the rain fell harder still. While his rivals crawled away from the grid, Senna made a perfect start and flew off the grid in the lead. As 17 of the 26 starters gradually fell by the wayside, Senna glided onwards. After 10 laps he led by 12 seconds. After 20 laps, it was 30 seconds. After 40 laps, 45 seconds. Senna had gesticulated at officials as the conditions worsened to stop the race. When the race ground to a halt after 67 laps, as it passed the two-hour mark, Senna took the chequered flag by 1m 2.978secs from Italian, Michele Alboreto’s Ferrari, the only car left on the same lap.

  As Senna climbed out of the cockpit he was greeted by an ecstatic Peter Warr, a scene captured forever in an historic black-and-white photograph taken by Steven Tee of the photographic agency LAT. Behind Warr was his mother, Neyde, who had flown out from Brazil
to watch the race.

  Senna shed a few tears before climbing onto the top step of the podium for the very first time in a Grand Prix, flanked by Michele Alboreto and Patrick Tambay. He dedicated the victory to the team and his family.

  “He went out there and just blew everybody else away,” says Warr. “It was one of the motor races of all time – not for the closeness of competition, but for exactly the reverse. Anyone who stood there that day and saw him drive away from a field of some of the fiercest competitors that Formula One has seen could not fail to be impressed. There is a lovely story that gives a little insight into his character. At one time he got it wrong. He hadn’t made a mistake the whole race but then he got it wrong and was off on the grass – the car went sideways and then swerved back to the tarmac. And with a flick of the steering wheel Senna went off down the road. Jenks [veteran journalist Denis Jenkinson] went up to him and said ‘My God, that was unbelievable car control. That was really special’. And Ayrton said ‘Don’t you believe it. I just lost it – how it came back I don’t know’. That demonstrated the honesty of the guy and characterised his entire career.”

  After the race Senna said: “They all said I made no mistakes, but that’s not true. On one occasion I had all four wheels on the grass, totally out of control. But the car came back onto the circuit.”

  It was a stunning performance by a driver with little over a year of Formula One behind him. Senna later recalled: “One of the best moments of my career was my first victory in Formula One, in Portugal, in the rain. It was also the first pole position of my career and together with my first championship was one of the best, if not the best moment of my career so far. It was a race full of memories, full of excitement. It is something that I am going to keep in my mind for the rest of my life, that’s for sure.”

  But at the time it had not all been pleasant as he recalled: “The race should have been stopped – conditions were dangerous. It was difficult to keep the car in a straight line because I could see nothing in front. Conditions were much harder than in Monaco last year. The rain was torrential and I had a few tricky moments. It was purely by chance that I did not come off the road. I knew I had won, it was just a question of keeping going.”

  Senna was astonished by the worldwide attention he received after his first victory. His initial reaction was to back away from it, telling his German journalist friend and later his biographer, Karin Sturm: “I come from a relatively sheltered world, from the warmth of my family.” But there was nothing he could do about it. Suddenly he was the focus of attention at press conferences and every journalist wanted to interview him. He had done very few interviews before that, and journalists discovered he had a habit of not looking at people directly when he was talking to them. They soon interpreted this as a devil-may-care arrogance. Karin Sturm described it as ‘an attempt to protect a very sensitive inner core from the harshness and coldness with which he was confronted in Formula One’.

  Suddenly any thoughts of him having to play second fiddle to Elio de Angelis were gone. A process had begun whereby de Angelis would be relegated to number two driver. Nigel Stepney said: “The whole nucleus of the team working for him just happened.”

  Unsurprisingly he was suddenly championship material and would have taken the title in his second season but for the chronic unreliability of his car. It was fast enough as he reeled off pole at Imola, pole at Monaco, front row in Canada and pole in Detroit. By then de Angelis had decided to leave the team – the first of Senna’s many Formula One victims. No one could live with him.

  The failure of the officials to stop the race in the face of impossible conditions prompted the drivers to get together at Imola two weeks after Senna’s Portuguese victory: almost all of them signed a petition drawn up by Niki Lauda to ask for a review of wet-weather safety procedures.

  Regardless of the weather, Senna was on form once again at the San Marino Grand Prix at the Imola track. On Friday he clocked a stunning lap of 1m 27.589secs, over half-a-second better than Alboreto, the second placed man. He shrugged: “It was a very good lap, but not perfect. I may never get it perfect.” To prove his point he went even faster on Saturday and took the second pole position of his career with a time of 1m 27.327secs. It was a 60-lap race and Senna led until lap 57, when his car ran out of fuel despite his best conservation efforts. He was classified seventh, while de Angelis won after Prost was disqualified for being underweight when he ran out of fuel on the slow down lap after winning on the road. It was not obvious then, but Senna’s driving style was very heavy on fuel. It was the way he controlled the throttle.

  Next up was Monaco. Senna took his third pole position in a row, but not without incident, as both Alboreto and Lauda felt that the Brazilian had held them up. They were furious: Lauda refused to accept Senna’s apology while Alboreto blocked Senna in return at Rascasse, almost causing the Brazilian to hit the barriers. Despite starting on cold tyres after his tyre blankets short-circuited, he led from the start, as at Imola; but he also retired as at Imola, this time after just 13 laps when his Renault engine blew.

  Senna’s record for the first four races of 1985 was one win, three mechanical retirements. He could easily have had 31 points and been leading the championship. De Angelis was undoubtedly a star, but after the season’s first qualifying session, Senna had kept him firmly in check. It was remarkable for someone with so little experience.

  The next race was supposed to be at Spa, but it was postponed in one of the more farcical episodes in Formula One history. Cautious of the notorious Ardennes rain, the organisers laid special tarmac which was supposed to make the track easier to drive in wet conditions. Unfortunately the region was hit by a heatwave, and when the Formula One cars took to the track the tarmac disintegrated. Safety concerns prevailed and the race was postponed until later in the year, and the teams moved on to Montreal.

  The Canadian Grand Prix marked a fightback for de Angelis. He took pole, forcing Senna to settle for second, and kept the lead at the start. Senna ran in second for six laps, but then his turbocharger came loose and he had to wait in the pits until the components had cooled so his mechanics could repair the damage. It left him five laps behind and although he clocked the fastest lap he was never going to catch the leaders. “He’s really good. I was impressed, but Jesus he takes some risks,” said Keke Rosberg after watching the lapped Brazilian tackle the track.

  Senna was on pole again at the next race in Detroit – by 1.198 seconds. Lotus’s Steve Hallam later recalled: “Jo Ramirez of McLaren said ‘okay, which short-cut did he take!’” He needed no lessons in street circuit mastery. Senna complained to Nigel Stepney that his car felt strange after he had run over a manhole cover and on inspection of the underside of the car the mechanics found that two lugs had been lost from the oil tank. As no oil was leaking it was decided to keep this from Senna. Stepney confessed after the race, to which Senna replied: “You should have told me, because I wouldn’t have gone over that manhole cover again, I’d have driven another line.”

  Senna failed to finish, crashing out from fourth place while trying to overtake Alboreto for third – he had led the first seven laps but an enforced pitstop to change blistered tyres meant having to fight his way up from the very back. He admitted the crash was his own fault, though he escaped with nothing more than a jarred hand. To his credit, the same corner had also caught out Prost and Mansell earlier in the race, so he was in good company.

  The French Grand Prix at Paul Ricard was a similar story. Senna started second and raced in that position until he was forced to pit on lap nine when his gear selectors jammed. He began to pick his way up the order again, but slid off on his own oil when his engine blew several laps later.

  Senna qualified only fourth for the British round at Silverstone, as Rosberg clocked the fastest qualifying lap of all time, but he burst into the lead at the start and stayed there until lap 57 when his engine began to splutter. Prost took the lead and Senna re-passed him almost immediate
ly, only to retire a lap later when his car ran out of fuel.

  Senna then qualified fifth on a topsy-turvy grid at the Nürburgring – he battled through to first in the race but was put out with a broken driveshaft.

  With nine races of the season gone, Senna had just nine points as a result of his win in Estoril. He had led six races and could well have been leading the championship had the Lotus been more reliable. He seemed to have drawn all the short straws. De Angelis had scored points in all of the first seven races of the season before he was hit by two consecutive retirements.

  Senna’s luck took an upturn at the Österreichring. Despite qualifying only 14th due to bad weather and a turbo failure, Senna fought his way into second by the end of the race. At Zandvoort, bad weather, a burning car and a fine for taking a short-cut left Senna in only fourth on the grid, but he held off Alboreto to take the final podium place in the race. At Monza – a track he had never raced before due to his contractual disagreement with Toleman in 1984 – he took pole, but he could not repeat his pace in the race and finished third. The succession of races had not been spectacular, but he had at least become a consistent points scorer.

  In mid-September Senna skipped off back home to São Paulo for two weeks’ rest. In the meantime there was testing at Brands Hatch and Lotus found itself without a driver as de Angelis was ill. So Renault driver Derek Warwick was asked to test for the team. Renault was withdrawing its own works team at the end of the year, and Peter Warr was under pressure from Renault to give him the number two seat at Lotus.