Despite that, it still put Senna into the really big pay league. The amount he was paid meant a great deal to Senna, not for material reasons, but as a marker of how much he was worth. As he explained in 1992: “It’s all a question of market, of negotiating your deals in an appropriate way. I’m the highest-paid driver today: it’s not because of my skin colour, my eyes, my hair or anything, it’s because it’s worth paying me the money and nobody would pay anything to anyone unless they could get it back somehow.” Although the amount of money he was paid for that McLaren contract was never revealed, it was believed to be $7.5 million a year, the going rate at the time, as Formula One drivers’ salaries had suddenly exploded and multiplied four times in three years as the world’s economies boomed and new sponsorship money, mainly from tobacco companies, poured into the sport.
Piquet won the race, his Williams then fitted with active suspension that seemed not to have the same troubles on fast circuits as Lotus’s. Senna had led in the middle of the race, but excessive tyre wear caused him to spin off and he finished second. Mansell finished third after an inexplicable lack of race pace, and several Williams team members hinted in private that they thought Honda was determined that the 1987 world champion would be driving a Honda-powered car in 1988.
Senna was 14 points down in the championship going into the Portuguese Grand Prix, and with Williams looking stronger every race his prospects looked dim. Senna and Mansell both failed to score – Senna had qualified fifth, then suffered a lengthy tyre stop and fought his way back to seventh from the rear of the field; Piquet was third and Prost took victory, claiming a record 28th career win. There were four races to go and Lotus was looking far from the team it had been at the beginning of the season.
Senna kept the championship mathematically alive with a fifth place on heavily worn tyres in Jerez, although his chances were admittedly faint. He had 51 points to Piquet’s 70 and Mansell had overtaken him for second place in the standings.
His hopes ended in Mexico. He qualified only seventh, but in the race was battling with Piquet for second when he spun off. He tried to restart the engine, but an unsolicited push from some marshals meant an illegal push-start would have been declared if he had rejoined the race. Senna was furious and got out of the Lotus and punched one of the marshals. He was fined $15,000 as a result.
Shortly after Mexico, FISA president Jean-Marie Balestre announced that active suspension would be illegal from 1st January 1988. It was a blow for Lotus and Williams and for the top teams, which had all secretly been developing their own systems.
The championship was over on the Saturday of the inaugural Japanese Grand Prix, when Nigel Mansell hit a wall and suffered broken bones. Honda got its wish and Piquet was set to take the number one to Lotus for the 1988 season. Senna finished second in the race – the highest runner for Honda on the manufacturer’s home ground. At the final race of the season in Adelaide he was again the second driver to cross the line, but on this occasion he was subsequently disqualified for using illegal cooling ducts on his brakes. Second place in the race would have clinched him second place in the championship from Nigel Mansell, but in the end he had to settle for third.
It was Senna’s least successful year for Lotus. He drove 16 races, taking only one pole position but winning in Monaco and Detroit, finishing second at Imola, Hungary, Italy and Japan, third in Britain and Germany, fourth in France, and fifth in Austria and Spain. It was enough to give him 57 points, worth third place in the championship. But it meant little. He wanted the championship, which by then had been denied him three times.
And that was the inglorious conclusion to Senna’s Lotus career. He had moulded the team for his own needs, but ultimately it could not deliver what he really wanted – a Formula One world championship – and like Toleman, like his wife Liliane, it had been bluntly discarded when it failed to fit in with his dreams. Senna was heading for McLaren.
CHAPTER 13
1988: The Golden Car
Instant glory and personal happiness
The 1988 season was an important one for Ayrton Senna. It not only heralded a new team but also a new girlfriend – someone many people, including his close friend Gerhard Berger, believe was the real love of his life.
When they met, Xuxa Meneghel was a bigger star than Senna – and earned more money. She had been a well-known figure on Brazilian television since the dawn of the 1980s and had her own top-rated show. Such was her success that she was reckoned to be the 38th best paid entertainer in the world, although she was relatively unknown outside Brazil.
It was Xuxa who spotted Senna first, when she was flicking through a magazine. He was on the verge of becoming really famous when he joined McLaren, and was on the cover. Inside there were pictures of him with animals. She remembers thinking: “Wow, look at his face. He likes animals just like me, and is also famous.”
She even discussed him with her manager, Marlene Mattos, but was certain it would come to nothing. “These things don’t happen in my life,” she said at the time. So she closed the magazine and forgot about it. A week later Senna phoned her dressing room at the TV Globo studios. She was recording her show but he left a message, and she called him back. He said to her: “Hi, most beautiful woman of Brazil.” They talked freely straight away and he asked when they could meet. She said her show was filmed Monday to Saturday and she could not get away. He asked her about Sunday but she said she would not have enough time to get to São Paulo from Rio. He told her he would send his plane for her and she agreed. The plane arrived on the tarmac at Rio dead on time, and there was a little note for her from Senna. She took some colleagues back with her on the flight, then went to her house in São Paulo. She called Senna and tried to make excuses, saying she was very tired.
“How long would it take for me to get to your house?” he asked. “Fifteen minutes,” she replied. “I’ll be there in five minutes,” he said. And sure enough, five minutes later a car was outside her house with the wheels spinning and smoke billowing from the exhaust. Xuxa remembers he was really nervous, but then so was she. She says when they touched and shook hands for the first time she felt it was really special – and that her dog Zé fell in love with the Brazilian straight away.
It seemed almost love at first sight for Xuxa and Senna too. That evening they stayed at her house and just talked. They had a lot in common – they both knew fame, had money and were single. He did not stay the night and they did not make love – but it was the night two Brazilian stars got together. It was the start of something long term and they both knew it. As he was leaving he asked if he could see her the next day. She said she was going to see her grandmother. “I would like to meet her,” he said. But Xuxa made an excuse. In reality she thought the relationship was moving too fast. When Senna left, her dog made a huge fuss and followed him to his car. He looked at Xuxa and said: “This dog knows what’s good for his boss.”
Unfortunately circumstances conspired against them. With Senna about to return to Europe for the Formula One season they hardly saw anything of each other that year, except fleeting visits. Xuxa was committed to a very heavy TV schedule, working out of São Paulo for much of the time. Senna did find time to appear as a guest on her show and they saw each other occasionally, but did not sleep together. She knew he had other girlfriends and didn’t want that sort of relationship. For the time being it was left in abeyance – the timing was wrong but the seed had been sown.
Joining McLaren was not easy for Senna. Alain Prost was king of the hill, having won the world championship twice already. But Senna had a nice surprise when he arrived. He immediately found two people he was to bond with and who would remain lifelong friends: team manager Jo Ramirez and physio Josef Leberer. The main impact on his life would come from Josef Leberer, an Austrian expert in sports medicine and a top physiotherapist. Senna had never really had contact with a top physiotherapist and nutritionist. All his training was done by Nuno Cobra in Brazil, who he had worked with since star
ting in Formula One.
Leberer was a protégé of another Austrian,Willy Dungl, who founded the world-famous Dungl Clinic in Gars-am-Kamp in Austria. Dungl was famous in Formula One circles for his work with Niki Lauda in the 1970s. Leberer was his protégé.
Ron Dennis had hired Leberer for the start of the 1988 season to ensure that Senna and Prost were in tip-top condition. Not just keeping them physically fit, but mentally strong as well. Leberer worked well with both Senna and Prost, but quickly drew close to the Brazilian, as did most of the team. He looked after him mentally and physically and stayed close. He quickly devised a new training programme and diet for Senna, and personally cooked as many of his meals as he could, also briefing the housekeepers in his houses in Brazil and Monte Carlo. Senna also instantly bonded with 47-year-old Jo Ramirez, a Mexican Formula One veteran who had already been in Formula One for 27 years. He had worked with the Eagle, Tyrrell, Fittipaldi, Shadow, ATS and Theodore teams, and finally McLaren from 1983.
They helped Senna overcome Prost’s dominance within the McLaren team. Prost was not only the biggest man at McLaren but also the biggest man in the paddock. As Ramirez said: “When Ayrton first drove for McLaren, the biggest man in the paddock was Alain Prost. He was the man that Ayrton wanted to emulate – and eventually the man he wanted to beat – so he ended up driving the same car as Prost in the same team.”
At the time, most paddock observers had no doubt that Senna would be blown off by Prost in 1988. No one thought he would come in and overpower Prost the way he did and neither did Prost. In fact at the start of the season Prost was totally unconcerned about his new team-mate. “McLaren is the only team that can have two top drivers with equal skills on the material and psychological scales,” he said at the time. “I will help him become a member of the team.
“He has never been with a team-mate who drives fast. He has the advantage of his youth and motivation; I have a lot of experience, and I have a say in the matter. Our aim is to build a top-flight team and if we have the best car, we will compete against each other, and for the championship. There are two kinds of contestants: there are your opponents, and there are your team-mates, who are often the most redoubtable because that’s the only way to size yourself up, since you’re driving the same car.”
There was no doubt that Prost was the more experienced of the two. But Senna was convinced he would prove the faster driver – and he was right. The Brazilian also had a huge advantage through his relationship with Honda, which had been amazed by his grasp of engineering. He was the first driver the company had successfully communicated with. But Prost had already done four years with the team. It was his team. Senna knew his main battle in 1988 would be against his team-mate. However, he was in no doubt about the outcome, as he told friends: “I’m going to blitz him.”
In reality Prost never had a chance. Senna knew his own weaknesses as well as his strengths: he was the faster driver and qualifier, but knew that Prost was probably the better race driver, who carefully devised a strategy that would yield good results by the finish.
However, much of the finesse was unnecessary, as Honda took advantage of changes in turbocharger regulations to produce a blindingly fast engine, which blitzed the opposition. It was the last year that turbochargers were allowed and the regulations had been continually tightened over the previous few years. It was not an easy job to develop an engine capable of satisfying the requirements regarding boost pressure (2.5 bar or less) and fuel efficiency (tank capacity of 150 litres or less). But it was a tightrope that Honda’s engineers, with Senna’s help, negotiated perfectly. John Barnard, the original designer of McLaren’s MP4, recalls how they did it: “Honda manipulated the regulations to accommodate the boost level and found a way to circumvent them that masked the boost limit level by putting cunning shapes within the manifold, which effectively put the head of the pop-off valve in a low-pressure area. So although the boost limit was 2.5 bar the engine saw as much as 2.9 bar.” It took Ferrari a whole six months to catch up and do the same thing.
The RT168E engine was an immediate winner and the car felt very good out of the box. McLaren had the best engine, the best chassis and the best drivers. The technical team on the 1988 car was technical director Gordon Murray with Steve Nichols, Neil Oatley and Tim Wright.
The new McLaren MP4/4 was so good that Alain Prost – who had driven no shortage of capable cars in his career – declared that it embarrassed him. He said: “It’s perfect so it’s very difficult to make mistakes in.”
With Williams facing a year uncharacteristically out of contention with a normally-aspirated hybrid engine built by an engineer called John Judd instead of a turbocharged Honda, Ferrari was McLaren’s only real competition. Williams had had its bank account enriched by Honda to the tune of several million dollars to break its engine supply contract early. Lotus also had the Honda engine but a useless chassis. If the team had been any good, Senna would not have left.
This was to be a golden year for McLaren, one of those rare years when a team has the best chassis and the competition is in disarray. Senna had jumped into the team at precisely the right moment. That golden scenario was reversed just four years later when Senna found himself up against Nigel Mansell and the dominant Renault-engined Williams.
Ferrari had been quick in testing but, as ever, reliability was suspect. Gerhard Berger and Michele Alboreto were two good drivers, but not a patch on Prost and Senna. In addition, team principal Enzo Ferrari was in poor health.
Ironically, the portents for McLaren were not particularly good for the new season. As a result of factory tinkering with the turbocharger, Honda’s new V6 turbo engine was late, ready just a week before the season opened. The car made it to Imola for only the last day of a three-day test, after being air-freighted to Bologna.
Senna flew to Europe especially for the test and to open up his Monte Carlo apartment for the new season; he planned to fly back to São Paulo straight after.
On Wednesday 23rd March, Prost climbed into the car and was doing competitive times from his first lap. In the afternoon Senna took over and was a whole two seconds faster. Next came Gerhard Berger’s Ferrari, which had already been testing for two days. With barely 500 kilometres done, the car was driven back to the McLaren factory in Woking, crated up again and flown off to Rio.
As a result of circumstance, the opposition was humbled, and the two McLaren team-mates strongly suspected they had a car capable for the first time in history of winning every Grand Prix in a season. Senna even suspected he could win every race, given the chance. And with perfect reliability he may well have done.
Senna was delighted how easy his new car was to drive compared with a Lotus: “I used to cover the palms of my hands because if I didn’t I would get these terrible blisters and that would make steering difficult. I don’t do that anymore now. My new car is lighter, easier to handle.”
Even though the season started at the beginning of April, Prost’s and Senna’s race cars had done no running at all when they were uncrated in Brazil for the opening race of the season in Rio de Janeiro.
Apart from an upcoming intra-McLaren battle, the early-season pundits had predicted that Nelson Piquet in the Lotus Honda would be a challenger. That proved a joke, but a serious war of words started with Piquet off the track.
The knives were out straight away when Piquet gave an interview with a Rio newspaper on the eve of the race: he was quoted as saying Senna was homosexual and that his well-publicised flings with women were a front. Piquet claimed he had been told this by an ex-girlfriend of Senna’s who he was seeing at the time. Senna was incensed and wanted to issue libel proceedings, but was persuaded against it by Philip Morris’s John Hogan, who argued that the subsequent publicity would be far worse. Nigel Mansell had experienced similar problems with Piquet in the past so Senna chose to ignore the allegations.
Then the matter took a more serious turn when the Brazilian edition of Playboy was published just before the race, wit
h Piquet smearing both Senna and Mansell. He repeated the Senna jibes and called Mansell an uneducated fool with an ugly wife. It caused a minor stir in the local newspapers and some ripples abroad. A former girlfriend of Senna’s, 24-year-old model Surama Castro, was quoted as saying: “If that man is gay I would like to have a gay man in my bed every night.” Senna had dallied with Castro the previous year after meeting her in Milan.
Press reports after the spat were amusing: “One woman alluded to his mystical allure: ‘Although I have never met him somehow I feel a rather extraordinary presence emanates from him which even transcends the physical.’ And another wrote of his broad appeal: ‘He is the complete man who is incredibly brave, very intelligent, extremely lucid and eloquent, deeply spiritual, a loving part of a family unit and at times a playful child.’”
But the interviews had raised doubts in people’s minds about Senna’s sexuality on the basis there was no smoke without fire. Until his death, rumours persisted that he was bisexual, though without a shred of evidence to back them up. Senna was aware of the rumours but chose to ignore them. His lack of a regular girlfriend didn’t help. He was a bit of a loner and liked his own space. After Maria and Marjorie who followed each other from Formula Three into Formula One, there was a succession of girlfriends that lasted months, mainly in Brazil, including models Virginia Nowicki, Patricia Machado, Christine Ferraciu and Marcella Prado, and actress Carol Alt. None lasted more than six months and few came to races.
The Life of Senna Page 20