The Life of Senna

by Rubython, Tom

  If Piquet had timed the publicity to out-psyche and upset his Brazilian rival, it didn’t work. Senna took pole in Brazil. But he was immediately warned how different it would have been if Williams still had the Honda. In a hopelessly underpowered Williams but with a brilliant chassis and a brilliant driver at the height of his powers, Nigel Mansell proved he was the best driver that day by squeezing Alain Prost off the front row. Piquet was only fifth, out of contention.

  It was a false dawn for Williams. Prost won in what should have been a comfortable one-two, but Senna’s gearbox failed on the warm-up lap. He switched to the spare and started from the back of the grid, working his way up to second before a flat battery pushed him back to sixth. However, it all proved academic as the switch of car was subsequently deemed illegal by the race stewards: on lap 31 a marshal stepped out onto the track in front of Senna’s car waving a black flag with a board in his other hand that read ‘number 12’. Being black-flagged was a rare event in Formula One racing – the equivalent of being sent off in a football match.

  Senna was disqualified just as he was getting ready for another charge up the field. There was plenty of anger from Senna and McLaren about the disqualification and the fact that it had been enacted so late in the race. The reality was that Ron Dennis had been arguing with stewards on Senna’s behalf. The ruling was harsh and ultimately fair, but the decision about the punishment very, very slow.

  Then FISA president Jean-Marie Balestre was adamant the whole thing had been the team principal’s fault: “To be stopped like that in the middle of the race is extremely disagreeable but the rules are the same for everybody. The other drivers would not understand if the rule were not applied. It’s the law of the sport. The rule is very strict. It’s regrettable on a sporting level, but a rule is a rule. This incident shows the regrettable lack of knowledge of the rules on the part of team directors and drivers. If anyone is to blame in this affair it’s Ron Dennis.”

  Senna didn’t want Prost running away with the championship early but he knew this was a race he had lost, not one his team-mate had won.

  The first race saw Senna build up a good rapport with his new physio Josef Leberer. “I remember the first race,” said Leberer, “I think he had an engine failure, anyway he did not finish the race. In the evening, I did cooking for him. I wanted to do everything so good. I was completely tired and suddenly in the evening he called ‘hi, Josef what are you doing?’ I said, ‘you need some food, he shouted, ‘no, no, no we go out, I have some friends here, we are going out, do you want to come with us?’ Can you imagine how I felt. This is the first race, this guy is a Brazilian hero and he is thinking about me. With his friends he was a different person, so friendly and funny, talking in Portuguese. He said to me: ‘I am sorry that we talk Portuguese’. So they talked English with me. It was really relaxed.” Leberer soon found he was also a big friend of the family

  But it was a chastened Senna who returned to Europe in the second week of April to his Monte Carlo apartment. Home for the past few seasons had been a glass and marble block of flats of the type only found in Monaco called The Houston. It was on the Italian side of the seafront, which stretches down to the Beach Plaza. At the time Monaco living suited him for the tax advantages and the fact that it was close to the Paul Ricard circuit, where most of the testing was done in those days. His first test of the European season was scheduled for Monza on 19th April. He did 42 laps and shunted the car but walked away.

  The calendar was very different then and the second race of the season did not come until Sunday 1st May; six years later, that day would be very different. In 1988 Senna led from start to finish to win the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola, with Prost coming home second after fighting back from sixth when his engine almost stalled leaving the grid. They lapped the rest of the field. The win had been a lucky one and just after the finish line Senna pulled up, fresh out of fuel.

  Even though it was one win each, Prost still held the advantage. It had not been lost on Senna that every time he won, Prost would probably be there and take second. And every time he made a mistake or retired, Prost would again be there to take the win. He suddenly had the realisation that the best man would not necessarily be world champion.

  At Monaco, Senna took pole by 1.427 seconds from Prost. It was possibly the greatest qualifying lap of all time, and Senna later described it in mystic terminology, explaining that he had been in a kind of trance, going faster and faster with each new qualifying lap. The McLarens were two seconds faster than anyone else throughout the weekend.

  In his subsequent report of the race in Motor Sport magazine, legendary journalist, the late Denis Jenkinson, described the other drivers’ objective as not to get lapped by Senna too often.

  Leading off the line, and easily in front for 66 laps, the Brazilian had the race in his pocket. In this situation Prost would have simply eased off and controlled the race majestically to the finish. But not Senna. If there was ever a race that indicated and explained so vividly why Senna only won 41 races from 65 pole positions it was Monaco in 1988. He realised he was in the best car at his most successful circuit – probably the closest he would ever get to perfection in Formula One. Throughout the race he tried to push the limits of perfection, and lapsed into a trance similar to the one he had experienced in qualifying.

  Shortly before the 67th lap he began to go too quickly for his team’s nerves; as he started lap 67, Ron Dennis radioed to him to slow down. But as he obeyed and began his cruise towards the finish, demonstrating some racecraft, of which he was not a great practitioner, Alain Prost pulled one of the legendary strokes for which he was so famous. Sensing Senna was suddenly easing off, Prost put in a very quick lap to pull back six seconds. It took the gap to under 50 seconds and Senna literally panicked that he was losing the race. It was the reaction Prost wanted. He had out-psyched Senna and his reaction was exactly what he thought it would be. On lap 67, distracted by the command from his team principal to slow down, Senna lost the plot, and sped up again as he deftly flicked his McLaren through the left and right of Casino Square down to Mirabeau and round the Loewes hairpin, down towards the seafront close to where he lived. He went into the right-hand corner just before the tunnel and glanced the Armco, which pushed him across the track where his front wheel touched the wall lightly at Portier. Monaco forgives no mistakes and he was out with a bent suspension arm. He climbed angrily from his car, brushing away help from marshals by the cockpit, and leapt the barrier as Prost sped by in the lead. He walked straight back to his apartment in the Houston block overlooking the Mediterranean. Only in Monaco could he make the five-minute walk home from a retirement without passing by the pits to explain. He was deeply upset by his own failure. He refused to talk to anyone and it was only much later that McLaren deduced the reasons behind the crash. An astonished Prost commented: “I was happy to be second and did not expect to win today. I was very surprised when I realised I was in the lead. I could not believe it.”

  It was devastating because there had been only 11 laps to go to the flag. Prost was second, nearly a minute down the road, and Berger’s Ferrari was way down on him. Murray Walker, who was commentating that day, was as amazed as anyone: “It was one of the very, very few mistakes that Senna made through loss of concentration,” he said at the time.

  Jo Ramirez said: “The moment he saw that Alain was second and could pull back something like six seconds in one lap then he panicked. I remember Ron shouting to him ‘stop, stop, slow down, it is only six laps, slow down’. Of course slow down was not in his vocabulary – the next lap he did another fastest lap and then he crashed.”

  Murray Walker remembers: “He was so upset, appalled and distressed by what had happened that he walked straight back to his apartment, which was not very far from where he had gone off, and completely disappeared for the rest of the day.” That was distressing for Walker and his co-commentator James Hunt, who had viewers at the biggest race of the year.

  It wa
s up to Ramirez to find out what had happened: “I kept ringing the apartment but the telephone didn’t answer,” he says. “Finally, at 10pm, the telephone was answered by a Brazilian woman who used to look after the flat. So in Portuguese I said that I knew Ayrton was there, and could I please talk to him. She insisted he was not there but I said I knew he was, he just didn’t want to talk to anyone, but that I needed to talk to him. Eventually Ayrton came to the phone and he was still crying. He said: ‘I don’t know what happened – the steering came off in my hand’.”

  Alain Prost says: “Ayrton was angry at Monaco when he did not win. But he did not know who to direct his anger at. He was always like that. Sometimes he just wanted to have a fight and his biggest motivation was to fight against me.”

  Senna thought he had lost the championship that day. He realised that although he could routinely smash Prost in qualifying, and was without doubt significantly faster, Prost had an edge over him in races and could manipulate him – and, like in Monaco, he was helpless to do anything about it. Prost took full advantage of his psychological breakthrough and won again in Mexico; Senna, worried about his fuel consumption, deliberately settled for second.

  Astonishingly Senna was only third in the championship after Mexico. He may have annexed pole position for every race, but Prost was running away with the championship and Gerhard Berger was in second. The scores were Prost 33, Berger 18 and Senna only 15.

  But at Montreal for the Canadian Grand Prix a fortnight later, it was Senna who won and Prost who had to settle for second. After complaining that pole was on the dirty side of the track, Senna had lost the lead to Prost at the start and had to overtake his team-mate to regain it. Prost was afterwards full of praise for his rival, even admitting he was the quicker driver: “He is the quickest, most professional driver. I don’t know if I’m as fast as I was last year or two years ago. But for sure Senna is the quickest. The car is so good this year that we’re going to win almost all the races.”

  Senna was back in the groove and the Monaco disappointment was forgotten. He took a lights-to-flag victory in Detroit at the next race and lapped everyone except Prost. It was the hottest race of the year and Senna had come through with flying colours, at last translating his mastery into successive race wins. Only eight cars completed the whole race distance. It put Senna in second place in the championship with 33 points to Prost’s 45. The car was embarrassingly quick, to the point that it smothered the careers of drivers like Thierry Boutsen, who reached his peak in the wrong year. The McLarens made everyone else’s performance academic. In Detroit Boutsen finished a good third for Benetton Ford and said afterwards: “The only problem was that I didn’t have a McLaren.”

  Senna didn’t care whether the dominance of the McLaren was having a detrimental effect on the sport. It was his first year in a really competitive car and he was making the most of it. Unlike Boutsen he was peaking and had the best car. Asked by journalists if McLaren’s domination was good for the sport, he smiled and said: “I don’t really care.” He was entirely focused on winning the world championship.

  McLaren was already leading the constructors’ championship by 78 points to Ferrari’s 27. Ferrari team manager Marco Piccinini told the press that the team would be a lot more competitive in the second half of the season. Ron Dennis laughed: “If the second half means the last eight races and Marco is giving us the next three, then we’ll take them.”

  Even more remarkably, Senna had been on pole position for every single race that season. It was unprecedented. Despite that, he was not leading the world championship – and that was also unprecedented. Senna shared the record of six consecutive pole positions with Stirling Moss and Niki Lauda. But he was not destined to break it.

  The run came to an end just as his world championship charge hotted up. In France, Senna failed to take pole for the first time that year, as Prost squeezed out every inch in front of his home fans. The Frenchman would have been humiliated if Senna had beaten him to pole at home, and he proved he could still do it, even if a little bit of his motivation after winning two championships had disappeared. In reality he dominated the race – the only time in 1988 he was dominant. After taking an early lead, a fumbled pitstop saw him lose it, and Senna was three seconds ahead. But Prost hauled him in majestically and swooped past for the lead, making Senna look like an amateur. Prost romped home and Senna was second. The Brazilian later said he had gearbox problems, but still praised Prost’s driving.

  After Paul Ricard the team went straight to Silverstone for testing before the British Grand Prix. Senna used it as a chance to practise his model-aeroplane skills, and between sessions was to be found at the back of the circuit in the desolate, wide-open spaces. In the test session he was one of the slowest drivers there, six seconds adrift of Prost, as he focused on set-up and tyres for the race.

  At the Silverstone event in mid-July, it seemed as if Marco Piccinini’s predictions may have been correct. For the first time the McLarens were not on the front row. Instead the Ferraris of Gerhard Berger and Michele Alboreto led the qualifying, relegating Senna and Prost to third and fourth. But the session was far from typical, interrupted by rainstorms and a blown engine for Senna to contend with. He also spun the car right round twice in the day, looking to shave off 10ths at Stowe corner. The McLarens were bested by the Ferraris that day. Amazingly, after both his spins, Senna controlled the car, got it pointed in the right direction and carried on as if nothing had happened.

  Come race day, the rain poured down and Berger took the lead at the start, but on lap 14 Senna powered past into first, albeit nearly taking out his team-mate, who was on a slow lap en route to retirement. Senna stayed there for the rest of the race, followed home by Nigel Mansell, while Prost, no lover of wet conditions, complained of handling problems and parked his car in the pits from 15th. Despite the victory the team was unhappy, and Ron Dennis said: “Taken as a whole, I don’t think we did a very good job this weekend.” For any other team at the time a win would have been greeted as a miracle.

  It seemed not to matter that McLaren had won its eighth consecutive race, which was another record in a single season.

  There was controversy afterwards as Prost admitted he could have carried on despite his clutch problem, but that he thought the conditions were too dangerous. It was a signal for normally pro-Prost French journalists to lay into him, accusing him of being a coward and not as fast as Senna. They implied his performance was disgracing the whole of France. Ron Dennis leapt to Prost’s defence, saying he employed the two most professional drivers in the sport and if one or both made the decision to stop because it was dangerous he would support them 100 per cent. The criticism unnerved the team.

  As the season wore on, Senna was appreciating all the attention from Josef Leberer. Never had one man made so much difference to his life. First Leberer focused on his back and gave him regular massages. Leberer remembered: “He was so committed and in the evening it was good to relax and ‘come down’. I really took a lot of time to look after his back and massage. I think he really appreciated that. The chemistry was good. He was a special person.”

  At the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim in late July it rained again and qualifying went to form, with Senna on pole and Prost second. But journalists had smelt blood and were baying for it at the delayed post-qualifying press conference. Prost laid into the journalists, slamming their attitudes. Led on by French colleagues, they were baiting Prost, hoping he would crack and give them a story. In the race Senna led all the way with Prost coming in second, nearly 14 seconds behind. Senna had closed to within three championship points of the Frenchman.

  In the first week of August at the Hungarian Grand Prix, the scene of so much happiness for Senna, he took the championship lead for the first time, heading a McLaren one-two after a close scrap with his team-mate: just over half a second separated them. He and Prost were equal on 66 points, but after 10 races Senna had six wins to Prost’s four. He was very close to
equalling Jim Clark’s and Alain Prost’s joint record of seven wins in a season.

  Before Belgium the McLaren team-mates had an important task: to do first tests with the new normally-aspirated V10 Honda engine that was ready for the 1989 season. Turbos were banned for 1989 so Honda had no choice but to build a new engine. Senna had rarely driven a normally-aspirated Formula One car. Prost tried it first in mid-August at Silverstone. On the same day Senna was at Monza testing the regular turbo car. Then they swapped and Prost flew to Italy and Senna to Silverstone. Senna crashed the car heavily first time out and ended the test. He was simply unused to the characteristics of a normally-aspirated car in Formula One. His only experience had been his tests with Williams and McLaren in 1983, an encounter long since forgotten.

  It didn’t phase him. At the Belgian Grand Prix in Spa in late August, Senna took his fourth victory in a row, from pole to flag, to equal the seven-win record. But of more interest to him than records were the points-scoring permutations. With the seven wins altogether and a dropped score points system that favoured the Brazilian, the title was looking good. Prost, who finished second, conceded: “I think it’s over. I know it is not over mathematically, but I cannot really hope to win four out of five races. That would be too difficult. I think Ayrton is going to win the world championship and deserves to, for what he has done this year and the last two or three years. He has had a fantastic season and I am not stupid. The pressure will be off me now.”

  That meant the pressure was on Senna. The claims irritated the Brazilian, who said: “I am happy with the result, but you cannot say I have won the title yet. I am close to it but it is not finished and I will keep on fighting the same way. I have to carry on working. You cannot afford any mistakes when you are racing against someone like Alain. Wait and see. It is not finished yet.” McLaren was on course to win every race in a season, a feat never before achieved. The team had already won the constructors’ and drivers’ championships, it just didn’t know which driver was taking the title. But the train was about to temporarily hit the buffers.