“You were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Irvine piped up. “I was battling with Hill.”
Senna replied: “Who is supposed to have the call? You, or the leader of the race who comes through to lap you?”
“The leader of the race,” Irvine admitted. “But you were too slow, and I had to overtake you to try to get at Hill.”
Senna thought he had won the argument. “Really? How did I lap you if I was too slow?”
“Rain,” Irvine explained. “Because on slicks you were quicker than me, on wets you weren’t.”
“Really? Really?” Senna replied. “How did I overtake you on wets?”
“Huh?”
“How come I overtook you on wets?” Senna demanded.
“I can’t remember that,” Irvine replied. “I don’t actually remember the race.”
Senna was in no mood for jokes. He punched Irvine on the side of the head, causing the Irishman to fall off the edge of the table where he had been perched. Howell and Ascanelli dragged the Brazilian out of the Jordan motorhome, while he shouted expletives at Irvine, who muttered from the floor that he would claim for injury from Senna’s insurers. Senna shouted back: “You’ve got to learn to respect where you’re going wrong.”
As news of the incident spread in the pressroom, Senna was vilified, especially by some sections of the British press, who had not forgiven him for falling out with Nigel Mansell a few years earlier. Irvine played the innocent victim: “He is totally out of control, completely and utterly. He hit me across the head and I fell down,” he said. There was even talk of the Brazilian losing his superlicence as a result. With just a single Grand Prix to his name, Irvine was a stranger to the sport and people had yet to recognise the psychological games he would play to good effect on other drivers in later years, and which had caught out Senna and consequently himself at Suzuka.
Damon Hill was unsympathetic. “The era of one driver saying ‘after you’ to another is long gone and that is as much due to Senna as anyone else. He started being very aggressive when he came in and everyone else has copied him. It has been the same for everyone since 1984. We all know that in Formula One you have to be very aggressive, just like Ayrton, if you want to succeed.”
Senna had also had a more minor disagreement with Prost after the race. The Frenchman had pointed out that it could be their last time on the podium together and that they should shake hands. Senna had completely ignored him. Perhaps he had decided there would be one further podium meeting.
The Australian Grand Prix at Adelaide was Prost’s final race. It was also Senna’s final race for McLaren. Senna was in the middle of a holiday with Adriane and looking forward to an event where the McLaren Ford would be competitive around the street circuit. He duly took pole. Once upon a time that had not been unusual, but Williams Renault had been so strong that it had enjoyed a run of 24 consecutive poles since Senna’s last front-of-grid spot at the Canadian Grand Prix in June 1992. With electronic driver aids due to be banned the following season, everyone was saying it was the end of an era, but no one could have guessed it would mark Senna’s final victory.
It was fitting that on Prost’s big occasion, Senna stole the show, because it had always been like that between them. The Brazilian led through all but pitstops and as a result McLaren broke Ferrari’s all-time record of 103 victories. Between them Prost and Senna had scored 65, well over half the total. On the podium, Senna surprised everyone, including Prost, by giving his old rival a farewell hug and telling him he would miss him. Perhaps even Senna realised that Senna without Prost was not the same show as Senna and Prost together.
Senna was moved by the occasion: “I had to keep my feelings very much under control because in those moments emotions were taking over. I had to win this race, that is why I had to keep my emotions under control.” Prost said: “It was very difficult for me before the start. I kept thinking it was the last time I was putting on my gloves and the last time I was doing everything. It was very difficult to keep my concentration, but the motivation was there. It was not easy in the car. Altogether, it was very strange for me. I feel tired now.”
With victory in Adelaide, Senna took second place in the championship with five wins and 73 points to Prost’s seven wins and 99 points. He finished ahead of Hill, with his Williams Renault, and ahead of Schumacher and Riccardo Patrese, with their superior Benetton Fords.
After the race, Jo Ramirez presented Senna with a framed montage of his greatest moments with McLaren. At the bottom there was a message from Ron Dennis that read: “Dear Ayrton, The best in anything is expensive. Occasionally though, you get value for money. Not all the time, but most of the time. Thanks for all the results and the good times shared. Have a nice holiday in Didcot. From one friend to another. Ron Dennis.”
That evening Senna and Adriane went to a Tina Turner concert organised to coincide with the end of the Grand Prix weekend. It was held within the circuit after the race to encourage people to stay on and ease the severe traffic congestion. Team personnel had a special VIP area to the right of the stage. Suddenly Tina Turner struck up her trademark number, ‘Simply the Best’. She walked stage left and beckoned to Senna to join her, holding his hand as he came forward and brought him onto the stage. She told him how wonderfully he had performed that day and how the song was for him. It didn’t seem like Prost’s occasion to celebrate his retirement and fourth world championship.
But Senna had not forgotten his rival. Now the Frenchman was retired and no longer a threat, a thaw had set in: “We both love motor racing. We are both world champions and despite the difficult times we’ve had in the past, today is the end of an era,” he said. “When we were both on the podium we had the opportunity to wish each other well. It is a good way to end. Next year there will be a little bit of emptiness.”
Ron Dennis was extremely sad about Senna leaving the team. He realised he was the best the team had ever had. But by season end he felt some bitterness at the way in which he was leaving. The five victories he scored during the year in many ways made it even worse. Dennis liked to win as much as Senna. He said: “This year, most of the time, I think Ayrton has done an extremely good job, and the results have reflected that, both in qualifying and racing. Some of the time, and understandably so, he possibly struggles with the motivation to give 100 per cent. But I accept that. It happens only rarely, and does not last very long. But that is normal. I find it difficult, too. So does anybody who is accustomed to winning and is no longer doing so.”
Dennis also thought the lack of a really competitive team-mate had blunted his edge somewhat that season: “Ayrton’s strengths – his commitment, focus and skills – are obvious and there for all to see. I think that over the years, by and large he has been able to maintain his own standards. I also think if there is a higher level to be reached it can only be reached when he is racing against another driver with the same equipment. That’s when he’s prepared to dig deeper and try harder. Obviously at the moment that’s not the case.” Dennis also thought Senna would miss McLaren, which had effectively become his team: “The environment he is in is very important to him. It’s possible that if he’s not part of the McLaren team he might find himself in a situation he won’t like, because he’s possibly forgotten the styles and cultures of the other teams he has driven for. I think McLaren is a company that’s focused on winning, We’ve done that fairly consistently, and there is an inevitability about the fact that we’ll do it again. The same cannot be said for many other teams. One of the things that I can never understand is how so many of the teams that have never won a Grand Prix can accept their situation and how others seem happy to rest on their laurels. That’s not the way we think. We will win again, no mistake about it.”
Dennis’s underlying bitterness at losing Senna showed in his final comment: “It is a criticism I level at virtually any driver – when they win it’s them that’s winning and when they lose it’s the team that’s losing. I think it’s just somethi
ng that spirals out of the character profile that you have to have to be a world champion. But it’s still a disappointment. You get flayed in the press when you’re failing and you don’t even get the recognition when you’re succeeding. But that is motor racing and you have to live with it.”
Senna was sanguine: “I know there have been some negative comments from him, which are very sad and unfortunate because we worked together for six years and we won three championships together. I have good memories despite whatever happens now or in the future. I think respect must always stand. I know he has been saying some bad things to the press [about me] and I really feel sorry about that. I feel sad in a way because I developed for the team... as much as they did for me... I also did a lot for the team. I worked well for everybody. I have no problems with anybody in the team. We did our maximum under all the circumstances, even when we didn’t have a competitive car. For me, to say the sad things he said about me is very unfortunate. I think he will regret it.”
The final months of the year were spent solely with Adriane, as Senna prepared for what he believed would be a certain title with Williams Renault in 1994. Contractually he couldn’t drive his new car until 1st January 1994, and that suited him fine. As he said: “I have one regret – that I do not have enough time to devote to my private life.” Since he had discovered Adriane, Ayrton had finally found the balance. Before her he had been seen with a succession of Brazilian beauties on his arm, mainly TV personalities. At one point he had even said he had been cured of marriage, as Brazilian gossip columnists raked over his previous acquaintances as stories of his romance with Adriane appeared almost daily. He was linked among others with Australian model Elle MacPherson, American actress Carol Alt and former top model Lauren Hutton, a woman nearly twice his age. One columnist avidly described the reason women found Senna so attractive. The article said that women saw in his warm brown bedroom eyes great tenderness as well as sexual passion, and many of them tried to put their feelings into words in love letters to the man of their dreams. It was typical of the hyperbole of the time. But for him, for the first time in his life, he had found someone he wanted to be faithful to.
At the end of 1993, friends were saying in Brazilian newspapers that he was close to proposing to Adriane. If he was he wasn’t saying, and he certainly never did. But he did say that winter: “She carries my happiness,” as he took his nephew Bruno karting on his private track at Tatui, and joined his two nieces, Bianca and Paula, in the swimming pool afterwards.
Adriane then joined them and all five took Senna’s two dogs, Kinda the Schnauzer and mongrel Samanta, for an evening walk.
The two dogs told a story in themselves. They had just turned up on Senna’s farm one day by fate. As he said: “They just came to me. I didn’t go and buy them or programme it. It just happened. I love them and everything I have, everything that is part of my life, I love.”
As for the children he said: “This is my apprenticeship for becoming a father.” And he didn’t mind if Adriane heard either.
Some time during his last long Brazilian summer, Senna told friends he had seriously considered retiring from competition to live permanently in Tatui. His helicopter pad in São Paulo made it possible for him to travel to his offices every day, and return mid-afternoon. He had the perfect life and he knew it. Formula One somehow interfered with that life. Little did he know how it would unravel in 1994.
CHAPTER 22
The Best Lap Ever Driven
Senna’s finest two minutes
Although much else in the field of superlatives in Formula One is constantly in dispute, the question of the greatest lap in history is not in doubt. It happened one miserable Sunday in the English Midlands. As Sunday 11th April 1993 dawned, rain was teeming down in desolate Leicestershire.
At 6am or thereabouts, Ayrton Senna rose from his bed and looked out of the window to survey the countryside from his suite in the opulent Stapleford Park Hotel in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire. Stapleford Park was a haven, created by an unlikely founder, American pizza restaurant entrepreneur Bob Payton. But it had no appeal that Sunday morning for Ayrton Senna. He was focused on how to get out to the Donington Park racetrack, where the European Grand Prix was being held that day.
At once he decided to drive to the track and not risk using TAG’s helicopter, just in case it couldn’t land at Donington.
Not only was it raining but there was a deep mist hanging over the countryside. The fog was so bad Senna wondered whether the race would even take place. The rules require that a medical helicopter needs to be able to fly before a race can begin, but despite the poor weather, flights were not disrupted into and out of the track.
The Donington Park circuit sits right alongside East Midlands airport. Senna had toyed with the idea of commuting right into Donington from Faro airport near his home in Portugal. He was glad he hadn’t taken this option. His HS125 jet was sitting on the East Midlands tarmac ready to fly to Portugal and new girlfriend Adriane. He wished she was here with him, but he knew that she would be bored in greyest middle England with nothing to do.
The night before he’d had dinner with Ron Dennis, Mansour Ojjeh, pop singer Mike Rutherford of Mike and the Mechanics, plus Mario and Michael Andretti and communications magnate and IndyCar team owner Bruce McCaw. It had been a good night. He liked the company and Ron and Mansour, despite occasional strains, adored him. Ayrton Senna was accompanied for this race by his friend Galvao Bueno, a commentator for the Brazilian television station TV Globo. As ever, TV Globo was covering virtually every last detail of Senna’s life.
Bueno was in another hotel and Senna would meet him at the track. His thoughts went back to Bueno and he gave him a quick call to make sure he was up. Bueno and another TV Globo man, Reginaldo Leme, had been very important to Senna’s career. Bueno had come to the fore after Senna had fallen out with Leme, just as the driver had fallen out with many people as he became more successful. Senna regretted it but it was the way of the world. His friends and helpers from the early days expected everything to be the same when he became world champion – and it wasn’t. Bueno was a newer friend and he understood the pressures.
Public relations and publicity had always been of huge interest to Senna. Right from the early days he had employed PR people to send out press releases when no one had even heard of him. By 1993 he was more organised, with his own full-time PR staff headed by Brazilian Betise Assumpção, who followed him from race to race. In addition, Brazilian newspapers paid him obscene amounts of money to write columns that he probably would have contributed for nothing if pushed. The irony of others paying him to promote himself was not lost on him.
As it was he always kept a TV Globo man at hand to attend to his PR needs. In the old days it had been Leme, now it was Bueno. It was extraordinary how Senna could manipulate people and situations to get what he wanted. The result of this access and manipulation was many misconceptions about the Brazilian that he never cared to correct. They were, he reasoned, part of the myth and the legend that would be so important to him when he retired.
One of the biggest misconceptions concerned his mastery in the rain. The truth was he hated the rain and he thought driving a Formula One car on anything but a bone-dry track was extremely dangerous. But everyone thought he loved driving in the rain and prayed for it. However, his advantage was that others hated it even more.
Senna liked to sleep with the curtains open on the eve of a race so he could see the weather as soon as he woke up. When he saw the rain on the hotel window he bounded out of bed. He knew he could win.
The McLaren Ford was not the fastest car – it did not even have a works engine. The Renault-powered Williams and the works Ford-powered Benettons were both faster with their high-revving pneumatic valve-operated engines. Renault had pioneered the process of replacing steel springs with pneumatic operation in the 1980s, allowing engines an extra 1,500rpm. Three of the four cars with this type of engine were ahead of him on the grid.
> As he watched the rain, his race strategy was already forming in his mind. To win, he had to be ahead at the end of the first lap; from fourth on the grid. As was his habit, Senna used the quiet of the morning to plan how he would get in front. One of Senna’s mystical talents was that he could record in his mind how he wanted to drive a lap, and replay it later and hone it to perfection before he even got in the car. He sat down on the bed and drove the lap in his head, this time on a very wet track.
Another of his talents was going into what he called ‘spiritual mode’. He could turn off from reality and sink into an inner consciousness. That way he could achieve great things in a race car while not really conscious. And when he woke up he knew he would win the race, reliability allowing. He didn’t expect anyone else to understand it: that was just the way it was. He left the hotel at 7am and drove to the track in 30 minutes in his hire car with his physio, Josef Leberer. At the track Leberer prepared him a breakfast of his usual muesli and coffee, then supervised Senna’s normal race morning stretching and aerobic exercises.
Weather conditions in the warm-up session were damp but the morning was otherwise uneventful. As the cars edged round to take their places on the grid at 1.30pm, the rain was getting worse.
Donington is a tight track and not only did Senna not like the rain, he didn’t like the circuit, on which he had first driven a Formula One car exactly 10 years before. He may not have liked either but he excelled at exploiting them, especially the wet conditions.
There were two plans in his subconscious. One was taking the lead from the start, which would render ‘plan B’ unnecessary. ‘Plan B’ entailed him being fourth or fifth after the start, which he thought the most likely. In the back of his mind was the fact that, in the dry, the Williams Renault cars would be two seconds a lap faster. And that was the reason he needed to be in front at the end of lap one – so he could build that cushion in case the weather improved. Senna peered up the grid at the cars ahead of him. He knew Alain Prost, on pole, hated racing in the rain, a loathing that probably dated back to his involvement in the accident that seriously injured Didier Pironi at Hockenheim in 1982. Prost had been only 11th quickest in the warm-up; Senna knew that when the chance came he would be easy meat.
The Life of Senna Page 37