The Life of Senna

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The Life of Senna Page 40

by Rubython, Tom


  To win was what he desired more than anything else. That he was more successful at getting pole than he was at winning was a mystery to him, as it was to others. He once said: “You either commit yourself as a professional racing driver who is designed to win races, or you come second, third, fourth or fifth. I am not designed to come second or less. I race to win. As long as I feel it is possible. Sometimes you get it wrong, sure. It is impossible to get it right all the time. But I race to win because I am designed to win.”

  And that was probably the problem – he tried too hard to win and wore out the car or went off trying when he should have held for second and possibly inherited victory.

  Senna’s designs on the art of winning, his detailed planning to parlay his superlative natural talent into ultimate success, were unsurpassed. Michael Schumacher has become the dominant driver of his era by emulating Senna’s pioneering pursuit of excellence. But prior to Senna, none of the sport’s other superstars worked as hard at winning. Sir Frank Williams only employed him for a short time but it was long enough to realise what distinguished Senna from the team’s other greatest winners, Nigel Mansell and Alain Prost. “Ayrton was the most committed of all. What was outstanding about him was his mental application. He had an air of invincibility around him. He put his entire body and mind into winning.”

  The Brazilian’s ceaseless search for perfection involved extensive investigations into every aspect of driving, beginning with such fundamentals as the correct seating position in the cockpit and placement of the hands on the steering wheel. He believed in the classic ‘quarter-past-nine’ position, with his hands exactly opposite each other on the wheel. However, his distinctive cornering technique was at odds with conventional wisdom, involving quick stabbing applications of the throttle throughout the turn. From the entry, around the apex and through the exit of the corner, Senna controlled the rear of the car with the throttle and the front with the steering wheel. But it was his way of gaining control of races that most set him apart from his peers.

  For Senna the race began on the formation lap, during which he deliberately worked at intimidating his rivals. While everyone else used the formation lap to warm up their tyres by weaving from side to side, Senna employed not so subtle forms of psychological warfare. By pretending to squeeze a following car out of position in a corner, feinting overtaking a car in front, or weaving ominously near a car that might venture alongside, he forcefully demonstrated his intentions and ambitions for the race. He called this aggressive behaviour ‘a sort of declaration of war’ and felt that such tactics would make it easier to later ‘swallow up’ the opposition. Senna considered the start and opening laps to be the most important parts of the race and believed they must be approached with great determination. “A driver must not wait for things to happen – on the contrary, he must act first, creating a situation that may be to his advantage,” he once said. He thought deeply about the start, visualising a perfect getaway but allowing himself different alternatives ‘so as not to be demoralised if things didn’t work out as imagined’.

  More often than not it was his scintillating starts and devastating opening laps that demoralised his peers. The prime example of getting the jump on his rivals was his breathtaking first lap in the rain at the 1993 European Grand Prix at Donington, when he overtook every car in front of him and never looked back en route to one of his most memorable victories. Though he was capable of winning by the kind of stealth and cunning often used by his arch rival Prost, Senna’s competitive fires burned so fiercely that he favoured winning by fighting hard, preferably by annihilation. His essential philosophy was straightforward. Since the whole point of racing was to finish ahead of everyone else, he believed that if a driver was behind someone his goal should be to overtake them, and if he was ahead then he should do everything in his power to avoid being overtaken. It was contrary to Senna’s mindset to simply sit where he was and wait for the chequered flag. For him the race was a battle from start to finish.

  Unrivalled as an overtaker, Senna had an extensive repertoire of manoeuvres he employed to suit individual circumstances. While a surprise attack might sometimes work, he believed that a successful overtaking move more often came ‘after you have studied your opponent and discovered his weaknesses’. In order to identify such flaws he advocated staying behind for a few laps before pouncing. “The driver behind must actively create chances for overtaking and pressurise his opponent into a mistake. This is the real fascination of Formula One racing.”

  As much as he concentrated on continually perfecting his driving skills, Senna worked at developing a winning mindset that everyone acknowledged was on a different plane. Gerhard Berger – team-mate, friend and now BMW’s director of motorsport – thinks the Brazilian’s secret weapon was his mentality, especially his unwavering single-mindedness, his steadfast self-belief and his absolute determination not to be beaten. When they were together at McLaren, and Williams had the technological advantage, Berger might set the third fastest time in a practice session behind the two Williams cars and then be content with that because, after all, the Williams cars were better than the McLarens. But as Berger says: “For Ayrton, Williams didn’t exist. The only thing that existed was himself – and he had to be first. That thinking gave him the ability to create a power.”

  While most drivers tailored their performance expectations according to their car’s capabilities, Senna refused to be beaten by mechanical limitations. “It is simply in your mind – believing you can do it,” he said. “First of all, you’ve got to have the knowledge; you’ve got to have the experience, the basic feelings for doing it. After that it’s only a question of believing you can do it, and committing yourself to it, before you actually achieve it. It’s like knowing what’s going to happen before it happens. Like believing things you cannot see and feeling things you are not touching. That is the key, the power.”

  Senna’s relentless quest for ever more speed and his predilection for pushing himself harder and harder were seen by critics as potentially fatal flaws in his make-up. Often condemned for what was regarded as excessive risk-taking, he defended himself against charges that his conviction that he had a divine right to win made him dangerous.

  On the contrary, Senna insisted he thought carefully about the role of fear and used it to manage the risk factor. “I always think about risk before I get in the car, especially if the circuit is one of the more dangerous ones,” he said. “I must think about this because the more calculating you can be, the less can go wrong because of an unexpected situation. There is the possibility that you could also make a mistake because your judgement might go wrong on that day. At the same time, you should not have too much fear or you cannot commit yourself.”

  Undoubtedly, Senna thought more deeply about his profession than any of his rivals, including Alain ‘The Professor’ Prost, who was renowned as a thinking driver. Throughout his career, which paralleled the increasing takeover of technology in the sport, the engineers who worked most closely with him marvelled that his mind was more than a match for any computer. When Senna was at Lotus, the team’s technical director, Gerard Ducarouge, said: “With Ayrton we don’t need telemetry.” Nigel Stepney, now at Ferrari, also worked with him at Team Lotus, where he recalls: “Senna’s precision was unbelievable. On a debrief he could spend five or 10 minutes telling you about one lap – every bump, every entry, every apex, every exit, every line he’d taken through every corner. I think he wore Ducarouge down with his memory power and explanations of what he’d done.”

  Senna’s insistence on lengthy debriefing sessions was legendary and his determination fully to understand the technical aspects of making a car go quickly meant he was often the last driver to leave the circuit. He would sit for hours analysing the data amassed by the engine and chassis telemetry, working out ways to improve the performance of the car and maximise its potential. Steve Hallam, formerly with Lotus and now with McLaren, considers it a privilege to have engineere
d cars for Senna, whose understanding of how a Formula One car actually worked was unmatched. “He was able to extract the maximum from all those parameters that go towards fulfilling a car’s performance. In other words he would get the maximum from the brakes, the tyres, the engine, from every single part. He would consider each of them separately to find his limit and where he could extend it. Then he would combine them and channel his skills into well-defined periods of time. For a pole lap or an entire race.”

  Senna once tried to describe how he put everything together to help achieve those unbeatably quick laps. When his mind was in gear it seemed he could anticipate the physical act of driving to the point where it was as if he was operating on automatic pilot. “It is always my objective to concentrate on the task, taking into account everything within me: my personality, my training, both my weak and my strong points,” he said. “I can then get to a level where I am driving ahead of the next corner. I am a split second ahead entering a corner, halfway through a corner, exiting a corner – just before braking, just before changing gear, just before putting down the power. I can almost predict what I’m going to face and correct it before it happens. And that takes a lot of concentration as well as instant reactions. It means a lot of tension goes through the body, because it’s like electricity. Every movement is instant and has to be 100 per cent precise, or as close to 100 per cent precision as possible.

  “In this way the driving becomes automatic because your brain controls the throttle. It knows your braking ability, your gear change points. It depends on your eyesight before a corner”.

  On one of his really quick laps Senna was a sight never to be forgotten. One of the most eloquent descriptions of him at speed is given by John Watson, who was driving a McLaren in the 1985 European Grand Prix at Brands Hatch where Senna, in his second season in Formula One, finished second in the race after starting from pole. Watson had just completed his own qualifying lap when he saw Senna’s familiar yellow and green helmet coming up behind him at a phenomenal speed. He moved over to let the flying Lotus Renault past and this is what he saw: “I witnessed visibly and audibly something I had not seen anyone do before in a racing car. It was as if he had four hands and legs. He was braking, changing down, steering, pumping the throttle, and the car appeared to be on that knife-edge between being in and out of control. All of this at absolutely awesome speed. It was a master controlling a machine. I saw something very special that day: a little glimpse of genius.”

  With the same genius for pure speed that secured a record 65 pole positions, Senna won 41 of his 161 Grand Prix races. Only very seldom did he back off and simply cruise to a victory. It was against his nature to go anything much less than flat out, an aspect of his character that was dramatically driven home to him in a lesson he never forgot. Because he was so intensely self-critical and analytical about his driving, any mistake he made caused him great mental anguish, and none more so than the one that cost him victory in the 1988 Monaco Grand Prix. Having won there the year before, with Lotus, Senna was then with McLaren, where his intense rivalry with team-mate Alain Prost was in its early stages. After beating Prost to pole by an astonishing 1.427 seconds, Senna was determined to destroy his team-mate in the race. By lap 54 he was nearly a minute ahead of Prost, who, after getting past slower traffic, reeled off a succession of fast laps. When Senna retaliated with even quicker laps, worried McLaren boss Ron Dennis ordered them to slow down and hold their positions for the good of the team. A few laps later – while leading Prost by 46 seconds – Senna crashed. The accident happened at Portier, the right-hander that brings the cars out to the tunnel beside the Mediterranean. There sat the abandoned McLaren, and when Prost cruised over the finish line to score an easy win. It was one victory less.

  After the accident he in his flat he wept until he fell asleep, so disconsolate and embarrassed at making such an elementary error. Ramirez remembers: “That’s how intense the guy was. That’s how much it meant to him. I’ve never known anyone with Ayrton’s will to win.”

  There was another element to Senna’s emotional state at the time that no one else knew about. It was only after he clinched the 1988 championship that Senna spoke about the spiritual transformation he had experienced at Monaco. “Monaco was the turning point in the championship,” he said at the time. “The mistake I made woke me up psychologically and mentally and I changed a lot after that. It gave me the strength, the power and the cool mind to fight in critical situations. That was when I took the biggest step in my career as a racing driver, as a professional and as a man. I have to say that it brought me closer to God than I’ve ever been and that has changed my life completely. I am a better human being now than I was before. I am better in everything I am and everything I do. The accident was not just a driving mistake. It was the consequence of a struggle inside me, which paralysed me and made me vulnerable. I had an opening to God and another to the devil. The accident was a signal that God was there, waiting to give me a hand. I just had to tell him what I wanted.”

  Senna said that from then on God spoke to him and answered his prayers through passages in the Bible. When he sought guidance and protection, the Bible would open at references to courage, determination and strength. On hearing about the depth of his religious conviction some people ridiculed Senna, and others, Prost included, worried that he might take even greater risks and endanger himself and others because he thought God would protect him. Senna was stung by such criticisms and eventually refused to discuss the religious aspect of his life, apart from with close confidants. Nonetheless, with or without divine intervention, following that single error in 1988 the fact remains that Senna won the following five Monaco Grand Prix events in a row.

  Ramirez was particularly close to Senna and still finds it difficult to mention his name. Of all the 35 victories Senna won for McLaren, the one Ramirez remembers most is the 1993 Australian Grand Prix, in Adelaide. It was Senna’s last race with McLaren before his move to Williams. As usual, Ramirez was beside Senna’s car on the starting grid, helping him do up his seatbelts, when Senna confessed he felt very strange. Ramirez says: “I said to Ayrton ‘You just win this for us and we’ll love you forever’. He grabbed my arm, squeezed it really hard, and his eyes filled up. Mine did too.”

  Ramirez was worried that the emotional moment might adversely affect Senna’s performance – but it didn’t. He won the race to give McLaren a record 104 Grand Prix victories, one more than Ferrari at the time. Sadly, it was also destined to be the 41st and final victory of Senna’s career.

  It was later that night, that Tina Turner sang to him ‘Simply the Best’. Jo Ramirez says he has that moment on video but has never been able to watch it.

  CHAPTER 26

  The Last Love Story

  So close to happiness

  In Ayrton Senna’s 34 years on earth he only ever had three serious women in his life. There were lots of less serious ones but they were rarely seen in public and never really partners. The three were his teenage sweetheart and then wife Liliane, between 1975 and 1981; Xuxa Meneghel, a very famous (and rich) Brazilian TV presenter, between 1988 and 1992; and finally Adriane Galisteu, from 1993 to 1994 – the last and the most special. Close friends expected them eventually to marry.

  It was a love story that started on 15th March 1993, at 4 o’clock, when Adriane, a 19-year-old Brazilian model went to the offices of the Elite model agency in São Paulo for an audition. It was nothing special and Adriane almost turned it down as a job beneath her. Shell wanted hospitality hostesses for the 1993 Brazilian Grand Prix, and was ready to pay modelling rates for four days’ work. The oil company wanted the best: the best worked for Elite, and the oil giant was ready to pay.

  The audition almost ended in tears when two Shell executives asked Adriane to model a swimsuit. She misunderstood and said she was walking out. She only calmed down when they told her the uniform for the job had the same cut as a swimsuit, which was why it was necessary. Three directors of Shell turned
out personally at the audition to approve the girls. The hospitality arrangements at the annual Brazilian Grand Prix were very important. Big deals would be hatched there and everything had to be perfect.

  Adriane passed the audition and got the job. She and nine other girls were offered $1,000 each for the weekend’s work.

  Formula One was not entirely strange to Adriane. On a break from a photo-shoot in Portugal in 1990, she had watched Nigel Mansell win the Portuguese Grand Prix at Estoril.

  The proceedings for the Brazilian Grand Prix weekend kicked off on the Thursday following the audition with a press conference, but Adriane wasn’t there. She had a modelling job and refused to break the agreement. To her, the work for Shell was just another job, albeit hostessing rather than posing for a camera, which she had done since the age of 12. As she says: “It never crossed my mind that during that weekend I would find the love of my life.”

  Adriane was on her way to becoming a top model in Brazil. She was always busy, admittedly not earning a fortune, but always in demand. Already she had been abroad half-a-dozen times on assignments, and was still only 19 years old.

  By 5am on Friday 19th March, she was out of bed and in a taxi waiting to take her – still yawning – to the Elite model agency’s offices in the middle of São Paulo. She met the other nine girls and headed off to the circuit in a specially hired bus before the circuit traffic built up. Adriane was learning quickly that a downside of being a member of the inner circle of the Formula One circus was that the mornings were always very early. She remembers: “At the circuit we were quickly told how Formula One operates so that we wouldn’t just stand there with our pretty faces and bodies. They introduced us to the jargon of the circuit: pitwall, cockpit, pitlane, etc.”

  Friday went, Saturday came and Adriane barely knew why she had even bothered to go home in-between, so relentless was the pace of the event.

 

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