The Life of Senna

by Rubython, Tom

  As he rushed to the helicopter pad with Fittipaldi, he phoned a TV Globo reporter at the hospital who told him Senna would not last long. After a wait, the helicopter arrived and Braga, Berger, Fittipaldi and Bueno took off for Maggiore. The trip was made in absolute silence. These were four men as close to Senna as it was possible to be. The tragedy that had unfolded that afternoon defied any meaningful words.

  The cramped Imola media centre, as word of Senna’s condition circulated, was enveloped by a shroud of dread. He would never race again, at best, and most were under no illusion that he would be dead before midnight.

  Top journalist David Tremayne had been tipped off by Collins and was starting to write an obituary for the next day’s edition of the London Independent. Other British journalists with national newspaper contracts followed suit. Many of them hadn’t much cared for Senna when he was alive, but the enormity of his imminent passing weighed heavily.

  When Sid Watkins arrived at Maggiore, he conferred with the doctors who had been treating Senna. They had ordered an immediate brain scan. It merely confirmed that Senna had no chance of surviving the accident. Watkins was told Senna had multiple fractures of the base of the skull where his head had smashed into the carbon-fibre headrest of the monocoque. What had likely happened was that the right front wheel had shot up after impact like a catapult and violated the cockpit area where Senna was sitting. It impacted the right frontal area of his helmet, and the violence of the wheel’s impact pushed his head back against the headrest, causing the fatal skull fractures. A piece of upright attached to the wheel had partially penetrated his helmet and made a big indent in his forehead. In addition, it appeared that a jagged piece of the upright assembly had penetrated the helmet visor just above his right eye. Any one of the three injuries would probably have killed him. The combination of them all made it certain. Only Senna’s extremely high level of fitness meant he had momentarily survived. He suffered brain death on impact but the lack of any physical injury to the rest of his body meant that his heart and lungs continued to function. The neurosurgeon who examined Senna said that the circumstances did not call for surgery because the wound was generalised in the cranium. But an X-ray of the damage to his skull and brain indicated he would not last long, even with a machine maintaining his vital functions. Watkins looked at the monitors of blood pressure, respiration and heart rate: the end was near.

  Although their helicopter had left before Watkins’, finally Leonardo arrived with Josef Leberer. Then Julian Jakobi turned up. He had hitched a lift to the hospital with a Brazilian journalist, who knew the way after a trip the previous Friday to visit Barrichello.

  Dr Servadei and Dr Gordini together with Watkins immediately took Leonardo, Leberer and Jakobi into a small room, next to Senna’s. He told them that the end was near, that the situation was hopeless. Leonardo was in a hopeless condition himself, unable to absorb the news, but Jakobi and Leberer accepted the news stoically, and supported him. Like Watkins and Ecclestone, Jakobi also had to be strong whilst coping with intense personal grief. Leberer wanted to go in and see Senna whilst Jakobi comforted Leonardo. The doctors warned him that Senna did not look good because of his head injuries. But Leberer went in to see his friend for the last time. In the room, the life-support systems were noisy. Leberer saw his friend’s massive head injuries. He said: “I knew every part of his body. I was there because I wanted to see him there. We were more than six years together. We were friends and I did not have a problem to go there, even if there was a big injury.”

  As Watkins was talking to Leonardo, Galvao Bueno’s helicopter was landing in front of Maggiore hospital. Hospital staff recognised Gerhard Berger and the group was quickly ushered through to the intensive-care unit. The four men were led into the little room where Professor Watkins told them bluntly that Senna was already dead but that his heart was still beating. Berger remembered: “Sid Watkins told me it was very, very, very critical and basically there was no chance of getting him through.” Bueno remembered: “Sid Watkins said, ‘He is dead. He is brain dead, his heart stopped, we managed to make it go again, and he is kept alive with machines, but the Italian law requires us to wait 12 hours and take another ECG. Only after this can we disconnect him.’ I asked him: ‘But Dr Sid, will we have to wait suffering for 12 hours?’ He answered that he did not believe that even with support Ayrton’s heart would hold on for these 12 hours.”

  Watkins suggested they all went in to see him before that happened. Berger went first, with Josef Leberer supporting him. Berger sat down by his bed with all his memories of the man who had shared his career and also been a big part of his life outside the sport. He quietly spoke to Senna’s lifeless form. After spending a few intimate minutes in the bleak hospital room he quietly say his final goodbyes and kissed his friend on the cheek. He said: “I spent a few minutes with him and then that was that.”

  Then, in turn, the others went in to say goodbye.

  By now Senna’s family had gathered at the family farm in Tatui. Viviane Senna’s husband Flavio Lalli was fulfilling the same role as Ecclestone, Watkins and Jakobi, and had taken charge of a distraught family. Watkins was handed a phone with Lalli on the line. He told Lalli what he had told Leonardo, Jakobi, Bueno, Berger, Braga and Fittipaldi, that the situation was truly hopeless and that Senna would soon die. The family were on the verge of a decision to catch a chartered jet straight to Bologna. Watkins told him it would be inappropriate as there was nothing they could do. Watkins remembered: “They accepted the tragic news with dignity, and took my advice to remain in Brazil.”

  After Berger went into Senna’s room, Watkins decided to leave, unable to take any more. He was used to death, but this was unlike anything he had experienced. Watkins had borne the brunt of the tragedy. It had fallen to him to tell Senna’s family that he was effectively dead. Even he could only take so much. Although Senna was still technically alive there was nothing more he could do. It was just a question of waiting for the inevitable, which Watkins’ experience told him would be within the hour. For him, his friend was already dead. He took the chance of a lift back to his hotel. Watkins needed some time on his own to come to terms with the day’s events. When he got to his room, a man who had seen death many times discovered his own vulnerability as the television replayed the accident incessantly.

  Like Watkins, Berger needed some solitude. He took a helicopter to the airport, then his plane home to Austria. At the airport, in the evening dusk, he saw Senna’s plane waiting forlornly for an owner that would never return. Berger broke down, overpowered by the silhouette.

  In Portugal, Luiza Braga tried frantically to book a plane, as friends helped Adriane pack enough clothes for three days. She knew there was little hope, but told herself she would be by his bedside, waiting for him to recover. It was the only possible thought, and it kept her going.

  As she waited, a neighbour told her she had heard he had recovered consciousness. Adriane’s own mother phoned from São Paulo and asked what was happening. Adriane told her she hoped Senna would recover and that it was not as serious as was thought. Her no-nonsense mother immediately disabused her of that and made her face reality. TV Globo was delivering far more accurate information to Brazilian viewers than the more reserved European television channels, which were waiting for an official bulletin and shying away from the reality. Adriane’s mother told her the truth: that only a miracle could save him. After putting the phone down from her mother, Adriane felt her emotions going out of control. Her friends gave her a tranquilliser pill. She phoned Neyde da Silva at home in Brazil and tried to calm Neyde down, telling her she had heard her son had recovered consciousness. Neyde told her the family would catch a plane to Bologna at 2:30pm (local time).

  Even as they spoke, at Maggiore hospital electrical brain tests confirmed that Senna was brain dead and being kept alive only by artificial means. Senior doctors conferred about the press bulletin promised for 6 o’clock. They did not want to raise any false hopes, no
r could they say he was dead, because he wasn’t. By law, the machine could not be turned off. They compromised with an announcement saying Senna was clinically dead.

  At 6:05pm Dr Fiandri, her voice shaking at the gravity of her announcement, told reporters that Senna was clinically dead. He was still connected, she said, to the equipment maintaining his heartbeat. The news led the early-evening news programmes. In Britain an hour behind Europe, the news bulletins waited for a more final verdict.

  Josef Leberer returned to Imola to fetch his car. A doctor gave him a lift.

  Neyde da Silva, calling from Brazil, told her son Leonardo to ask the hospital to arrange for a priest to visit her eldest son. The priest arrived, went into Senna’s room at 6:15pm, and gave him the last rites. At 6:37pm Senna’s heart stopped again and Dr Fiandri decided not to try and restart it. Keeping a man who was effectively dead artificially alive was ethically doubtful. She said enough was enough. At 6:40pm, Dr Fiandri pronounced Ayrton Senna dead, but said the official time of death would be 2:17pm, when he had impacted the wall and his brain had stopped working.

  Oblivious to this, Juraci drove Adriane to Faro airport. When the chartered plane arrived, around 6:30pm, Adriane was waiting desperately on the tarmac. As soon as the door opened, she scrambled on board and into Luiza Braga’s arms. The pilot told them it would be a three-hour flight. On board, Luiza told Adriane that her boyfriend was as strong as an ox and that she had heard nothing more from her husband at the circuit, other that it was very serious. But even as they spoke, Senna was already dead.

  The captain taxied to the edge of the runway, and waited for clearance to take off. As he waited, a message was relayed to the plane. The pilot immediately taxied back to the terminal building, without a word to his passengers. The message was that Ayrton Senna had passed away, but the captain didn’t want to be the one to break the news to them. He finally told them there was an urgent call for Luiza back at the control tower. He said: “I don’t have authorisation from the tower. There is a call for Luiza and Adriane.”

  Adriane shook with fear about what the call might reveal.

  Luiza rushed off as soon as the plane door opened. Adriane stepped from the plane and was overwhelmed at the silence in the terminal, the silent people there, betraying the news she didn’t want to hear. Adriane followed Luiza to the control tower. “I shook all over, from head to toe,” she remembered. She waited in silence alone. Luiza Braga was pale when she returned. She took Adriane’s hand. “Adriane,” she said, but Adriane interrupted her and said: “Luiza, only don’t tell me he has died.” She replied the only way she could: “He’s died.”

  The two women hugged each other for comfort. They spent 40 minutes in the control tower, sobbing and trying to come to terms with the devastating news. They did not know what to do, and were driven back to Senna’s house at Quinto da Lago. The pilot waited at Faro for instructions. When they returned they found the whole house in mourning. Juraci, the housekeeper, who had regarded Senna as her son, was screaming. Adriane made for their bedroom and lay motionless on the bed for two hours. She remembers: “I naively thought I would see him arrive that night, even earlier than expected, with that beautiful smile of his, ready for a reunion after almost a month.”

  When Josef Leberer returned to the paddock from the hospital he found it a desolate place. Everyone was trying to come to terms with what had happened. By that time his death had been announced. He remembered: “It seemed like everybody was waiting and asking, ‘what’s happened, what’s happened, what’s happened?’. I had to tell them.”

  Leberer had to cope with two grieving teams. Not only his own but also McLaren. Ron and Lisa Dennis and Mansour and Cathy Ojjeh huddled around him for news. He found Frank Williams and Patrick Head in a state of disbelief. After finally getting Senna to drive for them after all these years they couldn’t believe he was gone so quickly.

  He couldn’t cope with too much of it and drove his car back to the hotel.

  Meanwhile, Luiza Braga spoke to her husband at the hospital who told her there was no point going to Bologna and to pack some bags and prepare to return to Brazil for the funeral. Braga told his wife to take Adriane to their home in Sintra with one of the cars Senna kept at the villa. He said he would join them as soon as he had got Leonardo back to Brazil and made the arrangements to have Senna’s returned to Brazil. He told her to instruct the pilot of the chartered jet, waiting at Bologna, to go. Luiza explained the plan to Adriane, who agreed: “I gathered all I had brought from Brazil,” she remembered.” The big suitcase, everything. The three pieces of luggage that I had just unpacked, less than 24 hours before, with all I would need to spend the next five months of the European season by his side. The season that ended before it began.” Before leaving, she took a T-shirt and shorts of Senna’s she had worn that morning to go running.

  Then she walked around the house and gardens for the last time. The garden and lawns were bathed in moonlight, as they only can be in the Algarve. She walked by the swimming pool and then went into his study and checked for messages on his fax. She gazed at his photographs on his desk for the last time and his trophies. She stopped by his powerful Swiss stereo player and wondered what was the last music he had listened to. She pressed the eject button and out came a Phil Collins album. She slipped it into her pocket, as she remembered: “I wanted to know what had been the last CD he had listened to in life. That was one thing that I had the right to share with him. After that I walked in tears around the house.”

  At around 10 o’clock, the two women left for the two-hour drive to Sintra. They were silent, thinking about what had been a terrible end to a terrible day. Just after midnight, Adriane pulled into the drive of the Braga home, where Senna had stayed many times and he had his own room. Adriane went straight to bed, but not in his room. That would have been too much to bear.

  Back at the track, the lights in the media centre burned brightly as 200 journalists prepared 200 obituaries. The pit garage, containing Senna’s shattered car, was now guarded by armed police.

  At the hospital it was revealed that nurses had discovered a small furled Austrian flag hidden in the sleeve of Senna’s race overalls. Journalists concluded he had intended to fly it from his cockpit on the parade lap, and dedicate what would have been his 42nd Grand Prix victory to the memory of Roland Ratzenberger.

  Around midnight, Angelo Orsi was back in the developing room at his office. The pictures were not pleasant. He was doubtful any magazine would publish them. Representatives of the Senna family told him immediately they that did not want anyone to even see them. Orsi respected their wishes. The pictures have never been seen, except by the family and Senna’s girlfriend Adriane. Today they are believed to be still in a safe in the Autosprint offices. Both the magazine and Orsi have turned down significant offers, believed to be well over $100,000, for the rights to them. Orsi’s decision earned everlasting respect from Galvao Bueno, who had tipped off the Senna family about their existence: “He is the only person who’s got pictures of Ayrton’s face, developed and stashed in a safe. He has already turned down fortunes for them, he won’t sell, he won’t give. His superiors at the magazine understood his action, even with the fabulous offers from agencies, and I find it very dignified.”

  There is much more Galvao Bueno would like to say about the events of Sunday 1st May 1994, but he agreed with Milton and Neyde da Silva that he would never discuss it. He confided to friends he mentioned the events to: “I shouldn’t be talking about this, I have an agreement with his family.”

  In America, five hours behind Europe, Nigel Mansell was interviewed on the NBC nightly news: “I thought he was bulletproof,” he said. “It hurts, it hurts big time.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Anatomy of an Accident

  The ingredients of tragedy

  The computer on board Ayrton Senna’s Williams FW16, registered the start of a new lap at 2:17pm and began to record the last 14.4 seconds of his life in a racing car on lap
seven of the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola on Sunday 1st May 1994. He crossed the line in the lead. The car fed data back to the pit garage computer every time it passed the pits, and a burst of digitised information was caught by the tiny radio dishes on the wall in front of the Williams pit. It was instantly relayed to the computer screens of the data engineers in the rear of the garage. It told the story of Ayrton Senna’s sixth and final lap of his Grand Prix career.

  Sensors had recorded a very fast lap – in fact the third-fastest lap that would be recorded in the race as he attempted to put space between him and his closest rival, Michael Schumacher in second place. The data captured showed the behaviour of the most significant components of the car during the preceding minute-and-a-half of lap six: the temperatures, speeds, pressures, measures, wear rates, steering and hydraulics. Crucially, the steering angle was being measured by a potentiometer placed on top of the steering column, just behind the dashboard. Any steering-wheel movement was registered by the sensor. A pressure sensor mounted on the hydraulic steering system was measuring the performance of the power steering.

  On board the car were two data-recording black boxes one belonging to the team and one belonging the engine-maker, Renault. They were unrelated systems which would collect data for the whole race as a back-up to the telemetry. The data recording was primarily to collect information to make the cars go faster, but it also provided data to assess the causes of an accident, in much the same way as an aircraft’s black box.

  As Senna approached Tamburello bend, the onboard computer was recording hundreds of pieces of data every second and sending it to the black boxes, as well as storing and compressing it for the burst to the pits.