The Death of Ayrton Senna

by Richard Williams

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  The Death of Ayrton Senna

  ‘Essential reading’ The Times

  ‘A fascinating description of the machinations of Formula One and a tribute to a driver “so perfect that nobody thought anything could happen to him”’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘Instantly hailed as a classic … a poignant memoir of the man considered by many to be Formula One’s greatest driver … Williams avoids the pitfalls with an elegantly terse style, economy of language and a willingness to confront the fact, too often forgotten, that Senna was anything but an angel … a fitting elegy to a unique talent’ Sunday Times

  ‘The book does full and elegant justice to Formula One’s greatest driver … “Few people really know me,” Senna once said. Williams comes very, very close’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘For the casual racing fan it’s a mighty good read, for the Senna fan it’s indispensable … superbly written’ Time Out

  ‘A poignant, literate unravelling of a great tragedy’ Bookseller

  ‘Stands well clear of the herd – part narrative, part investigation, part tragic drama’ Irish News

  ‘A masterly portrait’ Scotland on Sunday

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Richard Williams is chief sports writer for the Guardian. His previous jobs include chief sports writer of the Independent, assistant editor of The Times, editor of Time Out and Melody Maker, and head of artists and repertoire at Island Records. His most recent book is The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music.

  The Death of Ayrton Senna

  RICHARD WILLIAMS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA), Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Viking 1995

  Revised edition first published by Bloomsbury Publishing 1999

  Reissued in Penguin Books 2010

  Copyright © Richard Williams, 1995, 1999

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-141-96391-4

  For my Father

  ‘We must judge a man, according to Beyle, neither by what he says, nor by what he writes. I add: nor by what he does’

  ALBERT CAMUS, Notebook VI

  ‘Faith can move mountains, but it won’t beat a fast draw’

  FROM El Dorado (1967)

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  The first flush of daylight was lining the eastern sky as Flight RG723 said goodbye to its fighter escort and swung into the landing pattern, bringing him home for the last time. Already his people were gathering along the expressway from the airport through the suburbs, a million of them or more, carrying their flags and banners, preparing their tears of welcome and lamentation as the big jet came out of the rising sun into São Paulo.

  Eleven hours out of Paris, Captain Gomes Pinto floated the McDonnell-Douglas M D11 and its strange cargo over the endless clusters of high-rise blocks with their shanty-town infills. São Paulo may be one of the biggest and ugliest cities on earth, a vast megalopolis of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, but in that dawn its inhabitants turned into villagers, sharing in the mourning for their golden boy, their favourite son, their champion.

  At 6.12 a.m. the plane touched down on the main runway of Guaralhos airport. Its passengers, restricted to the economy compartment, disembarked. Over the next thirty minutes the polished mahogany casket containing the mortal remains of Ayrton Senna was removed from the business-class section, lowered to the ground on an electric lift, and carried by soldiers of the Polícia da Aeronáutica to a waiting fire-engine, where it was draped with the bandeira, the familiar green and yellow national flag of Brazil. At 6.45 a.m. under a sky already bright blue, the fire-engine moved off, preceded by an arrowhead of seventeen police outriders in white leathers who led the motorcade on the thirty-kilometre journey into the city.

  Just beyond the airport perimeter, the taxi driver found a gap to park on the already crowded grass verge. We jumped out and ran up the slope to join the people lining the six-lane highway, just in time to see the parade go by. On the rear deck of the fire-engine, a quartet of white-capped cadets from the Military Police school sat on either side of the coffin, facing fore and aft, mounting guard; five more clung to the ledge at the rear of the vehicle. Behind it, in the slipstream of the spectators’ applause, came the official cars and the police vans. As soon as they had passed, the taxi driver and I slid back down the steep grass slope, got back into the car, and immediately found ourselves sucked into the wedge of unofficial traffic following the motorcade.

  It was a vast dusty mass numbering hundreds of vehicles in all shapes and sizes and states of repair, battered Beetles and shiny Subarus, smart new XR3s and heavily oversubscribed jeeps, taxis and pick-ups, a Mack truck flying a Brazilian flag the size of a house, all crossing and recrossing the central reservation, some racing headlong down the wrong side of the carriageway in an attempt to keep up with Ayrton Senna’s last ride. Most of the cars had his photograph taped inside the windscreen, or black scarves tied to the radio aerial. One car-borne banner, hastily hand-lettered, read Adeus Ayrton – Tricampeão. Farewell, Ayrton – triple champion. From many side-windows, in an echo of Senna’s trademark gesture on so many afternoons of triumph around the world, a spare hand held a bandeira, its colours stiffened in the airstream.

  Witnesses to this spectacle, this Mad Max remake of a grand prix lap of honour, the people of Ayrton Senna’s home town thronged the pavements and overpasses and windows and parapets of their crumbling concrete canyons, applauding the passage of their champion and shedding neither the first nor the last of their tears. Motorcycles and pushbikes joined the parade. As the day’s rush hour began, the weight of extra traffic choked the city. Sometimes, like the people in the blocked-off side roads, we had to stop and switch off the engine, getting out and turning our faces to the sky, where a dozen police and telev
ision helicopters hovered and circled, marking the motorcade’s progress like a cloud of mid summer midges.

  As we passed through the Anhangabau tunnel, a group of bikers set up a chant: ‘Olé, olé, olé, olé, Senna.’ Now banners and freshly sprayed graffiti were everywhere, dangled from every bridge, painted on every blank surface: ‘Obrigado Senna’ (thank you, Senna), ‘Senna não morreu, porque os deuses não morrem’ (Senna isn’t dead, because gods don’t die). And ‘Obrigado, Senna por fazer nossos domingos felizes’ (thank you, Senna, for making our Sundays so happy).

  As it neared its destination, the procession slowed. The motorcycle outriders peeled away, replaced by an honour guard of mounted lancers: five at the front on white horses, two dozen more on bays with red cockades on their black steel helmets, flanking the fire-engine as it crawled between crowds now twenty deep, jammed together, their arms outstretched above their heads, applauding Senna’s passage.

  Beneath the pink blossom of the late-blooming paneira trees, I walked round the July 9 Palace, the state legislative assembly building, a classic of fifties concrete brutalism set within a city park in São Paulo’s southern zone. All the way round, tens of thousands of people were already waiting calmly in line. Inside, before the doors were opened, a private twenty-minute religious ceremony was conducted by Pastor Sabatini Lali in the presence of Senna’s family, gathered around the coffin. By the time the doors of the Monumental Hall were opened to the public, the queue of those wishing to pay their last respects was at least three miles long, winding back up the drive, out through the entrance and around the perimeter of the compound, snaking back and forth, unsupervised but in perfect order, through the park. It would take those at the back of the queue seven hours to reach their goal, shuffling slowly forward in what, by the middle of the morning, had become eighty-degree heat, to salute the casket, now with a fresh bandeira coverlet and surmounted by one of Senna’s old helmets, the display guarded by two soldiers with pikes and four riflemen, their weapons reversed.

  Upon hearing the news of Sunday afternoon’s tragedy at the Imola autodrome, President Itamar Franco had immediately declared three days of national mourning, including a day off for all state schools. So Brazilians of all ages and types came to Ibirapuera Park to say a personal farewell. Among the first in line was Adelia Scott, eighty-four years old, who had travelled many hours from her home in the south of the country. ‘I adored him,’ she said. Near her at the head of the queue was a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, Marco Putnoki, who had been in line since the previous afternoon. In fact the vast majority of those queuing to say farewell were under twenty-five, which said something about both Ayrton Senna and Brazil.

  Senna was young and beautiful in a country where those assets have often seemed to represent the only stable currency, and the naked distress of the young mourners – university students and McDonald’s workers alike – showed very starkly what he had meant to them. ‘He was our hero,’ said eighteen-year-old Silvia Barros, ‘our only one.’

  At a discreet rear entrance, family, friends, business associates and racing colleagues were arriving to pay their respects, each with a small stick-on lapel badge bearing a single letter: F for familia, A for amigos. Among the As was twenty-three-year-old Christian Fittipaldi, a member of Brazil’s foremost motor-racing dynasty and in his second season of Formula One. I asked him to explain the dead man’s special significance to his country’s young people. ‘He was a good example to everyone,’ Fittipaldi said. ‘He was someone you always looked to, and not only on the track. You know, if a country has a lot of political and economic problems, and it has someone who does so well, who goes out into the world to represent a Third World country and succeeds against people from places where the conditions are very much better … well, he was a big plus for us, that’s all.’ Fittipaldi turned away to comfort his grand prix colleague and fellow countryman Rubens Barrichello, who had broken off an interview with a television reporter and was weeping openly on a friend’s shoulder.

  Back out by the main gate, the mood of restraint was breaking down in the face of a growing crush, funnelled by police through a small entrance. More than 150 people fainted as the riot squad of the military police attempted to restore order beneath a banner that gave some idea of the strength of feeling Senna’s death had aroused among his people. ‘Assassinos Mercenários Queremos Justiça’ it read, in stark black and red lettering: money-grabbing assassins, the people demand justice.

  Hour after hour the young and old filed by, thousand upon thousand, given just enough time to glance quickly across at the little grandstand crammed with press photographers and TV cameramen, their telephoto lenses trained on the small VIP enclosure opposite, anxious not to miss the visits by family, friends, colleagues and celebrities – by his father, Milton da Silva, his mother, Neyde, his brother, Leonardo, and his sister, Viviane; by President Itamar, with the entire cast of São Paulo’s political life; by his personal pilot, Captain Owen O’Mahony; and by the footballer Viola, who had dedicated his goal for Brazil against Iceland in Florianopolis the previous night to the dead man’s memory and now wore the colours of his club, Corinthians, which Senna had supported. (The following night, Viola would score twice for the club in a league match against Guarani, and on both occasions would celebrate by running a lap of his home stadium holding a small bandeira in his hand, past banners that read ‘Senna – in our hearts for ever’ and ‘Thank you, Ayrton’.)

  Senna’s girlfriend, Adriane Galisteu, a blonde twenty-one-year-old former singer and fashion model, slipped in and out; they had spent the last thirteen months together, mostly at his home in Faro, on the southernmost tip of Portugal, and at his beach house outside São Paulo. Her visit to her lover’s remains coincided with the appearances of Alain Prost, Senna’s oldest and bitterest adversary, and Gerhard Berger, his best friend in the paddock. Both embraced her, enfolding her distress inside their own. Frank Williams, the entrant of the car in which Senna had died three days previously, arrived in his wheelchair, his drawn face betraying his grief. Ron Dennis, the owner of the McLaren team, with whom Senna had won his three world championships, sat on the VIP bench for forty silent minutes. Nuno Cobra, for ten years Senna’s personal physiotherapist and counsellor, fine-featured and spare-framed, walked haltingly across to the silver catafalque and wept as he stroked the head of the coffin, addressing it with tender words, as though he were trying to console an unhappy child. Those of us watching at that moment had to turn our eyes away from such sadness.

  In more normal circumstances the coffin would have been open, the face of the deceased available to the last parting gaze of the bereaved. But so grievous had been the injuries caused to Senna’s skull in the crash at the Imola autodrome three days earlier that the conventional cosmetic preparation was abandoned and, at the family’s request, the lid stayed shut. Still, many of those who passed by in a ceaseless flow blew kisses at the coffin, or gave it a poignant little wave, or crossed themselves, or moved their lips in a silent farewell prayer. Others could do little beyond clutch each other in grief, one or two giving way altogether and collapsing into the arms of waiting paramedics. Over the rope separating them from the coffin they dropped keepsakes – a single flower, a bracelet, a poem. Some held up photographs of the great man as they passed. One older woman had a scrap of paper pinned to her T-shirt, with a scrawled message: ‘Senna obrigado’. Thank you, Senna. Again and again, that was said. Thank you for what you gave us. A man of advanced years halted, threw his arms wide, and began a formal valedictory address to the coffin before being gently cut short and moved on by an attendant. In the late afternoon, a blind man in a business suit passed by, led by a friend; he, too, had spent seven hours in line.

  A high proportion of the younger people – the girls, mostly – had the dead man’s name written with felt-tip pen across their foreheads. Even more of them had three stripes painted on each cheek, in the colours of yellow, green and black. A Brazilian friend walked me out of the buildin
g and into the park, explaining as we passed the line of mourners that this custom had begun two years earlier, when the youth of the country took to the streets for the first time in twenty years to demand the impeachment and removal of the corrupt president Collor de Mello. ‘They painted themselves with a yellow stripe and a green stripe, the colours of Brazil,’ Ana Cecília said. ‘Now they’ve added a black stripe, for mourning.’

  Leaving the hall, going back into the sunshine, we passed by an avenue of floral tributes piled high between the walkways. Giant constructions of exotic blooms, floral crosses and flags and wheels, some bearing satin sashes lettered with the titles of official organizations and companies with which Senna had dealings, others with cards signed by private individuals. Wreaths from Goodyear, from Audi, from São Paulo and Corinthians football clubs, from the Fittipaldi family, from the Andrettis – Mario and Dee, Michael and Sandra – and from Bernie Ecclestone and the Formula One Constructors’ Association. Flowers from automobile clubs around Brazil and Senna fan clubs around the world. Two huge crosses, from Mansour and Kathy Ojjeh of TAG, among his sponsors in the championship years, and from McLaren International; these were people who had paid him a million dollars a race, and been happy to do so. And a plain circlet of white chrysanthemums ‘from two of your many fans in Northern Ireland’.

  In a room deep within the July 9 Palace, Senna’s brother, Leonardo Senna da Silva, was cutting across the elegiac mood, addressing a press conference with angry words which spoke of another aspect of the tragedy, one that would reverberate with growing intensity over the coming months. ‘The motor sport authorities are only interested in money,’ he was saying, echoing the angry banner at the main gate. They knew the dangers, the risks the drivers were facing at Imola, the fact that at the corner called Tamburello, where Senna had died, only a narrow strip of grass and twenty metres of tarmac separated the track from a solid concrete wall. If they’d taken the correct precautions, Leonardo told reporters, his face held taut to conceal the depth of his emotions, ‘my brother would be alive today’.