The perfectly mundane and unremarked crash of Sir John Whitmore, a wealthy amateur driver, in his Lotus Elite during a practice session at Mallory Park on Easter Monday 1959 took place at the very moment my father was shepherding my mother, my sister and me out of the field that served as a carpark, along a path between some bushes and into the trackside viewing area by the Esses, a curving double bend.
Here the racing cars flicked first to the right and then to the left in a single fluid movement. Leaving the Esses, the circuit climbed up a short straight to a right-handed hairpin, after which it doubled back to enter the finishing straight by means of a trickily cambered left-hand sweep known as Devil’s Elbow. From where we were standing, if you looked across the Esses and the corner of the paddock, you could just see the tops of the cars skimming through. That was where Whitmore lost control and hit the wall. He got a shaking, nothing more.
And it was where, that afternoon, I watched with the beginnings of hero-worship as an unknown Scotsman named Jim Clark wrestled a huge and unwieldy Lister-Jaguar sports car to victories in three separate races. That made it four wins for Clark in the course of the afternoon, since he also won the race for which Whitmore had been practising, at the wheel of a second Lotus Elite.
Later in the day, after a picnic tea, we walked round the circuit and stood with a few hundred other spectators on a broad grass bank on the outside of Devil’s Elbow. My sister and my mother weren’t much interested by this time, but from there my father and I could see almost directly down into the cockpits of the cars, where bare forearms and string-backed gloves operated huge steering wheels with thin wooden rims and long slender gear-levers in a setting of dull aluminium and polished leather.
Clark, in his dark-blue helmet and leather-rimmed RAF surplus goggles, was clearly in a league above all the other drivers at this run-of-the-mill English club meeting. On every lap his arms worked back and forth as he fought the snub-nosed, bluff-tailed Lister down through the left-hand sweep, using the throttle to maintain the car’s balance as the adverse camber did its best to throw him into the pit wall where the track straightened. The busy movements of his arms appeared to bear little direct relationship to the path of the car: the steering wheel would be spun in quick, deft jabs to the left and then to the right, but the car would maintain a curving trajectory as smooth as the howl of its six-cylinder engine.
Nobody had taught Clark, then a twenty-three-year-old lowland farmer, how to do this: it was just something he could do. An inbuilt sensitivity gave him the ability to drive the car beyond the normal limits of its roadholding, setting it up in what, in those days, was known as the four-wheel drift, by which the car was persuaded to take corners in long power-slides. To the spectator, even one who had never seen a motor race before, the result was the clear sight of a driver operating at the very limit of control, using the technique that had made heroes during the decade of men like Fangio and Moss.
For the next nine years I bought magazines, listened to the radio, and watched with mounting pride and pleasure as Clark ascended to absolute pre-eminence among grand prix drivers. Stirling Moss had been my first hero, indeed the embodiment of heroism in the immediate post-war years, but Clark came up with the generation of the sixties; he seemed more modern, closer to me. I saw him again during his career: at Mallory Park in 1962, winning the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in 1965, and leading the first lap of the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix at the wonderful old Spa-Francorchamps circuit. He had won two world championships when he was killed on 7 April 1968.
Men find beauty in racing cars; they stand and stare at them for hours. But the strange visual potency of the cars is not what draws 100,000 people to Silverstone for a grand prix. The emotional trigger is the sight of a driver visibly fighting the machine. It is what an eleven-year-old boy recognized that day in 1959 as he marvelled at the sight of Jim Clark wrestling the Lister-Jaguar down through Devil’s Elbow. And it is what millions saw when they watched Ayrton Senna in a Formula One car in the years between 1984 and 1994.
In his ability to express a remarkable gift in terms that the ordinary fan could appreciate, Senna was just about unique. Other drivers have been fast and exciting: from Tazio Nuvolari in the thirties to Nigel Mansell in recent years, many have sent the pulse-rates rocketing in the grandstands through simple courage. The favourites were those accustomed to taking a car beyond its limits as a matter of course, trying to overcome the odds through sheer force of will. They could take an inferior machine and wring out the last drop of its speed, and the crowd could see it happening.
Other great drivers achieved their speed by a different method, avoiding drama in the belief that calmness and neatness were more likely to result in consistently good times. Fangio was like that, and Moss, usually, and Clark (despite his battle with the Lister-Jaguar, which turned out to have been an untypical display), and Stewart, and above all Alain Prost, whose brain was so calculating and devoid of a natural dramatic instinct that he was nicknamed ‘The Professor’, which is a funny thing for a racing driver to be called.
Ayrton Senna, perhaps uniquely, combined a smoothness of technique, a calculating brain and an unshakeable belief in his own superiority with a powerful aggression and a need to go as fast as possible all the time. And that, perhaps crucially, was where he differed from the only man with whom he truly bears comparison.
Chapter Three
When Senna’s car hit the wall on the outside of Tamburello at 2.17 p.m. on 1 May 1994, bits flying off as it spun wildly back to the edge of the track, an old man a continent away switched his television off almost before the wreckage had come to rest.
‘I knew he was dead,’ Fangio said later.
Most people watching the TV coverage were still staring at the pictures, praying for Senna’s safety. After the lurid televised accidents to Berger, Piquet and others in recent seasons, they knew that the evidence of the eyes could be contradicted by reality and that, given the strength of the modern grand prix car, it was possible for a driver to survive such a holocaust – especially at Tamburello. When Nelson Piquet stepped out of his wrecked Williams with only a bruised left leg and shaken wits after hitting the concrete wall backwards at full speed in practice for the 1987 race, and when Gerhard Berger escaped from the inferno of his blazing Ferrari at the same spot two years later with nothing much more serious than seared hands, it was clear that miracles could happen. But sitting at home in the town of Balcarce, where many years ago the people built a museum to commemorate the exploits of their most famous son, eighty-two-year-old Juan Manuel Fangio knew enough to see beyond the television pictures.
Of all the greatest champions of motor racing, the dozen or so who form the rank of the immortals, Fangio was perhaps the one whom Senna most closely resembled. For decades after his retirement, Fangio’s total of five world championships between 1951 and 1957 was accepted as being beyond reach. Jack Brabham, Jackie Stewart, Niki Lauda and Nelson Piquet each won three, but never looked like challenging the great Argentinian’s absolute pre-eminence. Even when Alain Prost won his fourth title, it was with the last gasp of his Formula One career, and a powerful following wind. Only Ayrton Senna could raise his eyes to what had seemed a target forever out of range. When he died, with a fourth title in his sights, he was only thirty-four years old; the ‘Old Man’, as Fangio had been known, had been forty-six when, as reigning champion, he pulled into the pits at the end of the 1958 French Grand Prix, unbuckled his helmet and called it a day. Almost forty years later, it is certainly true that the greater physical demands on drivers require them to be younger and fitter, and a forty-six-year-old world champion is virtually unimaginable. Still, thirty-four is nowhere near Formula One’s retirement age. Senna was certainly no longer in the flush of youth when he died, but his performances throughout the preceding season left no doubt that he was still in his prime. Beyond question, there were world championships left for him to win.
Quite obviously he shared with Fangio such basic race-
day attributes as a phenomenally refined driving technique, a high degree of mechanical sensitivity, an acute sense of racecraft and a willingness, in extremis, to abandon the finesse for which he was noted and call instead upon reserves of raw aggression. But beyond all that, the trait most obviously linking them was a political shrewdness placed in the service of a cold-eyed self-interest. Secure in the knowledge of their own virtuosity, both men recognized that it was worth nothing unless applied in partnership with the right vehicle: in other words, the car offering the greatest mechanical advantage at any given time. Like Senna, Fangio moved throughout his career from team to team, exploiting an uncanny ability to predict which was in the ascendant and which in decline, and never letting sentiment get in the way of his decisions.
After establishing his reputation with heavily modified American saloon cars in the marathon races that wound across Argentina, Bolivia and Peru during the 1940s, Fangio arrived in Europe in 1949 and, subsidized by President Juan Perón, began winning races in a Maserati entered by the Argentine Automobile Club. Noting his string of successes at San Remo, Pau, Marseilles, Albi, Perpignan and Monza, the all-conquering Alfa Romeo team invited him to complete their line-up by joining two illustrious veterans, Luigi Fagioli and Dr Giuseppe Farina, for the following season, the inaugural year of the world championship. Farina, whose relaxed style provided the model for the young Stirling Moss, won that first title, with Fangio as his runner-up; each had won three of the year’s six Formula One races. Fangio won three more in 1951, the cerise Alfetta taking him to the first of his five championships. In 1952 and ’53 the championship series was run to the specifications of Formula Two, and Fangio’s Maserati was no match for the Ferrari of Alberto Ascari, who won nine grands prix in a row, setting a record which still stands. For 1954, however, Fangio was signed to lead the Mercedes-Benz team, making their post-war return to the tracks which they had dominated in the triumphalist heyday of National Socialism. The titles of 1954 and ’55 were as good as won, and Fangio took the chequered flag in eight of the eleven races entered by the team over the two seasons.
When Mercedes withdrew from all racing after the Le Mans crash of 1955, in which one of their cars ploughed through a public enclosure killing eighty spectators, Fangio signed with Ferrari for 1956. He won the title in the last race of the season, at Monza, after his car had broken down, when the young Englishman Peter Collins forfeited his own chance of the title by voluntarily handing his Ferrari over to the team’s number one. In those days a shared drive yielded half points, and the three points for half of a second place were enough to give Fangio a winning margin in the championship over Stirling Moss. Had Collins refused to give up the wheel, the full six points would have made him the first British world champion, at the age of twenty-four; he was to die two years later in a crash at the Nürburgring, before he could win the title that surely would have been his. Enzo Ferrari, the old schemer, had warmed to the blond, handsome, open-hearted Collins in a way he never could to Fangio, partly because of the Argentinian’s more reserved nature but also because Ferrari knew he could never exert the degree of control over Fangio’s destiny that he enjoyed wielding over the careers of the ambitious, vulnerable young Italians and Englishmen who otherwise made up his team. Fangio, already a triple champion, had in addition been responsible for many of Ferrari’s worst defeats, and owed old Enzo no fealty or even undue respect.
Unlike the rest of the motor racing world, which first respected and later deified Ferrari, Fangio saw him for what he was: a small-town car builder with an incurable addiction to intrigue. For this perception, and the lack of the usual sycophancy that it engendered, Ferrari could not forgive him. ‘A strange man, Fangio,’ Ferrari wrote a few years later, in My Terrible Joys, a memoir in which he luxuriated in the treachery of others and in his own anguished rectitude. ‘A great driver, but affl icted by persecution mania … I think it unlikely that we shall ever again see a champion capable of such sustained successes. But Fangio did not remain loyal to any team. He was conscious of his ability, he invariably used any means to ensure that he should if possible always drive the best car available at that moment. And he was successful in this, placing his self-interest – which was quite legitimate and natural – before the affection which has, instead, kept other great drivers faithful to a certain team through good and ill fortune.’ Ferrari’s hypocrisy took the breath away. This was a man who had seemed to take a malevolent glee in first hiring and then destabilizing driver after driver – Jean Behra, John Surtees, even Niki Lauda, who had won two championships for him after a long drought – and here he was levelling a charge of disloyalty at the greatest figure in the game, a man whose competitive instincts were forged from steel but whose sporting behaviour was entirely impeccable.
Fangio’s speed seemed to derive from the very serenity of his temperament, yet his finest hour came on a day when he acted against his instincts, abandoning his suave control when brute vigour offered the only chance of a result. His lifelong maxim was that the best way to win a race was at the lowest possible speed, but his pursuit of the two young Englishmen, Peter Collins and Mike Hawthorn, at the Nürburgring in 1957 became perhaps the most celebrated act of sustained aggression in the sport’s history.
The old Ring, laid down in the Eifel mountains near Cologne in the 1920s, provided the perfect theatre for such a god-like performance. Fourteen miles long, with more than 175 corners, including every variety of bend, surface and gradient, with hedges and ditches and spinneys to claim the unwise, it represented Formula One’s last link with the original city-to-city marathons. The Ring’s lap record, when the circus arrived for the 1957 German Grand Prix, was a shade over nine minutes and forty seconds; by the end of the race, Fangio was to have lowered that by twenty-three seconds. He had led in his cigar-shaped red Maserati from the beginning, but a bad pit stop put him almost a minute behind Ferrari’s two English boys with ten of the twenty-two laps left. Driving with a kind of cold fury no one had seen him display before, Fangio, then aged forty-six, reduced the gap to nothing, overtaking Collins and Hawthorn, whose combined ages barely surpassed his own, in a shower of dust and pebbles as he slid by on the inside, using the ditches and the verges. All his virtuosity was on display that day.
Like Fangio, Senna was keen to adjust the odds in his favour whenever possible. Senna firmly believed he was the best, but he also knew that he was involved in a sport so devised that he could only prove his supremacy if the conditions were right, and that no effort to squeeze the last fraction of improvement out of those conditions would be wasted. Right from the beginning, he showed neither an inclination to accept simply what was on offer nor, if he was going to say yes, to take it in the form in which it was originally presented to him. He would go on demanding until he got what he wanted, and he didn’t much mind whose finer feelings were disturbed while he did it. When Niki Lauda described him in 1985 – with only the evidence of Senna’s novice year in Formula One to go on – as ‘probably the greatest talent to emerge in recent years’, he added: ‘By this, I don’t just mean his fast lap times, but also the way he has come to grips with the whole business. He simply understands what is going on. I’m particularly impressed by the speed with which he has matured without making mistakes along the way.’ But, again like Fangio, Senna’s most glorious achievement came in a moment when he allowed passion to take over from cool calculation.
It happened at the 1993 European Grand Prix, a race added to the calendar at the last minute because of the cancellation of another event and awarded to Donington Park, a pre-war rendezvous rebuilt and reactivated in the seventies through the enormous energy and financial commitment of a mutton-chopped Leicestershire building contractor named Tom Wheatcroft. As a boy, before the war, Wheatcroft had watched the giant Mercedes and Auto Unions leaping over the bumps, the scream of their supercharged engines reflected off the brick walls of the farm buildings. It was his dream to bring Formula One back to the circuit which, though redesigned, wid
ened and resurfaced with high-grip tarmac as smooth as a silk shirt, still contained within its undulating contours the beating heart of the old track. On 11 April 1993, Easter Sunday, his vision came to life as the cars formed up in front of the grandstands for the third round of the world championship. And Ayrton Senna gave him a race fit for his dreams.
Alain Prost and Williams had won the season’s first grand prix, in South Africa, while Senna – second in that race but so dismayed by the decline in the performance of his McLaren that he had been contemplating a retreat into a sabbatical year – took the next round, in Brazil, by coping with the drizzly conditions better than anyone else. So, quite unexpectedly, Senna led the championship. At Donington, he intended to keep the initiative.
In the two days of practice, under a lowering sky but on a dry track, the Williams-Renaults of Prost and Damon Hill displayed the technical advantage which had made them the firmest of pre-season favourites. With a characteristic lack of visible drama, Prost recorded the fastest lap ever driven round the track, ahead of Hill, his willing dauphin, whose modest presence in the team had suited Prost’s purposes rather better than the prospect of a challenge from Senna in an equal car. In fact it was Hill’s performance rather than Prost’s that gave the clue to the superiority of their cars: this was only the Englishman’s fifth grand prix, and while he was clearly a competent professional racing driver, he had yet to convince experienced observers that he could compete with the élite. At thirty-two, Hill owed his seat in the team to his diligence as a test driver the previous season, and to the fact that he would not make trouble; but more than those considerations, to Prost’s political skill in fighting off Senna’s challenge. Third on the starting grid, more than a full second behind Hill, came Michael Schumacher, a fraction in front of Senna, whose McLaren was carrying a less powerful Ford engine than Schumacher’s Benetton.
The Death of Ayrton Senna Page 3