Both Coyne and Morris mentioned it in connection with the incident between Senna and Mansell in Adelaide, and a voice from another era added his support to the view. ‘The one thing Senna wanted to do was beat Mansell in Nigel’s last race,’ Stirling Moss said. ‘The fact that he was so close shows how hard he was racing. But it’s a business in which things can happen very fast. Maybe Nigel lifted off early. I don’t know. Since that kind of accident must always be the fault of the man who was behind, I guess it was Senna’s fault – but I don’t think he was to blame, if you see what I mean.’
Why might Mansell have used it? To throw Senna off balance, perhaps. Or maybe he had braked early simply out of a sudden excess of caution, as Prost may have done when he threw the title away at Suzuka in 1990. More likely he was thinking back five months, to the Monaco Grand Prix. In this, a race Mansell had never won, the Englishman led by a comfortable half-minute until, with eight laps to go, a puncture brought him into the pits. There ensued a chase of brief but nevertheless epic proportions, culminating in a final lap throughout which the Williams, on fresh tyres, seemed to be trying to climb over the McLaren, which was getting no grip from its tired rubber. Somehow, against all probability even on a track notorious for making overtaking difficult, pitting his wits against a car that was probably three or four seconds a lap quicker at that point, Senna held Mansell off, to win by a length. And much later the vanquished driver explained, without rancour, how his rival had done it. ‘Ayrton will sometimes slow up on a short straight just to make you back off,’ he said. Looking at the video of that last lap, paying particular attention to the sequence around the swimming-pool complex, where the cars turn left, right, and left again before approaching the last corner, you can see, without the benefit of telemetry, that this is exactly what the McLaren is doing. ‘Ayrton was perfectly entitled to do what he did,’ Mansell said immediately after the race. But memories are long in motor racing, and the Englishman – who may have yielded nothing to Senna in terms of guts but never commanded anything like the same degree of tactical finesse – may just have been indulging an ill-judged and ultimately expensive desire to show the Brazilian that he hadn’t forgotten that particular episode in their long and semi-private battle.
An alternative and rather more intellectually satisfying explanation came from another man who raced against Senna in the early days. Back in 1983, Davy Jones was an eighteen-year-old American prodigy competing for the British Formula Three title. At home in Nevada, between races for Jaguar in a US sports car series, he chuckled as he replayed the Adelaide video, remembering the time he sat back and watched as Senna and Brundle landed on top of each other at Oulton Park when the Brazilian tried a run down the inside and found the door locked. After paying the customary tribute to Senna’s mental toughness, Jones said something very interesting: ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if his thinking in a race isn’t so far advanced that his mind is not relating to the incident that’s actually happening. Maybe if Nigel lifted a bit early, Ayrton just wasn’t prepared for it, because his mind was already two or three corners ahead. You know, when you take a corner, your mind goes to the turn-in, then to the apex, then the exit. You’re always a step ahead of what you’re actually doing. But maybe Senna is always three steps ahead. Maybe that was it. And maybe that’s why he’s such a great champion.’
But was that great champion responsible for bringing the hooligan tactics of Formula Ford to the more sophisticated and refined world of Formula One? Did he turn grand prix racing into a contact sport?
‘It’s not slot-car racing, after all,’ Rick Morris said. ‘It’s not a non-contact sport. It’s supposed to be a spectacle.’ And he stated that he didn’t think Senna was any more to blame for the changes in etiquette than Prost or Mansell or anybody else.
Stirling Moss agreed, but added that the term ‘brake test’ hadn’t existed in his day; nor had the concept. ‘If someone had tried it on me,’ he said, ‘I’d have gone and punched him in the face.’ Davy Jones said wistfully that he wished he’d been racing in the sixties, against Moss and Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart: ‘There’s a lot of money involved now, and teams have to do well to justify and hang on to their sponsorship. That’s certainly changed the ethics. Some of the moves you have to make now … well, in the old days they’d probably have taken a second thought.’
There was never a more contemplative grand prix driver than Ayrton Senna, nor one more obviously concerned with the philosophical questions raised by his occupation. Once he was in the car, however, he didn’t go in for second thoughts; not about the dimension of his own talent, not about going for a pass at the first and slightest hint of an opportunity. He knew that this willingness to work in the margins was what gave him the advantage over those who were more inclined to pause, even for a microsecond, to check the odds and evaluate the risk.
Thinking back to the Formula Ford days, Dave Coyne got to the heart of it. ‘I knew he was hard,’ he said, ‘and he knew I was hard. Once one of you gives way, it’s all over. And once you have that edge, you’ve got to hold on to it.’ Senna got it, and was in the very act of trying to hold on to it when he died.
Chapter Five
‘Few people really know me,’ he was to say in later years. And the rest, he added, the ones who thought they knew him but didn’t, ‘just don’t understand what it takes from a racing driver who has dedicated all his life, since four years old … who has left family and friends behind, thousands and thousands of miles away, to live in Europe, and to go through all the steps to eventually come to Formula One … nothing has ever come to me easy.’
No doubt that’s how he felt. To him, his entire career was a struggle. But the struggle was, quite literally, all in his mind. In terms of advantages, no aspiring world champion could have had more of a flying start.
He was born Ayrton Senna da Silva on 21 March 1960 in Santana, a northern suburb of São Paulo. The second child of Neyde Senna and her husband, Milton da Silva, he was two years younger than his sister, Viviane; a second son, Leonardo, was to follow. Milton, the owner of a successful metalworks specializing in the manufacture of car components, also bought a cattle ranch in Goiás in partnership with a friend; later the ranching side of the business extended to several farms, accommodating more than 10,000 head of cattle. In a country with many millions of very poor people and a small élite enjoying extreme wealth, it was a comfortable existence, and the legacy of a happy and secure childhood could be seen in the behaviour of the adult Ayrton Senna, to whom home, family and his native land remained the centre of life, a warm haven whenever his sporting and business commitments allowed.
There are two images which sum up the relationship of Milton and Neyde da Silva to the son they nicknamed ‘Beco’, and which perhaps explain much about his subsequent behaviour. The first is a photograph taken in the paddock at a go-kart meeting in 1973. It shows Milton and Ayrton looking proudly at the camera: the father has both arms around the son, in an embrace of fierce, protective pride, almost embarrassing to European eyes. The second is a fragment of film shot in the aftermath of one of Senna’s pre-Formula One victories. Behind the pits at some English circuit, he and his mother fall into a triumphal embrace. As they begin to separate, his mother reaches up with her right hand and caresses her son’s cheek as one would that of an infant. This was not a boy who ever went short of love, or of a belief in his own special place in the universe.
Attending first the Colégio Santana and later the select Colégio Rio Branco, he was given a general assessment of his work at the age of twelve. His overall grade was 68 per cent: decent, but not outstanding. By that age, however, he had already been driving for eight years.
He had been slow to walk, and at three was still having trouble co-ordinating the movements required to run or to climb stairs. His parents had taken him to a specialist, who examined an electroencephalogram and could find nothing wrong. Already, however, the boy had shown an interest in cars. At three, like most children, he had a p
edal car, a little jeep; but when he was only a year older, by way of therapy, his father made him a miniature go-kart, a perfectly authentic device with a one-horsepower petrol engine from a lawn-mower, a bucket seat and a smart front-fairing. Ayrton drove it in the grounds of the family homes. As soon as he was physically big enough he began driving a full-size jeep around the farm, making gear changes without using the old and practically worn-out clutch. It would not be stretching a point to call this the first recorded example of Senna’s noted sensitivity to machinery, the more remarkable because no one had even taught him how to change gear with a clutch, never mind the more difficult art of clutchless shifting. He was then seven years old; before long he was being scolded for making unauthorized excursions on to the public roads.
Such tales are common among the biographies of the greatest drivers. One hot afternoon in the late summer of 1904, the twelve-year-old Tazio Nuvolari, a farmer’s son, took his Uncle Giuseppe’s Bianchi out on to the road between Brescia and Ronchesana, mastering its controls without the benefit of instruction; automobiles immediately replaced unbroken colts in the boy’s affections. At an even younger age Juan Manuel Fangio, one of six children born to an accordion-playing stonemason, was hanging around Señor Capettini’s repair shop in Balcarce, fetching spanners for the mechanics; soon another garage-keeper allowed him to drive a wooden wagon powered by an old motorcycle engine, carrying the sweepings from the garage floor to the municipal dump. Maurice Trintignant was piloting a Bébé Peugeot around his father’s vineyard in the Vaucluse at the age of nine. Stirling Moss, whose parents had both dabbled in motor sport, sat on his father’s knee to take the steering wheel for the first time soon after his sixth birthday; five years later the father, a successful dentist, paid £15 for a 1929 Austin Seven which Moss learnt to throw around the fields of the family’s farm. The boy Jim Clark also had the luxury of farmlands in which to learn the rudiments of controlling a four-wheel vehicle in unfavourable conditions. In Canada, near the St Lawrence River, the eleven-year-old Gilles Villeneuve drove an old pick-up truck round and round a field next to the old farmhouse bought by his father, a piano tuner. Nigel Mansell was twelve when he talked his father, an aerospace engineer who had raced go-karts, into getting him a kart of his own. Stockbroker’s son Graham Hill, on the other hand, did not drive anything with four wheels on it until he was twenty-four, an apparent handicap which failed to prevent him from twice winning the world championship in the era of men as naturally gifted as Clark, Dan Gurney, Jackie Stewart and Jochen Rindt.
But Ayrton Senna, it is fairly safe to say, displayed a precocious natural talent as soon as he was physically able to express it. Nor does it seem that he had any other destiny in mind than the route, as straight and direct as possible, to the world championship. He began in go-karts, the nursery formula which established itself in the 1970s as the best way for young drivers to learn not merely how to handle a sensitive vehicle on a circuit at high speed but also how to race in close company with others.
He was encouraged by his father, who, like all his fellow countrymen, had taken pride in the growing achievements of Brazilian drivers in Europe, particularly those of Emerson Fittipaldi, another São Paulo boy, who in 1972 became his country’s first world champion. Perhaps Milton da Silva’s most crucial early intervention was to contact Lucio Pascual Gascon, nicknamed ‘Tchê’, an engine-tuner of Spanish origin whose horsepower had propelled Fittipaldi to his boyhood karting triumphs ten years earlier. Engine power was critical to the performance of the tiny karts; at Milton’s request, Tchê cast an eye over the boy during a test session on the little kart track within the precincts of São Paulo’s Interlagos circuit. ‘If he carries on like that, he’s going to win races,’ the Spaniard told the father after watching a few laps. A deal was agreed whereby Tchê would build the boy’s engines himself. The following Sunday, 1 July 1973, Ayrton was back at Interlagos to take part in his first race, and won. Soon he was spending all his out-ofschool hours at Tchê’s workshops, absorbing the basic elements of a knowledge that would make him technically the most formidable grand prix driver of his generation, fully able to converse with his race engineers in Formula One’s own abstruse language of slip angles, spring rates and engine mapping.
His dedication was self-evident. ‘Every time I went to the kart track he was there, training,’ remembered Rubens Carpinelli, then president of the Brazilian national karting commission and later head of the São Paulo automobile federation. ‘He was impressive. He was only a boy, ready to talk to anybody about his kart.’ And, said Carpinelli, he was a loner, strong on self-reliance: ‘His engines were prepared by Tchê, but he looked after all the rest himself. He was both the mechanic and the driver.’ Even then, according to those around him, he entered a race with the sole object of winning. It was victory or nothing. And in pursuit of his goal he was already looking for perfection, attentive to the tiniest detail. His slight build helped: in a kart, even more than in a grand prix car, every kilo of the driver’s weight and every square inch of frontal area have an impact on the performance of the vehicle, particularly at top speed in a straight line.
Two weeks after victory on his début, Senna won the junior category of the São Paulo winter championship. And when the summer season started, he fought his way to the full junior title. Already he was learning that no matter how talented you may be, the limits of your achievement are defined by the quality of your equipment; and the quality of that equipment is determined by your own ability to present yourself in the right place at the right time with the right qualifications and backing, and with the political skills necessary to ensure that you are the one who emerges from a crowded field.
The next year he won the national junior championship, followed in 1976 by the senior championship of São Paulo and victory in a big three-hour race in his new 100cc kart. This, too, was the season in which he first appeared in the yellow helmet with green and azure bands, painted to echo the colours of Brazil. The South American title fell to him the following year.
In 1978 he made his first racing trip outside South America, to enter the kart world championships at Le Mans. Milton contacted the Parilla brothers of Milan, Europe’s top kart constructors, who arranged a test for the eighteen-year-old at the Parma-Pancrazio circuit in Emilia-Romagna. Their team leader, Terry Fullerton, also took part in the test session, supervised by Angelo and Achille Parilla. Fullerton, the 1973 world champion, was himself preparing for the races at Le Mans, but Senna attacked the unfamiliar track and ended the day outpacing him. The Parilla brothers signed him up as their second driver for Le Mans, and after a fortnight’s preparation in Italy the team left for France, where they were joined by Tchê, dispatched at the Senna family’s expense to give expert assistance with the team’s engines. There Senna caused a minor sensation by qualifying in third place, and by finishing the race a scarcely less creditable sixth. He returned to Brazil, but a few weeks later travelled with the Parilla team to Japan, where he finished fourth at the Sugo circuit, the modest first step towards what would later become a profound mutual relationship with Japan’s motor racing public.
He opened 1979 by finishing runner-up in the South American championship, in Argentina. A return to Europe saw him winning the San Marino Grand Prix and travelling to Portugal for the world championships, where he came second over a course laid out in the paddock area of the Estoril circuit.
He won his national championship again in 1980 and ’81, but he never did manage to take the world title. Second again in 1980, mechanical problems lowered him to fourth and fourteenth in the subsequent years.
By the time of his last significant kart race, the Brazilian championship of 1983, his life had moved on. At nineteen, he had married Liliane Vasconcelos Souza, a childhood sweetheart from the same stratum of São Paulo society as the da Silvas, a girl with blonde hair and a figure that was still remembered years later as stopping traffic in the pit lane; and he had given up his studies at business school, which his
father had hoped would provide the groundwork for his succession to the leadership of the family firm. He had decided instead – in fact he had made up his mind at the age of four and a half, according to his own later testimony – to become a racing driver.
After karts, the next stage would be a graduation to proper single-seater racing cars, and there was only one place to go for that. Since the sixties, England’s club racing scene has represented the most effective finishing school for new talent from around the world, a battleground for young men who want to be world champion and need to prove their worth in a highly competitive environment.
The vitality of English racing has its roots in the work done in the 1950s and ’60s by John Cooper and Colin Chapman, two iconoclastic engineers whose lightweight rear-engined Coopers and Lotuses were comparatively cheap to build and created an economic environment in which small-time racing could thrive. Unlike most of their predecessors in England, Italy, France and Germany, Chapman and Cooper decided not to build their own engines, but to buy them in. This simplified their operations, and significantly reduced the capital investment for men who were not subsidized by vast commercial empires. Their creativity revolutionized racing-car design around the world: Ferrari’s Formula One cars look the way they do because of Cooper and Chapman, as do the machines that take the grid at the Indianapolis 500. Their legacy is not just in that achievement, or in the continuing success of the increasingly sophisticated partnerships between small, flexible teams such as McLaren and Williams and the major car manufacturers who supply their engines: Honda, Renault, Porsche, Ford, Peugeot and Mercedes-Benz. It is also to be found in the health and enduring importance of the various British single-seater series, a proving ground for international talent from which the likes of Mika Hakkinen of Finland, Rubens Barrichello of Brazil, Damon Hill of England and David Coulthard of Scotland were still emerging in the nineties.
The Death of Ayrton Senna Page 5