The Death of Ayrton Senna

by Richard Williams

  Ayrton Senna da Silva arrived in England in November 1980. With the support and guidance of Chico Serra, who was less than six months away from his own Formula One début, he headed straight for the headquarters of the Van Diemen company in Norfolk, where Serra introduced him to the company’s founder, Ralph Firman. Confronting Firman was a slender, fine-featured youth with curly dark brown hair, a full-lipped mouth of the type usually described as sensual, soft mid-brown eyes (all inherited from his mother) and a reserved, self-contained manner that might have been shyness or might have been arrogance. Senna completed ten laps of the bumpy Snetterton circuit, a converted World War Two airfield, in a Van Diemen Formula Ford 1600. It was his first time in a proper single-seater racing car, and it wasn’t an enjoyable experience: the car’s handling didn’t suit him, and there was no opportunity to make adjustments. But Firman, a former mechanic with a high reputation as a talent scout, had seen enough. Using Serra as a translator, since Senna at that point spoke little English, Firman signed him up for the forthcoming season, gently deflecting the novice’s demand to be paid for the privilege in favour of a deal more closely reflecting the reality of their relationship, depending on a measure of subsidy from the driver’s father.

  Ayrton brought Liliane to England in the new year, and they settled into a rented flat near the Van Diemen factory in Norfolk. For Liliane, accustomed to a life of privilege at home in São Paulo, the realities of being a junior racing driver’s wife in the English backwoods seem to have come as a shock. Nevertheless on 1 March 1981, after weeks of testing, Senna appeared on the starting grid for the first race of the season, in the kidney-shaped bowl of the Brands Hatch short circuit, entered under his full name alongside his two team mates, Enrique Mansilla of Argentina and Alfonso Toledano of Mexico. It was a good day for the team. Mansilla finished first and Toledano fourth, sandwiching two British drivers, Dave Coyne and Rick Morris. For Senna, his first car race was taking place on a circuit very different from the flat kart tracks of his previous experience: the first corner at Brands Hatch, called Paddock Bend, was a long and tricky right-hander, falling away into a wickedly vertiginous descent followed by a steep switchback up to a hairpin. He finished a respectable fifth, eight seconds behind the leader after twelve laps.

  At Thruxton a week later he was third, beating Mansilla, his team leader, after a race-long battle. And one week after that, when the Formula Ford mini-circus returned to Brands Hatch, Van Diemen gave him a new car, and he won.

  It rained for much of the day. The Brands bowl is a tricky place at the best of times; in the rain it can be diabolical, transforming already difficult corners like Paddock Bend and Clearways into skating rinks, while even the apparently harmless bits turn evil, thanks to small rivers that cross the track on the top and bottom straights. This was Senna’s second visit to the place, in the third car race of his life, in an event contested by young men who all fancied themselves as future world champions. He beat Mansilla again in his heat, before walking away with the final by a margin of fifteen seconds.

  It wasn’t that Senna liked the English climate. He and Liliane both hated it, and early associates remember that he insisted on things like having his driving gloves warmed on a radiator. But rain, as it turned out, was something that he could work with.

  Rain divides racing drivers like no other external factor. Sometimes those who may be lions in the sunshine, like the 1967 world champion Denny Hulme, men who would cheerfully race all day in a heatwave with their brakes shot to hell and petrol sloshing down their necks from a broken filler pipe, simply say no thanks at the sight of rain and settle for a comparatively easy day in midfield. This may be a sign of common sense rather than a want of courage. A man as hard as Niki Lauda once tossed away the chance of a world championship because he just didn’t fancy the odds against survival in a downpour. Fear of the rain was a condition that would affect Senna’s greatest rival; and to say that a refusal to take risks in the rain diminished the achievements of Alain Prost would be, in some eyes, to invite ridicule.

  The real hero-drivers, however, have all used a wet track to demonstrate the qualities that set them apart, and that might add up to genius: Rudi Caracciola, Tazio Nuvolari, Stirling Moss, Jim Clark and Gilles Villeneuve among them. Rain exposes not merely outright courage but also a sensitivity of touch on throttle and brakes and steering, a way of doing essentially violent things in a gentle way. It also requires a perception beyond the normal limits of vision, in which shapes half-glimpsed through fountains of spray and heavy curtains of mist can be broken down by some mysterious super-rational process of interpretation into shape, speed, behaviour and likely intention, and instantly programmed into complex patterns of response and action. To anyone who happened to be tuned in to the events at Brands Hatch on 15 March 1981, Senna’s maiden Formula Ford victory could be taken as a strong pre-echo of the wet-weather virtuosity to come at Monaco in 1984, when only an official’s highly contentious decision to halt the race in a downpour robbed him of a win while he was serving his apprenticeship; in his first Formula One victory through the lakes of Estoril in 1985; and in that opening lap at Donington Park in 1993, a minute and a half of technique and commitment that came as close as anything could to summarizing an entire career.

  The next race of his first season in England, at Mallory Park a week later, contained further important pointers to aspects of his future. His first pole position for the fastest lap in qualifying was another harbinger, this time of a hard statistic: sixty-five poles to come in 161 Formula One grands prix, including his last four races. Just as significant was the turbulent outcome of the race, decided on the last lap when Senna, in second place, attempted to go round the outside of Mansilla, the leader, on the exit from the big 180-degree corner at the back of the circuit. Mansilla held his line, pushed wide, and edged his junior team mate on to the grass, giving himself enough breathing space to hold on for victory. Afterwards in the paddock an exchange of verbal recriminations was followed by a scuffle which led to both drivers being restrained by those around them. Clearly, Senna felt injustice keenly. If he believed his rights had been infringed, he was prepared to take direct action.

  There was another second place at Mallory two weeks later, the price of a tangle with his other team mate, Toledano, which permitted the canny Rick Morris to slip through in the later stages. But then, on a wet and blustery day at Snetterton, he again showed so well in the rain that the watching Dennis Rushen, manager of a successful Formula Ford 2000 team, walked up afterwards and made him an on-the-spot offer. He could do the 1982 British and European championships, Rushen said, for the bargain rate of £10,000. Senna thanked him, and filed the offer away.

  Snetterton was the first of four consecutive wins, the sort of run which later characterized his domination of Formula One. Then at Silverstone in June he was beaten by Morris’s dramatic leap over the kerbs at the Woodcote chicane in the last 300 yards of the race, a manoeuvre enshrined in club racing legend even before the cars were back from their lap of honour. In the next race, at Oulton Park, he dealt Morris a spectacularly abrupt form of summary justice, driving him off the track. At the same circuit in late July he began another streak, this time of six wins in a row, assuring himself of victories in both the RAC and Townsend Thoresen championships. The race that clinched the RAC title for the little black and yellow Van Diemen with the Brazilian flag on the cockpit cowling was another spectacular display in the rain at Snetterton. His record in his season in Formula Ford 1600 was twelve wins, five second places, one third, one fourth and one fifth from twenty starts.

  But on his final podium appearance of the 1981 season, at Brands Hatch at the end of September, he announced his retirement. To general astonishment, he told the crowd in the post-race interview that he was not going to stay around for the Formula Ford Festival, an end-of-the-season weekend event that attracts 250 drivers, produces a single champion and has launched many important careers. Senna would have been the hot favourite. Inste
ad he was going back to Brazil and giving up racing.

  This seems to have been the only time he seriously contemplated relinquishing his vocation. The reasons were threefold: first, he wanted to see if he could satisfy his father’s desire for him to prepare to take over the family’s businesses. Second, he was a long way from home and was having difficulty enlisting support and, crucially, sponsorship, even though (with the aid of an English friend, the photographer Keith Sutton) he had been sending regular reports on his progress back to the media in Brazil. The third factor was the state of his marriage, disintegrating in the face of the pressures on Liliane, who neither understood nor enjoyed racing and found her unhappiness deepened by her husband’s extraordinary intensity, the quality immediately noticed by everyone who met him.

  When Senna returned to England early in 1982 to take up Dennis Rushen’s offer, it was minus Liliane. ‘I don’t think of it as a mistake,’ he later said of the marriage. ‘I consider it to have been a very precious experience. We didn’t have children, so no one else was hurt. We have both continued with our lives with no ill effects. It was simply that she wasn’t made for me, nor I for her.’ They were quietly divorced.

  He also returned without any further obligation to follow his father into industry or farming. For four months he had tried to buck his destiny; now it was agreed that he should commit himself to following it. And with him came hard-won sponsorship from two Brazilian companies: Banerj, a bank, and Pool, makers of jeans, whose livery was to appear on his car, his overalls and his helmet for the next two seasons.

  He held Rushen to the precise terms of his seemingly overgenerous proposal. The team had been given Van Diemen’s new cars to run on behalf of the factory, which for Senna meant pitching camp in Norfolk again, this time in a rented house with a fellow Brazilian driver, Mauricio Gugelmin, and his wife Stella.

  The two-litre Formula Ford cars had slick tyres and wings, characteristics that brought them far closer to the behaviour of grand prix machinery and made them a much more complicated proposition, requiring greater attention to aerodynamic tuning. Senna arrived from Brazil too late to test the new cars, yet in his first race, again at Brands Hatch, he took pole position and won by fourteen seconds. Over the next five weeks he recorded five more poles and five more victories in a row; by the end of the season he had achieved twenty-one wins in twenty-seven starts, giving him both the British and the European championships.

  Snetterton was among the more memorable of the year’s victories. After losing ground as the result of someone else’s accident he fell back to seventh, lost his front brakes (their lines cut by debris from the crash), yet clawed his way back to the front and won the race using only the brakes on his rear wheels.

  The European championship took him to some of the circuits used by the Formula One championship, and at Hockenheim, Zolder and the Österreichring, the Formula Ford 2000s even acted as a supporting attraction to the grand prix meeting. It was at Zolder, in Belgium, that Senna tried to introduce himself to another fellow Brazilian, Nelson Piquet, the reigning world champion. But Piquet, a native of Rio de Janeiro and an expert in the art of relaxation, ignored the intense, unknown young Paulista. Perhaps it was not, after all, the best weekend at which to make such an approach: in qualifying, Gilles Villeneuve had killed himself by driving his Ferrari at full speed into the back of Jochen Mass’s March, which was cruising back to the pits. The French-Canadian was an erratic genius beloved by the crowds; although his death did not seem as unbelievable as had Clark’s and as would Senna’s, it affected the world of Formula One deeply. But Piquet’s snub was neither forgotten nor forgiven, and it continued to stain the relationship between them when Senna joined Piquet in Formula One two years later, going on to match his three world titles and far surpass his reputation. By that time, all Piquet’s casual insults could not disguise his jealousy of the ‘São Paulo taxi driver’, for whom the full expression of his supreme gifts could be attained only through long and painful struggle.

  In Austria three months later, another Brazilian did him an important favour. This time it was a fellow São Paulo boy, one who had known about Senna for years – indeed, had watched him emulate his own feats in the local and national go-kart championships. Emerson Fittipaldi had taken his two world titles into retirement, and had also shut down the team bearing his own name at the end of the previous season. But he was still on the scene, and at the Österreichring he took the opportunity to present his young compatriot to a number of senior figures. ‘I introduced him to the major team managers,’ Fittipaldi remembered. ‘Ken Tyrrell, Ron Dennis, all of them. I had not done this with any Brazilian driver before.’ Here, Fittipaldi told the elders of Formula One, was a driver who had everything it took to be a world champion. The subject of his testimonial stood by, looking embarrassed; but the big men, knowing Fittipaldi for a straight-talker, listened.

  More sophisticated machinery was bringing the particulars of Senna’s talent into focus. Those who experienced his driving on the public roads had ruefully commented on his way of going into corners and roundabouts at the highest possible speed, relying on his reflexes to handle the consequences. This was a habit that he carried with him on to the track, and it flew in the face of decades of conventional wisdom. In slow, out fast: that was the maxim for taking corners in a racing car for everyone from Fangio to Prost. Enter a corner too fast and you would waste time trying to stay on the road. Brake in good time, balance the car, floor the throttle as early as possible after the apex, get the power to the tyres without wasteful wheel spin or sliding: that was the way to win. In the era of aerodynamically induced downforce, making the old four-wheel drift obsolete, it became even more mandatory. But Senna was a racer, first and last, and modern racing, with wide cars on tight artificial circuits, is almost all done in the overtaking zone, which means the braking area before a corner. A driver who brakes early and neatly reduces his scope for overtaking, and therefore the possibility of racing. Who brakes last, and then manages to cope with the corner, wins. So Senna concentrated on refining his mastery of late braking, learning to handle the next phase – the ‘turn-in’ to a corner – with a unique combination of delicacy and aggression. Going for the fastest time in practice at a grand prix, Senna would make the car dart and shimmy on the entry to a corner, every twitch expressing the partnership of driver and car finding the limit of speed and adhesion. This was what John Watson, the distinguished Ulsterman, meant when he spoke, as he often has, of watching Senna overtake him and disappear on a hot lap during qualifying for the 1985 European Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, the only Formula One race in which they competed together. ‘Senna’s car was … dancing,’ he said. ‘Like raindrops on a pavement. The control … here was a driver doing things I had never even thought of, never mind attempted.’

  Also apparent by this stage was Senna’s disconcerting ability to start a race, psychologically speaking, in top gear. Most drivers require a lap or two to play themselves in, to feel out the conditions and the state of their car, and to get their tyres up to the temperature at which they begin to provide optimum grip – an absolutely vital factor in the car’s potential lap speed. Not Senna, who worked out that this was the time during which, if he screwed himself right up, he could jump away, open a gap and establish an advantage that might not otherwise be available, given a parity of mechanical equipment. To do this takes not just skill and desire but unshakeable nerve and total commitment in the face of the unknown. It also requires the kind of sensitivity that can make a car go almost as quickly on cold tyres as on properly heated ones.

  His other trick was to leave things late, so late that nobody else had time to do anything about it. The ability to summon speed to order lay behind his capacity for leaving his fastest qualifying lap until the last five minutes of practice, waiting until his rivals had set their times before going out and shattering their morale, condemning them to a night of scratching their heads and fiddling about with screwdrivers and software in an
effort to get back on terms.

  Midway through his second season in single-seaters, Senna was already receiving inquiries from grand prix teams. He and Keith Sutton had embarked on the unusual course of sending their weekly press releases to the Formula One team bosses, supplementing the intelligence that such men as Ken Tyrrell, Frank Williams, Peter Warr of Lotus and Ron Dennis of McLaren would be picking up from a weekly scan of Autosport and Motoring News. Alex Hawkridge of the small Toleman team was the first to show an explicit interest, offering Senna sponsorship for a season in Formula Three in exchange for his signature on an option for Formula One in 1984. Senna declined, indicating that although Formula Three was the next step, it would be taken on his own terms and with no hostages to fortune. Formula Three, like every other stage he had been through, would be entered with the best equipment he could get hold of, and no compromises. His extraordinary confidence allowed him to keep his options open, to turn down anything that might limit his room for manoeuvre or commit him to something less than the best available future.