But then, in 1970, the year Brazil won its third World Cup with Pelé, Jairzinho, and the rest of the greatest soccer team ever assembled, came the man who established Brazil as a serious motor racing nation. From the moment Emerson Fittipaldi, only twenty-three years old, slid into Colin Chapman’s sleek, low-line Lotus 72, he looked like a champion; two years later he became the youngest ever winner of the title. In 1974 he took his second championship at the wheel of a Marlboro McLaren. After one more season at McLaren, still at the height of his powers, he joined the team launched the previous year by his older brother, Wilson. But the cars, initially sponsored by and named after the Brazilian sugar company Copersucar, were never a match for his talent: ninth was his best championship position in those wasted years, and in 1980 he said goodbye to Formula One (although later in the decade he made an enormously successful comeback in American racing, winning both the Indianapolis 500 and the Indycar series championship). Wilson Fittipaldi never had his brother’s flair, a fifth and a sixth place being the only distinguishing features of his two seasons with Brabham, while in 1975 he struggled to develop the initial Copersucar before retiring to make way for Emerson.
José Carlos Pace, nicknamed ‘Moco’, could well have become São Paulo’s second world champion. He made his début in 1972, but one victory – in the Brazilian Grand Prix of 1975, five seconds ahead of Emerson Fittipaldi – plus three second places and two thirds were an inappropriate return for three highly competitive seasons with the Brabham team, whose ambitious owner, Bernie Ecclestone, became a close friend and was devastated when, early in the 1977 season, Pace was killed in a flying accident, aged thirty-two.
Luis Pereira Bueno, who had spent a season in England racing Formula Ford cars in 1969, qualified last and finished last at the wheel of an old Surtees in the 1973 Brazilian Grand Prix at Interlagos, during the first championship event held at the circuit. He and Ingo Hoffman, who made three appearances in the Fittipaldis’ Copersucar in 1976 and ’77, added nothing to the roll of honour. Nor, during the same years, did Alex Dias Ribeiro, a wild graduate from European Formula Two (where the nosecone of his car bore the legend ‘Jesus Saves’), who paid for his ten races in a March but was frequently to be found in the list of non-qualifiers. Chico Serra, who introduced Senna to European racing, appeared at the wheel of Fittipaldi and Arrows cars in the early eighties, without making a lasting impression.
Emerson Fittipaldi’s heir turned out to be Nelson Piquet, who arrived in 1978 at the age of twenty-five to take the wheel of an Ensign for what would be the first of more than 200 grands prix. Piquet’s natural talent was so obvious that by the end of the season he had been transferred from the humble surroundings of the little Ensign team, first to McLaren and then to Brabham, where he stayed for the next seven seasons and the world championships of 1981 and ’83. His third and final title, in 1987, came during one of his two seasons with Williams; after that his Formula One career wound down with a couple of seasons each at Lotus and Benetton before he moved to America, where a bad crash in an Indycar resulted in leg injuries that finished his racing.
When Senna arrived, then, Brazilians were a force in the Formula One world. They were known to have talent and money, although both commodities were not always present in the same package. (Argentina, by contrast, had long been eclipsed, only the gifted but moody Carlos Reutemann flying the blue and white flag after the fifties.) Nor were the Brazilian drivers subjected, as their footballers had so long been, to categorization according to the clichés of national temperament: the smooth style and cool calculation of an Emerson Fittipaldi bore little resemblance to the mercurial flair and improvised personal life of a Nelson Piquet. And Senna, too, presented his own personality to Formula One.
At Jacarepaguá he qualified on the eighth row of the grid – two thirds of the way down the field – in a Toleman left over from the previous year, but in the race he retired after only eight laps with a turbocharger problem. The same thing spoiled his run two weeks later in South Africa; nevertheless he finished sixth, three laps behind the winner, scoring his first championship point in only his second race. There was another point for him in the first European race, at Zolder, where he qualified nineteenth but lugged the old car round to the finish.
By this time the new Toleman was finished and ready back at the factory, but the team were delaying its appearance until the resolution of a conflict with their tyre supplier, Pirelli, who had lost interest in Formula One and had failed to keep up with the technical developments of their rivals, Goodyear and Michelin. At Imola the problems with Pirelli came to a head, and Senna failed to qualify for the race – the only time in his career that he suffered such a fate, and the moment at which he began to see his medium-term future elsewhere.
Perhaps, too, that hardened his attitude to a celebrity race at the new Nürburgring circuit in May, at which he joined a host of past and present stars, all driving identical Mercedes 190 saloons. For most of them, it was a bit of a lark; for Senna, it was a chance to make another mark. In a twelve-lap sprint he beat Niki Lauda home by a second and a half, with the likes of Reutemann, Rosberg, Watson and Prost in his wake, along with such former heroes as Denny Hulme, Jody Scheckter, Jack Brabham, James Hunt, John Surtees, Phil Hill – six world champions – and Stirling Moss, the old champion emeritus. Some of them may not have approached the event in quite the same intense spirit as Senna, but the twenty-four-year-old took the opportunity to demonstrate his seriousness of purpose to an important captive audience.
He got the new Toleman, and some Michelin tyres fitted, and at the Monaco Grand Prix he arrived. As simple as that.
Thirteenth in practice on a dry track, he made the most of race-day rain. His own skill and other people’s accidents saw him move up to second position by the twentieth of the scheduled seventy-eight laps. On a circuit noted for its lack of passing places, his victims were Jacques Laffite’s Williams, Manfred Winkelhock’s ATS, Keke Rosberg’s Williams, Rene Arnoux’s Ferrari and Niki Lauda’s McLaren. While accidents were befalling such aces as Tambay, Warwick, Piquet and Mansell, Senna was not only keeping his car on the track but was circulating faster than anyone as the rain fell harder and harder. On lap twenty he was half a minute behind the leader, Alain Prost; over the next eleven laps he reduced the gap to seven and a half seconds.
But then, at the end of the thirty-second lap, with Senna closing fast on Prost and with forty-six laps still to go, it was suddenly all over. The clerk of the course, the former Ferrari driver Jacky Ickx, leaned out over the finish line holding a red flag. Senna caught Prost just before the line and completed the slowing-down lap believing he had won, only to be told on his arrival back at the pits that the rules said that the winner would be whoever had led at the end of the lap preceding the showing of the red flag. In other words, Prost was the winner by 7.4 seconds.
There was immediate controversy. Ickx claimed that the weather had been too bad for the race to continue in safety, but races had been run to a finish in such weather and worse (Ickx himself had come second at Monaco in a cloudburst in 1972); nor, by any means, did the roads of the Principality represent the worst place to race in the wet, given the comparatively low average speed and the high level of visual information offered to drivers by the natural features – buildings, advertising hoardings and so on – bordering the narrow roadway, which allowed an easier orientation in rain and spray than the empty expanses of an artificial autodrome. There were dark mutterings about Prost’s nationality, and the fact that Monaco is practically in France, and the Belgian Ickx being a Francophone, and so on. Nevertheless, although deprived of his first grand prix victory by a very dubious decision, Senna behaved with perfect dignity. His restraint sent out the message that what he had done – and particularly the comparison with Prost, a more experienced driver at the wheel of a much better car – could be allowed to speak for itself. Which it did. ‘I probably got more publicity than if I’d won,’ he was later to say.
His sho
wing raised Toleman’s hopes, but the next few races were undistinguished enough to re-establish a mood of realism. Not until they reached Brands Hatch, for the British Grand Prix, was Senna again able to rise above the car’s limitations. First, though, came a bad practice accident to Cecotto, who had been struggling vainly to match his team leader’s speed all year. Senna had been fastest in the morning warm-up, and after only four minutes of the afternoon qualifying period Cecotto lost control in the fast Westfield Bend, hitting the barriers so hard that he had to be cut from the wreckage and taken to hospital by helicopter. The injuries to his ankles ended his Formula One career on the spot. Undaunted by Cecotto’s misfortune, Senna qualified seventh. In the race he made steady progress through the field until, with two laps to go, he brought the crowd in the Paddock Bend grandstands to their feet by diving inside De Angelis to separate the Lotus team leader from third place. Senna was on the podium for the second time, and he had done it with a tactic refined at Brands Hatch in the Formula Ford years. The spectators loved it.
Now he had the Toleman running regularly just behind the élite, although it was seldom reliable. But before the Dutch Grand Prix in August, Michelin announced their withdrawal from grand prix racing, a bombshell for Toleman since the team had already fallen out with Goodyear, now the only remaining tyre supplier. Suddenly their new-found relative stability had been undermined again. At Zandvoort, it was destroyed.
A prematurely leaked press release on the headed paper of the Lotus team appeared in the paddock at the Dutch Grand Prix, announcing that Ayrton Senna would be joining them for 1985, replacing Mansell alongside De Angelis. There was consternation in the Toleman pit, followed by anger.
Alex Hawkridge was not surprised that Senna’s thoughts had been roaming, given the degree of his ambition, but this was the first he had heard of any concrete plans, and the news of negotiations, never mind the apparent existence of a signed contract, clearly breached the terms of the buy-out clause in his deal with Senna, which stipulated that compensation had to be paid to Toleman before contact could be made with another team. Later it emerged that Senna’s newly appointed manager, Armando Botelho, had been in clandestine contact with Lotus since early July, and that negotiations had been under way for two months. The intention had been to make the announcement at Zandvoort, but not until after Senna had broken the news to Toleman that he would be exercising the escape clause.
Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport, the doyen of British grand prix correspondents and already a confirmed Senna fan, described the driver’s behaviour as ‘a simple case of bad manners and lack of discipline’. Harsh words were exchanged between the furious Hawkridge and his embarrassed driver. Senna claimed that he had been indicating since early in the season that he would be moving elsewhere. Hawkridge, in his rage, then did something that few team managers would have contemplated, given the powerful personality cults surrounding grand prix drivers. Infuriated by the patronizing tone of the Lotus press release, which included the statement that ‘he (Senna) will, of course, continue to drive for Toleman for the rest of the season’, Hawkridge announced that, as a punishment, the Brazilian would be suspended from the next round of the world championship, at Monza.
Before long Senna did indeed stump up the money stipulated in the buy-out clause, but the relationship could not be repaired in the course of the last two races of the season. At the Nürburgring, he qualified twelfth and went out of the race after colliding with Rosberg on the first lap, the cause of the accident disputed between Senna, who said Rosberg had turned into him on a corner, and the Finn, who believed Senna had simply left his braking too late. At Estoril, Senna redeemed himself by qualifying and finishing third, giving the team extra championship points – and according to the arcane system by which grand prix teams are remunerated, a reduction in travelling expenses for the next season.
Sadly, it would not be enough to secure the team’s long-term prospects. Coming on the back of Cecotto’s injury and the loss of Michelin, the messy conclusion to Senna’s tenure discouraged the sponsors Hawkridge had been hoping to attract for the following season. They struggled on through a mediocre 1985, but then Ted Toleman himself decided that the game was up and sold the team lock, stock and barrel to the Italian clothing manufacturers Alessandro and Luciano Benetton, who used it as the foundation of the project that would one day also have a bearing on the destiny of Ayrton Senna.
By the time he got to Lotus, Senna was already several years too late. Had Colin Chapman not died in 1982, he and Senna might have reconstituted something like the partnership between the Lotus boss and Jim Clark in the sixties, when Chapman sent Clark out to conquer the world in tiny little green cigar-tubes that looked delicate enough to float away but were packed with ingenious engineering solutions. Chapman was a bold engineer, willing to take a risk – sometimes with other people’s lives – in order to get an edge, and Senna would undoubtedly have responded to his single-minded ambition. Even after Clark’s fatal accident at Hockenheim in 1968, Chapman’s cars had carried Graham Hill, Jochen Rindt, Emerson Fittipaldi and Mario Andretti to the world title. But the founder’s death took away his company’s innovative genius, and nothing that Peter Warr or his own successors could do would prevent the onset of the gradual decline of the team which had once surpassed Ferrari in the total number of grand prix victories, into bankruptcy and closure at the beginning of 1995.
At the start of the 1985 season, however, such a fate seemed highly unlikely. The cars still carried the impressive black and gold livery of John Player Special cigarettes, the colours in which Fittipaldi and Andretti had won their titles. They were designed by a talented Frenchman, Gérard Ducarouge, and they were still enjoying the use of Renault engines which delivered plenty of horsepower, although their thirstiness was a problem in an era when the fuel regulations – born of a dim understanding of the outside world’s growing ‘green’ consciousness – forced drivers to keep one eye on their opponents and the other on the petrol gauge.
Continuing what would become his traditional practice of starting off by putting pressure on his own team mate, so establishing his right to any preferential treatment that might be going, Senna led De Angelis, who was starting his sixth season with the team, until his ignition system failed. But in the second race of the season, at Estoril, Senna dominated the Portuguese Grand Prix in such a way as to adjust the whole ranking system of Formula One.
In qualifying he took his first Formula One pole position, more than a second faster than De Angelis. On the Sunday it poured, and the race was his. As the remainder of the field floundered around, he dominated the conditions to such an extent that even a trip off the circuit, with all four wheels on the grass as he accelerated down the hill behind the paddock, was handled with complete equanimity (he called it luck, but other people who saw the incident considered that this was the kind of luck you made for yourself ). A full minute behind him came the Ferrari of Michele Alboreto, the only man Senna did not lap. As he returned to the pits, Senna greeted his crew with both hands off the wheel, double-punching the air in delight.
There was another pole at Imola, and a secure lead until the Renault ran dry with four laps to go; and at Monaco he led for the first thirteen laps until the consequences of over-revving the engine on the warm-up lap became evident. In the harsher streets of Detroit, he took pole and fought for the lead with Mansell’s Williams until a tyre change put him back; he was up to third when he hit the wall. He was leading at Silverstone when the fuel injection packed up, and at the Nürburgring when the engine blew. A second place in Austria and thirds in Holland and Italy followed. Then the rain came again, allowing him to display his virtuosity at Spa-Francorchamps, the most awe-inspiring and demanding of all modern circuits, where the race went from wet to wetter to dry and he finished in front of Mansell and Prost. At a dry Brands Hatch he had to concede to Mansell, who won again in South Africa, where Senna’s engine expired, as it did in the final race of the season, the inaugural Austr
alian Grand Prix at Adelaide – after a strangely undisciplined performance during which he forced Mansell off the track at the first bend and then indulged in some provocative wheel-to-wheel stuff with Rosberg and others.
Prost took the title, his first, at the age of thirty. But Senna could look back on two wins, two seconds, two thirds, seven pole positions, ten front-row starts and thirty-eight points, enough to give him fourth place in the table, just ahead of his team mate, who had started the season as the number one. The yellow helmet was now a fixture at the front.
He had seen off De Angelis, who transferred his services to the Brabham team for 1986. Now Senna was the undisputed team leader, and he extended the terms of his status to the prerogative of choosing his own team mate – something few teams would have arrogated to a driver. Peter Warr and the rest of the team badly wanted to sign Derek Warwick, whose experience with Renault had been unhappy yet who would have come into the team with experience of the French engines that also powered the Lotuses. Warwick was fast, knowledgeable, enthusiastic and hard working. His nationality was also an asset as far as the team were concerned: a British team with a British sponsor needed a British driver, as long as he was quick enough to give good support to the number one.
The Death of Ayrton Senna Page 8