The Death of Ayrton Senna

by Richard Williams

  On the face of it, a civilized disagreement between professionals. Not a voice raised. No hard looks exchanged. But the sub-text! If you just think about safety, sure, stop the race. Nothing could have been more carefully calculated to insult Prost, to evoke memories of the battles he had lost to Senna in the past, and by implication to devalue a victory which, in any case, as Senna went on to reveal, had been earned only because his own McLaren had suffered from a problem with the active suspension.

  ‘The car was impossible,’ Senna said in that soft, thoughtful tone. ‘It was a shame. In the warm-up it was fine. One corner of the car went completely out of my control. I thought it might be a puncture, but then I realized it was an electronic problem. It was hell to drive the car. Immediately Schumacher caught me up, and then Alain, and they were much quicker than me – not just round the corners but on the straights. But, given the car we have, it’s a good result.’

  A check of the lap times proved that Senna’s tale was not just part of another Formula One mind game. His times had risen exactly when he said they had, down to a small blip when he tried to give his tyres a rest as early as the third lap. He had given us the sort of accurate analysis his engineers were accustomed to hearing.

  The winner, sitting next to him, looked increasingly bleak. We thought we had witnessed the return of Alain Prost, champion racing driver. Now we weren’t so sure.

  Later that week Prost put on his best suit to appear before the international federation’s World Council in Paris. He played his tape, spoke his words of reason, and made his peace. He was on the way to his fourth world title.

  And yet, in finishing the 1993 season as runner-up to the principal rival of his career, Senna – the man who said, ‘I am not designed to come second or third’ – perhaps put together the most impressive year of all. In the MP4/8, he discovered a car that ran out of breath on the straights but could be thrown into the corners like a Formula Ford. There was only one pole position for him in the entire season, but time and again the crowds could watch the nose of the red and white car twitching as he searched for the limit of adhesion, just the way Peterson and Villeneuve used to do. His reward at the beginning of the season, while Prost was still rediscovering his competitive edge and getting to grips with the new Williams technology, came with wins at Interlagos and Donington.

  There were other bonuses to these victories besides cups and cheques. At a sponsors’ party at Interlagos he met Adriane Galisteu, a twenty-year-old blonde from Lapa, a working-class suburb of São Paulo. She and nine other girls had been sent by the Elite model agency to earn $1,000 a day handing round canapés and smiling at the guests in the Shell VIP tent. They met again at Senna’s victory celebration party, held at the Limelight disco in São Paulo. Shortly thereafter she was discovering that the bedroom closet at his holiday home in Angra dos Reis held forty or fifty pairs of identical white tennis shoes. They were to spend the remainder of his life together: 405 days, by her count.

  A lesser perk came in the form of having fun at his chief rival’s expense, lightening the mood of their vendetta although never relieving the pressure on an increasingly fretful Prost. After all, if your enemy is laughing at you, you start to wonder if your flies are undone. In the aftermath of the majestic victory at Donington, for example, Senna transformed the post-race press conference with a single moment of expert comic timing.

  He was late into the room, delayed by an informal celebration of a performance he knew ranked with any he had ever given. When he arrived, Prost was explaining all the things that had gone wrong during the course of what was for him a tactically disastrous race hindered by no fewer than seven panicky pit stops. It was the usual mundane parade of racing drivers’ excuses, multiplied by about three. The gearbox hadn’t worked properly, that was the first thing. There was still a problem with the clutch. The tyre pressures hadn’t been right, the aerodynamics were all over the place, the sun-roof had rusted up, the ashtray was full and the French tax laws were murderous. At that point you wouldn’t have bet on the triple world champion getting a Volvo estate out of the Donington car park in one piece.

  Senna leaned forward, towards the microphone.

  ‘Why,’ he said quietly, ‘don’t you change cars with me?’

  It was the only dry moment of the day, and it brought the house down.

  At Imola, Prost began the run of wins that took him to the title, interrupted by Senna’s inevitable victory at Monaco: his sixth, a record. Prost was crowned at Estoril, after which he announced his retirement at the end of the season. ‘The sport has given me a lot,’ he said, ‘but I decided that the game wasn’t worth it any more. I have taken too many blows.’ To no one’s surprise, Frank Williams told the world that Ayrton Senna would be driving one of his cars in 1994. The Brazilian’s two-year campaign had finally paid off.

  The pressure gone, Senna wrapped up the season with wins at Suzuka and Adelaide, his thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth over the six seasons in the cockpit of a McLaren. The Japanese race produced the only physical altercation of Senna’s season when, irritated by what he considered to be the disrespectful tactics employed by the Jordan driver Eddie Irvine, he went to seek him out in the Irish team’s motorhome to administer a ticking-off. Afterwards it emerged that Senna’s friend Berger had wound him up, pouring a couple of celebratory glasses of schnapps into a man who seldom touched alcohol; at any rate it was enough to enable Irvine’s studied show of dumb insolence to goad the head boy into turning back as he was leaving, and giving the cheeky third-former a cuff on the head. Ill-advised, in the modern world, but you couldn’t blame him.

  Still, for a season that had promised nothing once Prost removed the immediate possibility of a transfer to Williams, things had not worked out too badly at all.

  Chapter Eight

  Senna and Adriane seemed settled, which may be a strange way to describe people who were constantly on the move, using private jets, helicopters and limousines to ferry them between the house on the Algarve at Quinta do Lago, the Rio beach house at Angra dos Reis, the São Paulo apartment on the Rua Paraguai and the da Silva family farm at Tatui.

  ‘I felt that, with Adriane Galisteu, Ayrton was having luck in life,’ Emerson Fittipaldi wrote after his death. ‘He had found his other half, and his maturity as a human being was visible.’

  While Senna was alive, the discrepancy between his social background and that of Adriane, brought up by her mother in considerably less privileged circumstances, was allowed to carry no significance. When he was away, testing a car or fulfilling a sponsor’s requirements, Adriane took lessons in English, the lingua franca of the paddock, and jogged under the supervision of Nuno Cobra so that she would be able to run in the mornings with Ayrton, whose devotion to his physical fitness regime was absolute.

  Cobra was a close friend of long standing, and something of a personal philosopher. ‘Life is passing you by,’ Adriane heard him telling Senna during the early weeks of 1994, as they trained on the running track of the University of São Paulo. ‘Seize it.’

  In January Senna went to Estoril to try an updated version of last year’s Williams; the new FW16 would not be ready until the early days of March, three weeks before the first race of the season. In between there was plenty of opportunity to play on the jet-skis at Angra and the kart track at Tatui with his nieces Bia and Paulinha and his nephew Bruno, the children of Viviane and her husband, Flávio Lalli.

  And there was time, too, for business matters, which were assuming a larger role in his life. ‘I am trying to find new activities, a source of motivation for when I’ve finished,’ he said. ‘I believe I will be able to find some real alternatives in business.’ In 1993, his million-dollars-a-race deal had led Forbes magazine to rank him third in their annual list of the highest-earning sports people. His off-track income, from Banco Nacional, other endorsements and his own ventures, would probably have doubled that. A videogame under his name sold 800,000 copies, for example; there was a range of leisure clo
thing. Now he moved into a higher gear, announcing that his company Senna Import was the new distributor of Audi cars in Brazil. Cavaro, an Italian bicycle manufacturer, launched a new carbon-fibre mountain bike bearing his name. There were collaborations with TAG-Heuer watches, Mont Blanc pens and Ducati motorcycles. And, closest to his heart, there was the launch of Senninha e sua turma (Senninha and his gang), a witty and well-drawn fortnightly children’s cartoon magazine devoted to the adventures of a boy racing driver bearing a close resemblance to Brazil’s real-life hero. Senninha also jet-skied, outwitted baddies, and, in edition number four, fell in love with a little blonde girl. The magazine, Senna said, was an expression of his desire to give something back to children; he had plans to direct the profits from some of these ventures into projects to help the street kids of São Paulo. In March he donated $45,000 to a charity for sick children at the behest of his old friend Professor Sid Watkins, the Formula One circus’s resident medical officer.

  But when he sat in the new car for the first time during a test at Paul Ricard in February, he discovered something that disturbed him: the 1994 Williams did not have the inherent superiority enjoyed by its predecessors, and which had persuaded him to make such strenuous and protracted efforts to join the team. It was uncomfortably small in the cockpit, its handling was disconcertingly difficult to predict, and, as testing at Imola revealed, it was not as quick as Michael Schumacher’s new Benetton.

  In 1992 and 1993, the combination of Patrick Head’s chassis, Adrian Newey’s aerodynamics and Bernard Dudot’s Renault engine had given Mansell and Prost what was practically a magic carpet. But their domination, and the costly spread of computer technology throughout Formula One, had led the FIA to bring in new regulations for 1994, banning the sort of devices that were horribly expensive, even by Formula One’s inflated standards, and were also perceived to reduce the driver’s contribution, thereby diminishing the sport as a human spectacle. So out went fully automatic gearboxes (including McLaren’s programmed job and Williams’s projected constantly variable transmission); out went the device called traction control, which matched engine revs to road speed and eliminated wheel spin, at great cost to the spectacle since almost any idiot could floor the throttle and turn the wheel; most crucially for Williams, out went the enormously complicated active suspension, which they had perfected while others struggled. There was the added complication of reduced petrol tankage, brought in to create a need for refuelling stops in order to increase the entertainment value for television: an idiotically irresponsible measure.

  The new Williams was technically a more straightforward car, but it is in the nature of racing-car designers always to explore new solutions, and no solution to the problems set by a modern Formula One car can ever be called simple. From the day it first turned a wheel, the FW16 had its drivers and engineers worried.

  Schumacher, by contrast, looked and sounded highly confident at Silverstone in mid-March, doing the final fettling work on his Benetton ten days before the opening round in Brazil. But he was not silly enough to overplay it when told that people were speculating about how he was now faster than Senna. ‘It’s nice to know people have that trust in me,’ he said mildly as a bright spring sun chased thunderclouds across the sky outside the Benetton motorhome and the yawp of a lone Tyrrell floated across the infield. ‘The only thing I can say is that I’ve got another year of experience. Hopefully we can push the Williams, sometimes stay close, sometimes win a race, but as for the championship, I think we’re still one more step away from that.’

  Senna and Hill, he said, had ‘the best package’ for the season. ‘But that doesn’t mean that in some races where they don’t find the right set-up, we might find a very good set-up – and we’ll be very close, we’ll fight together, and then by strategies or stuff we’re going to win races. But too many bad things would need to happen to other teams for us really to have the chance to win the championship. Drivers like Senna or Hill, a team like Williams … they don’t make mistakes.’

  His team were helpful to a lone observer that day, but when they were asked about the function of the three coloured buttons on the centre of the Benetton’s steering wheel, they clammed up in unison. It was curious, but it didn’t seem very important at the time.

  A few days later Williams held a final test at Silverstone, and invited the media. Damon Hill, under pressure from the British newspapers to match the exploits of the departed Nigel Mansell, told the journalists that he had no intention of becoming another victim of what he called ‘Sennaphobia’: a clever description of the point at which respect for the maestro shaded into fear, inhibiting aggression. Hill had read his history books, and knew what had become of Cecotto, De Angelis, Dumfries and Michael Andretti, and how even Prost and Berger had been made to suffer. His team mate, he said, was just another racing driver, albeit a great one.

  Senna went to Interlagos ready to celebrate the tenth anniversary of his arrival in Formula One, unsure of what was in store. ‘The cars are very fast and difficult to drive,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a season with lots of accidents, and I’ll risk saying we’ll be lucky if something really serious doesn’t happen.’ It would be a more open championship this year, he added; he would have said that anyway, but this time he meant it.

  At a post-qualifying press conference organized by Renault, just after wrapping up pole position a third of a second ahead of Schumacher, he shared the platform with Patrick Faure, the president of the French company’s sporting division, and launched straightaway into one of his sermons on the need to fight complacency. ‘We’ve seen today the gap being almost insignificant between our car and Schumacher’s,’ he said. Then he drew a deep breath, and turned towards Faure. ‘As far as the future season is concerned, it all depends on the development programme that both Williams-Renault and Benetton-Ford can do. I hope Mr Faure will keep on pushing the technicians from Renault to ensure that they continue the development of the engine, and also push Frank Williams and Patrick Head and all the engineers to get the new modifications in the development of the chassis.’ This, the sort of self-criticism normally confined to a locked motorhome or a debugged boardroom, was uttered before a single lap of the season had been run. It was in some respects a familiar gambit, and in the past an effective one. Renault and Williams were being put on notice that, notwithstanding their two consecutive championships with Mansell and Prost, they must now prepare themselves to deal with not merely different circumstances but also the requirements of an altogether more exigent character. Nothing less would do, he was saying, than total commitment.

  What particularly concerned Senna was the car’s response to bumps, combined with its reluctance to hold its line on low-speed corners. Interlagos is a circuit with an abrasive, uneven surface, compared to the billiard-table tarmac of most grand prix tracks, and without its computer-driven electronic ride system the Williams was reacting badly. According to Hill’s post-season assessment, at this stage the car was ‘virtually undrivable’ in the slow corners. ‘And in the quick ones it threatened to turf you off the track at any moment,’ he added, pointing out that the problem was compounded by the narrowness of the footwell, which impeded the transfer of the right foot from accelerator pedal to brake.

  Senna, anxious to disguise these problems from his rivals’ attention and to get on with stamping his authority on the season, took the lead from the start on Sunday afternoon, and built a small cushion while Schumacher was finding a way past Alesi’s Ferrari. By the time they made their first pit stops, however, Schumacher was only a second behind, and good work by the Benetton crew allowed him to leave the pits in a narrow lead which he soon extended to five seconds and then, after the second set of stops, to nine seconds. Senna had seemed powerless to do anything about it, but with twenty-five laps to go he launched an assault. Gradually the gap came down: 9.2 sec., 8.1, 6.3, 5.5, 6.2, 6.0, 5.0. But on the next time round, lap fifty-six, with fifteen left to run, he was coming out of Cotovello, a slowish uphil
l ninety-degree left-hander, when he put the power on in third gear and the back end of the car stepped out of line, snapping him into a halfspin. As the Williams came to a stop in mid-track, the engine stalled. Around the circuit, his home crowd looked on, appalled, cheated of the denouement they had been counting on. Senna popped his belts and stepped out, leaving the victory to Schumacher. On the TV monitors, an unsentimental readout told us that at the moment the spin started his heart had been beating at a rate of 164 per minute.

  It looked like the most banal sort of error, something a beginner might do, or a driver from a lower formula experiencing the power of a Formula One car for the first time, not a triple world champion. Nevertheless he tried to take the blame. ‘There was nothing wrong with the car,’ he admitted. ‘It was my fault. I was pushing too hard.’ In the motorhome his words carried a different message, one conveyed to Didcot, where the Williams engineers continued to wrestle with the problem. Both he and Hill, who finished a struggling second to the elated Schumacher, needed the attentions of Josef Leberer, Senna’s travelling masseur and reflexologist, to ease away the strain of battling against their own cars’ evil tendencies.

  Now they were paying for the late delivery of the FW16, for allowing Benetton precious extra weeks in which to test and refine the B194. But Senna had his suspicions that there was more to it than that. And at the second race, the Pacific Grand Prix on the new Aida circuit near Osaka in Japan, his thoughts darkened further. He took pole by a fifth of a second from Schumacher, but in the Saturday morning warm-up both he and Hill spun their cars at the same corner. In the paddock on race day, Senna lay on the floor of the Williams cabin for an hour, clearing his thoughts. His race, however, lasted only a few seconds. Schumacher got the better start, and led into the first corner. Behind him, Senna felt the impact of Hakkinen’s nose on his own gearbox. The Williams slewed sideways, presenting a wide target which was duly hit by Nicola Larini’s Ferrari, both of them ending up in the sand as Schumacher raced on to victory. Afterwards Senna stood and watched the two Benettons, noting the differences in the behaviour of the car of Schumacher and the apparently identical but much slower one of his young Dutch team mate, Jos Verstappen.