The Death of Ayrton Senna

by Richard Williams

  Berger, too, went to São Paulo, and then back to Austria, to Ratzenberger’s funeral. As he crossed and recrossed the Atlantic, as he stood beside the graves of two colleagues and saw the faces of their bereaved families, he thought long and hard about retirement. On Wednesday of the following week he called a press conference.

  ‘I earned good money,’ he said. ‘I was driving in good teams, I was winning races, I had pole positions … basically, not a lot to prove. So what is the point to take still the risk? That was my question to myself last week. But the other side is, what is the rest of your life?’

  Chapter Nine

  The noise on the videotape is a harsh low-pitched drone; not at all the electric howl you’d expect from a racing engine at full throttle. An ominous sound, the more so when you know what’s coming next.

  It’s 2.17 p.m. on 1 May 1994, and the seventh lap of the San Marino Grand Prix has just begun. These pictures are coming from a camera mounted on Ayrton Senna’s Williams. As he crosses the start and finish line of the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari at Imola, Senna has less than thirteen seconds to live.

  Nine seconds after breaking the start-line timing beam, Senna’s car enters Tamburello, at just over 190 m.p.h. The car’s blue and white nose follows the trace of the bend, its nearside wheel only an inch or two from the white rumblestrip. The picture, from a camera mounted on the bodywork above the driver’s left shoulder, shudders in response to ripples on the track surface, transmitted and magnified through the steel rods and carbon-fibre shell of the highly strung chassis.

  The car is deep into this turn when the driver’s yellow and green helmet appears at the right-hand side of the video frame. The driver is inclining his head to the left, and from the angle of the helmet he appears to be looking down. Perhaps he has seen something in his instruments. Perhaps he is peering into the rear-view mirror mounted on the left-hand side of the cockpit. The helmet jiggles.

  These pictures are being beamed from the camera in Senna’s car to a helicopter hovering above the circuit. Up to twenty of the twenty-six cars in the race are carrying these cameras. At any one time, four of them are sending signals to the helicopter, which relays them instantaneously down to a large grey truck parked behind the pits. In the truck, an editor chooses two or three to feed on to the event’s host broadcaster, whose director will mix the pictures into coverage from his own static cameras around the circuit.

  Just over eleven seconds have elapsed since the start of the lap. Now something unexpected happens, something disturbing, and suddenly the world begins to move not in seconds, as it has for the viewer at home in his armchair, but in tenths and hundredths of a second, as it does for the driver.

  At 11.3 seconds there is a vibration. The car leaves the smooth curve of its trajectory. In the next tenth of a second it seems to straighten, jumping away from the line of the bend, heading across the track towards a thin strip of grass and the narrow tarmac run-off area, beyond which lies the concrete perimeter wall and a hoarding advertising Agip, the Italian national petrol company, with a single phrase, in white capital letters twenty feet high, flanked by two chequered flags: I PILOTISSIMI!

  And at 11.4 seconds, with the car heading for the wall at 190 m.p.h., after four minutes and thirty-six seconds of continuous picture transmission from the camera located just behind Ayrton Senna’s head, just 1.4 seconds before the fatal impact, the film ends.

  The final image from Senna’s car shows him heading for the wall, in line for an impact at a point just beyond the chequered flag on the Agip hoarding. He hit the wall 12.8 seconds after the start of the seventh lap, suffering a fatal head injury from a steel suspension arm which snapped when his right-hand front wheel broke off and drove its jagged end through the yellow helmet in the area of his right temple.

  In the 1.4 seconds between the end of the videotape and the impact would almost certainly lie important evidence contributing towards an understanding of the cause of his death.

  ‘The editor thought that there was no longer any interest in the picture of Senna in the lead, so he shut down the camera and switched over to the picture from Michael Schumacher’s car,’ Bernie Ecclestone said many months later, giving an answer to the obvious question. ‘It was a judgement call.’ All the in-car cameras, and the copyright on the images they produce, are owned by the Formula One Constructors’ Association, the body which Ecclestone founded and runs, and upon which, with the assistance of the lawyer Max Mosley and the entrepreneur Paddy McNally, he has built the platform for the immense prosperity of the grand prix circus. Ecclestone’s understanding of the role television could play in Formula One’s rise to global prominence as a major sports-entertainment package is the reason Nigel Mansell has a private jet, Ron Dennis can toss a coin over a matter of a million and a half dollars, and even design engineers earn seven-figure salaries.

  But the existence of the videotape of Senna’s last moments on earth took six months to come to light. FOCA’s pictures from Senna’s car were not being fed out live to external networks at that point during the race. Viewers around the world were watching the start of the seventh lap from the camera in Schumacher’s car, a few lengths behind. If they were very alert, they saw Senna’s car veer off to the right at the very instant the host broadcaster’s director made the perfect natural cut to a camera positioned beyond Tamburello, looking back to see the cars leaving the curve. Mercifully for them, they did not see the moment at which the car hit the wall; the next thing they saw was the Williams ricocheting back towards the edge of the track, wheels flying into the air, the suddenly dishevelled machine coming to rest, the driver’s helmet slumped motionlessly to the right.

  Apart from those watching the bank of monitor screens in the big grey FOCA Communications truck which is parked close to the timing tower in the paddock at every grand prix, no one saw the pictures from Senna’s car. Not until a persistent journalist, Roberto Cabrini of Brazil’s TV Globo, persuaded Ecclestone to give him a copy did the outside world get a chance to see them. Until then, the pictures had been thought not to exist at all.

  After Cabrini had shown the film as part of a report on the continuing investigation into the crash, Ecclestone firmly denied ever having given the impression that there had been no pictures from Senna’s car. But why had it taken so long for them to come to light? ‘It didn’t,’ he said. ‘Frank Williams had the tape two days after the crash. He phoned to ask if we had anything, and we gave it to him. If anybody else had asked, they could have had it, too.’ Yet, according to Cabrini, it was only months of badgering that enabled him to break down Ecclestone’s resistance.

  Ecclestone – who is also vice-president of promotional affairs for the FIA, the world governing body, and therefore the man most concerned with the sport’s image – tried to resolve the other mystery, the question of the missing 1.4 seconds, by explaining the FOCA editor’s decision to cut away at the crucial moment in terms of the quality of the surviving tape. ‘If you’ve seen the film,’ he said, ‘you’ll have noticed that the picture was breaking up. It wasn’t of broadcast quality.’ True, as Senna comes round at the end of the sixth lap, accelerating out of the ninety-degree right-hander called Traguardo on to the straight, there is some momentary interference; but the video image has settled again before Senna approaches Tamburello. Indeed, apart from the rough growl of the engine, the final seconds have a curiously serene quality; with the empty track stretching out ahead, it is as though Senna were alone in the world.

  It was easier to believe Ecclestone’s contention that the editor had made a split-second decision to opt for a more obviously dramatic shot. After all, in the second he apparently chose to cut away, only Senna himself knew that something was wrong.

  An early copy of the FOCA videotape went to the office of Maurizio Passarini in Bologna, a half-hour’s drive from the Imola autodrome. Passarini, an investigating magistrate in his mid-thirties, was appointed in the immediate aftermath of the Imola weekend to look into both fatal accid
ents, Ratzenberger’s as well as Senna’s. His findings might lead to the absolution of all surviving parties, or to criminal charges against anyone found guilty of contributory negligence, which in effect meant either those responsible for the design and/or manufacture of the Williams car, or the managers of the Imola autodrome.

  Such investigations have been held in Italy before, with inconclusive results. At Monza in 1961 Wolfgang von Trips changed direction going into the Parabolica curve without noticing the presence of Jim Clark and went flying off the road into a chain-link fence against which spectators were pressing. Fourteen of them were killed, as was von Trips. The wrecks of his Ferrari and Clark’s Lotus were impounded, and the Scotsman and his team boss, Colin Chapman, left the circuit by helicopter as soon as they could. The investigation was still going on a year later, at which point Chapman, fearful of prosecution, entered his cars for the 1962 grand prix at Monza under the fictitious name of Worldwide Racing. No conclusion was ever reached. Nor was it in the case of Jochen Rindt, who died at the same track in practice for the 1970 grand prix, when it seems that a rod to the inboard front brakes of his Lotus 72 broke, just as it had in testing the previous week, in the hands of his team mate, John Miles. On both occasions the cars turned sharp left, straight off the track; in Rindt’s case a fatal outcome was ensured by his preference for leaving his crotch straps undone, a comfort measure which meant that when the car hit the barrier head-on he slid forward. Rindt’s car, too, was taken into custody by the authorities; it is believed to have remained in a lock-up garage at Monza for twenty years, long after the investigation had atrophied, before being quietly sold to a collector.

  For all the inauspicious precedents, Maurizio Passarini was under no obligation to be anything other than completely thorough; there was no deadline for the inquiry. To assist him, he assembled a team of distinguished figures: the engineers Tommaso Carletti, a chassis specialist formerly with Minardi and Ferrari, and Mauro Forghieri, who designed Niki Lauda’s championship-winning Ferraris in the mid-seventies and had recently worked on the Bugatti supercar; Roberto Nosetto, a former Ferrari team manager and an official observer for the FIA; Dr Rafaele Dalmonte, a member of Italy’s Olympic committee and a specialist in sports medicine; and Emmanuele Pirro, the former Benetton grand prix driver and current Italian touring car champion. The facilities of the 900-year-old University of Bologna were placed at his disposal, as were those of other research establishments, such as Pratica di Mare, the Italian military aerospace laboratory looking down from the mountain of Poggio Ballone across the Gulf of Follonica to the island of Elba.

  Outsiders were kept away, including Patrick Head’s team from Didcot. Head himself was allowed two ten-minute visits to the wreckage, but went away in frustration that his men, with their intimate knowledge of the car they had built and developed, could not – for perfectly sound legal reasons – be permitted to take it apart and find out what, if anything, had contributed to the tragedy. Another English racing-car designer, Adrian Reynard, had better luck. Hired by Senna’s family to conduct a private investigation in parallel with the official one, he was granted half an hour with the car.

  None of Senna’s fellow drivers believed that he could have made a mistake: not at a corner like Tamburello, which might have been flat out but presented little challenge to the driver’s skills. For a car to leave the track there, something must have gone wrong with it. From the start, there were three theories that had nothing to do with breakages or other kinds of sudden malfunction. First, Senna might have been trying so hard to stay ahead of Schumacher that, in trying to overdrive what was basically an unforgiving car, he pushed it too far; second, that his car might have picked up debris left – despite the marshals’ efforts – on the start line in the wake of the Lehto/Lamy accident, upsetting its already delicate aerodynamic equilibrium; third, that his tyres had cooled down so much while running behind the safety car that even on its second lap at racing speeds the car was still running below its optimum ride-height and was bottoming on the Tamburello bumps, throwing it off track. None of these possibilities seemed susceptible of absolute proof, since each depended on what might be called ‘informal’ data (the driver’s testimony, or that of eyewitnesses) or evidence that might have been wiped away by the impact, such as debris from the earlier accident. Other theories, slower to emerge, might have a more substantial grounding.

  For Passarini’s analysts, the chief problem was that FW16B/2’s black box, storing the data on the car’s behaviour during the race, had been destroyed. The device was located on the right-hand side of the car, in between the bodywork and the carbon-fibre survival cell. Impact damage to the small battery powering the box had wiped away its memory, just as the removal of a battery from a portable car radio will erase its settings. This meant that information on the behaviour of the car’s suspension, for instance, would be lost for ever.

  The impounded remains of FW16B/2, its bodywork battered and ripped, lay behind the locked doors of a garage within the precincts of the autodrome. Various components were removed for inspection at Bologna University, including the steering column – which, snapped off at its root, was shown lying next to the car in photographs taken immediately after the crash. One theory, said to have its origins among the small group of people who saw the results of the first metallurgical tests, gained such wide currency that it formed the basis of a major article in the French daily sports newspaper L’Equipe and was broadcast around the world. This suggested that the rupture had led to the crash, rather than being among the results of it. Some said that, in the weeks leading up to the race, Senna had asked for alterations to the steering column, in order to give him more room in the cramped cockpit. It was alleged that the modifications weakened the shaft. The broken column spent many weeks at Poggio Ballone, along with certain components from the left rear suspension – which, had it failed at Tamburello, might have thrown the car into its delinquent new trajectory.

  Back at Bologna, however, there was some electronic data for the scientists to examine, after all. It came not from the black box, which had indeed been ruined, but from an unexpected source: the onboard memory of the engine management system, which transmitted two-second bursts of data to the Renault engineers each time the car passed the pits, the process known as downloading. In Head’s words, his engineers ‘piggybacked’ the system, using its spare capacity to receive their own information. This data would have been downloaded at the end of the lap and then erased from the onboard memory. That indeed was what happened to the data from lap six as the car crossed the line, but the data from lap seven, all 12.8 seconds of it, was still there when the remains of FW16B/2 came to a halt. Located amidships, next to the engine whose heartbeat it was principally recording, the memory was unscathed.

  Unlike the videotape, these read-outs – which came under four headings – did not end until the car hit the wall. Some of the information was unsurprising. Senna’s speed was 192 m.p.h. when he entered Tamburello, and 131 m.p.h. when he hit the wall. In between, the graph suggests that his speed slowed dramatically and then accelerated again, but that is an illusion created by the fact that the speed sensors are mounted on the wheels, which locked up under heavy braking before he released them in the half-second before the impact, perhaps trying to regain control. Nor is it enlightening to know that he came right off the throttle in the space of half a second before jamming his foot back down on the accelerator pedal in the last fifth of a second; that might just have been a helpless reflex, perhaps bracing himself for the impact. The two other items, though, combined to tell a more intriguing story.

  Both were related to the car’s steering. The first, showing the direction and force of the steering effort, clearly demonstrated that Senna was holding the car on a steady left lock until the final instant. But the second graph, displaying the hydraulic pressure within the Williams power-steering system, is where some people came to believe the origin of the accident lay. What it shows is the pressure rising sudd
enly in the instant after the onset of the accident, then falling swiftly until the last half-second before impact, when it describes a crazy up-and-down pattern.

  Did this indicate the sort of system failure that might have triggered the accident? Steve Nichols, an American engineer who designed the McLaren with which Senna won the 1988 world championship, was puzzled by the reading. ‘If the power steering broke, you’d expect the hydraulic pressure to go straight to zero,’ he said. ‘It would be the same with the other reading if the accident had been started by the steering column breaking. But it’s hard to tell for sure, without knowing what kind of a system they had and where the measurements were being taken within it.’

  Those are the kind of details that Formula One people like to keep to themselves, or at least within the four walls of a magistrate’s office. Frank Williams and Patrick Head turned all their available information over to Maurizio Passarini, and then declared themselves unavailable for further comment until the results of the inquiry were made known.

  ‘I’m satisfied that the inquiry is being properly run,’ Williams told me as the 1994 season was drawing to a close. ‘He’s a very serious, straightforward magistrate. I’ve met him and been interviewed by him, which is why I can say that he’s a very honest and open individual who is insistent on finding out all the facts before he makes his decision, and he won’t be rushed.’

  At one point, Passarini himself hoped to announce his team’s findings at the end of November, seven months after the accident. But as that time approached he issued a communiqué in which he announced a delay, pending further tests. ‘The problem involves the co-ordination between experts, who are professional people with other responsibilities and obligations,’ he said. ‘The quality of their analysis is fundamental to the inquiry. Time is certainly marching on. There’s no deadline. But we can’t leave the matter for eternity.’