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The Death of Ayrton Senna

Page 18

by Richard Williams


  The atmosphere in the improvised courtroom was informal, verging on chaotic. There were no more than fifty people present, divided equally into lawyers, journalists and members of the public. Alongside each black-cloaked lawyer sat a glamorous and somewhat younger female assistant, affecting an elegant lack of interest. Before the hearing could begin, Hill’s lawyer and business manager, Michael Breen, successfully insisted that several television crews be removed.

  Sitting in front of the 36-year-old judge, whose chair was positioned under a small crucifix and a sign reading ‘La legge e uguale per tutti’, Hill was asked by Passarini if there had been a problem caused by a lack of space inside the cockpit of the car. Yes, Hill said, it was very tight. Did Senna have the same problem? ‘I believe so.’ And had they discussed it together? ‘I don’t remember.’

  The problem in his own car, Hill continued, was to do with the amount of space between the rim of the steering wheel and the edge of the bodywork, which restricted the movement of his hands. Was that also Senna’s problem? ‘I can’t honestly say.’

  Dressed in a dark suit, pale blue shirt and navy and white polka dot tie, Hill was co-operative but guarded in his responses, particularly when Passarini pressed him to say exactly when the steering column had been modified. ‘I don’t know exactly,’ he replied. ‘I think it was before we went to the first test, but I can’t be sure.’ Before the first race of the season, then? ‘I can’t remember the exact date. I seem to remember it being done before we ran the car. In other words, before it went to a racetrack.’ Before the beginning of the championship, then? ‘Yes.’

  When had he known about the modification? ‘Because I don’t know when it was done, I can’t tell you. I was made aware that it had been done.’ Did he remember who had informed him of it? ‘No.’ Would he confirm, then, that in 1994 the FW16B ran with power steering? ‘Yes, it did.’ And had the team’s cars used such a system in 1993? ‘I don’t remember.’

  At this point a degree of astonishment was in order, since one of the characteristics of a Formula One driver is an outstanding memory, a special capacity for storing and evaluating technical information. Hill might have been fired from the Williams team during the previous season amidst considerable bitterness, but any residual acrimony would hardly have erased such significant items of data, or the precise context surrounding them.

  Clearly prepared for such bland responses, Passarini attempted to expose inconsistencies by reading out extracts from a statement the driver had given him during an unwitnessed interview in Imola on 16 June 1994, six weeks after the accident. According to his lawyer, Hill had never been given a copy of the statement and was therefore hearing his own three-year-old words for the first time since he uttered them. It didn’t take a Perry Mason to stand up and shout ‘Objection!’ to that.

  The supposed inconsistencies turned out to be minor and inconclusive, but there were enough of them to suggest that time had persuaded Hill to become more economical with his knowledge of the technical background. He opened up slightly on the question of the power steering, saying that the system could be activated from the cockpit, that he had been told to switch it off after Senna’s accident, and that he had been given permission to switch it on again during the restarted race.

  But there were further gaps in his recollection. ‘In the two previous races in 1994,’ Passarini asked, ‘did you race with or without the power steering?’

  ‘I honestly don’t remember.’

  ‘And at the San Marino Grand Prix, did you have a chance to talk to Senna about the car? As far as you know, did he have any reason to complain about his car?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ Hill replied – although anyone with a reasonable knowledge of contemporary Formula One would have known that by the time the Williams team reached Imola for the third race of the 1994 season, it had been apparent for weeks that the FW16 offered its drivers a surprisingly unpleasant experience. This was the sort of problem that would have occupied every waking hour of Senna and Hill, both drivers of great technical acumen, working collaboratively within the team.

  Hill did talk about visiting the Williams factory a few days after the race. ‘I went to a meeting with a number of the team’s engineers, to try and understand the data that we had at the time, to try and find a possible reason for the accident. I came away from that meeting with the view that, on the evidence I had seen, it was difficult to explain the cause of the accident. But I had satisfied myself that there was no evidence that I could see at the time to support the theory that the steering column had broken. And it was important for me to satisfy myself on that.’

  Hill talked about examining data from the steering and suspension systems during that meeting, and looking at film from the onboard camera. When he was asked about Tamburello, he replied that it wasn’t a corner that the Williams drivers took in sixth gear, that it wouldn’t normally be regarded as difficult for a Formula One driver, and that he hadn’t experienced oversteer there himself, but that there were certainly bumps which changed the balance of the car as it travelled through the bend. ‘It wasn’t what you’d call an easy flat-out curve,’ he observed. ‘You had to concentrate. You had to be smooth with the steering.’

  Passarini then devoted more than an hour to showing the court a version of the videotape from Senna’s car, although lawyers for the various defendants raised objections to the legal status of a piece of footage they had apparently not been officially told about, and the court spent many minutes listening to voices raised in histrionic argument. The magistrate managed to invite Hill to comment on what he was being shown, but the driver was reluctant to commit himself, although he thought he could see that, in the seconds before the impact, Senna had twice made small steering adjustments to correct tail-slides in the corner. This, he explained, had been caused by the phenomenon called oversteer, which in this case could have resulted from low tyre pressures created by a drop in temperature when the cars ran slowly behind the safety car for five laps after the start-line accident. Low tyre pressures, Hill said, would reduce the car’s ground clearance. His own FW16 had bottomed several times during the period after the safety car had left the track, releasing the field to resume at racing speed. But he could see nothing inconsistent about the images from Senna’s car, although he mentioned that the version of the footage he had seen a few days after the accident had been of a better technical quality – an interesting remark in the light of Passarini’s pre-hearing complaint about someone tampering with the tape.

  Other lawyers questioned him. One of them, Oreste Dominioni, representing Williams and Head, asked him if he had received any communication from Patrick Head before the restart. ‘I don’t remember,’ Hill replied. Dominioni read him a passage from his statement to Passarini: ‘Before the second start, on my radio, Mr Head assured me that after an examination performed on Senna’s car there was no evidence to suggest that I would suffer the same problems on my car.’ Do you, Dominioni asked, confirm that statement? ‘Yes,’ Hill replied.

  Dominioni also directed him back to the question of turning off the power steering for the restart. ‘I remember asking if I could turn it back on during the race,’ Hill responded, ‘because the steering was very heavy without it. The engineers considered it and came back to me later on the radio and said it would be safe to turn it back on. I turned it on, but by that time I’d become used to driving without it, so I turned it back off again.’

  You said, Dominioni continued, that because the steering wheel became heavy, you asked for authority to turn it on. ‘My arms were tired.’ Does this mean that without the power steering there is a higher load on the steering wheel? ‘It was heavier than it would normally be because we had adapted the steering to be quicker, which makes it heavier, thinking that we would be using power steering.’

  And when he met the Williams engineers a few days after the accident, the lawyer said, had there been any suppositions advanced as a result? ‘No. The only suppositions I remember a
re my own. When I left the factory, no conclusion had been presented to me by any of the engineers.’ No discussion about finding the cause of the accident? ‘I had looked at the pictures from the camera, and to me there was another kind of explanation, so it was really just a discussion about that impression.’

  ‘Problems with the steering column,’ Dominioni said, with a careful measure of asperity, ‘problems with the power steering, problems with the suspension, problems with the aerodynamics, problems due to the set-up of the car, problems due to the car bottoming on the track … do you remember that during the meeting all these problems were discussed?’

  ‘Yes. They were all possibilities.’

  ‘And what was your feeling?’

  ‘My feeling was that the car looked to me to be oversteering. There were two distinct times that it oversteered in the corner. And he did exactly what you’d expect him to do to correct it.’

  Adrian Newey’s lawyer, Luigi Stortoni, asked if these movements were normal or abnormal. ‘The images are difficult to interpret,’ Hill said. ‘You have to remember that the camera moves, too, with the movement of the car.’

  Roberto Causo, the FIA’s lawyer, appearing on behalf of Bruynseraede, continued on the same line. Was the oversteering normal at that part of the circuit? ‘No, not normal.’ So why did Senna have to make two corrections? ‘My own idea is that the car oversteers when it crosses the place on the circuit where there are some bumps.’

  Did Hill think that low tyre pressures could be one of the potential causes of oversteering? ‘When we race the cars, the temperature and pressure of the tyres is critical to the way the car handles. It affects the handling, and it affects the ride height.’ So it could be the cause? ‘Certainly a possibility.’

  Passarini, too, returned to the question of oversteer, pointing out that Hill had not spoken of it during their meeting in Bologna, when the driver gave him the unwitnessed statement. ‘I saw these pictures a week after the accident, and that was my impression. Then I came to see you in Bologna and I hadn’t changed my impression. Maybe I just never mentioned the word oversteer.’

  So how had his own car been behaving? ‘When the safety car left the track, what I was expecting was that the car would touch the ground. It did, a little bit, in a few places, but not severely. I was driving cautiously because I knew the tyres would be cold and the pressures low.’

  Passarini seemed to have run out of questions. It was one o’clock. Hill had been giving evidence all morning, give or take a couple of brief withdrawals for consultation. The judge thanked him and told him he could go. The lawyers rose, gathered their assistants, and stepped out into the streets, ready for lunch.

  Through the fog of repetitive questioning and incompetent translation, you could see the angles that Passarini and the defendants’ lawyers were trying to expose. But Hill remained resolute in his refusal to give an inch on any theory other than the one that Senna had crashed because low tyre pressures had caused the car to bottom on the ripples at Tamburello, throwing it off balance and into an attitude of oversteer. The only chink of fresh light emerged in his mention that the team had taken advantage of the benefits of their power-steering system by raising the gearing of the steering to make it quicker and more instantly responsive to small movements, which also made it heavier when the system was switched off. But no one asked Hill what the driver might have experienced in the event of a sudden system failure in the middle of a high-speed curve. Nor was he questioned about his reported advice to Senna, before the race, to stay away from the inside of Tamburello. (‘Damon said he’d never drive there,’ a team member told me long after the accident. ‘If you used that bit of the track, it would save you perhaps 20 feet. Maybe Ayrton decided that he needed it.’)

  Others had already given their testimony: Pierluigi Martini, Michele Alboreto, Tommaso Carletti and Mauro Forghieri, who had helped Passarini and his technical advisor, Enrico Lorenzini, the head of the faculty of engineering at Bologna University, compile the report; Charlie Whiting, the head of the scrutineers; Eddie Baker and Alan Woolard of Ecclestone’s Foca television team. After Hill’s day in the witness box, Frank Williams also made the journey to the Casa Dopolavoro. But, as a quasi-criminal inquiry, the story was running out of steam. Passarini stuck to his conclusion, that the Williams technicians were responsible for poor design and faulty manufacture of the steering column, and that their failure represented a breach of the duty of care assumed by any manufacturer of racing cars towards the people who drive their vehicles. In the first matter, he was unable to supply definitive proof – because there could never be any such thing. In the second, he appeared to be trespassing into an area not susceptible to regulation by a legal code.

  And so on 16 December 1997, three and a half years after the accident, and ten months after the commencement of the hearings, Antonio Costanzo announced that no action would be taken against any of the defendants. He quoted Article 530 of the Italian penal code, which deals with acquittals on various grounds: lack of guilt, lack of a crime, lack of proof, or a plea of justification. Williams, Head and Newey, Costanzo’s deposition said, were acquitted ‘per non aver commesso il fatto’, because they had not committed the deed of which they were accused; the other three – Bendinelli, Poggi and Bruynseraede – ‘perche il fatto non sussiste’, because in their case no deed existed.

  A statement issued on behalf of Williams and Head described it as ‘the only possible outcome’. Passarini, however, swiftly expressed his disappointment, reasserting his belief that Head and Newey, as the team’s technical chiefs, should be called to account. ‘In a few seconds,’ the correspondent of the Gazzetta dello Sport wrote, ‘the judge had destroyed all the magistrate’s work, disavowing two-and-a-half years of judicial inquiry, with expert opinion throughout Italy, involving the flower of professorship at the highest academic levels.’ The acquittal of all six defendants, he continued, was ‘like losing 6–0 at tennis or football’. According to Italian law, the magistrate had up to fifteen months in which to register an appeal against the judge’s ruling.

  For Leonardo Senna, nothing had changed. ‘The real culprit was the wall, which was too close to the corner and didn’t offer adequate protection.’ Unsurprisingly, however, the world of grand prix racing expressed relief. ‘A good day for Formula One,’ Eddie Jordan said. Flavio Briatore, the manager of the team whose car Senna had been trying to outrun, added: ‘It seems to me to be the logical outcome of an event which has gone on too long and created so much argument. Senna died in a racing accident.’ Ken Tyrrell, the doyen of the paddock, commented: ‘It was impossible to believe that the most successful team in Formula One, and probably the most skilful, could have made such a huge mistake.’ Damon Hill had a further reaction: ‘I always believed that Williams built a car that was safe as well as fast. If I hadn’t felt that way, I wouldn’t have got back into the car that afternoon.’

  But the certainties of Tyrrell and Hill appeared to be undermined when, exactly six months later, Costanzo published the conclusion that lay behind his decision. The balance of probability, the judge declared in the course of his 381-page document, pointed to the accident having been caused by a fracture of the rewelded steering column. For that reason, he said, the charges against Bendinelli, Poggi and Bruynseraede had been dismissed. Similarly, Frank Williams had been involved only in the commercial management of his team, and had no responsibility for the technical. Which left Head and Newey, against whom no action would be taken.

  ‘The details of the disputed event do not allow us to state as a fact that the death of the driver was the result of a culpable infringement of a duty to prevent such events on the part of Head and Newey. The evidence as presented is not sufficient to sustain the charge or to assign to one or other of the accused the role of manufacturer or designer of the steering column. And even if one of them had taken the decision to modify it, the general circumstances would not support the accusation, and it would be necessary to show that the dec
ision had contravened the rules of diligence. Such a demonstration was lacking, and in conclusion neither was it proved that the accused had conceived and designed the steering column.’

  It was true, the judge continued, that the modification of the steering wheel was not a routine piece of work, but this did not imply that it would have been carried out by Head and Newey themselves. ‘A failure to observe proper caution would have been the decision to assign the work to an unqualified technician. But the modification was carried out by a specialist. The stress fracture is not enough to raise the question of a violation of the obligation to control the work of others.’

  *

  Should the inquiry and the hearing, a protracted and distressing and expensive affair, have taken place at all? Inevitably, some voices, most of them British, were raised against the Italian legal system from the start. There were those who felt that Senna’s death was caused by a pure racing accident, of the sort that had been happening since motor sport began, and that if you were going to subject each incident to legal scrutiny then you might as well abolish the whole sport. Others pointed to the lack of comparable fuss about the death the previous day of the far less celebrated Roland Ratzenberger; after some consideration, Passarini had concluded that there was no guilt to be detected in the circumstances of the accident that killed the Simtek driver. It didn’t even take a cynic to suggest that had Ratzenberger died not on Saturday but on Sunday, not in his crash but in Senna’s, and had the Brazilian not been involved, there would have been much less in the way of legal figures giving press conferences over the subsequent years.

 

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