Many Italians saw it differently, and were keen to defend the workings of their system of judicial investigation. ‘In Italy,’ a friend of mine said, ‘as soon as there is an accidental death, the dead person is protected by law. Italian law doesn’t accept that just because someone is killed doing something he enjoys, that’s the end of the matter. After all, your mother may take a plane to go on holiday. You both know that planes sometimes crash. But if it did, and your mother was killed, wouldn’t you want to know if the plane had been screwed together properly?’
When Max Mosley made critical remarks about the Italian legal system, suggesting that an unfavourable outcome to the proceedings might lead Formula One to withdraw from its races on Italian soil, a particularly spirited response came from Pino Allievi, the distinguished Formula One correspondent of the Gazzetta dello Sport. ‘The truth is that in Italy there has always been motor racing, and not a single person has been jailed as a consequence of accidents, fatal or otherwise,’ he wrote. ‘But this does not mean that Italian magistrates should stop investigating the causes of tragedies. Far from it. Here in Italy every citizen has the right to protection, whether his name is Senna, Williams or Rossi. Mr Mosley would do well to stick to his own business. For the moment, Italy doesn’t need “advice” which is so scandalously partisan. If the English, who have always considered us to be a banana republic, will no longer come to race at Imola or Monza, so be it. Formula One will suffer much more from that decision than our civilized society.’
For the Williams team, on the other hand, the inquiry meant four years of operating with a shadow over their lives. On a banal level, it meant dealing with regular attempts to circulate rumours. Some of them indeed were regularly recirculated, such as the one about Senna having formed a habit of driving the first lap of each race without drawing breath, in order to change the balance of oxygen in his brain – something which could, according to those who propagated the story, have affected his judgement. Other rumours continued to concern the events after his death, mostly to do with who told what to whom, as in the well-sourced story that those closest to Senna were told that he was going to be all right, even after the race had been restarted.
Frank Williams and his associates and employees dealt with that by maintaining a blanket refusal to comment on anything to do with Senna or the accident – a proscription that Patrick Head, the most fascinatingly loquacious of men, infringed only once or twice, without saying anything really new. No matter how many assurances the team might be given that no one had ever been jailed in Italy as the result of a motor-racing accident, its members could be forgiven for fearing that there was a first time for everything. Mounting a defence of Williams and Head cost the team £1.5 million in legal fees.
Meanwhile Patrick Head married Betise Assumpcão, Senna’s former public relations woman. Adrian Newey left the team to join McLaren for a salary believed to be in the region of £2 million a year; after a year of enforced idleness in which he served out his Williams contract, he took Ron Dennis’s cars to the world drivers’ and constructors’ titles in his first season. And at the end of the 1998 season, the first for ten years in which his team had not won a single grand prix, Frank Williams was knighted.
As for Ayrton Senna, his memory was honoured in various ways during the years after his death. At Interlagos in 1995, the drivers paraded round the circuit on a flatbed truck, each waving a bandeira, as he used to do on his victory lap. In Suzuka, his presence seemed to outweigh that of the living drivers in the minds of the young Japanese fans. At Monaco, the harbour was used for the party to celebrate the launch of a rakish new Abate speedboat, with the familiar double-S on its hull. As with the T-shirts, the commemorative replica helmets, the fountain pens, the books and videos, a proportion of the profit was dedicated to the Senna Foundation, which continued with its work on behalf of Brazil’s underprivileged children.
At Imola, a fine bronze statue of Senna in pensive mode was unveiled on the inside of the track at Tamburello, opposite the place at which he crashed. The precise point of his impact continued to be marked, during the week of the San Marino Grand Prix, by bunches of flowers, handwritten dedications and Brazilian flags fluttering on the wire fence. But it had grown harder to identify the exact location since the whole of Tamburello was redrawn, removing the old flat-out left-handed curve and replacing it with a big left-right chicane surrounded by acres of run-off space, incorporating vast gravel traps. The old profile of Tamburello was completely erased.
No more could you stand in the pits during practice and listen to a lone car crossing the start-line, hearing its howl hang in the air as it headed out of sight and into the woods at full throttle, imagining the sight in front of the driver as he held the car around the curve, following the concrete wall which bounded the course of the slow leaf-green waters of the Santerno. If you hadn’t been there before, you couldn’t imagine how such a thing might have happened.
Acknowledgements
I have cause to be grateful for the wisdom of many authors and journalists in the field of motor sport; particular debts are owed to the late Denis Jenkinson, the late Henry N. Manney III and Nigel Roebuck. In the press rooms of the modern grands prix, it is always a pleasure to hear the latest news from such erudite and generous spirits as David Tremayne, Maurice Hamilton, Alan Henry, Derick Allsop, Oliver Holt and Tim Collings. Back at the office, conversations with my friend Stephen Wood helped clarify the arguments, as well as diverting us both from the duties of the day.
Alert readers will have noticed that this is by no means the only book on the subject of Ayrton Senna. Others include Ayrton Senna: The Hard Edge of Genius by Christopher Hilton (Patrick Stephens, 1990; Corgi, 1991), and the same author’s posthumous Ayrton Senna (Patrick Stephens, 1994); Remembering Ayrton Senna by Alan Henry (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994); Ayrton Senna: A Personal Tribute by the photographer Keith Sutton (Osprey, 1994); Ayrton Senna do Brasil by Francisco Santos (Edipromo, São Paulo, 1994); Goodbye Champion, Farewell Friend by Karin Sturm (MRP, 1994); Ayrton Senna: A Tribute by Ivan Rendall (Pavilion, 1994); My Life With Ayrton by Adriane Galisteu (APA, 1994); and Ayrton Senna: Prince of Formula One by Ken Ryan (APA, 1994).
The passage in which Senna describes his mystical experience at Monaco in 1988 comes from Grand Prix People by Gerald Donaldson (MRP, 1990). Steve Lacy’s description of the parallel experience of the musician can be found in Improvising: Its Nature and Practice in Music by Derek Bailey (The British Library, 1992). Enzo Ferrari’s views on Fangio are from Le mie gioie terribili (Licinio Capelli, Bologna, 1963) and Gino Rancati’s Ferrari, lui (Sonzogno, Turin, 1977). Fangio’s views on Ferrari are from Ma vie à 300 à l’heure (Plon, Paris, 1961) and Fangio: My Racing Life (Patrick Stephens, 1990). Phil Hill’s memory of passing a team mate’s accident is from The Cruel Sport by Robert Daley (Studio Vista, 1963).
Andrew Longmore’s reconstruction of Senna’s last twenty-four hours in The Times was informative, as were the relevant passages from Denis Jenkinson’s The Racing Driver (Batsford, 1958) and A Story of Formula 1 (Grenville, 1960), The Great Racing Drivers, edited by David Hodges (Temple Press, 1966), David Tremayne’s Racers Apart (MRP, 1991), Inside Formula 1, a collection of Nigel Roebuck’s columns (Patrick Stephens, 1989), Timothy Collings’s Schumacher (Bloomsbury, 1994), and Damon Hill’s Grand Prix Year (Macmillan, 1994). Also in The Times, Simon Barnes has written perceptively about Senna’s character.
Newspapers and periodicals consulted include Autosport, Motor Sport and Motoring News (UK), L’Equipe (France), La Gazzetta dello Sport, Auto + Sport and Autosprint (Italy), and A Gazeta Esportiva, O Estado de São Paulo and Istoé (Brazil). Special thanks go to Pino Allievi and Giancarlo Galavotti of the Gazzetta and Paolo Ciccarone of Auto + Sport.
I am particularly indebted to Ian Jack, editor of the Independent on Sunday, where some of these passages took their initial form as real-time journalism; to Simon O’Hagan, my first sports editor at the paper; to Alan Rusbridger, editor of the
Guardian, and to his sports editor, Mike Averis; and to Simon Kelner, who put me on the flight to São Paulo, where Ana Cecília Americano taught me the meaning of saudade.
The Death of Ayrton Senna Page 19