But he didn’t. Instead, he nipped past Villeneuve on the last lap, gave him no chance to come back, and stole the race.
Villeneuve was incandescent. His sense of affronted propriety, combined with his anxieties about his future in the sport, sent him clean over the edge: ‘I haven’t said a word to him [Pironi] and I’m not going to again – ever! I have declared war. I’ll do my own thing in the future. It’s war. Absolutely war.’ The Ferrari team operatives made it worse by hemming and hawing. Pironi had made himself popular with the Scuderia, and his people were adamant that SLOW merely meant ‘slow’ rather than ‘don’t take the lead’.
Who had misunderstood the sign? Pironi or Villeneuve? After a while, Ferrari himself joined in, giving it as his opinion that Pironi had misinterpreted the pit signals and that he well understood Villeneuve’s disappointment and agreed with him. But this was no use to Villeneuve. He was not in the most robust psychological state to begin with, and now, instead of merely vowing to get even (think of what Prost, Senna, Lauda, Schumacher, would have done in the same situation), he fixated on the loathed Pironi for two weeks, all the way up to the Belgian Grand Prix, unable to see past his monstrous, duplicitous form. He became obsessed.
And the rest is history: 8 May, Zolder, the Belgian GP, the last minutes of qualifying: Pironi had set fastest time. The session was coming to an end. Villeneuve had one fleeting chance to beat his despised team-mate for pole position. His tyres were shot; his steering was playing up. He was not thinking in the least rationally. The act of driving fast, the thing that gave him more pleasure than anything else, had become corrupted into an act of vengeance. He wanted to nail Pironi. He wanted to do him in. He flogged himself round the two-and-a-half-mile track, came up behind the hapless Jochen Mass, coasting in after his final lap, committed himself to the wrong overtaking manoeuvre. His Ferrari made contact with Mass’s right rear tyre. It then launched itself into the air, before completely destroying itself, hurling Villeneuve clean out of the cockpit and throwing him into a catch fence. His neck was broken. He died later that day.
Ferrari withdrew from the race and went home to mourn.
It took a long time for them to win the Drivers’ Championship again. They picked up a number of Constructors’ titles; but there was a big gap between Scheckter and Schumacher. And, in August 1988, Enzo Ferrari died, aged ninety. There was an air of finality which hung about the team, all through this time. As Alain Prost would later remark, during his brief spell at the Scuderia, ‘Crisis is the normal state at Ferrari. When you win, there is a crisis of optimism.’
But the crisis of optimism took a long time to arrive. And many people, inside and outside the team, never quite got over the death of Villeneuve: the last hero; the standard-bearer for an age which had produced Ferrari himself.
21
THE BOREDOM, PARANOIA AND OUTRIGHT MADNESS THAT IS MCLAREN, PROST AND SENNA
It was perhaps unwise of Ron Dennis, team principal at McLaren since 1981, to come out (as he did, once) with the nerveless observation, ‘The problem with grey is that people immediately see it as a colour that goes with blandness. But I see it as a colour that works very well in mixtures and hues and responds to highlights. I like the flexibility of grey and I didn’t choose it by accident. I think it’s fresh, clean and has a tranquil effect, and it’s also got dignity and class.’ He was talking about the decor of his office at the McLaren HQ in Woking (the town itself a byword for dullness) but he could equally have been summing up the public image of the McLaren team during the 1980s and early 1990s: efficient, dull, ubiquitous, inescapable, really quite grey.
Once, long ago, there was a time when Ron Dennis wasn’t Mr McLaren. He had started at Coopers, with the tiresome Jochen Rindt, moved on to Brabham, then decided to make his own cars. And at the start of the 1980s, he was running a successful Formula Two outfit called Project Four Racing. McLaren, meanwhile, were still under Teddy ‘The Wiener’ Mayer, but were stuck in a rut. Their last Drivers’ Championship had been in 1976, with James Hunt; since when they had lost vitality and sense of purpose with the feeble M26 and M29 F1 cars, driven by slightly-less-than-Championship drivers John Watson and Andrea de Cesaris.
A connection was made. Ron Dennis was not only incredibly highly motivated and well organised, he also had sponsorship from the Marlboro cigarette people, and the services of top-of-the-line engineer John Barnard, with his clever carbon-fibre chassis designs. A kind of reverse takeover was duly fashioned, with Dennis becoming effective head of McLaren and establishing the foundations of the outfit we know and revere today. To an already strong financial/organisational/engineering mix, the team added a new engine in the form of the powerful and efficient TAG/Porsche turbo, and then a couple of absolutely first-rank drivers: Niki Lauda and Alain Prost. Lauda was making a comeback in ’82 in order to scrape together some cash for his business enterprises; and Prost joined in ’84 fervidly eager (after Renault) to reassert himself as a Championship contender.
And as a convocation of sheer brainpower and cunning, it was irresistible. In 1984, they collectively destroyed the opposition, taking the Constructors’ title with twelve wins out of a possible sixteen. They also took the Drivers’ title, with Lauda first and Prost second, a mere half a point behind his team-mate, but both of them with more than twice as many points as Elio de Angelis (Lotus) in third place.
Thus McLaren was established as the epitome of the modern British constructor, the apotheosis of the new garagiste, with a team of hundreds working at the gleaming shed of the Woking HQ, hundreds more at the TAG/Porsche engine works in Stuttgart, all in conditions as spotless and neurotically clinical as a NASA laboratory, all presided over by Ron Dennis: the team boss as omniscient, grey-loving stoneface. Thirty-odd years before, it was BRM, in a freezing shed round the back of someone’s house, an air of austerity, desperation and unfeasible dreams, led by a romantic, culminating in an abject lack of success. Now it was McLaren. How far we had come in that time.
All of which was fine, so far as Alain Prost was concerned. He was doing everything just right. He won more Grands Prix than Lauda (to advertise his genius) but came runner-up (to show respect to the more celebrated driver). He also loved McLaren, whose crisp shirts, seriousness, lack of hysteria and Stakhanovite work ethic, suited him like a well-made set of overalls. So happy was he, that the next year, he took a highly efficient world title (his first), followed by another one in 1986.
Admittedly, the ’86 title was achieved by dint of sneaking in between Nelson Piquet and Nigel Mansell, who had, unbelievably, got themselves caught up in a cat fight at Williams, but Prost didn’t care. ‘I’m very sorry for Nigel,’ he said, coyly. ‘He deserved to be champion this year.’ Prost was in the Land of the Blessed. He described the McLaren-TAG team as being ‘Like my family, with a wonderful, friendly atmosphere.’ He saw things completely eye-to-eye with John Barnard – and as for Ron Dennis, there was no praise high enough: ‘Ron Dennis is a leader of men, a catalyst of energies, he is completely respected.’ It was a world of sense and order. ‘When I was at McLaren,’ he sighed, later in his career, ‘every remark was taken into account from Ron Dennis down to the lowest mechanic.’ And in this manner, for three years in a row, McLaren won the Drivers’ Championship.
They took a break in 1987 to allow Nelson Piquet and Williams-Honda to take the Drivers’ and Constructors’ titles (Nigel Mansell losing out again), before coming back in 1988 with the McLaren-Honda MP4/4, and the most eye-boggling display of competence ever seen in Formula One: fifteen wins out of sixteen races, with only Gerhard Berger’s operatically sentimental win for Ferrari at Monza, just a month after Enzo Ferrari’s death, breaking the spell. Ten of McLaren’s wins were one-twos, at that – as often as not, a minute ahead of whoever had the unenviable job of coming in third. It was wonderful and terrible, the kind of ruthlessness that compels an awed respect at the same time as it threatens to send the observer into a light coma of boredom. It was Mercedes, 1955, all over
again, but on a numerically far greater scale.
What stopped it from being completely tedious was the fact that it was now Ayrton Senna who just managed to pick up the Championship (as opposed to Niki Lauda), with ninety points to Prost’s eighty-seven – the title chase thrillingly going all the way to Suzuka, the penultimate Grand Prix. To be pedantic, Prost ended the season with 105 points to Senna’s ninety-four, but at the time only the best eleven results counted towards the Championship. Prost’s steady accretion of points, which had worked well enough in ’85 and ’86, tripped him up this time. Senna won at Suzuka, and his eight outright wins to Prost’s seven did the trick. Clearly, something needed to be done. The Professor went away to ponder his arithmetic.
He also went away to ponder the problem of Senna.
An awful lot has been written and said about Senna, over the years. The easy part is this: born in 1960 (which made him five years Prost’s junior), to a wealthy São Paulo family, he rapidly developed an obsession with motorised transport, which evolved into an obsession with kart racing, which developed into a massively unfrivolous obsession with winning on the track, whatever the means of transport. As a childhood friend noted, Senna was ‘very serious as a boy, I think too much serious. He seemed like a child who was thirty years old.’ He duly moved to Europe and into the world of Formula Three, where he made a similar impression on his fellow competitors. According to one (the excellently named Calvin Fish): ‘I’m not really sure he was enjoying himself,’ and, ‘People used to say “He’s not really a happy kind of guy”.’
Senna was, in fact, a bit different from the rest of the crowd, whichever continent he was on. He was introverted, not massively confident of his command of English, somewhat spartan in his personal habits (no booze, no fags, not a tremendous amount of womanising) and elementally committed to becoming F1 World Champion – really astoundingly so, even when compared with a conventionally single-minded, hyper-competitive F1 driver.
A drive at Toleman duly came his way: complete with an astonishing performance in a June downpour at the ’84 Monaco GP. On this occasion, Senna exploited the great levelling effects of rain and Monaco to such effect that, even in the fairly feeble Toleman TG184, he saw off everyone on the track, apart from none other than Alain Prost, who was leading in his McLaren. More – Senna was actually catching him, and could very well have won the race, had it not been for Clerk of the Course Jacky Ickx stopping the race at the end of the thirty-second lap, citing the weather as reason enough to finish it there and then.
A degree of uproar followed, parties noting that Ickx had failed to consult with the stewards before halting the race; that he also worked for Porsche, who were supplying McLaren’s engines at the time; that he was a Francophone, like Prost; and that the rain appeared to be easing off, anyway. Whatever the truth, he was suspended from race control duties, while an outraged Senna, having seen a guaranteed win snatched from his fingers, never forgave any of the chief protagonists. Toleman team leader Peter Gethin then did his best to interpret this new star to the rest of the world by claiming that ‘Basically I think he’s a nicer bloke than he appears to be,’ but Senna had already instilled among his fellow F1 drivers the nervous awareness that he was not quite as other men.
Essentially, Senna took car control to a new level; and he could do it consistently, over the length of an entire race. He was the opposite of smooth – constantly on and off the throttle, stabbing at the brakes into corners, unsettling the car as if it were a go-kart, working it all the time, pinching out fractions of seconds. To take one observation from thousands: John Watson – no mean driver, five Grand Prix wins to his credit – said that to watch Senna in full flight ‘was just mesmerising. Here was a man who is on a different level from anyone. Nobody was doing what Ayrton was doing in a car.’ And when he stopped driving, his powers of concentration were such that he could analyse what he had just done in astonishing detail. When he moved to Lotus in the mid-1990s, Senna got Nigel Stepney as his mechanic. Stepney reckoned that ‘on a debrief he could spend five or ten minutes telling you about one lap, every bump, every entry, every exit, every line he’d taken through the corners.’ So boggling were his powers of recall that he even ‘wore down’ the Lotus designer, Gérard Ducarouge, with the sheer level of information at his command.
He served his apprenticeship: Toleman, Lotus, before arriving at last at McLaren, which is where the tensions really set in.
* * *
In calmer moments, even Prost would say of the Brazilian genius, ‘The way he drives is very good and I must say he is fantastic, unbelievably quick, but for me he is driving too hard.’ The same was said, not so long before, of Villeneuve; but Villeneuve’s fair play on the track and saintly amiability off meant that people forgave him. Not so with Senna, who, at the age of twenty-eight, was just entering his most potent driving years, which were also the years when his ruthless, mystical arrogance was at its most baffling and infuriating. He managed to be both hot-tempered and inscrutable, and, indeed, the only person who seemed able to get under Senna’s skin was – who else? – Nelson Piquet.
The rest of the time, however, he spent perfecting his already-extraordinary driving talents. It was in a qualifying session at Monaco, 1988, when Senna had his now-famous mystical encounter with pure speed: ‘Suddenly I was nearly two seconds faster than anybody else, including my teammate [Prost] with the same car. And I suddenly realised I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was kind of driving it by instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel.’ Other drivers knew about this – the state of perception-altering self-hypnosis, shifting one’s relationship with the car, speed, the track, into a new plane of consciousness – and were not always happy with it. Jackie Stewart rightly mistrusted it, arguing that it indicated the turning-point at which the car started driving you, rather than the other way round. But Senna somehow appropriated the moment of transformation, adding it to the mystique which was growing up around him.
All of which left Prost in the unhelpful position of being the nail-chewing, fussy, brooding, older driver, with no satisfactory way of dealing with Senna’s Olympian aura of entitlement. At first, he tried to act the grown-up, comparing the newly arrived Senna with a ‘pampered child’, whose ‘natural ability had always made him the focal point and centre of attraction in any team he had driven for’. Pretty soon, though, Senna was chewing up 1988’s calendar of races (four wins in a row, from the British GP to the Belgian); and by the time they got to the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka, Senna had become a ‘spoiled brat’, who, according to Prost, was not only detested by him, but by most of the rest of the McLaren team as well. Apparently, there was ‘a straw poll at Woking to establish who they wanted, deep down, to win the title, and I had come out clearly ahead’. Pointless, of course. Senna put in an imposing drive in the wet and the dry at Suzuka, took pole and fastest lap, beat Prost in the race and then came in second, behind him at the final Grand Prix in Australia, to take the Championship.
Were McLaren-Honda upset by the tensions between these two great drivers? No, they were as pleased as anything. The trophy cabinet was bursting, the sponsors were happy, the opposition was petrified. And Ron Dennis and co. were completely ecstatic when the positions were reversed in 1989, with Prost winning the title and Senna coming in as runner-up. What wasn’t to like?
Everything, if you were Prost. By ’89, the ‘family’ he had grown so fond of at McLaren had become ‘awful. Senna didn’t speak, didn’t smile. The difference between us was that I worked for McLaren, while Senna worked for Senna.’ Well, wasn’t that to some extent true of everyone? Nobody in Formula One wasn’t striving for their own glory, their own greater reputation. Wasn’t Prost being just a little oversensitive?
No, the problem was now one of betrayal – just as it had been with Villeneuve and Pironi, at Ferrari, seven years before. In the case of Senna and Prost, the great betrayal came at the San Marino Grand Prix, Imola, April 1989;
and it was Senna who broke his agreement with Prost that neither driver would try to overtake whoever managed to lead into the first corner. As it happened, Prost made the better start and moved ahead right away, only to find Senna diving past him at the Tosa hairpin (all this after a race restart, incidentally, Gerhard Berger having very nearly come to grief in a fireball, half an hour earlier) then sitting imperturbably at the front for the rest of the race, while an incensed Prost wandered home in second place, forty seconds behind.
‘It all changed at Imola,’ Prost raged. ‘We had an agreement and he broke it. What he did was dishonest and dishonourable. I knew then that I could never trust him again. I could have hit him.’ This was lèse-majesté, after all. Prost was a two-time Champion, five years older than Senna, an international sporting figure, and if Senna thought that after Imola there could be any relationship between them other than on a purely technical level, he was barking up the wrong tree: ‘I no longer wish to have any business with him. I appreciate honesty, and he is not honest.’ Senna’s riposte? ‘Get fucked.’
And here’s an odd thing: when trying to choose one of those definitive drives by which to remember Senna, well, you could pick his ’85 win at Spa (pouring rain) or his 1993 victory at Donington (pouring rain, then less rain, then more rain), or his Spanish GP win in ’86 (unbelievably close finish, Villeneuve-style, but with Mansell second), and let it stand for the whole of his achievement.
Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One Page 17