Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One

by Charles Jennings

  THE MODERN AGE 1994–2009

  24

  THE END OF THE AFFAIR: SENNA’S DEATH

  Time, the great leveller: by 1994, Ayrton Senna was looking at early middle age. Hard to think of Senna as anything other than sleek, self-contained and somehow ageless. But he was nearly thirty-four years old, and, like Jim Clark or Gilles Villeneuve – drivers whose talents sometimes appeared to place them outside the usual patterns of rise and decline – he was beginning to feel that his invincibility might not last for ever. Just as Clark had to watch the remorseless encroachment of young Jackie Stewart on his territory, and Villeneuve had to deal with the increasing presence of Alain Prost, so Senna now had Michael Schumacher (who had won his first GP at Spa, ’92, in torrential rain – a classic way to advertise one’s talent to the world) to remind him that nothing could be taken for granted.

  Moreover, Prost, the Old Enemy, had taken his fourth title in 1993, cashing in delightedly on the opportunity thrown him by Williams, before retiring. Which meant that he, Senna, had one Championship fewer than the Frenchman.

  Of course, Williams was there, waiting for him, the object of so much hope, so many ambitions. ‘I feel comfortable saying this is a dream come true,’ Senna declared at the time he joined the team. ‘I’ve been waiting impatiently for this. I need it for motivation.’ Frank Williams clearly didn’t need to justify his wooing of one of the greatest drivers in Formula One history, merely noting that ‘Quite apart from Ayrton’s driving ability, I was very impressed with him as a businessman; his attention to detail is meticulous.’

  Senna’s godlike status with the fans had, meanwhile, been burnished by his relationship with God. Far from making him seem a bit weird, this had turned out to be another Senna USP. The aura of spirituality, of otherworldliness that hung around him somehow diverted attention from his rampant, and highly secular, egomania and made him even more special to the rank and file. ‘I feel that I possess a kind of strength,’ he had claimed, some years earlier, ‘that brings me nearer to God. It is difficult to explain, but it is what I feel.’

  This professed closeness to the Deity, with all its attendant seriousness of purpose, completely captivated Professor Sid Watkins, when he took Senna on a pilgrimage to the Loretto School, where Jim Clark had been a schoolboy. Senna gave a talk to the enraptured students, said Grace before dinner and debated theology with the Bishop of Truro, who also happened to be there. The following day, according to Watkins, the Bishop ‘began his sermon with the confession that he had been spiritually and verbally outclassed by Ayrton Senna.’ This was remarkable stuff, especially when you consider the venality and shallowness of your average bubble-headed footballer/athlete/tennis star/Grand Prix driver, and helps to account for the monumentality of Senna’s legend, from the seething favelas of Rio, to the streets of Japan – where Senna was regarded with the greatest reverence. Indeed, his fondness for gnomic utterances – ‘Wealthy men can’t live in an island that is encircled by poverty. We all breathe the same air. We must give a chance to everyone, at least a basic chance,’ or, ‘Being second is to be the first of the ones who lose’ – which, while they would have sounded ridiculous coming out of the mouth of, say, Alan Jones, merely confirmed Senna’s place as the Thomas Aquinas of the racetrack. His sincerity was unforced; and his faith was real.

  But so was the pressure. Where, for instance, was Senna’s Christian charity when he punched Eddie Irvine after the Japanese Grand Prix, Suzuka, 1993? Not that it turned him into an apostate, but there was definitely something unChristian in Senna’s reaction to being unlapped by Irvine (who finished sixth) while leading the race. He screamed at Irvine: ‘You’re not a racing driver! You’re a fucking idiot!’ and followed this up with a resounding slap. Couldn’t he have suffered Irvine as he would have suffered the little children? Or were things starting to get to him?

  After all, even though Senna had always lived with pressure – generating much of it himself, much of the time – it was now coming too fast, too densely, not at his behest. 1993 was not an easy year. Prost claimed his fourth title at the Portuguese GP and announced his retirement, so there was nothing to be done about that. But Senna’s future number two, Damon Hill, of all people, was threatening to take second place in the Drivers’ Championship – as, indeed, was this horrible young German, Michael Schumacher, nearly ten years Senna’s junior. When Senna won the last race of the season – at Adelaide, in November – he dragged Prost, who had come second, up onto the top step of the podium and tearfully embraced him. He was overwhelmed, helplessly acknowledging that it was the end of an age, and that, while Prost was getting out with his dignity intact, Senna still had work to do, and not an awful lot of time in which to do it.

  In theory, the move to Williams should have solved everything. In practice, it didn’t. The fabulous FW15C of 1993 was so fabulous that, for the 1994 season, half of its gadgets were banned by the FIA, in an effort to normalise things on the grid. Traction control and active suspension were out, and, partly in consequence, the 1994 FW16 turned out to be an altogether dodgier car to drive. What then made things worse was the fact that rising star Schumacher’s Benetton B194 suited him down to the ground and allowed him to walk the first two races of the season, in Brazil and Japan.

  Still, all was not lost. Senna was still able to take two pole positions (albeit with some straining), the car was gradually improving, and there was a positive vibe in the Williams team, with Damon Hill dependable in the number two seat, and a powerful bond between Senna and Frank Williams himself. As Iain Cunningham observed, ‘It was a very genuine friendship, and there is no doubt that Ayrton looked up to Frank.’ It was with some optimism, therefore, that the team went to Imola, at the end of April, for the San Marino GP. Senna had simply blanked the first two failed races, arguing that he was now contesting a fourteen-, rather than a sixteen-race season. But, even with time running out and the season compromised, he felt that things might improve.

  The fact that Senna’s death, on 1 May 1994, can still generate reactions of upset and bewilderment is an index of how traumatic it was at the time. By the early 1990s, the Formula One community had got used to the idea that drivers didn’t die in modern Grands Prix. The most recent death in a race had been that of Riccardo Paletti, in the 1982 Canadian GP, before most people’s time in F1. Yes, Rubens Barrichello was badly hurt in a crash during qualifying at Imola, but he survived: it was reckoned to be an acceptable casualty. Then the hapless Roland Ratzenberger was killed during practice, two days before Senna’s death, and an old, unfamiliar, dread resurfaced – a dread which, for some reason, seemed to attach itself most strongly to Senna himself. Motoring News recounted the uncanny detail that ‘Several drivers reportedly felt the urge to go up to him [Senna] and touch his arm or shoulder at the drivers’ briefing without being able to say why.’ The Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, which had been in abeyance for some years, was reconstituted, with a special brief to concern itself with safety. Senna, the most senior driver, offered to lead it.

  Race day came around. Things got off badly, with a crash on the starting grid. The safety car came out while the wreckage was cleared away. Senna, who had been on pole, trailed round, with Michael Schumacher in second position. The safety car finally departed after five laps. The race was back on. Senna took off like a bat, desperate to leave Schumacher behind, desperate to reassert himself.

  Too desperate. Lap seven, he went into the Tamburello corner, lost control and slammed into a concrete wall at something over 130 mph. The right front wheel of Senna’s car was smashed back into his head; a piece of suspension penetrated the helmet. The red flags came out and the race stopped. The medical team – Sid Watkins in charge – got him out of the wreck, but it was a waste of energy. Senna died, lying on the track, the TV cameras watching him go. ‘Every time I push,’ he once said, ‘I find something more, again and again. But there is a contradiction. The same moment that you become the fastest, you are enormously fragile. Because in
a split-second, it can be gone. All of it.’

  The race was restarted, Schumacher glumly won, and another kind of mystery took over: the mystery of the accident. Was it caused by a mechanical failure? A lumpy track surface? Tyres too cold after the period behind the safety car? Or a driver’s error that brought with it the worst of bad luck? The endless to-ing and fro-ing of the manslaughter trials that followed merely served to make things darker, with rumours of missing accident video footage and many positive but unprovable assertions that the steering was seen to break seconds before the crash. As with James Dean, or Princess Diana: a crash, a death, and an enigma, all became inextricable component parts of the cult which then evolved.

  Senna was buried in São Paulo, and Brazil went into three days of mourning. It was discovered that he had spent much of his personal fortune trying to alleviate conditions among underprivileged children: an activity which he had kept surprisingly quiet about. His legend kept growing. Was he like Rindt, or Villeneuve – too fast to live? Or like Clark – so far beyond other mortals that the jealous gods called him back? Then again, Fangio, Stewart and Prost were all still alive: no one had felt the need to impose a tax on their greatness. He couldn’t, as Damon Hill would later argue, have simply made a mistake? Could he?

  As if stung by a collective guilt, the motor-racing community at once decided to go to town on safety, attempting to forefend any more catastrophes. The Grand Prix Drivers’ Association now had the ghost of Senna to compel it to new and bolder endeavours. The track at Imola was extensively reworked. Other circuits spent fortunes on redesigning crash-barriers and run-off areas. The next generation of cars had to meet far higher safety standards. The drivers eventually got to wear neck supports to reduce the potential damage from injuries such as those experienced by Senna. There was a tremendous air of sobriety about the place.

  But the new striving for safety had an unintended, but not unrelated, consequence. Senna’s predilection for driving in a fairly physical manner was given new room to breathe. As the cars and the tracks became visibly stronger and safer, so the opportunities for treating F1 as a contact sport became more various. You could go beyond the limits, more and more, and get away with it. It was an odd kind of legacy.

  And it was music, of course, to the ears of Michael Schumacher, champion in the year of Ayrton Senna’s death.

  25

  THE CURSE OF THE SON

  How very odd: in 1996 and 1997, the Drivers’ Championship was won by the son of a famous racing driver from an earlier generation. Damon Hill took it the first year; Jacques Villeneuve, the second. And they were in the same team. Since when did Formula One become such a family business?

  Let’s take a step back and consider the Ascaris. Antonio Ascari, a Mantuan like Nuvolari, started making a name for himself back in the 1920s, driving for Alfa Romeo. After a few tormenting failures in the Targa Florio, his career started to blossom when he won a brilliant victory in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, 1924, driving a stupendous supercharged straight-eight Alfa P2. Next year, he was on even better form, demolishing the opposition at the first Belgian GP, at Spa, and was about to do the same at the French GP, when his car crashed massively while leading and killed him outright.

  But he had a son, Alberto, who, undaunted by the fate that befell his father, went on to become one of the most successful drivers of the new age of Formula One. After starting out with Maserati, he fell in with the new Ferrari team, in time for the dawning of the Formula in 1950. A couple of second places put him fifth in the Drivers’ Championship; next year, he won in Germany and Italy and came second in the title race. Then, in 1952 and ’53, he absolutely wiped the floor with his opponents (Fangio, lest we forget, was going through his lean spell with Maserati and a broken neck), winning eleven out of a possible seventeen Grandes Épreuves in that time.

  After that, Fangio was back in control with Mercedes, while Ascari dithered around with Maserati, before returning to Ferrari, and then moving on to Lancia. But it was in an impromptu test-drive of a Ferrari at Monza that he died, inexplicably turning the car over at the Curva di Vialone. Heartbroken fans at once made some sinister connections: Antonio Ascari was thirty-six years old when he died, on 26 July 1925; Alberto Ascari was also thirty-six years old when he died on 26 May 1955. Both died on fast left-hand bends. Both left behind a wife and two small children. If this was what happened when you followed your father into the sport, it didn’t look like such a great idea.

  Jump forward to the second half of the 1990s. Two Formula One drivers, Hill and Villeneuve, both sons of Grand Prix racers who died before their time, both orphaned, as it were, into motor racing, both bearers of a famous name – well, it was Ascari, doubled. It was guaranteed to provoke the anger of Destiny. And what made it worse still was this: however good Antonio Ascari had been, as a racer, there was no question that his son’s achievements eclipsed his, whereas Hill and Villeneuve were in the less enviable position of having celebrated fathers whose reputations and personalities towered over them before they’d even had a chance to start.

  In fact, growing up as the son of Racing Legend Graham Hill had the effect of marginalising Damon’s ambitions, at the same time as it let him know that Formula One was a mixture of seedy showbiz as well as honest sporting competition. ‘I was backstage when I was growing up,’ he explained, wryly, ‘and I could see the show and all the tricks that were used to convince the people in the audience that what they were seeing was for real.’ Given the near-impossibility of making it as a mirthsome, friend-to-the-stars, larger-than-life racing institution like his father, Damon Hill did his best not to get into a car at all. Instead, he raced motorbikes, only sidling into four-wheelers at the relatively late age of twenty-three, when the temptation got too much to bear. Even then, having made his way through Formula 3 and got himself a job with Williams, he was happy enough being a behind-the-scenes guy, recording a fantastic number of solitary laps as a test driver and only being promoted into a proper drive in 1993 when Mansell left.

  This put him in an invidious position, and he knew it. His only other Formula One drive had been with Brabham (at the point at which they were about to collapse), and there were plenty of other good British drivers around – Martin Brundle and Johnny Herbert, in particular – who might have seemed better fitted for the job. On the other hand, quite a lot of his life had already been spent dealing with fraught and intractable situations. Taking on a new, highly visible, job at Williams was easy, in comparison.

  After all, when Graham Hill died in a plane crash in 1975, the Hill family not only lost their paterfamilias and principal breadwinner, they also found themselves more or less ruined financially, as the result of the ensuing insurance nightmare. Damon had to scuffle for work as a labourer and as a dispatch rider, just to pay the bills. Then, when he got into motor racing, his sponsorship deals kept imploding; he had to borrow £100,000 to keep himself in the business; Brabham went bust and never finished their final season. Everything he attempted was somehow in the teeth of adversity, like someone dragging a sled across the Arctic ice.

  By the time he was properly in F1 and well into his thirties, he had acquired a reflective, self-deprecating style which was a long way from the self-adoration of many of his peers. ‘I’m certainly one of the first people,’ he said, ruefully, ‘to pick up the paper and read about how wonderful I was.’ Things hadn’t come easily: anything that looked like a bonus was to be enjoyed as such, without false modesty.

  And then Senna died. And in May 1994, Hill, after one full season in F1, got bounced up into the position of number one driver, with no one else immediately in place as number two. At Monaco, ’94, the first race after Senna’s Imola crash, Hill cut a very lonely dash in the solitary Williams on the grid. Worse, his race ended almost immediately in a several-car pile-up at the start, and Frank Williams could be heard gnashing his teeth.

  Come the Spanish Grand Prix, at the end of May, he therefore found himself in a position unnervingly
reminiscent of that occupied by his father, twenty-six years before, at the Spanish GP at Jarama: Graham Hill, suddenly leading Team Lotus, immediately after the death of Jim Clark. As for Graham, so for Damon. The towering genius had gone, the journeyman hack (wearing the same blue and white rowing-club helmet, even) trudging up to fill the unfillable place, a burden of cosmic proportions resting on his shoulders, all played out in the heat and dust of Spain.

  And, like his father, he won the race. ‘To win it is better than I expected to do,’ he said afterwards, candidly enough. And it was a great win, just like Hill Senior’s, even though it was to some extent handed Williams on a plate by virtue of the fact that Schumacher, in the Benetton B194, had to spend most of the race stuck in fifth gear – while still managing to keep in touch with Hill’s Williams. On the other hand, this was Damon Hill’s fourth Grand Prix win, in only his second full season; whereas Graham Hill’s 1968 win came after he had already secured one World Championship, ten GP wins and the Indy 500. There was pressure, and there was pressure.

  Which says much about Damon Hill. Pressure is one thing if you’re a battle-hardened ex-world champion with an international reputation and the certainty that you’ve got the best car on the grid, another thing altogether if you’ve still got everything to prove, perhaps not the best car on the grid, a staggeringly gifted opponent (Schumacher) and a hypercritical team boss who clearly wouldn’t have picked you as number one driver in a thousand years if fate hadn’t sealed the deal for him. And yet, with all that on top of him, Hill tottered out at the Catalunya circuit and delivered.

  His reward? To see Nigel Mansell being dragged back into the other Williams car, halfway through the season, at a vastly higher salary (allegedly £900,000 per race, as opposed to Hill’s £300,000 for the whole year) and then to watch Schumacher (after a season of technological high-jinks and low track shenanigans) take the title by one point. He then made things comprehensively worse for himself in 1995, by failing to get the most out of the pretty good Williams FW17, having to watch Schumacher waltz away with his second title in a row (calling Hill ‘a little man’ in the process), and observe his new number two driver, David Coulthard (a young thruster in those days), take a neat victory over the German in the Portuguese GP.