Prior to Ratzenberger’s crash Rubens Barrichello, a great friend and
compatriot, had suffered a terrifying accident in Friday practice when his
Jordan struck a kerb at the Variante Bassa chicane, vaulting through a fence
to leave him suspended unconscious, upside-down. After Senna had retreated,
dazed and tearful, from a glimpse of the shattered remnants of
Ratzenberger’s Simtek, he became convinced that something at the Autodromo
Enzo e Dino Ferrari was profoundly wrong.
Frank Williams, his team principal, tried to impart a little reason. He was
staying in suite 100, directly below Senna, and left a note under his
driver’s door asking him to call down for a chat once he came back from the
meal with Leberer. Luisa Tosoni, then as now the hotel’s owner, remembers:
“I know that on this night, he came to his room and was ready to go to
sleep. Then he went downstairs again to meet Frank, and I supposed he was
telling him that did not want to race, because he seemed so incredibly sad
about what had happened that day. From seeing him, I imagined that Senna
could be strong only when he drove. Otherwise, he came across as such a
sweet person – gentle, generous, and very sensitive.”
Emotionally, Senna felt incapable of racing. But pragmatically speaking, he
had to. Reliability problems with Williams’ ’94 car, coupled with a spin in
Brazil and a first-corner collision in Japan, conspired to leave the
three-time world champion without a point to his name as he entered the
European campaign.
Damon Hill, his team-mate after a winter where Williams achieved a career’s
ambition in prising Senna from McLaren, says: “There was an atmosphere from
the word go, perhaps even from before we got to San Marino. The car was not
the beauty we wanted it to be, and Ayrton was concerned that he could not
push it as much as he needed to. So the pressure was on him to start opening
his account. It was one steady ratcheting-up of the tension.”
It is a theory advanced by Watkins that Senna, while harbouring a fatalistic
attitude towards death through his strict Catholic upbringing, was reminded
by Ratzenberger’s crash more acutely of his own mortality than he could
bear. But Brundle, a contemporary of Senna’s for 11 seasons and one who saw
every peculiarity of his rival’s character, believes he never seriously
considered pulling out of the grand prix. “As a driver you realise that
people get smashed up, people get killed,” he says. “If he was that upset
about it, he wouldn’t have stepped into the car on Sunday. Your heart is
wired to drive racing cars. The bottom line is that you get back in and go
again.”
The tête-à-tête with Williams appeared to trigger just such a shift in mood.
Senna consoled himself with a promise that, should he seize his 40th victory
on an Imola track where he had already won three times, he would unfurl an
Austrian flag in honour of Ratzenberger. He was also soothed by a telephone
conversation with girlfriend Adriane Galisteu, a 21-year-old model, who told
him she would meet him at Faro airport the following night when he flew back
to their second home on the Algarve. All the signs were, as a wedding party
gathered exuberant pace in the Castello lobby downstairs, that Senna settled
into bed in suite 200 if not calm, then at least appeased.
Room 200, which is still decorated the same as when Senna stayed there
As dawn broke over the Romagna countryside, Senna’s race-day began in a manner
befitting a driver contracted on $1 million per race, when Captain Owen
O’Mahoney called to ask when he should take the bags to his private jet in
Bologna. In radiant spring sunshine he projected a façade of serenity, even
exchanging pleasantries in the paddock with Alain Prost, who was shocked at
so cordial a greeting from a figure he had regarded as a mortal enemy.
Timesheets from the morning warm-up suggested, too, that Senna’s ruthless
racing brain had re-engaged. “He was just blindingly fast,” says Hill,
dumbstruck at seeing his stablemate eclipse the field by nine-tenths of a
second. “I felt I had to take a closer look at the difference between myself
and him.”
First, though, there was the solemn affair of the 11am safety briefing to
attend. Bernie Ecclestone ordered a minute’s silence in Ratzenberger’s
memory as Senna, anguish and introspection engulfing him afresh, sat at the
back of the room, weeping. Only afterwards did he raise his worries about
the Imola set-up, in a private discussion with Gerhard Berger and Michael
Schumacher, who alongside Brundle would later form the Grand Prix Drivers’
Association.
A sign at the entrance to the Imola circuit
“Ayrton was deeply concerned,” his nephew Bruno, heir presumptive to the
family F1 tradition, explains. “It was clear the cars were not working well
on their configurations that weekend. He understood that the circuit was not
safe in those circumstances.”
It is received wisdom, implicit in Asif Kapadia’s 2010 film of Senna’s life,
that he acted on such occasions out of laudable campaigning motives. But
Brundle, familiar with his adversary’s Machiavellian streak since their
Formula Three days, claims that there was always a heavy dose of
self-interest. “There was a great paradox about Ayrton,” he says. “Down at
the medical centre with Rubens, he had shown great compassion. But strangely,
he would also be one of the first to have an accident with you, or push you
off the road.
“I had a bizarre incident with him at Monza in ’93, where he made a mistake
and ran into the back of me when we were fighting for third. He ran over to
me, but as soon as he knew I was OK a switch flicked and the hard,
calculating element of him emerged. He drove with his heart primarily, his
head secondarily. Ayrton was no fool, but he was convinced the world was
against him – in F1 he thought it was Jean-Marie Balestre, the FIA
president, everybody. He was an emotionally driven guy. He had a God-given
gift to drive a racing car just over the limit, and beyond that he was
complex.”
Senna waits to start the San Marino Grand Prix in his Williams
By the time pre-race anxiety gripped the Williams garage, Senna conveyed a
more agitated air than usual. He withdrew from the chatter of the mechanics,
scrutinising the car with suspicion and leaning pensively against the rear
wing. There was such sombreness about him, according to his former PR chief
Betise Assumpção, that “you could just tell he didn’t want to race.”
Hill, in the sister car, interpreted Senna’s behaviour differently, as the
senior man’s method of constructing a force-field around himself. “I didn’t
get close to Ayrton in the moments leading up to a race,” he says. “People
gave him space, he was on his own. He kept a protected wall. I never had the
chance to forge a relationship with the guy. I was absolutely thrilled to be
his team-mate, because I thought I would learn so much. But it wasn’t to be.”
If Senna did indeed harbour grisly premonitions of what was about to
transpire, they were realised early. As he streaked into the first corner
from pole position his rear-view mirrors filled with flying debris, the
Lotus of Pedro Lamy smashed into the back of JJ Lehto’s Benetton, which had
stalled on the start line. Cue mass yellow flags, and the deployment of a
safety car, as Senna was left to reflect whether this bleakest of grand prix
weekends was somehow cursed.
The start at Imola
Three dreadful crashes, one of them catastrophic: the horrors at Imola seemed
too repetitive for it all to be mere coincidence. But in those first nervous
minutes as the cars held station, the thought had to be cast aside. “You are
in a racing driver’s state of mind, where you have a default mode,” Hill
argues. “Namely, ‘If this happens, we go to Plan B.’”
In Senna’s case, Plan B was straightforward. After two races he trailed
Schumacher by 20 points in the championship and, once the safety vehicle
peeled away, his only intention was to press home his on-track advantage
over the German by driving at the ragged edge of human and technological
capability. Here was a talent who, in his mid-Eighties Lotus days, could
boast of memorising exact readings from nine separate diodes on the back
straight at Brands Hatch, so he knew no other mindset. Sure enough, on lap
six and with the wreckage finally cleared, he decided, in Hill’s words, to
“put the hammer down”.
Few tracks could be as terrifying at full tilt as Imola. From the sweeping
curve of Tamburello to the hairpin bend at Tosa, from the intricate kink of
Acqua Minerale to the double left-hander at Rivazza, it was a three-mile
sequence of warp-speed straights, high-compression corners and alarming
changes in elevation. At the re-start Senna swept through every section like
a man possessed. His lap time of one minute 24.887 seconds was only
surpassed by two drivers by the end of the race – an extraordinary feat,
given that it was achieved on cold tyres and a full tank of fuel.
Maintaining a 0.6sec lead over Schumacher, he began lap seven and the 190mph
entry into Tamburello. Watkins, sitting in his medical car as the Williams
barrelled past him on the finishing straight, thought it appeared skittish
and unstable, telling his driver Mario Casoni: “There’s going to be a b—–
awful accident any minute.” Schumacher, likewise, instantly intuited that
the car in front was not responding as it should, claiming afterwards that
he noticed its chassis hit the tarmac as it rattled over the sharp bumps.
What ensued defied comprehension as Senna’s car deviated not an inch on its
exit from the turn, ploughing through the gravel trap at terrible speed and
straight into a concrete wall.
Hill, dodging the blizzard of bodywork back in fourth place, at first did not
recognise the severity of the impact. “When Ayrton went off, I remember
thinking, ‘I can’t believe this, it’s just one thing after another,
non-stop.’ That was my initial thought: ‘Now what?’ I didn’t have a feeling
in my guts that it was serious.” Brundle, in seventh, knew otherwise, having
spun off in jarring fashion at precisely the same spot. “It is a very scary
corner,” he says. “You don’t have small accidents at Tamburello.”
This was patently one of the largest. Even though Senna had decelerated to
130mph, the right-hand front of his car took the maximum force of the crash,
causing a wheel to fly off and become trapped between the undercarriage and
the wall. As the suspension crumpled like a tin can, his Williams was
launched back on to the edge of the track, its monocoque a ruined shell and
Senna’s head slumped, inert, inside the cockpit. Marshals swarmed to the
scene as Galvao Bueno, a Brazilian commentator and one of the driver’s best
friends, told viewers on the TV Globo network: “Ayrton has hit the wall
badly. It’s very serious.”
Senna’s Williams car shortly after the crash
A patch of crimson was visible next to the wreck: Senna’s blood. At this point
the BBC footage switched from the crash site to the pit lane, out of
trepidation for what would be visible next. But the local feed from Italy’s
RAI station remained fixed upon the desperate spectacle as Senna’s head
noticeably twitched. John Watson, the Northern Irish driver calling the
grand prix for Eurosport, described this as a “very positive indication”.
And yet 7,000 miles away in Buenos Aires, Juan Manuel Fangio, the five-time
champion and one figure with whom Senna’s greatness could legitimately be
compared, concluded it was an involuntary spasm that could only mean a
massive head injury. “I turned off my television,” he said. “I knew he was
dead.”
Watkins, who in treating Senna appreciated that he would not survive as soon
as he studied the wounds beneath his yellow helmet, recalled it thus: “He
sighed, then his body relaxed.” Not an avowedly religious man, the
neurosurgeon said: “That was the moment I thought his spirit departed.”
Medically, the prognosis was unambiguous, but Brundle expresses the confusion
that prevailed in the paddock. “I didn’t immediately think it was fatal. I
just saw the red flag and went back to the start line. I was originally told
it was Damon who had had the crash. We were informed that he had moved his
head, that it seemed like he was OK, but you subsequently learn that was the
nervous reaction of a man finally dying.” Senna – sorcerer, artist, icon,
virtuoso – was gone. It was 2.17pm.
A Brazilian flag hangs as tribute to Senna on the fateful Tamburello
corner
Owing to the strict edicts of Italian law, Dr Maria Theresa Fiandri, Bologna’s
chief medical officer, did not officially announce the death until 6.40pm.
But every effort to resuscitate him in those intervening 4¼ hours, as Senna
was taken by air ambulance to the city’s Maggiore hospital, had been
hopeless. Senna was brain-dead from the second of impact, when jagged pieces
of the right-front wheel assembly penetrated his helmet and produced
multiple fractures at the base of his skull.
Yet even in the midst of so desolating a tragedy, a race took place,
re-started a mere 38 minutes after Senna’s accident and won by Schumacher.
Indeed, the only concession the FIA made to the mood of mourning was to
insist that no champagne be sprayed on the podium.
Michael Schumacher, right, weeps as he waits to go on the podium
Brundle scarcely disguises his contempt at so astonishing a decision. “I was
angry that we carried on racing,” he says. “I’m still angry today, if I’m
honest. What makes me angry is that we raced past a pool of his blood for 55
laps. I thought that was disrespectful, and not the right thing to do.”
Brundle depicts a “pall of silence” over Imola that afternoon, as a welter of
misinformation circulated about Senna’s fate. “I didn’t know he had died
until after the race. Keke Rosberg told me, then I told Ron Dennis. We all
knew something was up.” Even Adriane received precious few details. She was
still on the runaway in Faro, preparing to fly out, 15 minutes after her
boyfriend’s life-support machine had been switched off.
Back at the Castello, few were so powerfully struck by life’s cruel
capriciousness that Sunday as Luisa Tosoni. For she had also been taken to a
hospital ward, to give birth to her second son, when she heard the news. On
what ought to have been the happiest day, she struggled to compute that this
impeccably-mannered Brazilian boy, on whom she had doted since he first
based himself at her hotel in 1989, would never again be checking into suite
200. “In one way I was happy because of my son, but in another I felt so
much…tristezza. It is an awful memory. I prefer to remember the good person,
the strong driver who wanted to win at any cost. I know that his father had
told him, ‘If you want to do something, you must do it the best.’”
Luisa Tosoni, the owner of the Hotel Castello
The full explanation for why Senna, who could make an F1 car dance through the
most devilish corners, went straight on at Tamburello is mired in claim and
counter-claim. Hill, however, after 20 years in which the sport has pursued
almost every legal and scientific avenue to establish the answer, is adamant
in ascribing it to straightforward driver error. “I was the only person who
had sat in the same car, on the same day and on the same circuit,” he says.
“I was able to piece together in my mind that the cause of the accident was
nothing to do with that Williams car. I satisfied myself, I wouldn’t do it
for any other reason. My calculation was that he had been pressing on, and
the car was very, very tricky over those bumps.”
Brundle draws a contrasting conclusion. “I had a conversation only this month
at the Chinese Grand Prix, where I learned quite a bit more information,” he
discloses. “I’m nervous about putting my opinion on it, because the cars
didn’t have as many data acquisition tools then. It was probably a set-up
issue – a combination of low tyre pressure, an odd aerodynamic effect on the
car, and Ayrton pushing hard against Schumacher. But the impression is that
his steering column failed.”
The judges at Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation in Rome agreed. In 2007,
after a trial that had lasted over a decade, they resolved Senna’s accident
had arisen from the failure of a column that was “badly designed and badly
executed”, and that ultimate responsibility fell upon Williams’ former chief
designer Patrick Head for “omitted control”.
The flaw in the verdict was that Head could not be arrested, since Italy’s
7½-year statute of limitation for manslaughter had expired. Plus, to this
day, the court’s findings are vigorously disputed. Adrian Newey, the
architect of Senna’s Williams, has pointed out how the car oversteered at
Tamburello, with the rear section snapping suddenly out of line – a movement
not usually associated with steering column problems and one that, he
suggested, was more likely to have been triggered by a puncture.
Television replays highlighted how a loose object was creating an obstruction
close to Tamburello, but this was almost half a mile from the point where
Senna veered off track. Nonetheless, the emphasis that Hill places upon the
bumps in this area is valid, since Senna had specifically complained about
the rough surface in pre-season testing there. Then, of course, there is the
question of culpability on the part of the Imola circuit itself.
Tributes at Imola to Senna from all corners of the globe
Senna’s misgivings about whether it was safe to drive were manifested in his
death, for just behind Tamburello ran a creek that significantly reduced his
run-off distance. To protect errant cars the creek should have been
redirected, but Senna found nothing to diminish his speed as he hurtled off
course into the horribly unforgiving expanse of a retaining wall. In place
of that wall there is now only a wire fence, festooned with Brazilian flags
and small posies of flowers to mark the spot at which his life was so
savagely cut short. “It has become a shrine,” Hill says. “It gives people
somewhere to continue displaying their remembrance and devotion.”
Hill often draws unkind remarks that he would never have won his drivers’
championship in 1996 had it not been for Senna’s tragic ending. But his
admiration of the driver with whom he was able to spend just three races at
Williams is boundless. “He was on a mission, wholeheartedly committed to
giving himself completely to his profession. The fact that he never offered
anything other than his absolute best incurred greater risk, and he knew
that. So I believe he was one of the most courageous racing drivers there
has ever been – the most gifted, the most fascinating. I don’t think you
will ever see anyone else like him.”
Twenty years later, there is still no threat to his status. Schumacher,
Fangio, Prost and Sebastian Vettel have garnered more titles, but Senna is
heralded as the greatest by every contemporary and every young pretender who
has come since. Mika Hakkinen, David Coulthard, Fernando Alonso, Lewis
Hamilton: all are united in saluting his pre-eminence. They marvel at the
dexterity of one who could propel himself from fifth to first inside 40
seconds in the wet, at the audacity of one who shunted Prost into Suzuka
dirt without so much as a trace of contrition.
For Brundle, the abiding example of his craftsmanship will always be his
mastery of the sinuous angles of Monte Carlo, where Senna could carve not
just tenths off his lap-times but whole seconds. “Ayrton got into such a
trance driving around Monaco,” he says. “He was almost outside his car,
outside his body.”
Bruno, the nephew whom Ayrton had anointed as his natural successor, says:
“People were aware he was fighting for something more important than just
winning races. It was a belief. He was convinced that he had been given a
singular opportunity by God, and he had the personality to make the most of
it. These are the qualities that make special people in history.”
A statue of Senna behind Tamburello, within the Acqua Minerale public park,
captures his enigmatic aspect beautifully. The bronze figure is sitting,
earnest and contemplative, as if perched on the pit wall. Echoing Tosoni’s
impression that he was essentially a simple, soft-natured soul, the monument
is refreshingly devoid of ostentation. Inquisitive children wander across
occasionally to touch the statue’s feet, and once they pass the only sound
is of birds warbling in the verdant Romagna forest. After the terrible
violence of Senna’s ending, all at last is still.
The statue of Senna at Imola