Ayrton Senna

Ayrton Senna: Seventy-Five Seconds in the Rain

Easter Sunday 1993, Donington Park, damp. Senna lined up fourth in an underpowered McLaren-Ford against Williams-Renaults carrying active suspension, traction control and anti-lock brakes. He lost a place off the line, then took Schumacher at Redgate, Wendlinger around the outside of the Craner Curves, Damon Hill on the brakes into McLean's, and Alain Prost at the Melbourne hairpin. Fifth to first in seventy-five seconds. He won by nearly ninety seconds. Emerson Fittipaldi telephoned him afterwards and said, "Ayrton, that lap is impossible." Watching it on television, Fittipaldi's verdict was two words: "Pure genius."

São Paulo

He was born Ayrton Senna da Silva on 21 March 1960 in Santana, São Paulo, the middle child of Milton da Silva, a landowner, and Neide Senna da Silva, with an older sister, Viviane, and a younger brother, Leonardo. His father built him a go-kart with a lawnmower engine; he was interested in racing by four and competing at Interlagos by thirteen. He won the South American Kart Championship in 1977 and finished runner-up in the karting world championship in both 1979 and 1980. He described his kart rivalry with Britain's Terry Fullerton as pure racing, uncontaminated by money and politics — a revealing preference from a man who spent his F1 career at war with both.

He moved to Norwich in 1981, won the British Formula Ford championship in his first season, then took 15 of 17 races across the British and European championships in 1982. In 1983 he won the British Formula Three title after a season-long fight with Martin Brundle, and the inaugural Macau Grand Prix. He dropped da Silva — too common a name in Brazil — for his mother's.

Toleman, Lotus, and the Rain

His 1984 debut for Toleman was undistinguished except for one afternoon. At a wet Monaco he qualified thirteenth and had climbed to second when the race was stopped on lap 31 — the first public demonstration of the thing he would become famous for.

At Lotus from 1985 he took his first pole and first win at a soaking Estoril, finishing more than a minute clear — a drive he called the best of his career. He won Spain in 1986 by 0.014 seconds from Nigel Mansell, one of the closest finishes in the sport's history, and Monaco in 1987, the first of a record six wins there.

Prost

The move to McLaren in 1988 put him alongside Alain Prost in the MP4/4, which won 15 of 16 races. Senna took eight of them — a record — and 13 poles, and his first championship. The partnership curdled within a year into the defining feud of the era.

At Suzuka in 1989 he dived down the inside at the chicane; Prost turned in; they tangled. Senna took a push-start, cut the chicane, won the race and was disqualified. Prost took the title, and Senna was fined and suspended. In 1990, with Prost at Ferrari, they collided again at Suzuka — this time at the first corner, at around 270 km/h — and Senna became champion in the gravel. A year later he admitted he had done it deliberately, as payback for 1989 and for the FIA's handling of it. He later apologised to Jackie Stewart, saying, "God won't allow me to live this lie."

In 1991 he won the first four races, including at Interlagos, and became the youngest three-time champion. In 1992 the Williams FW14B put the title out of reach and he won three races; that year, at Spa, he ran across a live track to help the trapped Érik Comas, disregarding his own safety. In 1993, unable to get a Williams seat because Prost's contract barred him as a teammate, he called Prost a coward publicly and re-signed with McLaren race by race at a reported $1 million a time. He won Donington, took a sixth Monaco, and won the last Formula One race of his life in Australia.

Imola

He finally joined Williams in 1994, replacing the retiring Prost, reportedly for $20 million. The FW16 had been stripped of its electronic driver aids by rule change and he distrusted it from the start: "It's going to be a season with lots of accidents, and I'll risk saying that we'll be lucky if something really serious doesn't happen."

He took pole for the first three races and finished none of them. At Imola on the weekend of 1 May, Roland Ratzenberger was killed in qualifying; Senna had an Austrian flag in the car, apparently to raise for him. That morning he spoke with Prost about reviving the Grand Prix Drivers' Association to push for safety, and told him: "I'm not optimistic at all about this race."

On lap seven his car left the track at Tamburello. He was airlifted to Bologna's Maggiore hospital and pronounced dead at 18:40 CEST; under Italian law the time of death was recorded as the moment of the crash. Dr Maria Teresa Fiandri said he had sustained "fatal skull fractures, brain injuries, and a ruptured temporal artery, any one of which would likely have killed him." An Italian court concluded in 2005 that a poorly modified steering column had broken and caused the accident; Adrian Newey was acquitted, Patrick Head was found culpable but shielded by the statute of limitations.

Brazil declared three days of national mourning. More than a million people are estimated to have lined the funeral route on 5 May, the largest procession São Paulo has seen. His grave at Morumbi reads: *Nada pode me separar do amor de Deus* — nothing can separate me from the love of God.

Why Ayrton Is Called a Genius

The word has been used about him by people who would know. Fittipaldi's "pure genius" was about Donington, and Donington is the strongest evidence, because it isolates the variable: the same track and rain for everyone, and a car with 700 horsepower and no electronics beating cars with 780 and every aid then legal.

The faculty is perceptual. In the wet, grip is not a constant but a field that changes metre by metre and lap by lap, and the driver must sample it continuously through the seat and the wheel at racing speed. Senna read that field faster and more finely than anyone of his era — Monaco 1984, Estoril 1985 and Donington 1993 are the same trick at rising difficulty. The qualifying record makes the point from another angle: 65 poles from 161 starts, the record at his death, measures the ability to extract the absolute maximum from one lap with nothing to hide behind.

The counter-case is that this is craft rather than intellect, and that Senna's judgment away from the limit could be appalling. He deliberately drove another man off the road at 270 km/h to win a championship, and admitted it. He called a rival a coward in public. He also had the best car on the grid in 1988 and 1991 — and Donington is remembered precisely because that was so rarely true. Genius is the right word for what he did with a steering wheel in the rain. It is not a word for how he behaved when he lost.

Legacy

He was the last driver killed in Formula One until Jules Bianchi twenty years later, because his death forced the safety overhaul that made the sport survivable. Brazil's footballers dedicated the 1994 World Cup to him. Honda's Tokyo headquarters was buried in flowers, though he no longer drove a Honda-engined car. He was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 2000 and the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2025 — and in Brazil he is not a sportsman but a national saint.

Achievements

• L'Équipe Champion of Champions
• Formula One World Champion
• 1984 Formula One World Championship
• 1994 Formula One World Championship
• 1993 Formula One World Championship
• 1988 Formula One World Championship