Ayrton Senna: why is the memory of the three-time champion still strong in the history of motorsport in Brazil and around the world?

On a warm, sunny spring morning, one year and eight days before the accident that would take his life, Ayrton Senna was surrounded by journalists in the Imola paddock.

About five minutes after getting out of his McLaren after the first practice session for the 1993 San Marino Grand Prix, the Brazilian was explaining his late arrival in Italy that morning on a night flight leaving São Paulo.

With his red jumpsuit taken off his shoulders and tied around his waist, Senna was surrounded.

The questions continued and, as time passed, a young journalist on his first coverage of the Grand Prix learned, the hard way, one of the main challenges of a “jawbreaker”.

Behind Senna, holding a recorder over the driver’s shoulder, the reporter’s fully stretched arm began to get tired and painful.

What to do? Very cramped, it was not possible to remove the arm and change the recorder hands, or I would lose the interview. But the discomfort only increased.

Until he made a decision. Carefully, he rested his arm as lightly as possible on the shoulder of the greatest superstar that Formula 1 had ever had so far — and probably ever had.

Senna didn’t know that the journalist knew he shouldn’t do that and that he felt terrible. He could have backed away, moved, or complained about the invasion of his personal space. Several current F1 drivers certainly would.

But not him. He ignored it, as if it wasn’t happening; he stood still like a yogi, tolerating the rudeness, seemingly oblivious to it, until all the questions were asked. He politely thanked everyone and got into the McLaren truck.

That journalist is the one who writes here. And that morning Senna gave a small demonstration of the generous, soft and gentle side of a man who, at other times, could be the personification of firmness, acidity, aggressiveness and blind and insatiable desire.

Why was Senna talking to the press after the first training session, something unusual? This reveals another side of him.

McLaren was using Ford engines at the time, after Honda canceled the partnership at the end of 1992. And Senna, frustrated with the lack of power compared to Williams’ Renault engine, the car and engine he coveted, would be competing on a per-race deal. .

He had already won two of the first three races brilliantly, but he knew that Williams would eventually reach its potential and his title hopes would disappear unless something was done about the engine he was using.

What was said was that he had agreed to race in Imola at the deadline, which is why his finish was so high, and he took advantage of the interview to protest the unfairness of it all.

The subtext was how could he, Senna, be in such a situation?

What he really wanted was a Williams-Renault — in mid-1992 he even offered to race for them for free, but Alain Prost, whose contract contained a “no Senna” clause, had already been signed.

Failing that, Senna wanted the factory Ford engine and was doing everything he could to get it — which was, by contract, reserved for Benetton.

Senna was playing politics, using his status to put pressure on and try to improve his situation. But within that, there was a sense of entitlement.

The same mentality that, three years earlier at the Japanese Grand Prix, led him to deliberately push his arch-rival Prost’s Ferrari off the track in the first corner at 250 km/h, as he was angered by the organizers’ refusal to move your pole position for the cleaner side of the track.

Two weeks later, Senna gave an interview in which he said a phrase that became iconic: “We are competing to win, if we don’t compete in the gaps we will no longer be drivers!”.

It has been cited many times over the years as a pure illustration of Senna’s aggressive racing philosophy. But people forget that Senna was dissimulating when he said that.

Interviewer Jackie Stewart — a three-time champion, who could not be ignored — pressed him about the incident with Prost, and Senna was not happy. The fact is that there was no gap there — and Senna knew that.

A year later, he admitted that he had deliberately thrown Prost off the track in retaliation for events at Suzuka a year earlier, in 1989, when he was stripped of his victory by motorsport leader Jean-Marie Balestre in dubious circumstances following a collision. with Prost, in a decision that gave the world title to the Frenchman.

This was Senna’s darker side — a man who would go to extremes, and sometimes display questionable morals, to get what he wanted and what he felt he deserved.

That was Senna. His appeal, the world’s fascination with him, lies not only in his astonishing talent, but also in the depth and complexity of his personality. Yes, he was one of the greatest racing drivers the world has ever seen. Maybe the biggest. But it was much more than that.

He had a charisma so convincing it could silence a room. It was magnetic to listen to. Immensely intelligent, he was a philosopher willing to provide a window into the dangers of his profession, his own sense of mortality and how it affected him.

“You are doing something that no one else is capable of doing,” he once said.

“(But) the very moment you are seen as the best, the fastest and someone who cannot be caught, you become extremely fragile. Because in a fraction of a second, it’s over.

“These two extremes are feelings that you don’t feel every day. These are all things that contribute to, how can I say, knowing myself more and more deeply. These are the things that keep me going.”

No other pilot has ever spoken in such a way, on this subject, with such eloquence.

Death also has its role in iconography. When Senna died at Imola in 1994, with his helmet pierced by a suspension arm after hitting the wall of the Tamburello curve, he was frozen in time, aged 34.

Age had added some wrinkles around his dark eyes, but it hadn’t diminished his movie star appearance — his life would become a biopic produced by Netflix. And her driving style was incomparable, as it always had been.

Just under two weeks before the interview that morning in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy in 1993, Senna had run his best race.

This journalist was also there, this time as a spectator, in the freezing rain at the Donington Park chicane, waiting for the cars on the first lap of the European Grand Prix.

As always in British F1 racing at the time, commentary from the circuit was almost inaudible.

There was no internet or smartphones to broadcast live news. I didn’t have a radio. But when the noise of the cars on the first lap began, a buzz arose in the crowd. Something special happened.

When the cars appeared and rounded the chicane, Senna, who had started fourth, was already in second and, just behind leader Prost’s Williams, clearly about to be first.

Senna had just turned in one of the best opening laps ever seen and then disappeared into the distance.

Senna did this a lot. There are too many great races to mention them all. He stood out as truly special from a very early age.

In 1984 he should have won his sixth race, the Monaco Grand Prix. In a Toleman, he was catching Prost’s leading McLaren in torrential rain and was close behind when the race was canceled halfway through.

The following year, his first victory, at the 1985 Portuguese Grand Prix, was one of the greatest wet races in history, in which he finished a minute ahead of Michele Alboreto’s Ferrari and at least a lap ahead of everyone else.

That year, his Lotus was not the fastest car, but Senna won seven pole positions in 16 races.

With another impressive performance, moving to McLaren in 1988, he secured his first title in Suzuka, Japan. After falling to 14th following a poor start, he caught and overtook Prost, then his teammate, in the rain.

And then there was Brazil in 1991, when he competed with Ricciardo Patrese’s fastest Williams, on slick tires and in rain at the end of the race, even with a car stuck in sixth gear.

At the end of that race, Senna was so exhausted that he was unable to get out of the car without help. On the podium, he could barely lift the trophy to honor the adoring Brazilian fans, who revered him as a kind of demigod.

Senna was a man who, without a doubt, dedicated himself to his sport with more intensity, and gave more of himself in the incessant search for success, than anyone else in history.

The transparency of how much this meant to him was another part of Senna’s powerful appeal, but it may have been what ruined him.

It will probably never be known exactly what happened in Imola on May 1, 1994. The car’s steering column broke in the accident. Would it have broken before? His team, Williams, said no. Its technical chiefs, Patrick Head and Adrian Newey, were eventually acquitted after a long and drawn-out trial in Italy.

They always argued that the accident was caused by a combination of factors: the diffuser blocking, robbing his car of downforce, when Senna went over speed bumps in the Tamburello curve at 300 km/h, making a tighter turn than on the way back. previous, with low tire pressure afterwards, trying to get ahead of Michael Schumacher’s faster Benetton. Damon Hill, his teammate at the time, says he also believes this, having seen all the data on the car.

Senna died believing Schumacher’s car was illegal earlier that year. It may have been – illegal software was found on it, although there is proof that it was used. In any case, the Benetton was certainly faster. But somehow Senna put the difficult and unpredictable Williams FW16 on pole position in the first three races of the year.

Head and Newey always argued that it was Senna’s credit, not the car’s. His average pace advantage over Hill in these qualifying sessions was an impressive 0.922 seconds. In the first race of the season in Brazil, trying in vain to stay with Schumacher, Senna had overtaken Hill just after half the distance.

Until the end he was pushing the limits, forcing cars to be faster than anyone else could, achieving things that shouldn’t have been possible, but that he somehow made possible.

That’s why, 30 years later, his spirit and memory remain as strong as they ever were in the hearts and minds of everyone who knows anything about Formula 1. And they always will.