Memories of SENNA, anectodes and insights from those who knew him

Lembranças dos amigos de Ayrton Senna em Inglês, sobretudo sobre a carreira dele, vou postando sempre, pois são muitos depoimentos. Extraído do livro: “Memories of SENNA, anectodes and insights from those who knew him” de Christopher Hilton.

He'd go round fast, come in: 'The left rear needs 2lb more pressure and it's starting go grain as well.' I'd counter 'Oh yes, and I expect you saw that seagull crapping three miles away as well...'

Dennis Rushen, team boss

Dennis Rushen and Ayrton Senna

As soon as he left the car after the 1988 japanese Grand Prix he went to a lonely place between the pits and the paddock. 'I was thinkin about everything that happened in the race, because I'm sure I felt the real presence of God.'

Lemyr Martins, journalist

Ayrton Senna and Lemyr Martins

Ok, we did so many practical jokes, but I really don't like to put this into my relationship with Ayrton because it was completely different.

Gerhard Berger, driver

Berger and Senna

We went to a village about thirty miles away. A gang of kids spotted him although he was under a poorly lit street lamp. He spent about half an hour signing autographs, sweet as anything.

Professor Sid Watkins, F1 doctor

Professor Sid Watkins and Senna

Mountain climbing

What leads a child to the destiny he will pursue into manhood?

Opportunity? Chance? Hereditary? Predisposition? Environment?

Ayrton Senna's family were not of any racing lineage. Not that it matters. Great musicians are not guaranteed to sire great musicians, politicians sire politicians playing a different music, and so it goes.

Senna's father Milton was a successful businessman and his mother a sucessful housewife. That excludes heredity. Milton gave his son a kart at the age of four as something to play on. that provides opportunity and chance. He might equally have insisted on violin lessons. Milton had a farm and a house in Sao Paulo on a hill. As it would seem, he'd never been to a racing circuit. That excludes environment.

We're left with predisposition building on opportunity. Most young men like speed and danger. Senna was able to express that and, because he enjoyed motor racing so much, his father's money enabled him to progress in it.

From the beginning he was utterly serious about karting, so serious that eventually he flew to Milan to run with the famous DAP team in the World Championships. From 1978 to 1982 he tried unsucessfully to win it. By 1981 he had made a further decision: he would compete a season in single-seater racing in England. What happened the is not clear. His father had paid for the season and young Senna said if he couldn't find sponsorship he wouldn't come back for 1982. As the eldest son he must surely have been expected to join the family business. He did come back and from then on the Rushen Green team and already had a clear aim of reaching Formula 1 — he moved to the threshold of that in 1983 with the West Surrey team in Formula 3.

ANGELO PARILLA

Boss, Team DAP

Angelo Parrilla of Yellow Hat and Senna on the right wing in a colony in Uruguay

Photo credit: Henry Martin, the red shirt pictured embracing his father.

He was a good guy with a lot of education. By that I mean a guy who doesn’t make any kind of problems in racing, in speaking, in everything. He had an ability to understand machines, for sure, and there is no discussion about this. My opinion is that he was born with it.

He had something different from all the others. What was it? That’s hard to explain, but it was the feeling he had for the kart and later on in Formula 1. It was absolutely unusual. When I looked at him in Formula 1 I did not see the same man that I had seen in karting: he was quicker in karting!

He gave the maximum in karting. If a good driver there gave 100% Ayrton gave 125. Anyone in karting will tell you the same: he was far superior to everybody.

Senna’s first World Championship was at Le Mans in 1978, when he finished sixth.

Ayrton Senna in Le Mans 1978

Angelo Parrilla with Senna's Kart was vice world champion in (Portugal 1978)

LAKE SPEED

Karter, USA, winner

I’d heard there was a guy from Brazil that was really an up-and-comer, quite quick, somebody who was going to be a real contender. As an American, basically I went to the World Championship each year as a nobody – certainly as far as the Europeans were concerned – even though I had been placed fairly high in it the last several years. It was always dominated by the Italian factories and the drivers that they had. I really kind of caught everybody by surprise by winnin’ the darn thing.

[There were three Finals and in one of  them]  I was leading and Ayrton came up, caught me and was pressuring me. I could tell he was thinking of making a do-or-die attempt to pass me for the lead. Sometimes as a driver you sense things like when somebody’s going to make a move. If they are putting pressure on you, you know something’s going to happen.

I remember approaching this particular turn I heard him coming. I could tell he was going to make his do-or-die attempt so I kept going a little deeper than normal and kept the kart straight. I didn’t  turn in – and he went by, whoooosh. He had planned on using me as buffer and he’d missed!

In stock car racing we’ll use you for brakes: go into a corner and bump the side of another car. They may get bumped off the track, they may get wrecked, but you use them to slow you down and you make the corner. It felt like that was fixing to happen, so instead of turning in and becoming his brakes I just didn’t turn in!

He had a really, really strong drive to win and there was also an age difference. He was younger – throw it all to the wind, win at all costs, that kind of thing, although he had a lot going for him and everybody expected a lot from him.

Senna’s second World Championship was at Estoril in 1979, when he was second and thought he’d won.

PETER KOENE

Karter, Holland, winner

Two things remain strong in my mind: that Ayrton thought he’d won and his disappointment when he understood he hadn’t. We were in the same team – DAP – and he spoke to me afterwards, thought not much. I don’t remember if he was crying or not but he was asking everybody ‘how could this happen?’ There were three Finals: we both won one and we were both second in another. It was decided by whoever had been quickest in the timed practice won and that was me.

Ayrton was always serious, never making fun. It wasn’t so unusual to me because I was more or less the same. Many of the others were making jokes and so on. Not him and not me.

PETER DE BRUIJN

Karter, Holland, unplaced

I’d won the first Final, I was leading the second with Ayrton behind, then my chain broke a couple of before the end. My championship was gone and he had it in his hands. Then he waved his team-mate Peter Koene to pass by because he thought he would be champion and he wanted the DAP team to have first and second places, in the third Final he went screaming over the line – champion! But when they went onto the scales to check the weight, everybody started to congratulate Peter Koene.

TERRY FULLERTON

Karter, GB

Ayrton thought he’d won and I thought he’d won as well! My strongest memory, however, is of  his burning desire to succeed. That was always present and, whenever you think of him, you can’t disassociate it from him. An example. He threw me in a swimming pool, pushed me in. That was the Championship Cup in Jesolo in May 1980 – a very, very good race and I won. He went away in the lead; I caught him and passed him on the last lap. He was really cheesed off, as he would be. He’d come second again. The next day we were relaxing by the pool and he had something burning inside him. I was near the pool so he rushed up and pushed me in. I was taken aback, but when I thought about it afterwards I realised it was just frustration – an opportunity to get back at me. It didn’t really bother me and it made him feel better.

MIKE WILSON

Karter, GB

The reason the World Championship always meant a lot to him was that at Estoril he could have won and he thought he had. You’d got to be weighed when you finished the race. I remember coming to the scales and he was jumping up and down thinking he’d won. About half an hour afterwards they said ‘sorry, you haven’t.’ That made him not so much frustrated as determined to win it. He really, really wanted it.

Senna’s third World Championship was at Nivelles, Belgium, and his second place made him ever more determined to win the title – which he never did.

ALAN BURGESS

Editor, ‘Karting’ magazine

He cried. I was struck by what lengths he would go to in order to in. He was prepared to cry and stamp his foot and plead in order to get a decision changed. It was over a rule about him being forced off the track [by a Swiss, Marcel Gysin]. He approached me with Angelo Parrilla and I went through all the rules – I was a Commission Internationale de Karting delegate as well – to see if there was anything that could help. I can’t remember the specific rule but I told him he didn’t have a case and it didn’t take much persuading for him to drop it all. I’d thought the tears were genuine until they stopped so abruptly. I had not met a karter who was prepared to behave in that manner, like an actor. The tears stopped immediately when he found I couldn’t help – and I decided I was being used.

In South America, I think karting has always been respected more than in most European countries and so to win the World Championship for a Brazilian would have meant real prestige.

I much admired him because he never forgot his roots in karting and was always prepared to show his support for it. The nearest anybody has come to that aspect is Michael Schumacher. Younger drivers looked up to Senna and thus subsequently they saw a connection to karting.

Senna’s fourth World Championship was in 1981 at Parma, where he finished fourth. He wanted the karting crown so deeply that he interrupted his car career to compete.

PETER DE BRUIJN

He didn’t have good engines and didn’t have good tyres. On the Sunday morning before the Finals he came to me and offered me his tyres, to try and beat the factory team of IAME. I was surprised at this offer because a fighter like him doesn’t give his good equipment away to help somebody else. In fact, at the time I didn’t understand what he wanted to do or that he saw me as a fellow driver who was struggling but had a chance to win with the tyres. I was always racing for factories but privately. I had never been an official factory driver. I didn’t take it because I was linked with the Bridgestone company and DAP were using Dunlops.

It’s an interesting insight into how his mind worked – normal people don’t think like that – and there are two possibilities about why he made of offer. Either he was trying to help me or his team did not like the IAME team to win, but I think it was more to help me. We’d been racing against each other for quite a few years at that time – not that we were talking to each other every day, but we respected each other. He was quiet but he’d talk. It was not easy for him because he was in a different team, and at that time there was a very strong mentality there not to talk to other people. He did. He wasn’t giving away secrets but he still did!

IVAN CAPELLI

Karter, Italy, ninth

He was the only driver entering the corner with one hand because he was using the other to close the carburetor [dragging more fuel into the engine]. From that I could see that Ayrton was a different driver. He had something completely different, something special.

Senna’s fifth World Championship was at Kalmar, Sweden, in 1982. He finished fourteenth and never contested the title again.

ALAN BURGESS

Bridgestone were at Kalmar and they were there trying to get Senna to change his racing car tyres to Bridgestone. He started to play them off [with Dunlop] I think to get the right tyres for the karting and he insisted on me acting as a go-between. The Japanese Bridgestone man was getting more and more perplexed at his intransigence, but it was just shrewd bargaining going on: Senna put on a front of being not interested. What people didn’t know was that the telex operator at the hotel had succumbed to the blandishments of an Italian and passed all the Bridgestone telexes over, and we were able to read what Bridgestone were doing.

Senna wasn’t a very public sort of person. He’d disappear for intense business discussions in the paddock. He used ‘sir’ a lot to me – it was unusual, you could say it was contrived, but South Americans are more polite with their seniors so I suppose it was quite natural for him. Mind you, compared to the normal karter and the rough language that they use, it came as a bit of a surprise.

BOB HERBERT

Father of Johnny (eighteenth)

We drove up there in van and a caravan, Harwich-Gothenburg. Johnny was lying about seventh in the final and the bloody chain broke. I sent the chain back to Japan with a strong note and they never replied! Senna had broken down earlier. Although he was doing Formula 2000 we knew him because Johnny had raced against him in Jesolo, a big race early in the year.

At Kalmar, Terry Fullerton actually used old tyres and I’m pretty sure Senna was on them, too: one- or two-year-old Bridgestone. They found that the shelf life had hardened them a little bit and they were not only better but lasted longer. Senna was driving like a lunatic and kept coming off – I remember once at the hairpin. He actually cried.

MIKE WILSON

Ayrton Senna and Mike Wilson in Bercy/Paris 1993

Photo: site iame.it

He had disastrous meeting and he was more than rude to me. I won, Lars Forsman was second and another Swedish guy, Thomas Danielsson, third. Afterwards, they called me to get the trophy and go on the podium; they called Lars Forsman and he shook my hand; called Danielsson and he shook my hand and Lars's. Then the guy who'd finished forth shook all our hands and stood at the side of all the finalists. When they called Ayrton he went and got his medal, didn't shake anybody's had but just stood. It was obviously very difficult for him to swallow. I thought what an effing idiot!

Next – 1989. One of the things that touched me was when I won my sixth World Championship that year. Ayrton was in Italy because it was the week before or after Monza. I don’t know if you know Pino Allievi [respect motorsport writer] of Gazzeta dello Sport, the Italian daily sports paper. Gazzeta had a brief item MIKE WILSON WINS IN VALENCE.

Ayrton called Pino and said ‘Italian journalists think they are the best in the world but somebody wins a World Championship for the sixth time and he only gets one sentence.’ Pino called me the day after and said ‘would you mind coming down and giving us an interview?’ I got half a page interview through that telephone call from Ayrton!

I always thought very, very highly of him when he was driving cars. One reason was that when anybody interviewed him and said ‘you began in Formula Ford in England’ he’d say ‘no, I began in karting.’ He always put that first and he always tried to get over to people that it was a very important part of his life.

When we raced we weren’t friends because, like Terry Fullerton, we were favourites to win the races. We couldn’t be friends: when you put your helmet on and go out onto the circuit, you can’t be friends with anybody if you want to win. We became very friendly in 1989 when I won the last World Championship. We were in Paris for the FIA presentations and they start from the minimum category, from karting, then to rally drivers and so on.

I went up and got my trophy. When I came down, Ayrton put his arm round me and said ‘I see you’re still winning World Championship!’ I said ‘obviously it’s not the same as the Formula 1 title you won last year.’ He said ‘it doesn’t matter. That trophy means at this moment you are the best karting driver in the world. It’s as simple as that.’

Mike Wilson World Championship Parma 1981

Photo: site federicascarscelli.com  

Mike Wilson World Championship 1985

Photo: site federicascarscelli.com 

Mike Wilson 6 time World Champion

Photo: site federicascarscelli.com 

Mike Wilson

Photo: site eamsamipensala.com

PHILIPPE STREIFF

Driver, F1, 1984-88

Ayrton Senna and Philippe Streiff in 1993

Ayrton was very sympa [a nice bloke]. My strongest memory is not of competition in Grands Prix, which is bizarre because I debuted in 1984, the same time as him. Although he was in the fifty-four races in which I competed, I never had a ‘privileged’ rapport with him because I was in teams like Ligier and Tyrrell. I wasn’t competing against him for the championship of the world!

So I speak in emotional terms about Ayrton Senna and when several times we discussed the first Masters of Karting I was organizing at Bercy, near Paris, in December 1993. We discussed it here in Paris and on the telephone at his seaside place in Brazil where he went to rest and water-ski. He came to Paris and met the FIA after taking a swipe at Eddie Irvine at the Japanese Grand Prix. He got a suspension and a fine, and I saw him the day after. That was the first personal contact I had ever had. He came to Bercy and drove against Alain Prost and Prost won!

In February 1994 I went to Estoril to see his first practices in the Williams-Renault. It was intimate because there weren’t many people. I spent two days with him and I showed him all the photographs from Bercy and a video. He was so passionate about karting. He said ‘OK, Prost won but next year I’ll be coming back and I will win.’

MIKE WILSON

Ayrton Senna and Mike Wilson in Bercy/Paris 1993

Photo: site iame.it

At Bercy there were a minimum of fifty journalists round him all the time. I said 'it must be difficult to be so popular.' He said 'you couldn't realise how many times I would like to go with my girlfriend and walk down the Champs-Elysées, but we hyst can't do it. This is one of the reasons why, when I go back to Brazil, I can wind down.'

Ayrton Senna and his girlfriend Adriane Galisteu in Bercy

PETER DE BRUIJN

At Kalmar in 1982 we'd sat together at the prize-giving because we finished thirteenth and fourteenth. It was interesting hearing him talk about what he was going to do in cars. He asked me if I had any plans. I'd tried cars but came back so I said 'no, I stay with the karting.' In 1993 I went to the karting at Bercy with my girlfriend, now my wife. People from Eurosport said 'Ayrton Senna is coming and we'd like to film you having a talk with him.' I said 'no, he won't remember me, it was ten years ago.' They threw me in front of him and he looked at me and said 'hey, how are you?' I was very surprised he recognised me but he did.

Championship in Nivelles (B) in 1980, ahead of future F1 World Champion Ayrton Senna, helped by engine tuner Roland Marechal and Kees van den Grint.

LUCIO 'TCHE' PASCUAL

Kart expert and friend

Almost nobody knows this and, for sure, it had a huge influence in the course of his life: if he had conquered the kart World Championship - and he told me this several times - he would have stopped his racing career immediately and worked in his family business. Aytrton was obsessed with the idea of being Kart World Champion and he tried to do that from 1978. In 1981 he was already racing single-seater cars in England but he managed to compete in the karting championship because he couldn't let his dream go away just like that.

Ayrton was always very close to karting and he only stopped trying to win the championship because he was becoming so established in single-seaters.

I always say that if he had won it he'd be here in Sao Paulo selling screws and bolts in his autoparts store! He'd have ceded to his family's pressure - they never supported his racing career. Because the title never came he kept going and going, breaking the family resistance, sticking to the racing career and becoming the Ayrton Senna that we all know.

THE TENDER TOUCH

If you watched Senna on the track, particularly when he was young, you saw a very hard man careless, as it seemed, of the welfare of others. Off the track he cared a great deal.

DENNIS RUSHEN

Boss, Rushen Green team, 1982

I was quiet and he was quiet. I could sit and talk to him, chill him out. We were on the same wavelength. We used to drive together in Europe, just me and him, and that's why we spent so much time together. We were going to the Österreichring long before they put all the motorways in and you had to go up hill and down dale to get to it. We were driving up there on a windy, uphill part of the road and on the right-hand side there was a lovely little waterfall. He said 'Dennis, can we stop? I want to go and stand with my back to that and will you take my picture? I'll send it to my mum.' He was a future World Champion, could have had an ego and all the rest of it, but no, I'm going to have a picture for my mum. He looked coy, a little bit embarrassed really, standing there, even though there was only me and the camera. I took the picture and he sent it back.

SOURCE

HILTON, Christopher. Memories of Senna: Anecdotes and insights from those Who knew him.  Sparkford: Haynes Publishing, 2011.