To tell the story of the Brazilian driver that I consider the greatest performer of Formula 1, I want to talk about the finest victories of "Magic" Senna, starting from the triumph in the rain in Estoril during the 1985 season, to arrive at the race masterpiece of Donington '93, which led him to be an undisputed hero of Formula One. A story about the driver who more than any other has managed to thrill a huge crowd of fans.
Portugal Grand Prix - 1985 (Estoril) - Ayrton wins the Pole position behind the wheel of the Lotus-Renault 97T in front of Alain Prost, not yet become the bitter rival of a lifetime. The race takes place under heavy rain and Senna leads from the first to the last lap. A clear success, caught with a car unable to aspire to the world title. The only driver not to be doubled by the Brazilian is Michele Alboreto on Ferrari, second under the checkered flag, while the opponents end up spinning under the flood like it was a dance show.
Tambay, the Renault driver, sits on the lowest step of the podium, but with a lap of distance from Senna. Piercarlo Ghinzani is the last of the drivers who arrived, finishing in ninth position with the Osella-Alfa Romeo six laps from Ayrton. The triumph achieved in Estoril confirms the impressive skills of the Brazilian in the wet, qualities clearly shown the year before under the flood in Montecarlo, behind the wheel of a poorly competitive Toleman. A rematch for Ayrton, a rematch waiting for twelve races, for that success denied by a red flag during the Monaco Grand Prix of the year before.
Japanese Grand Prix - 1988 (Suzuka) - Senna and Prost arrive at the penultimate race of the season with the Brazilian intent on getting his hands on the World Championship.
The Japanese appointment is new, the opening of the Japanese Grand Prix on the F1 calendar took place the year before, recording the success of Gerhard Berger. Despite Prost's victory in Jerez, during the fourteenth round of the 1988 season, the Frenchman's lead over Senna in the standings did not increase due to the rule that not all race results would be counted towards the World Championship. In fact, only a certain number of a driver's best results would count (the rule changed from the 1991 season).
At the time, the regulation stated that only the eleven best results were valid. Having obtained six victories and six-second places, Alain must discard a second place, thus earning only three points. With this situation, if Senna (who has to his credit seven victories, two seconds, a quarter and a sixth place) wins the Japanese Grand Prix, becomes World Champion for the first time in Formula 1.
On October 30, there is an air that smells of legend even before the start, after a qualifying day monopolized by McLaren: Ayrton gets the Pole position obtaining the best time, detaching his partner by more than three tenths. Berger, the Ferrari driver, started the race in the third position having a second and a half delay from Ayrton.
At the start, the engine of the car of Senna is turned off, but the driver miraculously succeeds in reviving it, starting from the fourteenth position. The Austrian Ferrari driver barely avoids Ayrton's car on the grid when the lights go out, avoiding a disastrous ending for the driver of the Woking team.
While Prost leads the group authoritatively and Capelli entertains with the March-Leyton House, Ayrton begins a gritty and desperate comeback. He overtakes opponents like skittles, up to the second position when there are twenty-three laps to the end. The rain comes to help Senna as he approaches the hated rival Prost and passes him on the straight of the finish line.
The roar of the crowd pushes the Brazilian towards the eighth success of the season. The driver enters the world champions' register obtaining the first title of his career. There are tears and screams of joy at the end of the Japanese Grand Prix. The host country is also celebrating for the success of the Honda engine, the national pride of the Land of the Rising Sun.
Senna-Honda, a winning combination able to unite two cultures so distant, in the features of a man able to combine like no other the Latin heat and the saudade, with the coldness, dedication and maniacal precision of a samurai.
"I saw God and it was him who guided me" the driver commented after the victory, in front of an audience of journalists bewitched by the magnetism of the Brazilian. He will continue telling reporters that he had precise miraculous signs, and even if people will not believe him and maybe laugh at it, he drove the car knowing that God wanted him to be the World Champion.
When focused 100% he faced a 180-degree curve, it seemed to him to see His image in the sky and, at that moment, the driver realized that he would make it. “This contact with God was wonderful," he said. A mystical contact that unites Senna to his people, worshipped with gold-green flags across the streets of Brazil.
Brazilian Grand Prix - 1991 (Interlagos) - The most overwhelming victory of the man on the mechanical means.
Ayrton, after seven failed attempts, triumphs in front of the home crowd and does so with a feat that is unbelievable. The Brazilian starts from the front row keeping the lead on the Renault Williams of Nigel Mansell and Riccardo Patrese. The advantage of Senna on the "Lion of England" seems enough to run a race all in all comfortable, but the English man begins a silent comeback that grows gradually until the twentieth lap, when the number 5 of the Grove team is just seven tenths from the Brazilian MP4/6 car.
On the 26th lap, Nigel stopped in the pits to change the tyres, but the stop proved to be a disaster, relegating him to the fourth position. Mansell has gone into a great deal of trouble to catch up with Ayrton but, on the 50th lap, just when it seems possible to overtake him, the Williams driver punctures a tyre and is forced to another pit stop that makes him disappear from the Brazilian radar.
Only ten laps after, the gearbox of Ayrton's car starts to give problems: to stop working first is the fourth gear, while Mansell retires due to problems similar to those facing by Senna. Gradually, all the lower gears are broken and only the sixth gear remains functional, forcing McLaren's idol to a physically devastating driving. Even the gearbox of the Williams of Patrese reports problems, but the Italian manages to continue, although he cannot catch the Brazilian.
In the end of such an epic race, could the rain be missing? Ayrton signals the commissioners to stop the race, but "the show must go on" and Senna is called to a superhuman effort if he wants to give his loyal audience the long-awaited joy. “Magic” Senna crosses the finish line screaming in pain, in a chaos of emotions: Rede Globo broadcasts the screams of the driver, mixed with the famous music that always went with his triumphs (which was a festive tune).
Ayrton, despite the terrible cramps on his right arm, finds the strength to perform the lap of honor and also grabs a Brazilian flag stretched by a commissioner on the track. He stops about halfway across the track, exhausted. "Magic" Senna does not reach the pits, he yields first. The doctors reach him promptly and help him out of the cockpit, exhausted, to take him to the awards ceremony in the medical car.
The crowd goes wild, no sentient human being masters his mental faculties in those moments. On the podium, Ayrton struggles to raise the flag of his country and the winner's cup, but the public seems almost not to notice, so much is the joy for Senna's home victory. Those moments in which the Brazilian makes the last effort to lift the cup, succeeding after a second attempt followed by the roar of the crowd, mark the History of Formula 1 with the letter S of Senna highlighted to infinity.
Monaco Grand Prix - 1992 (Principality of Monaco) - Not even Senna, the king of qualifying, can do anything against the two Williams-Renault FW14B. Ayrton, behind the wheel of his MP47/A, gets a gap of over a second from Mansell and Patrese, on the circuit that marked the birth of his Myth. At the start of the race, Senna overtakes Patrese, vainly chasing the other Williams driver, the "Lion of England", for 2/3 of the race.
At the 59th lap, the doubling of Alboreto’s Footwork causes some thrills to Ayrton: the Italian commits a mistake that threatens to compromise even the race of the Brazilian. Ayrton loses ten seconds on Mansell to pass the Footwork of Alboreto (remember that at the time the doubled were not required to give way) but is helped on the 71st lap by an unscheduled stop in the pits of Nigel Mansell.
The Williams English driver is convinced he has taken a puncture and, indeed, there is a problem: a nut of a wheel has loosened, causing damage to the rim. The pit operations slow down the race of the English man who loses the head of the race, now in the hands of Senna. Five seconds that must be recovered in four laps. Mansell is not discouraged and manages to catch the McLaren of the Brazilian, trying to overcome him at every corner.
Ayrton, despite an inferior car than Mansell, manages to keep him behind until the end, winning the fifth victory in the Monegasque circuit. This success, the first of the 1992 season, allows Senna to match the record of Graham Hill, considered the King of Monaco. A year later, "Magic" Senna will bring the number of successes in the Principality track to six, becoming the only “Sovereign” of the circuit of Monaco. On the podium, Mansell is exhausted and trembling, and struggles to shake hands with the Royals. He looks at Senna not knowing how the hell did he manage to keep him back in those last blazing laps.
European Grand Prix 1993 (Donington) - How to prove to be the best in one minute and thirty-eight seconds.
During qualifying, things have not gone very well for Ayrton, who only comes fourth. The Ford-powered MP4/8 had proved to be a non-competitive car without good development possibilities. The race starts in the rain, with the two Williams that have no difficulty in keeping the first two positions. Schumacher, in third place, starts the race badly closing Senna, and both drivers are overtaken by Wendlinger with his Sauber.
Ayrton begins the most sensational comeback of all time: at the exit of the first corner he gets rid of Schumacher, then with an incredible maneuver also passes Wendlinger through the Craner Curves, and then goes to attack the two Williams. After passing Damon Hill and his Williams in the Mclean's curve, it is the turn of Prost, passed under braking on the Melbourne Harpin, gaining the lead of the race in just one minute and thirty-eight seconds of great show.
Ayrton maintains the leadership but the changing weather conditions forced him to five pit stops to change the tyres. In one of these pit stops, the McLaren mechanics are not ready and the Brazilian makes a useless passage in the pit lane. The advantage accumulated by the Brazilian on the pursuers is such that Ayrton still maintains the lead of the race.
Senna wins by doubling all the opponents except Damon Hill, who nevertheless passes under the checkered flag with more than a minute and twenty seconds behind Ayrton. The rival of a lifetime, Alain Prost, is literally humiliated.
The Frenchman, after the race, will claim to have had problems with the gearbox. Obvious, the conclusions: Senna fans argue that Alain, every time he loses, has a good excuse to tell. The fans of the Frenchman, however, stress the technical problems of the Williams car, defending their favorite.
Senna speaks open-hearted after his incredible success: "It was a race like in my old days: from the heart. Pushing and using my head when I had two ways: to push and to be cautious.” He will continue emphasizing that he does not even remember how often he stopped to change the tyres, definitely more times than in any other race. Driving the car in the wet and in these conditions so slippery it was very difficult for him. Ayrton will tell the journalists: "A tremendous effort, because you simply could not perceive the feeling of the car". In the end, the inevitable end-of-race dedication of the Brazilian: "God is great. He is Big and powerful and when He wants, nobody can say anything different".
Stirling Moss, an old glory of Formula One, delighted by Senna's performance, will spend decisively eloquent words for the great Brazilian champion, underlining that Ayrton with this race has definitively enshrined himself as the greatest driver of all time. After Fangio and Clark, he will be the touchstone for the future generation of drivers.
If Ayrton could come back to a Formula 1 circuit again, with his audience, with his fans, with all the Formula 1 enthusiasts, I would imagine him this way, speaking to the present day:
"How strange are the pits nowadays. I always remembered them dirty, always messed up, with the oil on the ground and the tools of the mechanics thrown here and there, always with the risk of being able to stumble walking. Now the pits are clean, neat and fragrant.
I want to go for a lap. I enter a single-seater to try, as before, the adrenaline that runs through your veins, the blood that throbs in your head, when, at a crazy speed, you dart through the circuits of this sport to which I have dedicated my life.
The steering wheel is strange. It is light as a feather. It's so different from my times when we were used to finishing the races with our arms dead, from the stresses and the vibrations of the race. What good memories come to mind. I still remember that time in '91, in the Interlagos circuit, when at the end of the race I could not even lift my arms and they had to pick me up from the car to get me on the podium. What a beautiful moment and a lot of satisfaction. I was so tired, but happy.
But I miss the noise, now. Inside these new cars, it is so silent that in the cockpit you can even hear the audience screaming. And the car's vibrations are almost gone. But I remember the smell of petrol. Oh yes, I will never forget the smell of petrol. It was part of my life.
I like the inscription in my resting place that all the friends have done in my memory, in Brazil, in my home: "Nothing can separate me from the love of God". How many challenges I had in this incredible sport that I will never forget. How many opponents I have faced. But off the track, we were all friends. Now it is better for me to go: to come back up there, to have fun with Gilles, Jim, and all the others."
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