Ayrton Senna movie: Oliver Holt remembers the magic of a F1 hero who transcended his sport
http://m.mirror.co.uk/article?a=m4:23175345by Oliver Holt, Daily Mirror
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THE morning after Ayrton Senna died, I left my room above the pizzeria where I stayed every year at Imola and walked the half a mile or so to the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari.
Everything was still a blur. The crash, Senna in his famous yellow helmet lying fatally injured on the concrete run-off area by the side of the track as the medics worked on him, the helicopter landing on the circuit to carry him away.
The announcements in the press room that became increasingly grave in tone and content, a journalist who was a friend of the three-time world champion becoming more and more upset.
Working and working, knowing that Senna's death was bigger news than the fact Nelson Mandela and the ANC had just won South Africa's first multi-racial election.
And, finally, leaving the circuit in the evening and meeting Betise Assumpcao, Senna's press secretary, who was returning from the hospital.
She was a beautiful woman, popular with the media because she was always cheerful and bubbly, but now her face was stained with tears and she had no words. Her grief made the whole thing very real. The world's greatest racing driver, the planet's most famous sportsman was dead. He was 34.
The cause of the accident remains controversial. The cause of his death was that on impact a piece of suspension pierced his helmet visor and punctured his skull.
The next morning, May 2, 1994, the Imola circuit was surprisingly quiet when I got there with a colleague.
We walked out on to the track. We expected someone to stop us but nobody did, so we followed Senna's last journey.
We walked down the few hundred yards to Tamburello, the fast left-hand bend where Senna's Williams had careered into the perimeter wall at 130mph.
There were black tyre marks on the low white wall that traced the point of impact. There were flowers hanging in the fence.
The place was already becoming a shrine. We had been standing there for a couple of minutes when a silver Mercedes with tinted windows appeared from the direction of the pits and came to a stop.
A door opened and a tall, elegant woman dressed in black, her eyes covered by sunglasses, got out of the back seat and walked over to the crash site.
She bent down and placed some flowers on the spot where Senna had lain, bowed her head and walked back to the car.
It was an eerie moment of stillness and peace at the start of a frantic period of grief, investigation and recrimination.
It seemed to sum up the enigmatic nature of Senna and the mystique that attached itself to him and forms such an important part of his legend.
A brilliant new film about his life and death - called Senna - is released today and captures that mystique beautifully.
It examines the thoughts of a man who transcended his sport in the same way Muhammad Ali was bigger than boxing.
It tells of his bitter rivalry with Alain Prost and his resentment at his treatment by the sport's governing body, the FIA.
Some of the footage in the film is intensely moving, some of it, like scenes from explosive drivers' briefings, fascinating glimpses of a hidden part of F1.
Senna was a genius behind the wheel, of course. He won three world titles and set the record for pole positions, a pure measure of a driver's speed.
He drove in Formula 1's golden era, competing against great champions like Prost, Nelson Piquet and Nigel Mansell.
And when it rained, when the conditions wiped out any advantages a driver might derive from a superior car, Senna was the undisputed master. His pièce de résistance came at the European Grand Prix at Donington Park in 1993 when he conjured what many believe is the greatest lap in Formula 1 history.
Starting fourth in pouring rain, he slipped to fifth going into the first corner but then drove like a superhuman.
He produced an astonishing move to overtake Karl Wendlinger and then gave chase to Williams teammates, Damon Hill and Prost, whose Williams-Renaults were far superior to Senna's McLaren. Senna overtook them both with two daring moves before the end of the first lap and went on to win the race.
Prost, a metronomic Frenchman known as The Professor because of his precise driving style, was Senna's greatest rival.
And it was out of their fierce enmity that Senna's greatness was born because Prost pushed him to his limit.
The point Prost proved was that actually Senna didn't have a limit.
'Ayrton has a small problem,' Prost says in the film. 'He thinks he can't kill himself and I think that is very dangerous.'
In the late 1980s when their rivalry was at its height, it seemed there was nothing Senna would not do to win. The acrimony grew when they were teammates at McLaren in 1988 and 1989, sweeping all before them, and it reached its zenith the following season when Prost had moved to Ferrari.
In the penultimate race of the season at Suzuka in Japan, Senna started from pole position with Prost next to him.
As the cars headed for the first corner at 170mph, Prost edged ahead and turned into the corner, expecting Senna to yield. But Senna did not yield. He held his line and the two cars collided.
There was widespread astonishment at what Senna had done. Prost was furious and deeply shaken.
Once again, he alluded to Senna's disregard for his own mortality. 'He pushed me off,' Prost said. 'I am not prepared to fight against irresponsible people who are not afraid to die.'
The episode added to the aura that had built up around Senna and reinforced the idea that his greatness was not just a product of his skill and courage. Senna came to be viewed as a quasi-religious figure, who drew upon a higher force when he was driving.
'In the last qualifying session,' he said after the 1988 Monaco Grand Prix, 'I was already on pole, then by half a second and then one second and I just kept going.
'Suddenly I was nearly two seconds faster than anybody else, including my team mate with the same car (Prost).
'Suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. I got closer to God.
'It was like I was in a tunnel. Not only the tunnel under the hotel but the whole circuit was a tunnel.
KICKED
'I was just going and going, more and more and more and more. I was way over the limit but still able to find even more.
'Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realised that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down.
'I drove slowly back to the pits and I didn't want to go out any more that day. It frightened me because I was well beyond my conscious understanding.'
Some feel Prost has been demonised by the film and it is true he does not emerge well from it.
The film does not portray Senna as an angel, either, but it does reinforce his reputation as the greatest racing driver the world has ever seen. Senna took that with him to his grave.
3Senna is released in cinemas today.
