Ayrton Senna: A Legacy that will never end

Ayrton Senna: A Visionary, a Born Winner and arguably the greatest of all time

When I started to write this piece, I was really thinking to myself whether I will ever find the right words which could even define or rather do justice to the kind of talent and the skill that this Brazilian had. But after watching loads and loads of videos of Senna over the internet, I realized that maybe any words would not suffice to even remotely describe Senna as a driver. I would say that drivers like Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell, Nelson Piquet , Michael Schumacher were all great but there was something about Senna that made him stand out from any other driver that we have seen on the circuit or we ever will in the future in Formula One. With 65 pole positions, 41 race wins, 3 world championships in just 161 starts he was the most phenomenal driver in the F1 history. There are people who would question this by talking about the statistics, the number of wins and the number of pole positions of Alain Prost and Michael Schumacher and say that maybe they were the better drivers , but you have to make it clear to all those people out there that you do not talk statistics when we talk of Ayrton senna. He was a driver a whole lot more than all that. When you ask the people who know about the sport , you will get a very unanimous, undisputed verdict that Senna was the best.

There are only a few people who know that this world might have missed upon the great legend , had the Brazilian agreed to join his father’s business in the early 1980’s despite proving himself by winning the RAC and Townsend-Thoreson Formula Ford 1600 championships with the Van Diemen team in his formative years as a driver. But when he got the opportunity from Formula Ford 2000 team , he could not refuse. He pounced on it and went on to win the British and European FF 2000 Championships in the year 1982. It is also said that he had taken a ten thousand pounds loan from his own father on the terms that he would repay them when he could. But after his first year with the Ford team, even his family were convinced that Senna had chosen the right path for himself.‘

It is said that driving in the wet conditions is the ultimate challenge for a Formula one driver as it is difficult to keep control of the car even when you are driving on a straight track. Senna’s first Formula One victory came on a wet track in 1985 Portuguese Grand Prix with team Lotus. And it wasn’t without any reason that people used to call Senna the RAIN MASTER. Watching him in one of the videos , you can see him dancing with his car even when he was driving on a straight track. As his fellow drivers used to say, Senna had that extraordinary sixth sense of where the maximum grip on the track was even before he turned into a corner. He was a driver who raced only to win and not even a second position would satisfy him and it was his hunger for victory that compelled him to push himself and his machinery to the maximum limit. In his own words, “You either commit yourself as a professional racing driver or you come 2^nd or you 3^rd or you come 5^th. And I am not designed to come 3^rd ,^, 4^th or 5^th , I race to win. And if you no longer go for the gap that exists, you are no longer a racing driver”

He was remorseless and intimidating and dominated his rivals by the sheer force of his personality. Sometimes the extent to which he went to get past the car ahead of him was something not everybody liked but then that was Senna and when he was driving, he had just one aim and that was to get nothing less than a win. He often put the other drivers in a situation where he left the decision on the other driver to either let him pass or get involved in an accident and most other drivers succumbed to the mind games that he used to play.

Senna also had a big heart. He was a completely different personality off the track and this is the gentle and caring side of Senna that most people do not know about because of the image that he had created about himself on the track. Senna remains a hero to many drivers from around the world but no place more than in his home in Sao Paulo in Brazil where he had donated millions of dollars for the underprivileged and the disadvantaged street children. Also when his competitor, Eric Comas’ car crashed heavily into a corner, Senna was the first to reach to the scene and rushed to help Comas not caring about his own life.

There was never a driver like him and there never will be.