AYHTON SENNA
The doctor said it was serious. The child had a “motor coordination” problem. Ask him to go a straight line and the boy would turn a corner. Ask him to ride a bicycle and he would eventually end up walking.
Some called him awkward. Others called him different. Milton da Silva called it amazing.
How could his second son, the boy who had shown such an aptitude for Brazil’s racing scene, the boy who had shared such an affection for his father’s love of engines, wheels and motors, truly have a motor coordination problem? Impossible. No doubt Da Silva saw something different in Ayrton, his young boy with the dark hair and the darting eyes. He saw something so wondrous, so spiritual, it would turn a four-year-old into a racing phenom, a teenager into a track terror and a young man into one of the most revered Formula One drivers in the racing league’s long, colorful history.
Ayrton Senna da Silva’s driving skill would make them samba in the streets of his native Sao Paulo, Brazil. His unimaginable death at age 34 in a racing crash in 1994 would break their hearts forever.
“There is no one driver I wanted to be more than Ayrton Senna,” former Formula One champion Michael Schumacher said a decade after Senna’s death.
Schumacher had just broken Senna’s win total and broke down on the podium at the thought of his hero’s passing. “When it comes to racing, he will always be the best.”
Funny how it would all look so uncoordinated from the start. Senna was born on March 21, 1960, in Santana, Brazil, a well-to-do suburb of Sao Paulo. His father owned an auto-parts company and believed that cars would be the key to his son’s success. Labeled awkward and uncoordinated, Senna was somehow a different boy when he slipped behind the wheel of his tiny one-horsepower kart, a gift from his father at age 4. Suddenly he seemed confident and focused.
Each weekend, the family travelled to local parks where Ayrton would drive his kart. By age 8 he was driving the family car. By 10, when his father gave him a fullsize kart, he was driving like no one else his age.
Senna looked to Europe and modeled his focus after such Grand Prix greats as Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart. And a young Brazilian named Emerson Fittipaldi who became the country’s first Formula One World Champion in 1972. At age 12, Ayrton said he would do the same.
It would come sooner than anyone could imagine. Senna led for most of the very first kart race he entered at just 13 years of age. Four years later, he took the South American Kart Championship and then won again a year later. Europe, and the World Karting Championship, called. Senna followed.
But after a few years in the karting circuit, Senna’s life would reach a crossroad. After moving to England to race Formula Ford, he came close to giving it all up. With several other Brazilian drivers ahead of him in higher series, his sponsorship money had dried up. Frustrated, he announced his retirement saying that “a bad driver with money could always get the best car, but a good driver without the same was left out.”
He returned to Brazil to work at the family business, but his father, the man who saw the fire at such an early age, convinced him to go back. With the help of a Brazilian bank and partial sponsorship from his father’s company, Senna returned to racing in 1982 and quickly moved from the Formula Three championship to a Formula One team in 1984.
In F-1, the top tier of open-wheel racing, determination and attention to detail would be his hallmark. He turned Toleman, a second-tier F-1 team, into a contender and then, after moving to Lotus and then McLaren, set the F-1 world on fire.
Teamed with legendary driver Alain Prost, Senna won eight races and his first World Championship in 1988 — just four years into his F-1 career. He also won F-1 titles in 1990 and 1991. Eventually, changing engine suppliers would bring about the decline of McLaren. Only Senna’s brilliance remained. In 1994, that left as well after he fatally crashed into a barrier at the Imola, Italy, race circuit.
More that one million people attended his funeral.
In 162 races entered, he stood on the podium 80 times. He stood on the top tier 41 of those times.
The man with the undeniable spirit for life — a lover of jet skiing, waterskiing, Brazilian food and fast cars — left with an undeniable spirit. An uncoordinated boy who became a determined man.