The problems with the Senna cult

Twenty five years on from Ayrton Senna's tragic and untimely death, has the myth of Senna now surpassed and even smothered the reality, along with all its many complexities and contradictions? It feels very much as if we're compelled to worship the image rather than weigh the man in full.

Take the Senna Sempre logo, featuring an impressionistic image of his face, consciously aping the visual power of Che Guevara and James Dean iconography. Even rendered in monochrome, his eyes retain that disconcerting intensity.

He has become an ideal, an archetype, a face on a t-shirt - worn, perhaps, by many individuals too young to have seen him race.

Is this kind of nuance really that important, then? Well, it may be impious to suggest it, but really, in an age of works such as the shamelessly hagiographic movie Senna, there exists a clear danger of viewing his legacy through the rosy prism of nostalgia.

Those who die young are often spared the ravages of revisionism. Guevera's reputation as glorious underdog revolutionary and freedom fighter towers over some inconvenient truths - the brutal methods he employed and the later 'mission creep' that led him to dangerous overseas adventures and, ultimately, his death.

Dean arrived on the Hollywood scene on the coat-tails of Marlon Brando and, in departing the mortal firmament with just three starring roles in the can, he left a body of work that would never be sullied by subsequent poor career and lifestyle choices.

Hence the questions of how long Senna might have remained active, how successful he might have been, and what he might have done next are all glorious 'what ifs'. Not for him a tawdry and unedifying dwindling to dilute the power of the myth.

And what a myth it has become. One of the most irksome aspects of the Senna movie is its unwillingness to engage with any sort of nuance, as if the mission of the film-makers was to carve out a veritable stone tablet.

Senna's blatant swerve on his team-mate - nearly putting him in the pit wall - at Estoril in 1988, the tearing up of the pre-race agreement not to pass at Imola in '89, even Ron Dennis's often-stated contention that in many ways Senna and Alain Prost behaved as badly as each other; all narrative elements not conducive to canonisation and therefore not included.

Another curious aspect of the Senna cult has been the requirement to create relics.

No in-car footage exists of his magical and sublime qualifying lap of Monaco in 1988, where he crushed Prost by a second and a half. Footage from '89, where he ousted Prost by a barely less remarkable margin of 1.148s, regularly turned up on YouTube mislabelled as '88, so last year McLaren produced its own facsimile of the '88 lap - by using the official Formula 1 2017 game as the visual engine, complete with bespoke Murray Walker commentary and bouts of artificial VHS screen shimmy. It was at once evocative and weird.

As a Formula 1 fan growing up in the 1980s, I must confess I struggled to warm to Senna. Yes, he was blisteringly quick, but his often appalling manners on track - combined with his messianic sense of entitlement away from it - sat ill with me.

Rarely would a race go by without him chopping abruptly across the nose of a backmarker he felt hadn't paid him due deference. Barely a week passed in the winter of 1989 without the pages of Autosport divulging the latest details of his childish strop with the FIA, a body he felt was institutionally biased against him based on his disqualification from that year's Japanese Grand Prix, an outcome that handed the world title to Prost.

Obviously - Prost was French, FIA president Jean-Marie Balestre was French. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Senna's rivalry with Prost had long since intensified beyond the bounds of rationality.

It took Ayrton to some dark places. He harboured a belief he was receiving inferior equipment. He engaged in bizarrely extreme negotiating tactics with McLaren boss Ron Dennis, such as the impasse over a million and a half dollars in a contract negotiation that had to be settled by a coin toss. Being unfamiliar with the concept, Senna even pushed for clarity over what might happen if the coin rolled into the shagpile carpet and came to rest on its side.

I don't know what I find more unsettling about this - the decadence of deciding such a sum over a coin toss, the neurosis over a neutral outcome, or the fact the famously fastidious Dennis permitted such a tricky-to-clean item as shagpile on his soft furnishings inventory.

And what of Suzuka 1990, where Senna took umbrage when his demand that pole position be moved to the other side of the track was not acted upon, and then deliberately hit Prost at 160mph on the first lap.

Much later Ayrton would, in private, concede this darkly premeditated act wasn't his finest hour.

In the immediate aftermath, though, he tried to brazen it out, and his post-race interview with Sir Jackie Stewart has rightly become the stuff of legend. To my mind only Lance Armstrong has in subsequent years come close to matching Senna's look of sullen, cold fury as his interrogator picked apart the stream of platitudinous cant with which he sought to deny or justify his actions.

"If you no longer go for a gap that exists, you are no longer a racing driver," growled Senna in response to JYS's perfectly legitimate (and statistically rigorous) point that he, Senna, had a measurable propensity for colliding with other drivers.

This utterance has subsequently become a shibboleth for those who would seek to rationalise or even exonerate egregious acts of on-track loutery.

Indeed, it's repeatedly trotted out on social media by the kind of twerp who signs off with the words "end of" by means of peroration, as if the point is axiomatic and inarguable.

Lewis Hamilton names Senna as his childhood hero and inspiration but, apart from his tremendous natural speed, the near-ubiquity of his success and his occasional run-ins with authority, Hamilton has little in common with his idol.

In an era in which it has become almost acceptable to drive a rival off the track and then blame them for having the temerity to be there, Lewis races cleanly for the most part, and with respect. Aren't these values we ought to cherish too when weighing the legacy of drivers past?

More insights into the great Brazilian's remarkable life are included in our Senna celebration magazine, available from now in selected WH Smith's stores or from Autosport.com/senna. Interviews with Senna throughout his career, recollections from his former rivals, technical insights on his successful cars, and a look at the three-time world champion's legacy are all part of the 172-page special.