How the wider motorsport world reacted to Senna’s death

The Indycar paddock

A Brazilian great was testing at Michigan

Twice a Formula 1 world champion and Indianapolis 500 winner, Emerson Fittipaldi became one of Senna’s closest friends in racing. He first met him as a 14-year-old karter, who he invited into the Copersucar Fittipaldi garage during a test at Interlagos: “He was extremely shy, very polite but very quiet.” From there, Fittipaldi became his guide and, later, his confidant.

“When I first came to Britain to race in 1969, my F3 mechanic was Jim Russell’s brother-in-law, Ralph Firman [who went on to co-found Van Diemen, the most successful Formula Ford chassis builder in history]. So, when Ayrton wanted to race in England, like I had done, I called him: ‘Ralph, I have a guy who’s going to win the championship for you’, and he laughed and said, ‘Oh aye, Emerson!’

“When Formula Ford 2000 supported the Austrian Grand Prix, I took Ayrton for a trip along the F1 pitlane in Zeltweg to meet as many team bosses as possible. He didn’t want to, but I said he had to come with me. I wanted him to meet teams who’d have seats available. Using my best English expression, I told them all that he was ‘world championship material’.

Fittipaldi was Indycar testing at Michigan on the day Senna died

Photo by: IndyCar Series

“We enjoyed some great calls together. Even when he got to F1 he’d often come and stay with me in Miami Beach in December, and we’d go running together. When I won the Indy 500 in 1989, Ayrton called immediately to congratulate me. He had just won the Mexican Grand Prix for McLaren. Same day!

“On the day he died, I was testing my Penske-Mercedes Indycar at Michigan. I think it was lap 16 or 17 of a 27-lap run. I got a call – we had a security code if something happened to the car or something serious on track. I backed off immediately and went slowly into the pits. I asked why and they said, ‘Your wife is on the phone’ – can you imagine stopping a test with Penske for Indy like this? I feared one of our kids had a bad accident. My mind was racing.

“I couldn’t believe what she told me. For me, Ayrton was one of those drivers who’d never die driving a race car. It was impossible to hear what happened.” Charles Bradley

Senna's old F3 team WSR picked up the tragic news during Sunday qualifying at Silverstone

Photo by: Motorsport Images

The British F3 paddock

Senna’s old team boss was racing at Silverstone

Senna’s old team from British Formula 3 was still going strong in the championship in 1994. The Imola weekend was a Bank Holiday in the UK, so qualifying at Silverstone for West Surrey Racing and its opposition had taken place on the fateful Sunday. WSR boss Dick Bennetts, who had run Senna to glory in 1983, remembers a sombre weekend.

“We all were waiting, ‘What is the news?’ We’d heard of the accident, and were all wondering, ‘How bad is it? Is he still alive?’

“It was a real bad weekend, because Rubens [Barrichello] had his big accident Friday in the Jordan, and then Saturday with Roland [Ratzenberger]’s accident. We heard about that one and it was, ‘Ooh, that’s two of our ex-drivers on Friday and Saturday’, and then of course Sunday it even got worse. All we knew was he was seriously injured, and we didn’t actually know he had died until later. That evening, I was in the kitchen and getting phone calls from all round the world. Not only was he one of our drivers but he also became a friend.

“He shared a house with Mauricio Gugelmin, who drove for us in 1985, and Ayrton came along to quite a few of those races, even the final round [when Gugelmin clinched the F3 title]. I’ve got a photo of him looking at our rear wing, saying, ‘You haven’t got enough wing compared to all the others’. I’m sad that I never took him up on his offer to go to Brazil and go jet-skiing– he loved all that stuff. Him and Mauricio, they weren’t happy to have a standard jet-ski, they had to have it modified to be quicker than everyone.

“He used to still phone me up. ‘Why aren’t we doing well? Why aren’t we winning? Is it the engine, chassis, driver?’ He always took a keen interest. We got him back in 1984 when he was driving the Toleman. We were struggling with a Spanish driver [Carlos Abella]. I’d said to him and his manager, ‘If you don’t mind, we’ll put one of our ex-drivers in just to check the car out’, and when Ayrton turned up their faces just dropped. They couldn’t believe it!” Marcus Simmons

Senna was a family friend of Formula Vauxhall Lotus frontrunner Ralph Firman and was due to visit the week after Imola

Photo by: Sutton Images/Motorsport Images

The junior paddock

The son of Senna’s FFord chief was at Snetterton

When Ralph Firman was six years old, Ayrton da Silva (as he was then known) won two Formula Ford 1600 titles for the Norfolk-based Van Diemen team run by his parents Ralph Sr and Angela. By 1994, Firman was in his second season of car racing, a title contender in Formula Vauxhall Lotus with Paul Stewart Racing. On the Imola weekend, he was competing at Snetterton, with qualifying on the tragic 1 May and the race on Monday.

“Ayrton was one of the drivers my parents stayed in touch with. I remember him living with us when he was racing for Lotus for six months or so while he was renovating a house down in Surrey. He was always friendly. I was at school most of the time, but I remember him working out around the house. When you’re that age everyone’s friendly and nice, aren’t they? You don’t see anyone as different.

“I can remember exactly where I was in the Snetterton paddock when I was told by my mother. You just couldn’t believe it had happened, especially with the sadness of Roland Ratzenberger the day before – he also raced a Van Diemen in his early years. It was quite a surreal situation. The older you get and the more racing you do, you appreciate not only how great Ayrton was but also his achievements. Being a close family friend, it was a shock to mum and dad as well, and weird to get in a car and race the next day. But that’s motor racing, isn’t it?

“When I was 10, my father let Ayrton know he was buying me my first go-kart, and Ayrton bought me the engine, a DAP that was quite a flier. A few years later, we were going racing in Hong Kong on a street circuit around the Victoria Park area, and Mugen made really great kart engines. We were struggling to get contact with Honda, but after he won the world championship at Suzuka, that evening at the circuit he asked Mr Honda if we could use his son’s engines. Ayrton called my mum that night, and we got a reply pretty sharpish on the Monday morning!

“He was going to come up to Norfolk the week after Imola. That’s the other sad thing.” MS

Nuttall felt the change in atmosphere "like a cloud moving down the pitlane" racing at Dijon

Photo by: Motorsport Images

The sportscar paddock

Endurance racing was rebuilding from a low ebb

Sportscar racing in Europe was undergoing a relaunch in 1994 with the BPR Organisation’s series of International GT Endurance events. A race at Dijon on the same weekend as the San Marino GP yielded another class win and top-three overall for Harry Nuttall in the Bristow Motorsport-run Porsche 911 Carrera RSR he shared with Ray Bellm. He recalls how the mood changed as they celebrated on the podium.

“I remember that weekend very well because my father, Nicholas, came to watch me race, which he didn’t do very often. I have a vivid memory of standing on the podium with Ray and my dad being very pleased, which meant a lot to me.

“We couldn’t spray Champagne because of [French law] Loi Evin, but we were still very happy about another good result. Then it happened – there was a complete change in atmosphere. It puts prickles behind my eyes thinking about it even now. It was like a cloud moving down the pitlane; the whispers started, ‘Senna’s dead, Senna’s dead’. It’s difficult to describe it eloquently, but there was clearly a change in mood. Only as Ray and I walked off the podium were we properly told the news, but we knew something horrid had happened before that.

“We had a motorhome at that race for some reason and I remember watching the start of the grand prix on Eurosport before I got in the car. I thought, ‘Oh no, that’s miserable’, without knowing the worst. I’m not equating what I was doing with a driver in Formula 1, but you just go out and do your job thinking it’s not going to happen to you. I guess you need a bit of a carapace to do dangerous sports.

“To learn that Senna was dead was earth-shattering. It was impossible to imagine that someone of his otherworldly skill could have died. Something seemed wrong with the world.

“Later that week, me and Charlie Rickett, my business partner [and team-mate at Le Mans in the Porsche] were in our tiny little office in London and on the Wednesday we read David Tremayne’s obituary in Motoring News. It was spine-tingling. We had tears in our eyes – no, we were in floods. That’s what Senna’s death meant.” Gary Watkins

Panis was one of the first to test the revised car regulations following Imola

Photo by: Motorsport Images

View from the aftermath…

Imola’s tragedies prompted radical change in F1, with unintended consequences

After the events of Imola, FIA president Max Mosley hastily pushed through a series of changes to the technical regulations for the Spanish Grand Prix. These proved deeply unpopular, with several teams suffering structural problems in testing. Among them was Ligier with its rookie driver Olivier Panis. But the Frenchman believes that the changes benefited the unspectacular Renault-powered JS39B, with which he and team-mate Eric Bernard finished on the podium at Hockenheim in a race of heavy attrition.

“The first test we did with the floor cut was in Lurcy-Levis – we wanted to make some straightline data. And on one run when I put the sixth gear, I lost the rear wing. I had wheelspin in sixth gear! I said, ‘What is that?’ I was so surprised, but lucky compared with Pedro [Lamy], who was in Silverstone to do the test with the Lotus, also with the floor cut.

“Looking in the mirror, I don’t see the rear wing anymore. I just backed off very gently. When I got back to the pits, Frank Dernie [designer] called all the teams to say, ‘Stop testing, this is what happened to us, there is something wrong because we cut the floor’. But it was unlucky for Pedro that when we called Lotus in Silverstone, Pedro was already on the track. He went off because the wing came off and had a big accident [which broke his legs].

“But for us, it maybe helped us a lot – it helped us to develop different things after these new rules because some teams were struggling when we cut the floor. At the end of the season, the performance of the car, even if it’s a 1993 chassis, was pretty OK really. Because I was a rookie driver, first podium, for sure it helped Flavio [Briatore] to decide to keep me for two more years. It was a huge help, even if the Hockenheim podium was lucky.” James Newbold

Panis felt the changes inadvertently help Ligier and duly gave him an extended stay at the team

Photo by: Rainer W. Schlegelmilch / Motorsport Images