EP20: Celebrating the Greatness of Aryton Senna

[00:00:00] John Summers is the motoring historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and fast, and not much reliable. On his show, he gets together with various co hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.

Good. Day, good morning. Good afternoon. It is john summers the motoring historian and today I have with us, uh, Eric producer guy and, uh, William Ross Ferrari guy. Welcome gentlemen. Thanks, John. Thanks for having us. Thank you, John. Appreciate it. And you, how are you listeners there? You’re you’ve, you’ve only been listening to this for about 30 seconds, but these gentlemen have, uh, as usual with Mark Gammy, they’ve suffered through half an [00:01:00] hour of me yelling and shouting and cursing and technology because I can’t make the recording.

So in, in the future when podcasting technology works so smoothly, you, you’ll have forgotten the, the world will have forgotten about the challenges those of us have with the, uh, podcasting equivalent of Model T Fords and crank handles and, uh, and all of that. I wanted to do something slightly different with, uh, with this format today.

I I’ve tried to do a pivot to do, to talk in a slightly more serious way than, than historically I’ve done on, on these pods with Mark Gammy. And that’s why I wanted to have Eric, uh, and, and William on this time. The occasion of our pod today is, is to talk about 30 years. It’s the passing of Ayrton Senna.

May he rest in peace. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if he does rest in peace. That’s the question. Isn’t it? Mm hmm. In life, it didn’t seem as if he would. And perhaps that’s really what [00:02:00] we’ve got to be, be thinking about here. And I, my sort of reflection on, on Senna’s been is that, you know, Alan Henry, who’s a journalist that I don’t particularly rate, but he wrote a book about Senna called as time goes by.

I think what’s interesting about that title is. It hints at the fact that our ideas about somebody like Senna change as time goes by and I feel like that’s been The, for society at large with, with center and, and even for myself as a center fan, and I really was a, a center fan in period. So look, Eric, I, I know you are a, you are fond of this and, and the younguns are, uh, are fond of this kind of question, aren’t they?

Who was their greatest of all time and. I’ve tried to put together a little agenda for us here to, to allow us to examine that question in kind of a sensible way. I’ll talk a little bit about the work that I’ve done in, in, in the past, sort of thinking [00:03:00] about this. Really, it started with me being like, I was obsessed by him as a boy.

Well, what was the who, why, what, when of that? And, and I wanted to, to grow into that a little more so. And what’s important about that, John, is. As I like to say, even on break fix is we’re all petrol heads of a certain age. We grew up with Senna and Senna shaped our view of the motor sports world, maybe in different ways.

Maybe it was his triumphs at Monaco. Maybe it was those very long promotional ads. He did with Acura, you know, when he’s out there in the loafers on Suzuka, debuting the brand new. NSX, he just had this charisma about him. And I think it affected people in different ways, but all of us are from that era of racing.

And so looking back 30 years, since he passed away, I mean, he would have been what, 60 some years old this year. Yeah. Six, the. Four or 65, I think it was 64 that he was born in, wasn’t [00:04:00] it? He was 34 or 32. He is the same age as Jesus was when he died. I always think that that’s the, the, there’s this sort of, you know, and, and it’s a little bit like that very cynical LA movie producer said when James Dean was killed, that, you know, it’s, uh, you know, you’ve like great career move.

Yeah. You know, you’ve like died LA died young and, and left a good looking corpse. So William, what about you? I mean, Aton left a mark on you too during his time with us. You know, yes and no. I appreciate what he, his skill, his talent. That’s when you really started getting into just, hey, you know, that’s all those guys race was F1.

I want to say Senna was more of a bully than, you know, anything. He forced his way to the front. Yeah, he could drive a car, there’s no doubt about that. But I think, It’s kind of one of those, you know, I don’t know. I just I think it’s ego gotten away a lot of times in regards to it and he may or may have not allegedly tried to take out Alan Prost more than [00:05:00] once.

But we’ll talk about that later. But you bring up something really important because I can draw a parallel and I’m sure John will get to this later between Max Verstappen and Ayrton Senna because the parallel there is you can take the boy out of the go cart. Right. Right. But it’s very hard to take the cart racer out of the boy.

And if you watch Senna, he grew up carting and I’m John, I’m sure you’ll cover this private go kart tracks at his house in Brazil and all this kind of thing. And cart racing has a certain sort of race craft to it. That if you take that to its logical conclusion in formula racing, he continued that same driving style.

He drove his McLaren MP4. Like it was a go cart. I mean, people make that it drives like a go cart will send a drove it like it was a go cart. And so you see that in his race craft. You see that in his aggression in that bullying as you call it. And so I grew up noticing that too. And like you, I respected him.

We put sent on a pedestal. But there was [00:06:00] all, there were other characters in the shadows. There were the Damon Hills and the Nigel Mansells and the Allen Pros and the Michael Schumachers that learned from Senna. And so we’ll get into all that. And John, I don’t want to put the cart to before the horse because this is your show.

So let’s begin at the beginning. No, I, I love your, uh, you know, I, we’ve used this word bullying, haven’t we? We’ve, you know, you, you asked William for his opinion and he, he prevaricates and he hesitates a little bit and we get the same kind of response as we might get from an old NASCAR fan, somebody who maybe wasn’t a Dale Earnhardt fan in period and is now asked to reflect on, on Dale Earnhardt.

And I think that’s a, A really useful sort of parallel to think about is, is that both of them, um, sort of died in period and, and maybe weren’t that well loved or had some tactics that were, were a bit questionable. And that, as you say, it changed the sport. It put them on a pedestal and you’ve, you know, we’ve got bully and we’ve got charismatic and, and, and this is [00:07:00] sort of what we’re.

Picking around that with, with Senna in, in, in general and, and I think, you know, I’ll say it now and we, you know, we can come to it later on in the show as, as, as we talk on as well. But I think greatness, my thinking about Senna has led me to think that greatness lies not in The number of accomplishments you have, how you do the accomplishment.

So in other words, when we think about Prost and Senner, it’s not about statistics. It’s about how they did it. When we think about Muhammad Ali, it is a charisma, but it’s not a, You know, Oh, he was a handsome guy and all the girls liked him. It’s something more than that. And it’s a good place to start with Senna, right?

Because for me, there was no, nobody loved motorsport in my family. And, you know, formula one just happened to be on the TV on a Sunday afternoon. And I, I watched it and it was a small TV and it was color, but it was small and the cars droned and the volume was low. And I [00:08:00] was eating barbecue at a friend’s house and I watched the JPS Lotus.

Be in front and I like the guy in the yellow helmet driving it, you know, there was something about that that reached out of the TV, you know, out of the helmet and out of the car and through the TV and, you know, thousands of miles and, and, and gripped me. And I think then I had that. And I feel like.

That’s what we respond to when we talk about, you know, the, the greatest effort. Now this business of the comparison with Verstappen and Carters. Yeah, I think that’s the, this is a valid comparison. This is something I want to talk about with Senna is, is that Senna is at almost the end of the epic era of motorsport.

And it was like gladiatorial and the beginning of this sort of PlayStation WWE, like wrestling, it’s all for the show kind of way of being with formula one. And. You know, we can talk about that more later on, but certainly before the era of Senna and, and Prost, there was no requirement, you know, [00:09:00] not everybody came from go karting and James Hunt didn’t come from go karting.

Nicky Lauda didn’t come from go karting, you know, Mike Hawthorne would have laughed at you if he told you you needed to drive one of those ridiculous little things before you could drive a proper racing car. So, but arguably, of course, those little. Rear engined racing cars that the guys like Sterling Moss started off in, in Coopers and so on with the little V twin motorcycle engines.

Those kind of cars were pretty similar to go carts. So arguably Formula One always had this kind of Go kart heritage, but certainly Senna is the beginning of that era where if you didn’t come from karting, you’re really going to struggle. And if you’re going to drive Formula One, you aren’t messing around going to Le Mans at the weekend, you know, you’re not like, Oh, I’m going off to Indy this week.

I might just win Indy and then come back and do Formula One, like Graham Hill or. You know, Andretti, if Ferrari called him, he called Penske and say, I’m not racing for you this weekend. Got to go to Monza and win the [00:10:00] Italian Grand Prix for that old man, Ferrari, wouldn’t he? Would he, you know, that wasn’t around by, by the eighties.

Right. And that does play into the greatness conversation, because I think a measure of greatness is breadth. Right. And Senna arguably didn’t show that, that kind of breadth. But let’s, let’s talk about that later on. Let’s frame Senna as, as, uh, as, as you put it. Asked me to that, you know, a little bit about background and history.

So yes, Brazilian and yes, wealthy and not just wealthy, but, but also, you know, mom and dad cared. So, you know, the carting didn’t come easy, but when it came, there was the money to do the carting and there was the money to do the carting properly, and it was all about whether or not you hurt yourself, not whether or not.

You blew the motor up on the cart and, and that might seem obvious and that might seem normal for how modern racing drivers do it, but that was not the path for Bruce McLaren, you know, that was not the path for NASCAR drivers. It was often all about the shoestring or for Fangio, [00:11:00] even it was, uh, much more of a, of a hard scrabble kind of, uh, kind of existence there.

So Senna comes to England in late seventies, early eighties. And, and this is because England is perceived from where he is in South America, in Brazil as the center of motorsport. And, and that’s, you know, an interesting thing and it plays into Senna’s career because you’ve got the FIA based in Paris and you’ve got all the teams who were all based within about 150 miles of Oxford, which is a nice university town.

Which itself is only about 200 miles, just north, west, west of London there. So, you’ve got this sort of British Mafia in Formula 1. What Ferrari called the Garagista teams, you know, the Tyrrells and the Clarens and the Williamses. You know, these are British teams run by British people who are using the Ford V8, which is all right, an American engine, but [00:12:00] it’s built in England.

And, you know, you get the human gearboxes from maidenhead, which is all the way from Heathrow when you land at Heathrow maidenhead is all the way out to, you know, wherever your base is at did call or woking or whichever team you’re, you’re, you’re with at the time. And, and there’s a definite sense. I think that by the end of the seventies, the French in F in the FIA, well, I.

F this, right away with these three and a half liter V8, and we’re going to go to these turbo motors. And, and so this is sitting at the back of this, isn’t it? Because Renault comes and the best driver that Renault is able to produce is, uh, Prost, isn’t it? And he was the first French world champion. You know, which is really a remarkable thing, given they invented motorsport.

The first French Grand Prix was in bloody 1906 and it took them that long. They couldn’t get a world champion together. So maybe you can argue, no wonder Balestrin, the Frenchman running the FIA at the time wanted to, uh, to change. Anyway, long and short was this was [00:13:00] the lie of the land. Everything was in England.

Just Senna came to England and in the movie, he talks about racing with this guy, Terry Fullerton in go karting. As an Englishman, what the media picked up on was when he first did Formula 3, and the, I think it was the 1983 British Formula 3 season, he and Brundle, it was him and Martin Brundle, hammer and tongs, and Brundle beat him.

You know, and it’s classic Senna, right? That Senna did that histrionics where there was contact and, you know, did all the coming from behind. But however you may feel about Martin Brundle now, and I know he’s more famous for his clownish gridwalks with Machine Gun Kelly now than, uh, than the driver that he once was.

But, but for a lot of, of Englishmen, certainly for me, If I were ever to see him and shake his hand, I would still be shaking hands with, in my opinion, the only person who ever legitimately beat Senna. Nobody else ever beat Senna in the same car, but not [00:14:00] before or since, than Brundle that year in, uh, in, in Formula 3.

He had a wife. Did you know that James? He came with, I think her name was Adrian. She didn’t speak much English. I don’t think didn’t he date music sensation Shusha for a while. There was like a whole thing going on with the two of them. Oh, but this was later. He married when he was quite young and they came to him and she was like 19 and he was 21 or something like that.

And I’m not sure if you’ve ever spoken to South Americans when they feel like relocated to Seattle. Manchester, if you speak to Spaniards or Italians who are living in like Scotland or something like that, they really struggle with the weather. The weather is really hard. It’s the dreary, grey days. Even people in California who have grown up outside of San Francisco.

San Francisco is these sort of grey months in the end of the summer and I don’t notice it because I’m English and my friend from Cleveland, he doesn’t notice it either because, you know, Cleveland’s like that too. But if you’re not [00:15:00] used to it, it’s really hard. And I think, I think she struggled with that.

I think she struggled with the focus on racing. I think she struggled living in a house with the boys because Senna lived in a house with, do you remember Mauricio Googleman? I think after formula one, he was one of these people. He was better than the formula one career gave him credit for. And didn’t he wash up in IndyCar?

Didn’t he do IndyCar for a bit? Yeah. He didn’t do too bad in IndyCar. He won a few times there, but yeah, he actually, yeah, I think more known for IndyCar than he was as. Yeah, so he and Senna were mates. And the other guy that was here that really put in a good word for Senna was a guy called Johnny Chicotto, who is a Brazilian who lived, who had done, he’d done motorcycles and he did, he did like big rig racing when big rig racing was big in the eighties as well.

But he was somebody. Well, I think had the ear of the British motorsport community a little bit and put in a good word for center and, and, you know, and the, the drives did the same, but, but yeah, I think fundamentally. So, so as the relationship struggle really early on, I feel like you see a chance, you [00:16:00] see Senna’s commitment, right.

Faced with, you know, go home to Brazil and make sure the marriage works or do the racing while, you know, he stayed and she went home. He chose the racing. Yeah. Yeah. Right choice. So it’s funny. I was talking with, uh, with an American guy who’s not really a car guy earlier today, but he was talking about I rock Camaros and I remember that I, and I realized just what a special place this, you know, all different drivers all driving the same car, international race to champions.

Just what kind of cachet that, that had, you know, in Europe that we do similar of these kind of one mark. Racist. There’s, I think if you Google it up, there’s like the Formula One drivers all racing Austin metros around Silverstone somewhere, which is basically like a, the beetle cup series. Well, Mercedes, I believe it was Mercedes organized an event.

And Eric, you may know this. Was it at the Nordschleife? Or was it at the Sud Schleife? I don’t even know exactly. Yeah. It was what would be considered [00:17:00] now the Nürburgring GP course. I’ve actually watched this more than once. There was when they were debuting the new Cosworth powered 192. 3 liter 16 valve, which wasn’t even the Evo or the Evo two yet.

So Mercedes was launching their new one 90 E. And so, yeah, they did basically an IROC between all sorts of, you know, already famous names of the time. And what I take away, spoiler alert from this race is if I remember correctly, Senna didn’t win. And you said, you know, he doesn’t get often beaten by people, but he got beaten by Han Stuck, which doesn’t surprise me at all.

That’s how loud it was that serious. Didn’t he? Overall? Yes, I believe he did because he was racing in that too, but in a particular race, the one at the Nurburgring GP track, Han Stuck took home the trophy for that. I could be wrong. I’ve watched it a couple of times. I’m a huge Han Stuck fan as well. So to me, to see Senna in that I rock.

That was pretty awesome. I always feel like a lot of the other people in the race didn’t take it that seriously and I feel like Senna took it as a serious as a [00:18:00] serious opportunity put his name on the map and and he was almost too serious at that time because the car is a great car right the car was mercedes version of the e30 m3 so it was like the little sedan with You know, two and a half liter in line six, but it had like a dogleg five speed.

Yeah, I had one. I beat the hell out of it. It was a fun car. Well, that, that was the problem with them, right? Was that everybody who ever had them did that to them. Yeah. Slight correction for homologation purposes. It was a 2. 3 liter four cylinder 16 valve. Yeah. And then it went to two five. In the United States.

The streetcar was a 2. 5 liter six, but the actual homologated streetcars were four cylinders because so was the E30 M3 because they planned to use the 190 in Raleigh and they did use it in Raleigh. Wow, Eric. Wow. You’re a veritable. Did I know something that you didn’t know? You’re a veritable Wikipedia.

Yeah. I, uh, wow. So with Senna, [00:19:00] right? The real like, everything that we talked about so far is like the prologue to the race career, right? This like status of the go or not, you know, that where is the number of question we’re talking about really like chapter one would be that year that he spent in 1984 with Tolman.

Now, I went to Goodwood a couple of years ago, and I have a mate who goes quite regularly, and I guess they got a Tolman, whether it was the one that Senna had or not, but they have a Tolman. I think the model is the TG184. It has a really bizarre, like, double wing, like a double element. Rear spoiler where the second element sort of goes over the engine cover.

So the car looks weird at Goodwood. I remembered that like midway through the year, he was still using last year’s car. And this is also the era where it’s like four cylinders and it’s got a massive turbo on it, and you’ve got like a, a knob, basically like an oven controller just under the steering wheel and you just turn the boost up with, with that.

And Mike, Mike, I [00:20:00] run a class at Stanford every year. You know, I, in preparing for that, I found a Mario Andretti quote about those cars from that, that turbo era. And he said, you know, the power was not benign power. I need you to think about if somebody like Mario Andretti, who can drive an 850 horsepower sprint car on dirt, like with his eyes closed, if he’s talking about the power not being benign power, I think you really get a sense of just how horrible to drive those cars were.

Now, Old P. K. Nelson P. K. is always good for, uh, for a quote, isn’t he? He described the Monaco Grand Prix as like riding a bicycle around your living room. If you do the computer games, you kind of get a sense of just how tight it is. And, of course, Monaco is one of the places where Senna’s skill really demonstrate, you know, where Senna really demonstrated the difference between him and your average bear in terms of that [00:21:00] ability to get closer.

Senna. To the barrier and brake later and do it over and over and over and over and over again for three hours. Because it comes from kart tracks, it’s very similar. It’s very parallel to his experience. So him standing basically alone from a lot of the other drivers that didn’t come up through karting, he was in his element at a place like Monaco.

Just like in a kart race too when he crashed out leading the race by god knows how what he went back to his flat in Monaco to go pout instead of going back to the pits. Just like a kid racing karts. So, so that actually, that race was the mon that the gap there, that that’s a, that whole incident, right? I vividly remember it.

I don’t know. I must have been, it was 88, wasn’t it? So it was the spring of 88. So I would’ve been what, 14, nearly 15. By that time, like thoroughly committed, like my Sunday mornings where I would get out of bed, I would look at the newspaper. And you knew in the newspaper, if he was on pole, he could win.

And if he wasn’t on pole, you [00:22:00] know, he wasn’t, you know, the, he was going to struggle. And then McLaren, yeah, it was different. But if Pross was on pole, he was going to struggle. Well, I remember looking and thinking, is that a misprint? Because he was a second and a half faster than Pross. Well, they were like, and then it was only like a minute and a half around the track.

It was like, it was like processed mystic gear in comparison. And in the race, he just drove off at the front and did the same thing. If we want to get into not whether or not center was the greatest effort, but if we really want to get into centers greatness, it was right there because the gap between him and everybody else was so enormous.

And the skill involved, the cars were hard to drive and the skill involved. Was arguably greater than, so if, if Senna’s greatness is anywhere, it lies in the performance gap between him and anybody else. Right. So, so that, that year at Monaco, he was way faster than everybody else. He went faster and faster and faster.

They radioed him to slow down. It broke his concentration. He put it in the barrier. And understandably, I had [00:23:00] no problem with him going back to the battery. Like what is it? It’s not like I’m not like some NASCAR guy. Thank you. My sponsor, you know. And thanks to, you know, whatever dog food that’s sponsoring me and thanks to my mum in the garage and thanks to my dad for patting me on the back when I was five years old and thanks to God above.

No, right? No, I’m pissed off. I made a mistake. I did it in front of everybody else. And I don’t need to talk to Honda. I don’t need to talk to Ron Dennis. And I certainly don’t need to talk to any newspaper wankers about what just happened. Oh, Ed, and can you tell us what happened? Oh, yeah, I plane crashed out of the sky.

And it just disturbed me and, and, you know, cause of that, I jinked to the left. I lost concentration and put it in the barrier. Idiot. Anybody could see that, right? Anybody could see that the person who emerged from that room never made that mistake again, never overdrove again. Never. Right from then on, the gap between him and everybody else, he never overstepped it.

[00:24:00] And in the wet, it was so obvious, and it was so obvious at Monaco, because we just talked about 88 being the learning moment. Four years before, 84 is the year that he’s with Tolman. It rains. Cross wants the race to stop because it’s raining, which is understandable, you know, slip tires and all, and he’s leading and all.

He’s pulling the Nicky Lauda thing. XANA is coming with the thunder. And actually passes him on the finishing line, thinks he’s won, but because, you know, the event is that with the rules of the game are that if you stop the race early, it always winds back to the way the result was on the previous lap.

Of course, Prost was leading then, so he’s the winner. And I think if you, it’s, it’s on YouTube, you can see what Senate’s thinking on the podium with Prince Rainier. Right? You can see what Senna’s thinking there. There’s already a sense of the narrative that appears in the movie of this, you know, bloody French stitching me up.

I’m sure, I’m sure back in Woking, I’m sure Ron Dennett [00:25:00] and the English mechanics didn’t say to him, bloody French stitching you up. I’m sure none of that. I’m sure all those people out Honda in Swindon, just down the road from Woking, I’m sure none of them went, bloody French stitching you up. Right? I’m sure none of that happened.

I wasn’t aware of that in period. Are we saying that, then, is the moment, that is the event horizon for the beginning of the Prost Senna rivalry, which continued for years? No, it was there all along, because Prost was the guy to beat. Once P. K. was no longer really in the fray. And I really wonder how seriously Senna ever took PK, because PK is so seriously overlooked.

I need to do a thing right and think and write properly about PK. But if, if you go back to 81, 82, 83, people like Gordon Murray, And I’ve no reason to doubt him. People like Bernie Ecclestone considered PK the very best guy. So [00:26:00] what happened, right? Because by the late eighties, he wasn’t there. Well, if you look at recent interviews with PK, they’ll say that he had that huge prang at the beginning of 1987 at Tamburello, right?

The same accident, Berger had the same accident that would kill Senna. PK had that accident and he was never the same again. He reckoned he didn’t see the same way afterwards. So that year, 1987, remember where he was at William? Right. I remember famously he called Nigel Mansell’s wife ugly. The reason he did that.

Was I’ve seen him at, there’s an interview that he did at Goodwood just recently with Rob Widows. It’s out there on YouTube somewhere where Widows asks him which championship he was most proud of. And he says 1987 because I wasn’t fast anymore. I’d lost my eyesight and I realized the only advantage I had against Mansa was in testing.

So I knew that I had to split up the briefing. I couldn’t sit in the same driver briefing because then I’d give up my advantage. So that was [00:27:00] why I started doing things like saying his wife was ugly because I wanted him to, but he wouldn’t hit me. It was so English. I wanted him to try and hit me. And then we definitely be split up and then our briefings will be separate.

And then I could have the settings, which would be enough to enable me to have the competitive advantage, which You know, and PK did win the championship that year, but if you look, he rarely in those later years, he rarely out drove other people. It was usually the car and a well judged race. Those early years, I think he was really good.

I don’t know how he compared with, with Senate in, in those early years. But for me, Senna always wanted to be prost, but I dare say, or Prost, I dare say that was because. Prost had the best car in those years that when Senna was in the sport and really focused. It was. You know, if you think Pross was the dominant driver, 84, 85, 86.

And those were the years that Senna had moved from just trying to get to Formula One to being in Formula One and really [00:28:00] thinking what’s it going to take for me to achieve my goal here. So to bring our listeners up to speed, so we’re sitting in the middle 80s, we’re talking 84 to 87 right now, Senna moves from Toleman to Lotus.

And then I would just say, Eric, one more thing on that Toleman years and on that Monaco Grand Prix. And I should say the Toleman like caught fire, blew up, unreliable, just crappy, not competitive for the rest of the year. Right? So, so it’s that much, but arguably Stefan Beloff had an even better race than Senna in that Monaco Grand Prix.

And if you look at Beloff’s other achievements, we’re having a conversation, who was the greatest ever. If you really want to start writing. Beloff’s 1984 was arguably more stellar than Senna. At the same time, since we’re gonna focus more on the rivalry between Prost and Senna, Prost is running for Renault at this time.

He has not made the transition to Ferrari yet, right? To McLaren, yeah. To McLaren, well send it to McLaren and Pro to [00:29:00] Ferrari. Yeah. McLaren , right? They both step up their game and go with major manufacturers in 88. Yes. Um, so, uh, PRO is with McLaren from, it leaves Reno in I think 83 and by 84. Yeah, by 84 is at McLaren with Lauer Lau’s Champion 85.

He’s at McLaren 80 and right the way through until Senator joins in 88, and then they have. The year where it’s really mano a mano in, in 88, I was going to say 85 is the year that Senna steps from a second rate team to really a team where you can feel like you can challenge the championship. And this is when he joins Lotus.

And again, the within the British press, there’s a lot of contention around the joining of Lotus because he said, I’ll join Lotus, but I don’t want Derek Warwick in the other car. Now you may or may not know Derek Warwick. I mean, he runs a chain of Honda dealerships now, but he was one of these roughly tough, the Mark Blundell kind of working class, not, you [00:30:00] know, James Hunt, dad was a stockbroker kind of guy, working class guys who were really, there was a, you know, Warwick could have been a formula one world champion.

If you look at Warwick’s performance in, in arrows, had that cards fallen differently, he could have been a formula one world champion. Right. And recognizing that center. I said to Lotus, you can only build one fucking car for the race that’s actually going to finish, so you’re building it for me. I’m not having you building it, you know, half the good bits on Warwick’s car and half the good bits on mine, and then we both don’t finish.

Like, you’re putting a rabbit in the other car and I’m driving. The car that you can actually build properly. And to his credit, Peter war, the boss of Lotus was like, okay. So the other guy, the rabbit was this guy, Johnny Dumfries, Googling. He was one of England’s richest men. He owned a castle in Scotland, which he sold.

He was a philanthropist, beautiful daughter. He he’s a rat hole worth falling down. To be like, I was out in Senna’s teammate was just part of [00:31:00] the coolness of, uh, the Marquis of Dunfermline, I think was, uh, was his name. John Dumfries is the Anyway, so Dumfries was the teammate that Senna had at Lotus, right?

This is the year that Renault are doing Lotus engines. And although the Lotus chassis wasn’t great, the engine made all the power. I just want to pause a little bit. We talk about these turbo engines and we say, oh, 1500 horsepower, 1300 horsepower. I don’t know what you guys have read. My understanding is the BMW 4, not V6, made 1500 horsepower once on a flash reading.

Senna. In this era in a qualifying spec motor could expect 1300 horsepower, but that engine is only going to last the outlap, the fast lap and the inlap. It’s done. And when we move away from qualifying engines, which we do in this period, we don’t get that. So what Senna got in race trim and what Senna got in race trim with the boost down versus what he got in race [00:32:00] trim with the boost up.

Is TBD, you know, total aside, well not total aside, but relevant angle. I read an interview with Patrick Tornbay quite recently where he was talking about the Ferrari 126C. And how he was saying, this is an earlier turbo car, like early 80s turbo car. He reckoned that you never knew what power you were going to get from one minute to another, because they hadn’t even figured out the metering.

In other words, you could go around one corner and the turbo would blow a lot, and you could go around the other way and put the G forces the other way, and it would not blow as much. So, all of these horsepower figures are completely, like, Variable, but that’s the amount of horsepower he was dealing with at that time.

And there’s their wide tires, wide slick, but relative to the era or modern cars, not much error, not very aero complicated. I guess the other thing that’s very noticeable for us when we look at cars like, you know, Senna’s 97 and 98 T that was the models there is your [00:33:00] ankles. Your feet and ankles are in front of the front axle.

That means if there’s an accident. there is a little bit of plastic, you know, the brake master cylinder and your feet against the barrier, which is why, you know, those eighties drivers now they all walk with a bit of a limp. You’ll see Brundle he walks with a bit of a limp because all of them have broken their ankles and feet.

Multiple times. So going back to these horsepower numbers, so I’m leaning a little bit on my VW Porsche Audi knowledge, and in 87, the McLaren MP four slash three, the predecessor to the famous infamous Sena MP four four was powered by the TG Porsche V six, and I remember seeing those cars at the 87 Monaco Grand Prix.

The things we’re talking about in the Porsche books. Those Formula One cars were rated at 850 horsepower. I didn’t think they were making race trim. I would say that was race trim, right? But I never saw numbers above a [00:34:00] thousand in the Porsche world. So I would say if we use that as a benchmark in, at that time, Formula One had become more of like spec racing, like it is today.

They had to fit within a certain horsepower window. So in race trim, they were all somewhere probably between 830 and 870 on race day, 7, 000 horsepower. No, no, no. You, you had a knob. There was a gas, there was a gas limit. You had a certain amount of gas. So if you turn the wick right up and add it making a thousand horsepower, you’d pass everybody and then run out of gas.

That was old school DRS. What, well, okay. Right. But, but what kind of racing is it? Like, is this formula one? When you’re losing the race, cause you running out of gas or, you know, in order to pass, I’m like turning up the boost. The seats are really relevant for Senna because those early years with Lotus, those races that I watched at the barbecue where Simon Leake was the lads.

Now his dad had a Saab turbo Saab 900 turbo, which I can a nine seven three BMJ. So we’re not going to play now. Isn’t that crazy? [00:35:00] Those races, right? Senna would piss off at front and then would break down or run out of gas. And there was talk in the British press at the time that this was, it was just showboating, you know, he didn’t, and of course he was hugely insulted by that, and I was thinking about that earlier today, that that completely misunderstood who Senna was as a person, that was a, a Paul Troonish move, and Senna was nothing, not at all.

Before we move on just a little bit. So I’m coming to the table with a little Porsche knowledge. I want to lean on William a little bit. Do you remember horsepower? Why some of the power figures of what the Ferrari formula cars were putting down at that time, just for comparative purposes, as John mentioned, you’d bet you, I mean, they all had, you know, back then they were 30 engines, 40 engineers, because they would just qualify motor, pitch it.

You know, what do you like? They rebuilt it. They got rid of it, but you know, they could crank that up for it But I know back then it was about 850 in that range give or take 10 200 that the biggest trick was especially during the turbos one [00:36:00] obviously mileage wise but is how the power came on because You know, you have the guys going, okay, I’m in coming in the apex.

I haven’t hit the apex yet, but I’m putting my foot to the floor because by the time I hit the apex coming out, that’s when the turbo kicks in. So it’s all about moderating and be able to know when I handle the horsepower. And like John was saying is it was so erratic. It was kind of hard to have that flow going to go.

You know, that’s great. But I, I, parameter wise, whatnot, I know they’re all in that 850 range. And what you described is what I’ve also heard from talking to several 935 drivers where mitigating the turbo lag was the biggest thing they had to do because it would kick them in the chest when it was on boost.

And after that, they were just done. Dogs. So they had to really keep them just strung up as much as they could to stay in the boost range and then made the cars really twitchy, made it hard to drive. And there’s just monsters to begin with. So I can see that translating to formula one, but 88 for me, as we transition into this, I know John wants to go here because [00:37:00] it’s a special year.

It’s that potpourri. It’s that mixed bag of formula one that I want us to go back to because we sort of ditched the turbos. But there were still some turbos around. And then you saw the V12 Ferrari return. You had, you know, the MP44 Honda engine. You had all these different, just awesome cars running together.

And sort of the end of the turbo era that had started in the 70s. Right, John? Yeah, they wind the, they wound the boost down. So I think so. 87 Senna, 86 is the last JPS car. And he finished fourth that year, fourth year after the Lotus that he had in 87 was the model was the a hundred T it was camel sponsored and the car just, the chassis wasn’t up to scratch.

The interesting thing about that car was active ride. And by that year, you know, Senna won the street races. And if it was wet. You know, that was, was it so where anywhere where it was, where there weren’t those two parameters, he wasn’t winning. So it was [00:38:00] really exciting for me when he went to McLaren at last, because that was, was a good, you know, they were considered the best team at the time.

And of course, what you weren’t expecting was that that car turned out to be arguably. The greatest formula one car ever. I mean, certainly a completely dominant season and it is worth drilling into that, right? That there were 16 races and that McLaren won 15 of them. And the only one it didn’t win was the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.

Which took place two weeks after old man Ferrari died. So it was the first Grand Prix after the old man died. I don’t know what happened to Prost in the race. I need to look it up and see what happened to him in the race. But Senna was out in front doing his like aggressive passing of back markers. And a guy called Jean Louis Schlesser, a sports car driver who was subbing in the Williams.

Didn’t see him coming, turned into him, Senna got airborne in the first chicane, crashed out of the race, and the Ferraris were second [00:39:00] and third and went on and won. And it was all super poetic and McLaren’s perfect copy of book that year was like, was blotted. I guess the thought about that year was quite early on, it was clear how much better the car was.

So it developed into this duel between Senna and Prost. And certainly by the time of Monaco, it was clear. That when Senna won, Prost finished second, but if Prost won, Senna struggled to finish second. He tended to not finish second, or just generally have some other, you know, Senna esque kind of histrionics that was nowadays.

There’s so much emphasis on winning, completing every race, and you get penalized so much in the points if you don’t finish. But in those days, it wasn’t really like that. To illustrate that, Prost got far more points through the season, right? But in those years, there were 16 races, but you could only count your best 11 results towards the championship.

So early on, it became clear. The, it wasn’t about acquiring points. It was [00:40:00] about winning every weekend. And that I absolutely love. Let’s pull on the thread here though, because there’s some really important other things that are happening in the world of motorsport and especially in the automotive world, and this leans back into Williams camp.

When 1988 signifies. A very important time in Ferrari, right, William? August 14, 1988 is the day Enzo Ferrari died. The last car he blessed was the F40 and the Ferrari 640, which would be the next year’s Formula One car. Those were sort of the last two cars. I don’t want to say he was directly involved in the F40 for sure.

This is a pivotal moment for Ferrari. They’re getting their asses handed at them by McLaren with a Japanese engine from Honda, and their answer is The Ferrari 640 with a B12 going back to Enzo’s original methodology, big engine, big power, the hell with the rest of it. Well, for 89, [00:41:00] they banned turbos. Yeah.

That’s what I’m going to guess. So I was at 88, you still had teams running some, you know, some had a turbo, some were running the Cosmo, it’s all that kind of stuff. It was kind of across the board, but they didn’t develop that engine overnight. It was already planned. And kind of going back to that one winning two weeks after, You go really in deeply in that.

Some people kind of say it was all rigged just because of that, you know, it was Enzo had passed and there was all this colluding going on and whatnot saying, Oh, we have to have Ferrari win, at least coming first one, two of you, which no, but you know, it just, it’s. It’s one of those situations where it’s just kind of, you know, that storybook thing is like, oh, it’s too good to be true.

Senna was so aggressive with the passing of Bat Marcus, right? When it happened, I remember like being mad, but also feeling like, well, it had to happen sooner or later, even at the end, right? Even his passing at the end, it was he who lives by the sword. We’ll surely die by the sword. Yeah, exactly. You know, and going into 89, though, going through, obviously, you know, turbos are gone.

And that’s when you had all, you had [00:42:00] V8s, V10s, the V12. The biggest Achilles heel they were saying about that was weight. That’s what the biggest kind of problem was with that car, just because the weight that motor added. But the diversity that you had, you know, where Formula One was going in regards to the cars, what they’re able to do.

And just, you know, development wise, where everything was going was, it was such a great time. In regards to that, I mean, from, you know, your late eighties into your mid nineties was just awesome. You know, and then what you’re doing with McClare and everything like that with the cars. I mean, there were epic cars, some of the best F1 and arguably my opinion, some of the best looking F1 cars ever built.

I mean, just gorgeous. And what’s funny is if you compare those cars to the ones of today, I’ve made the joke and it’s not too far off that the wheelbase of a current F1 car is the same as a Ford F 150, they’re absolutely huge at like 140 plus inches wheelbase. If you look at Senna’s MP44, which was at car week at Pebble beach last year, where John and I were together to use the phrase again, it’s like [00:43:00] a go kart.

It’s tiny, tiny. And to your point from earlier, John, I believe it was Tanner Faust. actually drove that car. I don’t know why it was him, but he drove that car and talked about it a couple of years ago. And he goes, I don’t understand how they drove these things. It’s like impossible to drive and to drive at the limit.

He couldn’t fathom doing what Senna did. And on this theme of greatness, and we’re going to touch on this later on, but that is the thing, isn’t it? That motorsport is about leaning out of a high window. It’s who can lean the furthest out of the high window without actually falling, right? And greatness is about who can do that You know, the highest window.

And, and these cars were very high window. They were hard to, to drive properly. And the, the other thing is, although the, you know, we’re talking about monster, the circuits are the same. The, the runoff was very different. And some of the circuits they used were very different. You know, they were super unsafe, throwback circuits in place of a lot of them all.

You know, a lot of the circuits now that are very modern and safe [00:44:00] and sanitized. I guess the aero, you know, we talked about after Senna, one of the things after Senna’s passing was that they moved the front axle line back. And, you know, we were talking about the world of Porsche. That’s the difference between a Porsche 956 and a Porsche 962 is where the axle line is, you know, it, it, it, it, The, I feel like modern cars, they’re just so much more aerodynamically complicated.

The aerodynamics were less sophisticated then. So, you know, that MP4 strike four, it has the adjustable elements on the front wing and the adjustable elements on the rear wing and the side pods are just the side pods. There’s no arrow or anything to do with that. The wings of the wings, whereas. A modern car, your sense is the whole car is part of the wing there.

I think the other thing to think about is the turbo technology was going out and the way that the turbos went out was first They limited it to four bar and then they limited to two and a half bar of pressure and even in the two and a half I think 89 was the two and a half bar year and the mclaren was still a super dominant across the garage easter [00:45:00] teams You then have to Pivot somewhere else, right?

Are Honda going to build us a V8 or a V12? Are we going to have to go somewhere else? And a lot of the teams, as, as William said, they went back to the DFVs, the Ford DFVs they’d been using back in the 1970s before the, uh, before the turbo era. And for the time that the normally aspirated cars and the turbo cars ran together, the turbo cars were just in a class of their own.

It was just much, much faster. If you wanted to win, you needed a turbo car. Well, I was going to say what came along in the background, right? That’s why I wanted to mention that Camel Lotus 100T that Senna had in 87. By the early 90s, by 92, Williams, Nigel Mansell at that time, had got the active ride thing completely right.

They’d also got traction control right. They’d also got semi automatic gearboxes right. So by 92, We’d almost already moved into that point and squirt kind of era that we’re in at the moment, where, you know, if you look on film of Senna, you know, I think on YouTube, [00:46:00] the center on board is like pole lap at Monaco in 1991, and he takes his hand off.

He’s taking his hand off. The steering wheel to shift, you know, like, well, obviously he would, but if you show modern formula one fans that it’s quite astonishing that he goes through casino square with only one hand on the steering wheel. Oh yeah. And they say lap of the gods as it’s, as it’s titled, you know, that’s where the respect comes in and those guys is to your point is.

Especially going on something like Monaco, you’re driving with one hand because you’re shifting so much. I’m trying to remember what the number is. They said how many times you shifted during a race. And it was some obscene number. Not only just shifting, but heel toe and doing your feet. I mean, you have, all your appendages are doing something different.

You know, it’s not like something’s doing in units like this. It’s like being a drummer. I’m hitting heel toe gas, you know, clutch and you know, all this stuff. And that’s where the respect comes in. And like, yeah, you see him today. And you know, like I said, you started getting the early nineties, some out of that gearbox, everything like that.

And you started getting a lot of the controls on the steering [00:47:00] wheel regards to stuff moving around. Hey, you know, your, uh, brake bias and all about the active arrow and all about the active suspension and everything like that, and, you know, Those guys go where they could change it for every corner and all this stuff.

I mean, it was just getting, I would say out of hand, but basically that’s what it was is because it was who had, again, it’s all about money, but who had the best engineers built what they could create because there really wasn’t any limitation on it, a lot of guys adapted. Some didn’t, you know, it just really kind of changed how you looked, how someone raced a car, you know, and had the guys that were transitioning through it, you know, instead of.

Obviously didn’t miss a beat his limitation going from that, you know, from the McLaren into the Williams. Only thing was his McLaren’s, you know, the engine would let them down in regards to those last few years. He was there, you know, he still did all right, but it came down to the car. Well, so that’s the thing, isn’t it?

And there you go. Cause he wanted to have the winning car, but then he goes into the Williams. It was such a cool time in regards to what was going on. Am I the only one that when. Senna left [00:48:00] McLaren despite, let’s say, the dismal failure of the V10 Honda engine versus the turbo, the V6 that it replaced. I was disappointed.

I felt like Senna had somehow thrown in the white flag, like going to Williams. For me, as a fan, it felt like defeat. No, no, he tested with Williams at the beginning. He tested with Williams at the beginning. He always had the relationship with Frank Williams and Patrick Head. It was always an open door. So there was always the recognition.

And remember, it’s all Didcot is not really a long way from Woking. The engineers cross pollinated. So that English Garage Easter to club, right? And for that last year at McLaren, that 1993 at McLaren, because 91 hadn’t been what did 93 at McLaren, the car wasn’t there or 92 wasn’t great, right? So 93, the car wasn’t there and he did individual races.

He did an individual race by race contract with Ron Dennis. They would negotiate before [00:49:00] every race because the car wasn’t there. Cause Flavio Briatore, the Benetton guy had negotiated a deal with Ford that they always got the latest spec engines. The Senna was stuck on a non spec engine. And again, right.

We’re talking about greatness. The 1993 European Grand Prix from Donington. And we should say it was the only Formula One Grand Prix from Donington in the post war period, right? The previous one was like in the 1930s when it was the Silver Arrows. That race where Senna is, starts fairly low down the grid and then just drives past everybody else like they’re standing still on that first corner.

You know, down through the crane of curves. This is arguably the greatest opening map in history and definitely is a demonstration of Senna’s just superior skill when the Grip conditions were super questionable. So, you know, without that year where he was hyper pissed off and arguing with Ron Dennis all the time and on a [00:50:00] month to month, you know, on a race to race contract, it gave us that Donington Grand Prix, it squeezed that brilliance out of him.

Although I would say Ackernand out qualified him, Ackernand’s first Grand Prix, he out qualified Senna and it was pure speed again, right? You rarely see Senna bested, certainly. Qualifying that you did that as that little side note, who is a teammate was for the first part of the year, a little gentleman by the name of Michael Andretti.

Yeah, that’s right. 93. Yeah, that’s right. I got it. I will never forget that Australian Grand Prix when Michael, his first race. Oh, what a, what a let down. Oh yeah. Yeah. What? And. And Hockenheim took over, I think, was it after, what, the sixth race, fifth race, sixth race, something like that? I remember he’s at Estoril.

I remember he out qualified because Senna’s first Grand Prix victory in 85 had been at Estoril. And I remember just being rocking on my heel that Senna had actually been out qualified. Because again, it’s the greatness thing, right? He may not have been the greatest or rounder. I think you’d struggle to [00:51:00] make that case.

But was he the fastest ever? If you look at the poll records, I mean, how long did it take, um, Hamilton to eclipse his poll records? A really long time that the starts to polls ratio. And then Santa had was, was unequal. Did the stories that journalists tell of, because he used to get an hour to go out and do qualified.

And yeah, you know, anytime you set within that time, you’d have the qualified tire and the qualified motor. So you’d only have the three laps, but what Santa would do was wait until the very last minute. Yeah. There was the last person out and then you would know exactly the time that you had to do it.

You could always eat out that extra difference. Now, Michael. Michael Schumacher could do it as well. And it’s become as qualifying formats have changed. It’s become part of a Grand Prix drivers, you know, and anatomy years before they didn’t do that. You know, a guy like Fangio would spend three days working up to that pole time.

Just like you see the Isle of Man TT guys doing that now, whereas, you know, after Senna, Michael Schumacher famously, you know, [00:52:00] Martin Brundle used to say, you know, you’d spend all week at Silverstone testing. Fucking Michael had turned up second lap would be faster than anything you’ve done all week and you’d just be like, what, like, how, how can I match that?

And you bring up a good point that Schumacher at this point is in the shadows. So we have to remember that too. And he’s studying, you know, the rain God, as they used to refer to Senna and Schumacher himself was very talented in bad weather and sketchy weather conditions. But going back to my point from before.

I, as a fan, we’re talking about putting Senna up on a pedestal, you know, we’re paying tribute to his life. We’re talking about his career, all this kind of thing. I, as a fan, when I saw him put on that Williams uniform for the first time and race, I was like brokenhearted. I felt like he had given up. Like he was the Marlboro man, right?

He was McLaren. He was that Honda, that car in him. I don’t think about Senna with. The Lotus. I think about Alex Zanardi as one of the last John Player special drivers, right? And [00:53:00] that kind of thing coming up at the same time as Senna and all this kind of thing. I put the two together, the brand, the car, the time.

Senna is McLaren, McLaren is Senna. When he put on that Williams uniform for the last year, it did something to me and it makes me wonder, and I’m going to check my conspiracy theories at the door. That had he not gone to Williams, had he not been impatient, had he let the development team continue to maybe refine the B10, work the bugs out of it, it was whatever, development process like happens today, maybe, maybe, just maybe, Senna Wouldn’t have ended the way he did at Tamburello.

And we’ll talk about more. I have to say, and Lego agree with you too, because 100 percent the model you got right behind you, the car, everybody aligns with Senna is that MP4 for, you know, it’s me, I go to Williams and I kind of agree that obviously making the decision to go to Williams was based on the car.

And he felt that was, it was putting the best position, but the problem was, is when, and he went into it in [00:54:00] 94, they took all those regulations and they got rid of, you know, the active suspension. And so, so there’s a big drop in regards to, Hey, how much an advantage the Williams had. It wasn’t just that was it?

If you think of it, Williams since 1991, Williams had had a car that did everything with computers and then they were banned. So Williams had to like go back three years, whereas the other guys, they didn’t have active right in the first place. So they still had a pretty good chassis. So Senna, you know, I’d spent all year telling Ron Dennis, no, I’m not committing to you telling Patrick head and Frank Williams, I’ll drive for you for free.

Now he’s finally got the car. The car was bloody terrible. Car was virtually undriveable and the race, uh, Interlagos, the Brazilian Grand Prix in 1994, he had a half spin. He’d not had a half spin. I’d not seen him out a half spin since the Lotus years. Right? So those early years of 1994, when it was clear that the regulations had really left him high and dry.

And let’s [00:55:00] be clear, right? With the benefit of hindsight, it is light. It’s, no, I don’t think it’s, I think it’s beyond debate that Flavio Briatore and Michael Schumacher were cheating. They were cheating with the fuel rigs. We remember Joseph Verstappen’s caught fire. In Brazil, it was because they cheated the fuel rig and there was too much fuel going into it.

They were also cheating around traction control. So Senna was unfairly beaten in those first three races. And this is why we have this bad feeling around Williams. If there hadn’t have been, just not the cheatiness, if there just hadn’t have been the cheatiness, there would have been a sense of equal terms.

So as we arrive at Imler in 1994, Senna wouldn’t have had that pressure cooker of, you know, of the requirement to, to perform, the failure is, is not an option. Of course, the, the business of who’s to blame if, if we accept the Italian court argument that the cause of the incident was the broken steering column.

Yeah, if he hadn’t have driven a Williams, he would still be alive, wouldn’t he, Eric? Again, I’m not going to put on my [00:56:00] tinfoil hat, but. I just want to say, I think that’s steering column story is a load of absolute bullshit. Bollocks. I’m glad you said it. If you just pause and really stop and think about that, you’re telling me that a Williams mechanic, not some fucking 16 year old straight out of college, a Williams Grand Prix mechanic, is not able to weld a steering column together?

Sufficiently. Well, the, after four laps, four whole laps of racing speed over the rough bumps of four whole laps, this steering column shears in half so completely that, I mean, so you have to, but you know, let’s, let’s be real about this, right? If it wasn’t the steering column, I think what happened is that there were bumps on the inside of Tamburello.

And, and I think that at the start of the race. Uh, somebody let, I think stalls and somebody runs into the back of him. Horrible accident [00:57:00] at the start. We all go in everywhere. There’s day break, new process safety car comes out. Safety car is a voxel. VGSR. mm-Hmm. Now I never had the GSI model ’cause it had a lofty 170 horseback and my company had a policy that you weren’t allowed more than 150 i to make do with 130 horsepower SRI.

The bottom line is this is. Fucking slow car to be lead in a formula one race and the thought is that the tire pressures in Santa’s car went down and you can even, you know, he complains about, you can see him gesticulating to the safety car driver to, you know, go faster. So I think the tire pressures went down.

I think the car rode lower and, and as for the bumps on the inside of Tamburello, Sandra is on record as saying to Damon Hill, his young teammate is bumping on the inside of Tamburello to stay off there. Now, if you look at the onboard with Michael Schumacher, and this is just the Senate thing, this is maybe my idea about Senate, but if you look at the onboard, [00:58:00] having told he’ll stay off the inside of Tamburello, having gone and spoken with Ratzenberger’s family, having gone to Barrichello’s bedside, having done that, he then puts the car right on the inside because there’s no way I’m losing this race.

I’ve got to win this one. I’ve got to. Prove myself. I think, I think that’s what happened. I’m gonna say one word. I’m gonna say sabotage because that is sometimes heard on the winds of this conversation that the car was in a very soap opera esque way. Maybe the brakes were manipulated. Maybe the steering was manipulated with maybe the car just let’s call it.

It was sabotaged. I think Senna in some ways And maybe I’m speculating here, was a bit of a hypocrite? Damon, I don’t want you on the inside of Timberello because that’s gonna give you my line, right? Because that is an old racer’s trick. Never tell them, never show them your actual running line. No, no, there’s no, the young Senna might have [00:59:00] done that.

But look at the way that Senna was in those. It took Hamilton, Hamilton achieved maturity far more quickly than Sanna, right? Sanna took, or no, the other way around. I feel like Sanna achieved maturity more quickly than Hamilton. It took Hamilton a while to sort of come out from under the shadow of dating the pop star and stop being a, being managed by his dad.

You know, it took him a while to stop being a boy and start being a man. And you can say what you like about him now. You know, I know my friends at home think he’s an idiot. I like the fact that he’s doing different things outside of the sport and he’s experimenting with the notion of what a Formula One champion can be.

Senna, there was so much self confidence there after those two or three world championships. That was why he was happy to banter backwards and forwards with, with Ron Dennis for that one year. And that’s why the fire was there to do that stellar lap at Donington. That’s why the fire Was, was there to, to race this young German whippersnapper, right?

He was [01:00:00] because that, that’s the great loss, right? The, that you mentioned Schumacher was there waiting in the wings. I don’t think, feel that he was, he was there at that Belgian Grand Prix the year before he’d ever really got the, the only races they ever really raced against each other were those early years.

Uh, were those early races of 1994 when, you know, as I’ve said, I feel like Brea Torrey was putting his bum on the scales in Senna’s favor. So look, we’ve talked for ages. Let’s at least move the conversation a little bit towards whether or not we think he’s the greatest ever and how we might begin to, to answer that question.

So the first thing I want to sort of shoot down. Is this myth that, that people always say, which is, Oh, you can’t compare people across areas. And I agree trying to compare Rudolf Karachiola with Nelson Pique, both really good, neither anybody’s greatest ever. Well, maybe Karachiola was, I don’t know, but, but, you know, but what I’m saying is if you pick people, if you pick, you [01:01:00] know, not Richard Petty or David Pearson, if you pick Bobby Allison.

Or if you pick Kale Yarborough and you try and pitch them against Gerhard Berger, or you try and pitch them against, you know, Pietro Bordino from the 1920s. Apples and chainsaws. Yeah. But fundamentally, fundamentally, I put it to you, Maldonado versus Buck Baker, easy. I put it to you, Rossemeyer versus Nicola Mazepa, easy, right?

That you can always tell the greats. And you can always tell the terrible people who should have bloody stayed at home. I think in this case, to your point, we have to boil it down. If we just focus our attention on the era at hand, let’s say the period of 1980 through, let’s take it all the way to 2000 just to be fair, so 20 years span, there’s three names we have to look at.

The burgers and the John Lazy’s and the Nigel Mansell’s and all them. Okay, fine. But there’s really three names we have to focus on here. And it has to [01:02:00] do with statistics like you mentioned at the beginning. So it’s going to be Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Michael Schumacher. And I want to bring Schumacher into the conversation because I think when we talk about modern formula one, as you’re alluding to, it comes down to Even though Roast, even as of last month has been standing up and saying, Hey, don’t forget about me.

You know, I won more championships than Senna did blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, great. All of that is true on the back of the baseball card. Roast has more wins than Senna. Is he greater than Senna? My answer to that is like, to your point, very simple. No, is he one of the greatest rivalries? Is he a villain or vilified in Formula One?

Absolutely. There’s gotta be a bad guy. But to William’s point from the beginning of the conversation, who was the villain? Was it actually Senna as the bully? If you think about him with that lens and Prost as the martyr, or is it the other way around? Right? So it’s a rivalry. Fine. But again, I mentioned earlier, [01:03:00] Schumacher is in the shadows this entire time and using your math.

Which is greatness over time. It becomes a question about Senna versus Schumacher. I sort of four criteria that I feel you should apply. I feel that the first one is like, how dominant were they and for how long? So clearly, you know, somebody like Valentina Rossi, who was really fast for a really long time.

We can, we can say that that person’s impressive and, and you might want to think about, Oh, there’s some guys in American oval track racing who’ve been Really dominant for a really long time. John force in drag race. Right. The other one that I thought that the other thing is, is, is I think a lot of greatness lies in the ability to be cross discipline.

So Sterling Moss is greatness. If you went to a British club race in the early fifties, there would be. 10 different races with 10 different kinds of cars and moths would often be entered in every race. And he would step from a rear engine 500cc Formula 3 car into a Jaguar touring car into a Formula 1 car and [01:04:00] win everything.

I feel like that skill, I feel Andretti had that, I feel like Voight had that a lot. I feel like that is a level of greatness. And again, uh, by that measure, Senna. Does that transcend though, because we’re talking about the greatest in Formula 1, And to your point, Senna never really did any other disciplines.

He came up through the ranks, right? Go karting to Formula Ford and Formula 3 and to Formula 1. But he never ran other than that Mercedes race that we know of. He didn’t do touring car. He didn’t do rally. He didn’t come to the States and do the Indy 500 like Jim Clark did, right? Or things like that. We begin to close the aperture and we’re really talking about the greatest in Formula 1.

And this is Paul Verstappen, right? How can Verstappen demonstrate greatness When he’s only allowed to drive the best Formula 1 car, and when he’s driving the best Formula 1 car, round circuits designed by Herman Tilke. Right. You know, you can demonstrate greatness at the Nürburgring, you can’t if you’re on the Tilke circuit.

In the same way, right, you can demonstrate [01:05:00] some greatness, but it, it, it, it’s hard. Let’s be fair, Verstappen’s gonna be fast probably in anything you put him in. We’ve had this discussion before he hasn’t proven himself yet. He hasn’t stepped out of his comfort zone, which is formula one. And so that’s where, again, I draw that parallel 40 years later between Verstappen and Senna is Verstappen the new Senna, if you kind of think about it, looking and comparing their stories, but then who’s the Schumacher, I guess.

Louis Hamilton of that generation. Yeah. Except Hamilton feels far more like Sena reborn. Yeah. But somebody like myself, Hamilton’s whole way of being, the whole way that that Hamilton race felt like spiritually, it felt the same. Right. Sena did everything with passion. Michael did everything with clinical coldness.

I was a Michael fan in period, but only because he was so much faster than everybody else. Right. And so for a minute that happening could touch him. And I think, but for most of the time he couldn’t like the competition wasn’t there. And I think that’s another measure of greatness that, that, you know, Senna did have these [01:06:00] awesome foils.

So you talked about Prost as, as one foil, I think PK is another, I think Nigel Mansell’s another, and there is that photograph of the four of them sitting on the bench. On a pit lane wall somewhere, each of them were talented in their own particular way. And of course, with the completeness, Nigel Manson with the willingness to, to race and Senna with just the raw speed and, and, and, and aggression of those is he the, the, the greatest.

I think so. Yeah. Of those four for Prost, the whole business of hero or villain, you know, in period Senna was definitely the villain. People didn’t like him in period. He was the villain in period. And Prost was the established star who drove in a clean way. You know, he was Le Professeur, wasn’t he? Like reasoned everything, which, which, if you think of it, that’s how drivers have evolved before.

But if you think of how different Le Professeur was from, you know, sex, the breakfast of champions. And, you know, that was good enough to win Grand Prix just a few [01:07:00] years earlier. So PK, as I say, PK that early period with the speed. Those problem years I didn’t watch those years. I really wonder, for me, P. K.

‘s hidden, just how fast he maybe was. But actually, wheel, and actually, you know, wheel to wheel, Nigel Mansell raced like nobody else. But, but the reason that Nigel Mansell always raced like that was there was always some Birmingham esque tragedy. That he would moan and drone on about in the pit comp in the, and you were always just like, you know, I, it’s, it’s as simple as the reason the dude always has to drive out of his skin was because he bollocks up qualify by any normal driver would have qualified.

Well, I had the car at the front and just pissed off at the front and then they wouldn’t have needed to be all the, you know, in Leone, the lion, you know, history audits fighting your way through the field now for all that. Nigel Mansell is a great Formula One driver, but, you know, not in the same breath [01:08:00] as, as Senna or Prost in, in, in my opinion.

Now, I don’t believe in statistics. Don’t really care about the statistics. To me, it’s all the way in which it’s, it’s, it’s done. So, the fact that Prost has four championships and Senna has three, so what? Kind of thing is crossed right to feel a little aggrieved now. Yeah, because Santa’s taken on this sort of James Dean light glow.

Right. And, and this is, is something that, you know, is worth talking about a little bit is the work that I’ve done around Santa, where in 2004, I was living in Italy. So I, I drove to, to him, alert to, to, You know, do a personal like, how is this with Senna? Cause he’d been, it was so important for me. You know, my crash helmet was a Senna replica and there was nothing there.

There was nothing there and nobody there. Then I went in 2014, I was about to be a dad. So it was a important time in my life. And, and then. [01:09:00] Imola, there were events, there was photography exhibition where they done a sort of Andy Warhol pop art version of Senna, the Google doodle, when you go to the Google landing page to do your search thing, there’s a little picture edit the Google doodle was of Senna, you know, he crossed over into the The realm of, of, of something, you know, of something more than that.

And what that led me to do was, as I thought more about that was to develop this idea that we’ve talked about before, Eric, of a sort of beatification that he’s, he’s moved from being, you know, a racing driver. To being a, a saint. I don’t mean it literally. I don’t mean, you know, he’s now a saint. Are you sure?

Because in Brazil, he might be. Well, all right. But it’s this, it’s this pivot from, it’s more like Elvis or Marilyn Monroe. That you move from being an actual pissing, shitting human being. To [01:10:00] being like an icon of the 1950s or the king of rock and roll, you know, and so Senna has sort of moved towards this sort of the handsome dead racing drive.

I don’t know, maybe I’m exaggerating that a little bit because I feel like, you know, 30 years on, am I still talking about Senna? We are right now for an hour, you know, but to your point, and I think it’s important because it’s that martyrdom status. He’s been put up on a pedestal because he was taken from us at an early age, like a James Dean.

That’s a great analogy here because we don’t know. At 32, 33, 34 years old, what he could have done to today. I do feel for Alan Prost at this point, because he’s standing here going, guys, I’m from this era. There’s not many of us left, you know, of that time period. What about me? For Alan Prost, what about Martin Brundle?

I know! What about Martin Brundle? Brundle! Beat it. Rumble was the man who beat Senna. 191 Grand Prix [01:11:00] starts, zero wins, and now a clown show with Machine Gun Kelly and Shaquille O’Neal who doesn’t even know who he is. Right. But my point is, had Senna not died, I don’t think we would be having this same conversation.

The GOAT, the greatest of all time, would unfortunately be Michael Schumacher. And we know we’re not really sure his health and status right now, either. There’s a lot of back and forth on that. So I think the lens tends to shift if Senna was still alive, because think about it. We talk about Fangio and how great Fangio was, but Fangio lived a good, long life.

And then he passed away. There’s other drivers that have lived good, long lives and have passed away. When Nigel Mansell eventually leaves us. Are we going to go back and have the same reverence for Nigel Mansell? I mean, maybe we’re going to have it for his mustache. Yeah. We’re not going to have that for him in the same way we do for Senna.

That’s the thing, you know, he passes away. So, I mean, anything after that is all conjecture because just you don’t [01:12:00] know. It’s like this comic book he had where he joins Ferrari in 1995. And there’s a picture of him driving for Ferrari. Could have only wished. Well, that’s kind of what I wanted to throw out there was that’s what the talk was is the only reason he didn’t go to Ferrari in 94 was because they had contracts with the two guys at the time with, um, what’s her name?

So, and he had talks, Hey, everyone always wants to drive Ferrari. I think you do is getting up there in age. Even back in that time though, was, is when you were in your mid thirties, you were basically still in your prime, you know, it was not like this day and age where, Oh, you’re over the hill now. The interesting question would be is, okay, stay in 95, even if it was 96, he goes, I’m going to go to Farrar, because I want to finish up my career at Farrar, because I don’t want to stay.

Schumacher wouldn’t have gone. Right. Talk about changing history completely, because you wouldn’t have gone there if Sena was there. That’s right. That would have been kind of an interesting scenario, but again, it’s all conjecture. It’s all speculation. You make up whatever you want, because you’ll never know.

What if Sena won more championships? You don’t know, because again, it’s a scenario where it’s Dakar was playing such a more major role in regards to If you won [01:13:00] the championship, well, and the cars changed so much, didn’t they? The, the, uh, after the center was killed, the cars changed so dramatically, you know, that the whole parameters were, were different.

And what marred it for me and Prost because of growing up through the rivalry, all that stuff. I mean, and a lot of listeners may or may not know Prost and center were teammates at one point and, you know, they still couldn’t stand each other, all that stuff. But no, they were friends at first. They were friends at the beginning of 1988.

And there was respect and you’ll see interviews between them. And then there’s that interview at the British Grand Prix where Senate, where process and has a tiny problem. He thinks he can’t kill himself. Yeah, right. You can see Santa sitting there thinking you’re just a French. You’ve got no balls. You know, you can write that.

You can see that. And the tension, the other there’s later into the film does a really good job. Uh, showing those kind of you’re talking about the center documentary, right? You keep bringing the center documentary, the Asif Kapadia documentary. Yeah. Which, which when you watch now, it doesn’t seem that [01:14:00] revolutionary, but, but back when that film was made, not only did that make center come alive, but that really changed arguably, there would have been no drive to survive without that center documentary, that center documentary was, was really pivotal.

And Asif Kapadia was not a formula one fan. He was somebody who saw who Santa was. Who saw this compelling story and then who was able to dig deep with the resources, you know, get Bernie Ecclestone’s private film. So the, what you had was something that my wife watched, gosh, these baddie Frenchmen trying to outmaneuver our hero whilst I was being like, I can’t believe we’re in the briefing room at Suzuka and PK is standing up for Senna.

Yeah. The storytelling. And of course that’s something that I, that Eric, you and I have talked about a lot that, you know, arguably a lot of some of Senna’s greatness is predicated in the fact that Cappadia Yeah. made this compelling story about him, you know, without, [01:15:00] without the life of St. Patrick, we don’t know anything about St.

Patrick. He drove the snakes out of Ireland, right? He did. He was the first person to see the Loch Ness monster. But the thing about Frost, what really kind of put the thumb on there and sort of marred the lens for me, and I will admit, I grew up with the idea that Prost was the villain and watching the Cartier film, you know, there’s some things I read into the, even the funeral scene and is he really guilty and, you know, blah, blah, blah, and all this kind of stuff, but you and I have debated that back and forth several times, but it’s what came later.

I look at what he’s saying now and think about what happened after in the, in the nineties, in the two thousands, when he stepped up as the professor and he bought Jordan Peugeot and turned it into prost racing. And what happened? Nothing. Garbage. It was trash. And there was a tragic accident with Olivier Penice.

It was terrible. But every, you know, that’s, I mean, that’s the story of Graham Hill. That’s the story of John Surtees. You know, they, it’s hard to go [01:16:00] from one to the other, the people that, you know, we’re talking about the greatest ever. Jack Brabham has to be in with a shout. The bloody bloke built his own car.

He came from Australia, built his own car, built his own car. Be everybody in Europe. I mean, God, he started out front engine cars in the late fifties driving, then partners with John Cooper, first rear engine world champion, then aero wide tires, 1970, he’s still nearly champion in 1970, if he hadn’t have run out of gas and push the car home at Monaco.

and run out of gas on the last lap whilst he was leading at the British Grand Prix. He would have been world champion in 1970, not Jochen Rind. I don’t know how you, quantifying the greatness is, is hard. So what I’m getting at is, in this case, because you’re on the big stage, it’s Formula One, you’re in the global eye, there’s good and bad press, and these days it’s mitigated differently than it was back then.

Ben. So if you look at the nineties and early two thousands, and that’s why I was saying, we got to stretch the lens of this from the eighties [01:17:00] to the early two thousands for every failure that Prost inherited with his racing team, the former Jordan F1 Peugeot team, you know, this all French team, French drivers, and this whole campaign that he had, it was this like, over exuberant arrogance that I can’t define and it just irks me to no end.

But for every one of those failures, it negates his wins. And so it brings him down the ladder when you talk about greatness.

utter dominance in those Ferrari years. Did they negate the way Michael crafted the sport in his own image? It’s a black eye on Schumacher’s resume. And if he hadn’t come back and run at Mercedes after being done at Ferrari, he would have left on a high note. He would be greater. He would be greater, but he’s not.

He has these like two seasons with Mercedes that just suck. And the same is true of Prost. It’s like, had you just left it alone? You would have been [01:18:00] better off but it’s that tragic greek story of Hermes flying too close to the sun and the wings melt off his shoes and it’s all this hubris and formula one is full of that and to Senna’s credit we saw the bravado we saw yes this animal instinct the aggression his greatness i hate to say it this way he died on a high note And so there was never a negative if you discount, you know, his personality, whether you liked it or not.

And if he was a bully and these kinds of things, there’s not a lot of things in the con column where roast comes to the table and says, I’m so good. I’m going to start my own team. And it was terrible. And he was, he took a long time to be world champions. Well, he fiddled fucked around a lot with Reno, didn’t he?

Yeah. I mean, and let’s not beat around the bush. Job. We are new and torn by, could they beat me? Yeah. Could they be all three of us? Yeah, probably. You know, are they in anybody’s top 10 form at a one drivers, whoever sat [01:19:00] in a car? No. So the competition that he was facing coming up through the French ranks, you know, just wasn’t, That much was it that that’s the, and you know, the car that Renault, those rentals, you get the sense that when they worked, you could win with them, but they always like caught on fire or blew up or, you know, shit the bed somehow in the race, didn’t they?

They were never. So it was hard to tell his talent because the car was, was such a light. Buddy disaster. I mean, you can argue the same with PK, right? In those years with the problem with the rub and BMW. But again, if you, if you compare them with PK, who would I have put in the car? Who would I prefer in the car?

Prost or PK asked me what year it is. Cause early on, I’d take PK later on. I’d take pros. I was going to say, right. When we talk about the, the greatness, I feel it’s narrowing it down too much to say only the people from that era, just like Maldonado and Buck Baker, I feel like you can. Make comparisons and I feel like Fangio [01:20:00] has the status he has.

Because the guy has a 46 percent wins to starts ratio. And I just need you to really stop and think about that in an era when the cars weren’t that reliable. And like everybody else for a minute there, he was unknown and unreliable was the unknown foreign Johnny who was given the crap car that made up the numbers at the back of the grid, 46 percent win ratio.

He also wasn’t world champion until he was 40 and then he was world champion. four times back to back once, then had a big accident, recovered from the big accident, then just back to back. And you might say, well, he was always in the best car. Well, yeah, that was because everyone knew he was the best driver.

So he just went wherever the best car was. Again, wouldn’t you do that? When we’re considering his greatness, you know, Doug Nye, the British historian once asked Sterling Moss, you know, he said to Moss, you know, when it would, you know, with the two of you compare setup and Moss said, I would go and do all the testing.

And then Fangio would always say, I’ll have whatever Moss is having. I think cause [01:21:00] after the first couple of races, he trusted me and Doug, I said to him, well, you know, well, Sterling, did you never try to like, you know, trick the old man? And most of his lines. Yeah. Once at Dundrod, I went back to the engineers afterwards and said, actually changed my back axle ratio.

So. Yeah. Yeah. So I beat Fangio fair and squarely at that event and afterwards, I never wanted to do that again. I never wanted to cheat like that again. But think about Fangio. This is, I just take whatever. I just, I would just make the most of whatever you’re giving them. This is unlike Senna than what you need in the eighties where you go back and you change the car and you do this and you do that.

You don’t just drive the car until it’s all used up in, in the, in the, in the 1950s. And so this is why Fangio has the status that he has. I would say, you know, Ferrari’s greatest ever is Tazio Nuvolari, and I would, I, with Nuvolari, because of the descriptions you get of speed, the, you know, the gap between him and everybody [01:22:00] else.

Whether it’s Ferrari talking about the way he took corners, or whether it’s lap times, or whether it’s that first newspaper mention of an audacious young man. Everywhere you read, when you read about comparisons between Farsi and Novelari, it’s stories about You know, Vartze’s smoothness and Nivalari’s aggression.

If greatness lies in how it happens, as we’ve been talking about with Senna, you know, it’s not how many races you won. It’s the way in which you did it. It’s the manner in which you did it. It’s the style. I feel for, for passion and greatness, you can’t equal Nivalari. I mean, we’re going to have to let William probably settle this debate because you and I are never going to agree.

But and I will get Williams input on this. You hit on something almost by accident. And it triggered something in my mind because I realized maybe this discussion shouldn’t be about the greatest of all time. Maybe there is no such thing, right? Maybe we shouldn’t be trying to single out one [01:23:00] person. And what I mean by that is Fangio, Nuvolari, Schumacher, Senna, Prost, Mansell, you name it, pick your favorite.

They’re heroes. And if you think about it in that construct, Now we’re having this, depending on which camp you’re in, is it DC comics or is it Marvel comics? You know, who’s better Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, you know, so on down the line, they’re all great in their own respective ways. And together in period, they’re unstoppable.

This just justice league of racers. And if you think about it though, you have to layer it that Fangio didn’t run in the same era. In the same way, if you think about it from a comic book perspective, the early DC characters, you know, the Green Lantern with the tin hat versus, you know, the guy in the super suit that we saw in the 80s and 90s.

They’re still Green Lanterns. We’ll use that analogy, but they’re not of the same era. So you have to [01:24:00] do. Fangio and Moss and all the guys from, you know, the meal Amelia that we talked about on those episodes. And you have to look at them as heroes of that era. Now, if we want to get specific, who was the best of the best in that 20 year period?

So be it. So the question now becomes, do we really want to put Senna up there by himself? Or do we want to elevate other names? Because now you can bring in Andretti’s, and Unser’s, and Wuton’s, and Stuck’s, and Heywood’s, and Sullivan’s. The list goes on and on of other heroes, maybe from other disciplines, that can stand shoulder to shoulder with Senna.

In this glorious Iraq race in the sky. Right? So William, where are we with this? Should we continue down the path of greatest of all time? Or should we think about it more in the context of heroes? You have to kind of wonder when guards, like I said, obviously you’re set up on a pedestal, the timeframe that he raised.

[01:25:00] So you have all these young kids. They were into motorsports, whatnot. They grew up to start racing, so they idolized Senna, because that’s what they watched before they started racing. So then you got Lewis Hamzah, they were like, they had to say, Senna’s my idol, Senna’s my idol. So then you got this other younger generation, watching Hamilton, Emily, but then they have, you know, these guys, they’re racing up one, that say, the Emalates, oh, I love Senna, Senna’s my hero, da da da, so you have this, hey, I want to be like Lewis Hamzah, so, oh, I love Senna, you know.

Is that perpetuating his story, his status, whatnot, because people just keep pushing. You have these very high profile individuals in that sport, emulating saying, Oh, Senate was the best, so they have the other people want to, Hey, I’m emulating them. So, Hey, Senate is the greatest one, you know, of all time, blah, blah, blah.

I always break down discipline. I, you know, you can never have that saying, Oh, the grace of all time, grace of all time, say in that period. Okay, it’s not a hands down, you know, you look at how he did it, what he was able to do, you know, in the different cars, you know, especially in wet weather, anything like that, you know, but if you open that up to about just [01:26:00] pure drivers, you got to look at, like you said, the Andretti’s, the Foyt’s, do we go back and look at a Clark, Fangio, Moss, you know, the guys that could, you know, especially that is those guys, you know, To make a living, had to race everything and anything they could get behind the wheel to earn and support themselves and their family.

You didn’t have that day and age, you know, starting in the 80s, you know, these guys, their contracts could all of a sudden be starting. Hey, all I need to race is F1 because the money I’m making in it and blah, blah, blah. That’s all I got to do. It just got exorbitant, you know, just going up, you know, like John was saying, you know, that, you know, his last, you know, since last year, McLaren, that race by race contract, he was getting a million dollars a race.

Yeah, 16 million for the year. I mean, everyone was like, Oh my God, that’s absurd. And I listen to that, but look what he did. And it was all just point scoring with Ron Dennis anyway. It wasn’t, he didn’t need the money, neither. They just, I mean, if you look at interviews with Ron Dennis afterwards, it was just, it was just like, they were just, they just needed.

To have that process, because that’s how both of them were, and that was how their relationship had [01:27:00] been. I do think it’s too much of a cop out to say, oh, you know, it’s, you can’t compare across different eras, and so on. To me, no sports car driver is as great as the greatest Formula 1 driver, because Formula 1’s harder than sports cars.

Formula 1’s got better people in it than sports cars. I love NASCAR, but you know, driving a car, With, you know, a roll cage around an oval is not as difficult as driving a Formula One car. But is Formula One as difficult as running the 24 Hours of Le Mans? Because that’s a whole nother level. And in the Indy 500, Is a whole nother level of risk and the argument now, you know, and what, what Hindi is now versus what Indy was in the fifties and sixties, you know, is that the Indianapolis that Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart, you know, the other Englishman and Scotsman who, who, who came, what they found, that was a much, much bigger.

I mean, Jim Clark, when he won Indianapolis, 500, one more money in that single event, they need one. His whole Formula One [01:28:00] career up to then and if you go to the Jim Clark Museum, you know, the, the, there’s like all of his Formula One trophies and then there’s like a whole separate cabinet for his Indianapolis 500 trophy, you know, it was, uh, so, so the proportions, you know, the relative importance of the different events changes, I, I, I think as well, I just feel like fundamentally greatness is something that you don’t need, you either have it or you don’t, it’s either there or you don’t.

You don’t need to be a soccer fan to see Pelé’s genius. You know, I’m not a soccer fan. I didn’t even know who Messi was until my son explained to me the other day. But, you know, I know Pele and I’ve seen Pele do that overhead kick into the goal. I put it to you, Senna’s pass on the craner Donington Grand Prix.

That whole brooding, compelling manner that he has. In a thousand years time, when they talk about, when they say, well, you know, what is a racing driver? What did a racing driver look like? I just feel like it’s more likely to be [01:29:00] Ayrton Senna than Alain Prost. It’s the basketball analogy, right? When you talk about the greatest basketball player or most recognizable, there’s certain icons, right?

And I think that’s where we need to make the difference, is that, okay, if we’re not going to do the hero thing, And we’re not going to put Senna as the greatest of all time, then he’s an icon, much like Michael Jordan is an icon and a fun fact, just bringing the comic books back into the situation.

Apparently, you can go to the middle of nowhere of the Congo and show people the bat symbol and everybody knows who Batman is, right? It’s an icon. And I think Senna. That’s where we’ve transcended. He’s an icon, maybe not the goat anymore because Lewis Hamilton statistically is better. Max Verstappen can drive harder than Senna ever did.

Michael Schumacher and his records. But on these Tilke circuits, it’s like Senna versus Nuvolari. Senna drove a much harder car than Nuvolari did, but Nuvolari did like [01:30:00] the Mille Miglia and the Targa Florio and the Nürburgring in the rain. Now this is far more epic, this is a much greater stage than Senna had.

These modern Tilker circuits, this, you know, this, this whole persona that Lewis Hamilton has now, this is not Greatness in the sense that the sport used to be, nobody deserves to be a knight more than a knight of the realm, a certain than Lewis Hamilton for, you know, going abroad and doing great things and reflecting well on England and British people.

I eat fully deserves that. But the sport at the moment doesn’t have the epic qualities it had in the Senate period. The epicness ended with Senna and shoemaze. You know, deliberate crashing, a deliberate spoiling of Alonso’s pole lapper, you know, Monaco in 2006, you know, this kind of behavior. Yes, we saw it in Senna, that kind of what William called earlier bullying behavior, but, and in Schumacher, it’s come along [01:31:00] more and more and now everybody does it and it’s just part of the sport.

The sport is less for that, you know, the sport of Nuvolari was mountain climbing and bullfighting. The sport of Verstappen is, you know, tiddlywinks and Messi falling over, pretending he’s hurt his leg to get a yellow card, right? It’s the sport isn’t as epic as it was, therefore. It doesn’t matter to me how many pole positions or wins or championships a Jimmy Johnson or uh, or a Lewis Hamilton wins.

Those are not the same as the championships that David Pearson or Ed Senna or Juan Manuel Fangio won. I think what you can say it could boil down to is any genre, any discipline of racing. You have the guys who can go eight tenths, then you got the smaller minutes and go nine tenths. You had that very rarefied few, and what you heard said was, that could drive that car to ten tenths, lap after lap.

And I think that can kind of define how well or heroic or iconic [01:32:00] someone is. You know, there were very, very few that could do that and drive that car to ten tenths. Especially back then, to drive one of those cars at ten tenths. This day and age, there’s so many nanny aids and all this stuff, you know, so getting there, it’s not really the same.

But back then? To have the cojones for one but the talent to be able to drive that car that in Any car and basically any weather I just showcased what his skill and his talent was He was able to squeeze it out of that car. John knows the answers groupie rally. That’s the answer to everything Yeah, but you see that that is in the greatest ever surely You have to throw Sebastian Lowe in there if you’re talking about the greatest ever, because even if you say, well, rally cars are the slow and it’s only one discipline and you know, it’s the modern era where generally speaking, when people are dominant, they’re dominant for what, you know, KK Rosberg was champion one year.

Yeah. Vettel was champion four years. Arguably the skill gap between them and their peers was no more or less. It was [01:33:00] just the sport was different. So Vettel’s dominance looks good. You know, so even if you argued that rallying. Lobe’s sheer level of dominance, you know, is compelling. Yeah. I bring up rally only because William was talking multiple discipline.

And the reason I bring it up is if you look at it in the, again, in, in our lens in period, the greatest racing at that time, hands down, even though Senna was doing miraculous things with the McLaren group B rally was far and above the best racing that you could watch. In period more so than F one. I’ll make that argument all day long.

And there’s plenty of facts and figures to back that up too. But, you know, again, it’s all about these boxes and how we look at things and the perspective we’re coming at. So, yeah, cause you couldn’t see it. It wasn’t televised like world rally wasn’t televised. Was it? You couldn’t say anything you could in the States.

We had to pay a lot of money to see it. Yeah, I mean, I, me on my BBC subscription, you didn’t, you know, you didn’t see, uh, you didn’t see any of [01:34:00] it. I don’t know. Maybe in order to be great, do you need to be seen by a lot of people? Is Marco Allen’s greatness hidden under a Bushell because nobody was watching rallying.

Nobody saw him because I mean, that’s the thing with it. Even those, you know, because at least formula one, you know, one of the ways of spotting centers greatness is the car is so visibly on the ragged edge in comparison to everybody else. And that Kapadia film does a really good job of showing that. But if nobody’s filming the rallying, how can we?

We can’t even see that, you know, and that’s a spectacle. You know, Formula One, the cars are there, you watch them all go around, the cameras are there. Rallying’s hard. You’re standing on a mountain hillside and the car comes past, and then five minutes goes by and another one comes past. How great can that spectacle really be?

It’s better now than it was then, that’s for sure. There was a lot of helicopter footage back in the 80s for rally. That was the thing, wasn’t it? That the chase helicopters were part of the whole, like, over budgeting danger of Group B rallying. Well, we’ll put a pin in that because we’re going to come back to that at another point, not in this [01:35:00] episode, at another point, maybe this season.

So John, we’ve talked a lot about Senna. We’ve talked about his greatness. We’ve talked about his life, his triumphs, his tribulations and everything else. How do we bring this home? How do you want to conclude this tribute to Senna now? 30 years after his passing. Yeah. When you approached me to talk about this, I thought, well, you know, it is 30 years should sort of have some kind of a conversation.

And then my next thought is, well, do I really want to go over this ground again? Because I feel like, you know, I did do that work in 2014 where I went and visited and saw this peculiar beatification and stayed in a hotel where he spent his last night and like visited his hotel room and all this kind of really quiet.

Morbid? Yeah, well, morbid, but just odd, just really peculiar, like, and that was really what set me thinking about the, what’s, you know, what’s happening to this guy who used to just be a racing driver who I liked and is now turning into something else. And I’m, I’m reminded of. There was a Roman emperor, Vespasian, who [01:36:00] supposedly, when a Roman emperor would die, they would always be deified.

The Romans would always turn their old emperors into gods who you could pray to. So the joke is that Vespasian, supposedly, his final words were, Oh God, I think I’m becoming a god. So there was a sense of that sort of transition happening, right? There’s a sense of that. So I suppose, you know, so how should we, You know, how should we remember him?

How do I want to wrap this up? Maybe a good way to wrap it up is simply to say, you know, we’ve, we’ve said how hard it is to compare across areas. We’ve said how it’s all subjective from the point of view that, you know, that, that you’re looking at it from maybe the, the, the way to wrap it up is to say that greatness is, is mostly to do with us being middle aged and looking back to a time when, when we were young, we’re looking back to our own lost youth.

Right. That center center was the great guy when we were young. Therefore, we, you know, in our greatest moment, therefore we feel like he was the greatest ever. Therefore, instinctively we, we struggle. We, [01:37:00] we feel like we find ways of comparing Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel and Michael Schumacher with center.

That make him feel less advantageous because it’s our own youth that we’re looking back to. And it’s that own feeling of wowee, this is magical and spectacular and awesome. And this guy’s reaching out the TV and touching me in suburban England in summer 1985. William, I think he just defined. Nostalgia, didn’t he?

Sounds like it, just a little bit. Yeah, just a little bit. This is just a way to date all three of us. Way to make us feel old, John. Yeah, Jesus. Yeah, well, in that, so what that means, right, is that this exercise, you need to carry on, right? There needs to be a center at 40 years and center at 50 years. You know, because there’ll be that sense like it’s happening with 57 Chevys at the moment that the people who collected them are all dying off.

So they’re declining in value, you know, nobody, their greatness is declining because there’s nobody who remembers that greatness to buy [01:38:00] them proper values anymore. I think my parting thought on this is looking back over the 60 years of Senna, if you think about his 30 years on this earth and 30 years since he’s been gone.

Like I said at the beginning, he has touched our lives, and our is the global our, the motorsports community, the petrolheads that are out there, if you’re learning about Senna for the first time today, which I don’t know where you’ve been this entire time, but in my formidable early years, Senna was Part of what made me a motor sports enthusiast.

And so I just want to say thank you because if it wasn’t for Ayrton Senna, I don’t think I’d be invested in motorsport as much as I am now. That’s not to say I don’t have respect for Michelle Mouton and Han Stuck and all these other people that I hold in high regard, but Senna is sort of like Zeus. on Mount Olympus.

He’s the god amongst the gods, and so it’s hard for me to break that illusion because it was cemented. I imprinted on that at a [01:39:00] very, very early age. I mean, I’m younger than both of you guys, and I’m not trying to make you feel even older. Those first impressions, as they say, are lasting impressions. So when I look back over Senna’s time, before and after, all I can say is thank you.

Yeah. He is motorsport. Yeah. You know, he was like that for me. As an Englishman, you should have been a Nigel Mansell fan, but you weren’t. It was, or I wasn’t, it was, it was all about Senna and, and yeah. What I called charisma, Eric, you’ve framed it into being something larger than that. It’s this almost a lens for understanding motorsport altogether.

Yeah. And I don’t think, I mean, people that are probably huge fans of him understand or realize it. Yeah, he had this persona on the track, you know, obviously, whatever it takes to win, you know, doing what he has to do. I think that kind of changed how the attitude of drivers that came after saying, okay, I got it.

Like with Schumacher, hey, if you want to win, win championships, this is what you have to do to go forward. So I think he really [01:40:00] changed. You know, the sport in regards to future drivers and what they had to do if they wanted to be successful and reach the pinnacle and then be at that level to do it. It’s like, you gotta do what it takes to win.

Hey, you just gotta have that mentality. F it, you know, I gotta go after it and go get it. The other side though is, and to this day, I don’t think people understand or know, or probably a lot do, is his off track persona. I don’t think people realize how many millions of dollars he raised and donates to this day, every year to his foundation, to the underprivileged in Brazil.

If you look at what he’s done post mortem, it’s incredible. He did something positive with what he was able to achieve, which is speaks volumes about the type of person he was. And you know, he was a huge. Very, very religious guy. You know, talking about Prost’s comedy things, oh, you know, he doesn’t think he can die or whatever because he’s got something with God or whatever.

He’s got a God complex. He was an interesting character, but I think he just kind of set the precedent for future racing and future drivers for what it would take to be at that [01:41:00] level and do it. And you look at these guys, hey, it’s, it’s me, it’s me, it’s me, it’s me. You know, you don’t talk to your teammate, what not.

It’s like, hey, you just got to have that mentality. I got to do and look out for stop with I mean, from day one, whatever, when he was four or five years old, when he first got a cart, his dad was relentless and brutal on him in regards to practice and just driving what takes to be world champion. And look, and that’s what he knew and did.

And look at him now he’s paying off. So in 20 years, you know, young kids that are growing up carting now emulating Max for stopping. I mean, it’s just, that’s what people just all sense. That’s what I have to be. If I want to be world champion in Formula One, I got to be like that. I got to be like Senna. I got to be like Schumacher.

I got to be like Verstappen. You know, it’s like you got to have that singular focus. And you know, like I said before, for what he was able to do in a car, going on YouTube and just watching what he could do. I mean, it’s just unbelievable what he could do in a car at that speed doing all the multiple things, you know, it’s just, it’s incredible.

It’s incredible. And [01:42:00] it would have been fabulous if he hadn’t passed away, you know, just to see what he could have done subsequent years. I think he still had a good another six, seven years in them. Easily, it would have changed up how the sport played out in the following years. And I think it would have be able to put the bed in regards to his legacy in regards to where he would have stood, because if he would have submitted it in regards to two or three more championships, more wins, everything like that.

I mean, It really was solidified it I was always gonna have the argument. Well, I only won the three and understand, but you don’t know what he would done, but he was a man. That’s all you ever really the spiritual is a bit something we didn’t really touch on very much. And, you know, my, my personal sense is that he felt as if.

God was communicating through him, you know, we talked about Monaco in 1988 when he crashed into the barriers there, at least in the Cappadia movie when Cappadia has him talking in an interview, the feeling that you get from him is that God was speaking through him and I, I used to feel, you know, European [01:43:00] kings in the medieval period felt they had a divine right to rule, you know, God had put them on earth to be king, so that gave him the right to tell everybody else what to do because God had made them king.

And I’ve always felt like Senna had a sort of divine right to pass that, that he would place the car in such a way that, you know, it was up to the other guy, whether or not you add an accident, that way of being again, everybody’s like that in Formula One. Now, nobody was like that before Senna came along, and you can argue that made the sport worse, but that was the winningness and part of the greatness, the persona.

Away from the track, the charitable work, this sort of little persona Sanina, which is sort of a little like cartoon character version of himself that was involved with a lot of those kind of charitable projects. I feel like I want to talk to Brazilians about that element of who he is, because obviously that’s very different from the way that PK was.

And I feel like for Brazilians, a lot of Senna’s greatness [01:44:00] Lies in the fact that he was so proud of being Brazilian and something that I’ve written in the past is I feel like a lot of the British public’s affection for Sterling Moss was based on the fact that, you know, in post war England, there was still rationing.

So people were poor and didn’t have a lot of food and. Didn’t have a lot of excitement and life was a bit crap. And here was this Englishman who was going abroad and racing cars and winning. And it reminded you of winning foreign victories in the war. And he was young and handsome and smiling, and it was exciting.

And, and I witnessed that, you know, in my parents. peer group, if you like, that they all have this warm feeling towards Moss. And I, I feel like I would like to understand more about, you know, from a Brazilian perspective, but I do feel like my sense is Senna had that kind of thing going. That’s his greatness as a man.

None of that has any reflection on his greatness or otherwise as a racing driver or as a Formula 1 driver. [01:45:00] We’ll just ask Rubens Barrichello. The second coming, right? Yeah. But we’ll leave that where it is. I guess, John, it’s time to kind of close this thing up. Why don’t you take us home? It is time to, uh, yeah, thank you very much.

Yeah, thank you very much, Eric, for, uh, steering me through my rambling and disjointed thoughts here. Thank you very much, William, for being on board and offering, uh, Ferrari focused and Porsche focused perspectives here. Yeah. Thanks you both and we’ll see you next time

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