Meeting Ayrton Senna

I don’t know what to say. We are driving down the pitlane now, and I’m stupidly trying to apologise because the car is an automatic version, as if that’s somehow my fault. And then I realise. I’ve left my Dictaphone and notebook on the little table outside the motorhome. I cannot do this job without them. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I blurt, ‘we have to go back.’ Without a word Senna flicks the T-shaped gear selector forward and reverses to where we had started. ‘I wait,’ is all he says.

I sprint back, parting the crowd like Moses. We start again down the pitlane but have to stop once more, this time because there’s an official with a walkie-talkie standing right in front of the car. Senna lowers a window and said official leans in and says to the greatest driver of his era, ‘you’ve been reported for reversing up the pit lane. You have to go and see Sid.’ So Ayrton Senna and I walk wordlessly to Race Control, where the Clerk of the Course, a one-time legend called Silverstone Sid bollocks the reigning Formula 1 World Champion for something that is entirely my fault. If I could have fled the room, abandoned the job and never returned, I would have done so in a heartbeat.

But when we get back through the reporters and I climb into the car for the third time in ten minutes, something is different. Senna is smiling. ‘Hi,’ he says, ‘we were not introduced. I’m Ayrton.’ Whereas I’m just bloody dumbstruck. I still can’t explain it but figure that, as we sat there like naughty schoolboys, listening to Sid tell Senna he didn’t care who he was, he could not go reversing up his pitlane, some shared experience passed between us and broke the ice. And that was enough.

Now I can’t shut him up. He drives slowly but is completely animated, talking about the extensive revisions to Silverstone that have just taken place, explaining why he preferred the old circuit because it was smoother and faster, while accepting it was just too dangerous for modern F1. But unless he gets his clog down, I still haven’t got a story.

Happily he knows this and I get two laps at maximum attack. He stops talking, the twinkling eyes turn to steel and he guides the NSX around the soaking wet track at speeds I cannot compute. He’s sideways everywhere, often at enormous speeds, but there’s no sawing at the helm, no armfuls of opposite lock. Most of the time he just has the wheel a few degrees either side of straight ahead, regardless of the radius of the turn. Although I can’t see it, he’s directing this car almost entirely with his right foot. It is as well he’s not talking because I could not reply: all I can do is laugh.

One last extravagant drift through Luffield and we’re down the pitlane and back outside the motorhome. ‘Was that okay? Get what you need?’ he asks. More than, I gasp. He grins for the last time, shakes my hand again and then as the visor of his cap comes down, I see the walls go back up, as he steps out into the crowd once more and is gone.

I saw him again, briefly, in the spring of 1994, in the lobby of the Kempinski Hotel at Munich Airport. He wasn’t with anyone I recognised, I was sure he’d not remember me, so I left them to it. A few weeks later he was dead.

What do I remember most about my time with Ayrton Senna? Well the driving of course, mainly the supreme economy of his actions and the way he appeared able to slow time and work to a different set of rules to the rest of us. But actually, it was the fact that despite his ruined tyre test, underpowered F1 engine, the idiot who forgot his voice recorder and the indignities of our encounter with Sid, he just wanted to help me do my job. In truth I remember the smile, the rather redundant ‘I’m Ayrton’ and the warmth of that final handshake as much or more than anything he did in the car. And the truth is that, 26 years on from Imola, there’s a small part of me that still can’t quite believe he’s gone.