Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / 30 years after Tamburello... Celebrating the Greatness of Ayrton Senna

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30 years after Tamburello... Celebrating the Greatness of Ayrton Senna · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  John Summers is the motoring historian.
• 0:02
  He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into
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  a fairly inept sports bike rider.
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  Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of
• 0:12
  cheap and fast, and not much reliable.
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  On his show, he gets together with various co hosts to talk about new
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  and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.
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  Good.
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  Day, good morning.
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  Good afternoon.
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  It is john summers the motoring historian and today I have with
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  us, uh, Eric producer guy and, uh, William Ross Ferrari guy.
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  Welcome gentlemen.
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  Thanks, John.
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  Thanks for having us.
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  Thank you, John.
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  Appreciate it.
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  And you, how are you listeners there?
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  You're you've, you've only been listening to this for about 30 seconds,
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  but these gentlemen have, uh, as usual with Mark Gammy, they've suffered
• 0:59
  through half an hour of me yelling and shouting and cursing and technology
• 1:02
  because I can't make the recording.
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  So in, in the future when podcasting technology works so smoothly, you, you'll
• 1:09
  have forgotten the, the world will have forgotten about the challenges those
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  of us have with the, uh, podcasting equivalent of Model T Fords and crank
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  handles and, uh, and all of that.
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  I wanted to do something slightly different with,
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  uh, with this format today.
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  I I've tried to do a pivot to do, to talk in a slightly more serious way
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  than, than historically I've done on, on these pods with Mark Gammy.
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  And that's why I wanted to have Eric, uh, and, and William on this time.
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  The occasion of our pod today is, is to talk about 30 years.
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  It's the passing of Ayrton Senna.
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  May he rest in peace.
• 1:50
  Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  I wonder if he does rest in peace.
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  That's the question.
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  Isn't it?
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  Mm hmm.
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  In life, it didn't seem as if he would.
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  And perhaps that's really what we've got to be, be thinking about here.
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  And I, my sort of reflection on, on Senna's been is that, you know, Alan
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  Henry, who's a journalist that I don't particularly rate, but he wrote a book
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  about Senna called as time goes by.
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  I think what's interesting about that title is.
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  It hints at the fact that our ideas about somebody like Senna change as time goes
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  by and I feel like that's been The, for society at large with, with center and,
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  and even for myself as a center fan, and I really was a, a center fan in period.
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  So look, Eric, I, I know you are a, you are fond of this and, and
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  the younguns are, uh, are fond of this kind of question, aren't they?
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  Who was their greatest of all time and.
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  I've tried to put together a little agenda for us here to, to allow us to examine
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  that question in kind of a sensible way.
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  I'll talk a little bit about the work that I've done in, in, in the
• 2:58
  past, sort of thinking about this.
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  Really, it started with me being like, I was obsessed by him as a boy.
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  Well, what was the who, why, what, when of that?
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  And, and I wanted to, to grow into that a little more so.
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  And what's important about that, John, is.
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  As I like to say, even on break fix is we're all petrol heads of a certain age.
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  We grew up with Senna and Senna shaped our view of the motor sports
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  world, maybe in different ways.
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  Maybe it was his triumphs at Monaco.
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  Maybe it was those very long promotional ads.
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  He did with Acura, you know, when he's out there in the loafers on
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  Suzuka, debuting the brand new.
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  NSX, he just had this charisma about him.
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  And I think it affected people in different ways, but all of
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  us are from that era of racing.
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  And so looking back 30 years, since he passed away, I mean, he would have
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  been what, 60 some years old this year.
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  Yeah.
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  Six, the.
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  Four or 65, I think it was 64 that he was born in, wasn't it?
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  He was 34 or 32.
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  He is the same age as Jesus was when he died.
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  I always think that that's the, the, there's this sort of, you know, and, and
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  it's a little bit like that very cynical LA movie producer said when James Dean
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  was killed, that, you know, it's, uh, you know, you've like great career move.
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  Yeah.
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  You know, you've like died LA died young and, and left a good looking corpse.
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  So William, what about you?
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  I mean, Aton left a mark on you too during his time with us.
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  You know, yes and no.
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  I appreciate what he, his skill, his talent.
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  That's when you really started getting into just, hey, you know,
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  that's all those guys race was F1.
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  I want to say Senna was more of a bully than, you know, anything.
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  He forced his way to the front.
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  Yeah, he could drive a car, there's no doubt about that.
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  But I think, It's kind of one of those, you know, I don't know.
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  I just I think it's ego gotten away a lot of times in regards to it and he
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  may or may have not allegedly tried to take out Alan Prost more than once.
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  But we'll talk about that later.
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  But you bring up something really important because I can draw a parallel
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  and I'm sure John will get to this later between Max Verstappen and Ayrton
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  Senna because the parallel there is you can take the boy out of the go cart.
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  Right.
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  Right.
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  But it's very hard to take the cart racer out of the boy.
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  And if you watch Senna, he grew up carting and I'm John, I'm sure you'll cover
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  this private go kart tracks at his house in Brazil and all this kind of thing.
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  And cart racing has a certain sort of race craft to it.
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  That if you take that to its logical conclusion in formula racing, he
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  continued that same driving style.
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  He drove his McLaren MP4.
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  Like it was a go cart.
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  I mean, people make that it drives like a go cart will send
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  a drove it like it was a go cart.
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  And so you see that in his race craft.
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  You see that in his aggression in that bullying as you call it.
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  And so I grew up noticing that too.
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  And like you, I respected him.
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  We put sent on a pedestal.
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  But there was all, there were other characters in the shadows.
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  There were the Damon Hills and the Nigel Mansells and the Allen
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  Pros and the Michael Schumachers that learned from Senna.
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  And so we'll get into all that.
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  And John, I don't want to put the cart to before the horse
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  because this is your show.
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  So let's begin at the beginning.
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  No, I, I love your, uh, you know, I, we've used this word bullying, haven't we?
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  We've, you know, you, you asked William for his opinion and he, he prevaricates
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  and he hesitates a little bit and we get the same kind of response as
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  we might get from an old NASCAR fan, somebody who maybe wasn't a Dale
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  Earnhardt fan in period and is now asked to reflect on, on Dale Earnhardt.
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  And I think that's a, A really useful sort of parallel to think about is,
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  is that both of them, um, sort of died in period and, and maybe weren't
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  that well loved or had some tactics that were, were a bit questionable.
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  And that, as you say, it changed the sport.
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  It put them on a pedestal and you've, you know, we've got bully
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  and we've got charismatic and, and, and this is sort of what we're.
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  Picking around that with, with Senna in, in, in general and, and I think,
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  you know, I'll say it now and we, you know, we can come to it later on in
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  the show as, as, as we talk on as well.
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  But I think greatness, my thinking about Senna has led me to think that greatness
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  lies not in The number of accomplishments you have, how you do the accomplishment.
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  So in other words, when we think about Prost and Senner,
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  it's not about statistics.
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  It's about how they did it.
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  When we think about Muhammad Ali, it is a charisma, but it's not a,
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  You know, Oh, he was a handsome guy and all the girls liked him.
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  It's something more than that.
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  And it's a good place to start with Senna, right?
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  Because for me, there was no, nobody loved motorsport in my family.
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  And, you know, formula one just happened to be on the TV on a Sunday afternoon.
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  And I, I watched it and it was a small TV and it was color, but it was small and
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  the cars droned and the volume was low.
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  And I was eating barbecue at a friend's house and I watched the JPS Lotus.
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  Be in front and I like the guy in the yellow helmet driving it, you know,
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  there was something about that that reached out of the TV, you know, out
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  of the helmet and out of the car and through the TV and, you know, thousands
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  of miles and, and, and gripped me.
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  And I think then I had that.
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  And I feel like.
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  That's what we respond to when we talk about, you know, the, the greatest effort.
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  Now this business of the comparison with Verstappen and Carters.
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  Yeah, I think that's the, this is a valid comparison.
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  This is something I want to talk about with Senna is, is that Senna is at almost
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  the end of the epic era of motorsport.
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  And it was like gladiatorial and the beginning of this sort of PlayStation
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  WWE, like wrestling, it's all for the show kind of way of being with formula one.
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  And.
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  You know, we can talk about that more later on, but certainly before the
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  era of Senna and, and Prost, there was no requirement, you know, not
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  everybody came from go karting and James Hunt didn't come from go karting.
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  Nicky Lauda didn't come from go karting, you know, Mike Hawthorne
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  would have laughed at you if he told you you needed to drive one of those
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  ridiculous little things before you could drive a proper racing car.
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  So, but arguably, of course, those little.
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  Rear engined racing cars that the guys like Sterling Moss started off
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  in, in Coopers and so on with the little V twin motorcycle engines.
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  Those kind of cars were pretty similar to go carts.
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  So arguably Formula One always had this kind of Go kart heritage, but
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  certainly Senna is the beginning of that era where if you didn't come from
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  karting, you're really going to struggle.
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  And if you're going to drive Formula One, you aren't messing around going to Le
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  Mans at the weekend, you know, you're not like, Oh, I'm going off to Indy this week.
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  I might just win Indy and then come back and do Formula One, like Graham Hill or.
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  You know, Andretti, if Ferrari called him, he called Penske and say, I'm
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  not racing for you this weekend.
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  Got to go to Monza and win the Italian Grand Prix for that
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  old man, Ferrari, wouldn't he?
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  Would he, you know, that wasn't around by, by the eighties.
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  Right.
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  And that does play into the greatness conversation, because I think a
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  measure of greatness is breadth.
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  Right.
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  And Senna arguably didn't show that, that kind of breadth.
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  But let's, let's talk about that later on.
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  Let's frame Senna as, as, uh, as, as you put it.
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  Asked me to that, you know, a little bit about background and history.
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  So yes, Brazilian and yes, wealthy and not just wealthy, but, but
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  also, you know, mom and dad cared.
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  So, you know, the carting didn't come easy, but when it came, there was the
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  money to do the carting and there was the money to do the carting properly,
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  and it was all about whether or not you hurt yourself, not whether or not.
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  You blew the motor up on the cart and, and that might seem obvious and that
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  might seem normal for how modern racing drivers do it, but that was not the
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  path for Bruce McLaren, you know, that was not the path for NASCAR drivers.
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  It was often all about the shoestring or for Fangio, even it was, uh, much
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  more of a, of a hard scrabble kind of, uh, kind of existence there.
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  So Senna comes to England in late seventies, early eighties.
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  And, and this is because England is perceived from where he is
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  in South America, in Brazil as the center of motorsport.
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  And, and that's, you know, an interesting thing and it plays into Senna's career
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  because you've got the FIA based in Paris and you've got all the teams who
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  were all based within about 150 miles of Oxford, which is a nice university town.
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  Which itself is only about 200 miles, just north, west, west of London there.
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  So, you've got this sort of British Mafia in Formula 1.
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  What Ferrari called the Garagista teams, you know, the Tyrrells and
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  the Clarens and the Williamses.
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  You know, these are British teams run by British people who are using the
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  Ford V8, which is all right, an American engine, but it's built in England.
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  And, you know, you get the human gearboxes from maidenhead, which is all
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  the way from Heathrow when you land at Heathrow maidenhead is all the way out
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  to, you know, wherever your base is at did call or woking or whichever team
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  you're, you're, you're with at the time.
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  And, and there's a definite sense.
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  I think that by the end of the seventies, the French in F in the FIA, well, I.
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  F this, right away with these three and a half liter V8, and we're
• 12:26
  going to go to these turbo motors.
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  And, and so this is sitting at the back of this, isn't it?
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  Because Renault comes and the best driver that Renault is able to
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  produce is, uh, Prost, isn't it?
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  And he was the first French world champion.
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  You know, which is really a remarkable thing, given they invented motorsport.
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  The first French Grand Prix was in bloody 1906 and it took them that long.
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  They couldn't get a world champion together.
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  So maybe you can argue, no wonder Balestrin, the Frenchman running the FIA
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  at the time wanted to, uh, to change.
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  Anyway, long and short was this was the lie of the land.
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  Everything was in England.
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  Just Senna came to England and in the movie, he talks about racing with this
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  guy, Terry Fullerton in go karting.
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  As an Englishman, what the media picked up on was when he first did
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  Formula 3, and the, I think it was the 1983 British Formula 3 season, he and
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  Brundle, it was him and Martin Brundle, hammer and tongs, and Brundle beat him.
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  You know, and it's classic Senna, right?
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  That Senna did that histrionics where there was contact and, you
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  know, did all the coming from behind.
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  But however you may feel about Martin Brundle now, and I know he's more
• 13:37
  famous for his clownish gridwalks with Machine Gun Kelly now than, uh,
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  than the driver that he once was.
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  But, but for a lot of, of Englishmen, certainly for me, If I were ever
• 13:48
  to see him and shake his hand, I would still be shaking hands with,
• 13:52
  in my opinion, the only person who ever legitimately beat Senna.
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  Nobody else ever beat Senna in the same car, but not before or since, than Brundle
• 14:02
  that year in, uh, in, in Formula 3.
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  He had a wife.
• 14:06
  Did you know that James?
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  He came with, I think her name was Adrian.
• 14:10
  She didn't speak much English.
• 14:12
  I don't think didn't he date music sensation Shusha for a while.
• 14:16
  There was like a whole thing going on with the two of them.
• 14:18
  Oh, but this was later.
• 14:20
  He married when he was quite young and they came to him and she was like 19
• 14:25
  and he was 21 or something like that.
• 14:27
  And I'm not sure if you've ever spoken to South Americans when they
• 14:31
  feel like relocated to Seattle.
• 14:33
  Manchester, if you speak to Spaniards or Italians who are living in like
• 14:37
  Scotland or something like that, they really struggle with the weather.
• 14:41
  The weather is really hard.
• 14:42
  It's the dreary, grey days.
• 14:45
  Even people in California who have grown up outside of San Francisco.
• 14:49
  San Francisco is these sort of grey months in the end of the summer and
• 14:52
  I don't notice it because I'm English and my friend from Cleveland, he
• 14:55
  doesn't notice it either because, you know, Cleveland's like that too.
• 14:59
  But if you're not used to it, it's really hard.
• 15:01
  And I think, I think she struggled with that.
• 15:03
  I think she struggled with the focus on racing.
• 15:05
  I think she struggled living in a house with the boys because
• 15:08
  Senna lived in a house with, do you remember Mauricio Googleman?
• 15:12
  I think after formula one, he was one of these people.
• 15:14
  He was better than the formula one career gave him credit for.
• 15:17
  And didn't he wash up in IndyCar?
• 15:19
  Didn't he do IndyCar for a bit?
• 15:21
  Yeah.
• 15:21
  He didn't do too bad in IndyCar.
• 15:23
  He won a few times there, but yeah, he actually, yeah, I think more
• 15:25
  known for IndyCar than he was as.
• 15:28
  Yeah, so he and Senna were mates.
• 15:30
  And the other guy that was here that really put in a good word for Senna was
• 15:34
  a guy called Johnny Chicotto, who is a Brazilian who lived, who had done,
• 15:38
  he'd done motorcycles and he did, he did like big rig racing when big rig
• 15:43
  racing was big in the eighties as well.
• 15:44
  But he was somebody.
• 15:45
  Well, I think had the ear of the British motorsport community a little bit and put
• 15:49
  in a good word for center and, and, you know, and the, the drives did the same,
• 15:52
  but, but yeah, I think fundamentally.
• 15:54
  So, so as the relationship struggle really early on, I feel like you see a
• 15:59
  chance, you see Senna's commitment, right.
• 16:01
  Faced with, you know, go home to Brazil and make sure the marriage
• 16:04
  works or do the racing while, you know, he stayed and she went home.
• 16:08
  He chose the racing.
• 16:10
  Yeah.
• 16:10
  Yeah.
• 16:10
  Right choice.
• 16:13
  So it's funny.
• 16:14
  I was talking with, uh, with an American guy who's not really a car
• 16:17
  guy earlier today, but he was talking about I rock Camaros and I remember
• 16:22
  that I, and I realized just what a special place this, you know, all
• 16:27
  different drivers all driving the same car, international race to champions.
• 16:31
  Just what kind of cachet that, that had, you know, in Europe that we do
• 16:35
  similar of these kind of one mark.
• 16:37
  Racist.
• 16:38
  There's, I think if you Google it up, there's like the Formula One
• 16:40
  drivers all racing Austin metros around Silverstone somewhere, which is
• 16:44
  basically like a, the beetle cup series.
• 16:47
  Well, Mercedes, I believe it was Mercedes organized an event.
• 16:52
  And Eric, you may know this.
• 16:54
  Was it at the Nordschleife?
• 16:55
  Or was it at the Sud Schleife?
• 16:57
  I don't even know exactly.
• 16:58
  Yeah.
• 16:58
  It was what would be considered now the Nürburgring GP course.
• 17:01
  I've actually watched this more than once.
• 17:03
  There was when they were debuting the new Cosworth powered 192.
• 17:07
  3 liter 16 valve, which wasn't even the Evo or the Evo two yet.
• 17:12
  So Mercedes was launching their new one 90 E.
• 17:15
  And so, yeah, they did basically an IROC between all sorts of, you know,
• 17:18
  already famous names of the time.
• 17:21
  And what I take away, spoiler alert from this race is if I remember
• 17:25
  correctly, Senna didn't win.
• 17:27
  And you said, you know, he doesn't get often beaten by people,
• 17:29
  but he got beaten by Han Stuck, which doesn't surprise me at all.
• 17:33
  That's how loud it was that serious.
• 17:35
  Didn't he?
• 17:35
  Overall?
• 17:36
  Yes, I believe he did because he was racing in that too, but in a particular
• 17:39
  race, the one at the Nurburgring GP track, Han Stuck took home the trophy for that.
• 17:44
  I could be wrong.
• 17:45
  I've watched it a couple of times.
• 17:46
  I'm a huge Han Stuck fan as well.
• 17:48
  So to me, to see Senna in that I rock.
• 17:51
  That was pretty awesome.
• 17:53
  I always feel like a lot of the other people in the race didn't take it that
• 17:56
  seriously and I feel like Senna took it as a serious as a serious opportunity
• 18:01
  put his name on the map and and he was almost too serious at that time because
• 18:05
  the car is a great car right the car was mercedes version of the e30 m3 so
• 18:11
  it was like the little sedan with You know, two and a half liter in line six,
• 18:16
  but it had like a dogleg five speed.
• 18:18
  Yeah, I had one.
• 18:19
  I beat the hell out of it.
• 18:20
  It was a fun car.
• 18:21
  Well, that, that was the problem with them, right?
• 18:23
  Was that everybody who ever had them did that to them.
• 18:26
  Yeah.
• 18:27
  Slight correction for homologation purposes.
• 18:30
  It was a 2.
• 18:31
  3 liter four cylinder 16 valve.
• 18:33
  Yeah.
• 18:33
  And then it went to two five.
• 18:35
  In the United States.
• 18:36
  The streetcar was a 2.
• 18:37
  5 liter six, but the actual homologated streetcars were four cylinders
• 18:43
  because so was the E30 M3 because they planned to use the 190 in Raleigh
• 18:48
  and they did use it in Raleigh.
• 18:49
  Wow, Eric.
• 18:50
  Wow.
• 18:50
  You're a veritable.
• 18:51
  Did I know something that you didn't know?
• 18:53
  You're a veritable Wikipedia.
• 18:55
  Yeah.
• 18:55
  I, uh, wow.
• 18:58
  So with Senna, right?
• 19:00
  The real like, everything that we talked about so far is like the
• 19:04
  prologue to the race career, right?
• 19:06
  This like status of the go or not, you know, that where is the number of
• 19:09
  question we're talking about really like chapter one would be that year
• 19:14
  that he spent in 1984 with Tolman.
• 19:16
  Now, I went to Goodwood a couple of years ago, and I have a mate who goes
• 19:20
  quite regularly, and I guess they got a Tolman, whether it was the one that
• 19:25
  Senna had or not, but they have a Tolman.
• 19:26
  I think the model is the TG184.
• 19:29
  It has a really bizarre, like, double wing, like a double element.
• 19:34
  Rear spoiler where the second element sort of goes over the engine cover.
• 19:38
  So the car looks weird at Goodwood.
• 19:40
  I remembered that like midway through the year, he was still using last year's car.
• 19:46
  And this is also the era where it's like four cylinders and it's got a massive
• 19:50
  turbo on it, and you've got like a, a knob, basically like an oven controller
• 19:54
  just under the steering wheel and you just turn the boost up with, with that.
• 19:58
  And Mike, Mike, I run a class at Stanford every year.
• 20:03
  You know, I, in preparing for that, I found a Mario Andretti quote about
• 20:08
  those cars from that, that turbo era.
• 20:11
  And he said, you know, the power was not benign power.
• 20:15
  I need you to think about if somebody like Mario Andretti, who can drive an
• 20:20
  850 horsepower sprint car on dirt, like with his eyes closed, if he's talking
• 20:26
  about the power not being benign power, I think you really get a sense of just
• 20:31
  how horrible to drive those cars were.
• 20:33
  Now, Old P.
• 20:35
  K.
• 20:36
  Nelson P.
• 20:36
  K.
• 20:37
  is always good for, uh, for a quote, isn't he?
• 20:39
  He described the Monaco Grand Prix as like riding a bicycle around your living room.
• 20:44
  If you do the computer games, you kind of get a sense of just how tight it is.
• 20:48
  And, of course, Monaco is one of the places where Senna's skill really
• 20:52
  demonstrate, you know, where Senna really demonstrated the difference
• 20:56
  between him and your average bear in terms of that ability to get closer.
• 21:01
  Senna.
• 21:01
  To the barrier and brake later and do it over and over and over and
• 21:04
  over and over again for three hours.
• 21:06
  Because it comes from kart tracks, it's very similar.
• 21:10
  It's very parallel to his experience.
• 21:12
  So him standing basically alone from a lot of the other drivers that didn't
• 21:16
  come up through karting, he was in his element at a place like Monaco.
• 21:20
  Just like in a kart race too when he crashed out leading the race
• 21:23
  by god knows how what he went back to his flat in Monaco to go pout
• 21:27
  instead of going back to the pits.
• 21:28
  Just like a kid racing karts.
• 21:31
  So, so that actually, that race was the mon that the gap there, that
• 21:36
  that's a, that whole incident, right?
• 21:39
  I vividly remember it.
• 21:40
  I don't know.
• 21:41
  I must have been, it was 88, wasn't it?
• 21:43
  So it was the spring of 88.
• 21:45
  So I would've been what, 14, nearly 15.
• 21:48
  By that time, like thoroughly committed, like my Sunday mornings where I would get
• 21:52
  out of bed, I would look at the newspaper.
• 21:54
  And you knew in the newspaper, if he was on pole, he could win.
• 21:58
  And if he wasn't on pole, you know, he wasn't, you know,
• 22:01
  the, he was going to struggle.
• 22:02
  And then McLaren, yeah, it was different.
• 22:04
  But if Pross was on pole, he was going to struggle.
• 22:06
  Well, I remember looking and thinking, is that a misprint?
• 22:09
  Because he was a second and a half faster than Pross.
• 22:12
  Well, they were like, and then it was only like a minute and a half around the track.
• 22:15
  It was like, it was like processed mystic gear in comparison.
• 22:19
  And in the race, he just drove off at the front and did the same thing.
• 22:22
  If we want to get into not whether or not center was the greatest effort, but if we
• 22:27
  really want to get into centers greatness, it was right there because the gap between
• 22:32
  him and everybody else was so enormous.
• 22:36
  And the skill involved, the cars were hard to drive and the skill involved.
• 22:40
  Was arguably greater than, so if, if Senna's greatness is anywhere,
• 22:45
  it lies in the performance gap between him and anybody else.
• 22:49
  Right.
• 22:49
  So, so that, that year at Monaco, he was way faster than everybody else.
• 22:53
  He went faster and faster and faster.
• 22:54
  They radioed him to slow down.
• 22:56
  It broke his concentration.
• 22:57
  He put it in the barrier.
• 22:58
  And understandably, I had no problem with him going back to the battery.
• 23:01
  Like what is it?
• 23:02
  It's not like I'm not like some NASCAR guy.
• 23:05
  Thank you.
• 23:05
  My sponsor, you know.
• 23:07
  And thanks to, you know, whatever dog food that's sponsoring me and thanks to
• 23:11
  my mum in the garage and thanks to my dad for patting me on the back when I was
• 23:15
  five years old and thanks to God above.
• 23:17
  No, right?
• 23:18
  No, I'm pissed off.
• 23:19
  I made a mistake.
• 23:20
  I did it in front of everybody else.
• 23:21
  And I don't need to talk to Honda.
• 23:23
  I don't need to talk to Ron Dennis.
• 23:24
  And I certainly don't need to talk to any newspaper wankers
• 23:27
  about what just happened.
• 23:29
  Oh, Ed, and can you tell us what happened?
• 23:31
  Oh, yeah, I plane crashed out of the sky.
• 23:35
  And it just disturbed me and, and, you know, cause of that, I jinked to the left.
• 23:39
  I lost concentration and put it in the barrier.
• 23:42
  Idiot.
• 23:43
  Anybody could see that, right?
• 23:45
  Anybody could see that the person who emerged from that room never made that
• 23:49
  mistake again, never overdrove again.
• 23:53
  Never.
• 23:54
  Right from then on, the gap between him and everybody
• 23:57
  else, he never overstepped it.
• 23:59
  And in the wet, it was so obvious, and it was so obvious at Monaco, because we just
• 24:03
  talked about 88 being the learning moment.
• 24:05
  Four years before, 84 is the year that he's with Tolman.
• 24:10
  It rains.
• 24:11
  Cross wants the race to stop because it's raining, which is
• 24:14
  understandable, you know, slip tires and all, and he's leading and all.
• 24:17
  He's pulling the Nicky Lauda thing.
• 24:19
  XANA is coming with the thunder.
• 24:21
  And actually passes him on the finishing line, thinks he's won, but because, you
• 24:27
  know, the event is that with the rules of the game are that if you stop the
• 24:32
  race early, it always winds back to the way the result was on the previous lap.
• 24:37
  Of course, Prost was leading then, so he's the winner.
• 24:41
  And I think if you, it's, it's on YouTube, you can see what Senate's thinking
• 24:44
  on the podium with Prince Rainier.
• 24:47
  Right?
• 24:48
  You can see what Senna's thinking there.
• 24:51
  There's already a sense of the narrative that appears in the movie of this, you
• 24:54
  know, bloody French stitching me up.
• 24:56
  I'm sure, I'm sure back in Woking, I'm sure Ron Dennett and the
• 25:00
  English mechanics didn't say to him, bloody French stitching you up.
• 25:04
  I'm sure none of that.
• 25:05
  I'm sure all those people out Honda in Swindon, just down the road from
• 25:10
  Woking, I'm sure none of them went, bloody French stitching you up.
• 25:14
  Right?
• 25:14
  I'm sure none of that happened.
• 25:15
  I wasn't aware of that in period.
• 25:17
  Are we saying that, then, is the moment, that is the event horizon
• 25:22
  for the beginning of the Prost Senna rivalry, which continued for years?
• 25:29
  No, it was there all along, because Prost was the guy to beat.
• 25:32
  Once P.
• 25:33
  K.
• 25:34
  was no longer really in the fray.
• 25:36
  And I really wonder how seriously Senna ever took PK, because
• 25:40
  PK is so seriously overlooked.
• 25:42
  I need to do a thing right and think and write properly about PK.
• 25:46
  But if, if you go back to 81, 82, 83, people like Gordon Murray,
• 25:53
  And I've no reason to doubt him.
• 25:54
  People like Bernie Ecclestone considered PK the very best guy.
• 25:59
  So what happened, right?
• 26:00
  Because by the late eighties, he wasn't there.
• 26:03
  Well, if you look at recent interviews with PK, they'll say that he had
• 26:08
  that huge prang at the beginning of 1987 at Tamburello, right?
• 26:12
  The same accident, Berger had the same accident that would kill Senna.
• 26:17
  PK had that accident and he was never the same again.
• 26:20
  He reckoned he didn't see the same way afterwards.
• 26:24
  So that year, 1987, remember where he was at William?
• 26:27
  Right.
• 26:27
  I remember famously he called Nigel Mansell's wife ugly.
• 26:31
  The reason he did that.
• 26:33
  Was I've seen him at, there's an interview that he did at Goodwood
• 26:36
  just recently with Rob Widows.
• 26:38
  It's out there on YouTube somewhere where Widows asks him which
• 26:42
  championship he was most proud of.
• 26:43
  And he says 1987 because I wasn't fast anymore.
• 26:46
  I'd lost my eyesight and I realized the only advantage I
• 26:49
  had against Mansa was in testing.
• 26:51
  So I knew that I had to split up the briefing.
• 26:54
  I couldn't sit in the same driver briefing because then I'd give up my advantage.
• 26:59
  So that was why I started doing things like saying his wife was ugly because I
• 27:03
  wanted him to, but he wouldn't hit me.
• 27:05
  It was so English.
• 27:06
  I wanted him to try and hit me.
• 27:07
  And then we definitely be split up and then our briefings will be separate.
• 27:10
  And then I could have the settings, which would be enough to enable me to have the
• 27:15
  competitive advantage, which You know, and PK did win the championship that year,
• 27:19
  but if you look, he rarely in those later years, he rarely out drove other people.
• 27:24
  It was usually the car and a well judged race.
• 27:26
  Those early years, I think he was really good.
• 27:29
  I don't know how he compared with, with Senate in, in those early years.
• 27:32
  But for me, Senna always wanted to be prost, but I dare say, or
• 27:36
  Prost, I dare say that was because.
• 27:38
  Prost had the best car in those years that when Senna was in
• 27:43
  the sport and really focused.
• 27:45
  It was.
• 27:46
  You know, if you think Pross was the dominant driver, 84, 85, 86.
• 27:52
  And those were the years that Senna had moved from just trying to get to
• 27:56
  Formula One to being in Formula One and really thinking what's it going to
• 28:01
  take for me to achieve my goal here.
• 28:03
  So to bring our listeners up to speed, so we're sitting in the middle 80s,
• 28:06
  we're talking 84 to 87 right now, Senna moves from Toleman to Lotus.
• 28:11
  And then I would just say, Eric, one more thing on that Toleman
• 28:15
  years and on that Monaco Grand Prix.
• 28:17
  And I should say the Toleman like caught fire, blew up, unreliable, just crappy,
• 28:21
  not competitive for the rest of the year.
• 28:23
  Right?
• 28:23
  So, so it's that much, but arguably Stefan Beloff had an even better race
• 28:30
  than Senna in that Monaco Grand Prix.
• 28:32
  And if you look at Beloff's other achievements, we're having a
• 28:35
  conversation, who was the greatest ever.
• 28:37
  If you really want to start writing.
• 28:41
  Beloff's 1984 was arguably more stellar than Senna.
• 28:45
  At the same time, since we're gonna focus more on the rivalry
• 28:48
  between Prost and Senna, Prost is running for Renault at this time.
• 28:51
  He has not made the transition to Ferrari yet, right?
• 28:55
  To McLaren, yeah.
• 28:56
  To McLaren, well send it to McLaren and Pro to Ferrari.
• 29:00
  Yeah.
• 29:00
  McLaren , right?
• 29:02
  They both step up their game and go with major manufacturers in 88.
• 29:06
  Yes.
• 29:06
  Um, so, uh, PRO is with McLaren from, it leaves Reno in I think 83 and by 84.
• 29:14
  Yeah, by 84 is at McLaren with Lauer Lau's Champion 85.
• 29:19
  He's at McLaren 80 and right the way through until Senator
• 29:22
  joins in 88, and then they have.
• 29:24
  The year where it's really mano a mano in, in 88, I was going to say 85 is the
• 29:30
  year that Senna steps from a second rate team to really a team where you can feel
• 29:35
  like you can challenge the championship.
• 29:37
  And this is when he joins Lotus.
• 29:39
  And again, the within the British press, there's a lot of contention
• 29:43
  around the joining of Lotus because he said, I'll join Lotus, but I don't
• 29:47
  want Derek Warwick in the other car.
• 29:49
  Now you may or may not know Derek Warwick.
• 29:51
  I mean, he runs a chain of Honda dealerships now, but he was one of these
• 29:54
  roughly tough, the Mark Blundell kind of working class, not, you know, James
• 30:00
  Hunt, dad was a stockbroker kind of guy, working class guys who were really,
• 30:06
  there was a, you know, Warwick could have been a formula one world champion.
• 30:09
  If you look at Warwick's performance in, in arrows, had that cards
• 30:13
  fallen differently, he could have been a formula one world champion.
• 30:16
  Right.
• 30:16
  And recognizing that center.
• 30:19
  I said to Lotus, you can only build one fucking car for the race
• 30:23
  that's actually going to finish, so you're building it for me.
• 30:25
  I'm not having you building it, you know, half the good bits on Warwick's
• 30:28
  car and half the good bits on mine, and then we both don't finish.
• 30:31
  Like, you're putting a rabbit in the other car and I'm driving.
• 30:34
  The car that you can actually build properly.
• 30:36
  And to his credit, Peter war, the boss of Lotus was like, okay.
• 30:41
  So the other guy, the rabbit was this guy, Johnny Dumfries, Googling.
• 30:45
  He was one of England's richest men.
• 30:47
  He owned a castle in Scotland, which he sold.
• 30:50
  He was a philanthropist, beautiful daughter.
• 30:53
  He he's a rat hole worth falling down.
• 30:56
  To be like, I was out in Senna's teammate was just part of the coolness
• 31:01
  of, uh, the Marquis of Dunfermline, I think was, uh, was his name.
• 31:05
  John Dumfries is the Anyway, so Dumfries was the teammate
• 31:09
  that Senna had at Lotus, right?
• 31:11
  This is the year that Renault are doing Lotus engines.
• 31:15
  And although the Lotus chassis wasn't great, the engine made all the power.
• 31:19
  I just want to pause a little bit.
• 31:20
  We talk about these turbo engines and we say, oh, 1500 horsepower, 1300 horsepower.
• 31:25
  I don't know what you guys have read.
• 31:27
  My understanding is the BMW 4, not V6, made 1500 horsepower
• 31:33
  once on a flash reading.
• 31:35
  Senna.
• 31:36
  In this era in a qualifying spec motor could expect 1300 horsepower, but
• 31:42
  that engine is only going to last the outlap, the fast lap and the inlap.
• 31:47
  It's done.
• 31:48
  And when we move away from qualifying engines, which we do
• 31:51
  in this period, we don't get that.
• 31:53
  So what Senna got in race trim and what Senna got in race trim with
• 31:57
  the boost down versus what he got in race trim with the boost up.
• 32:01
  Is TBD, you know, total aside, well not total aside, but relevant angle.
• 32:06
  I read an interview with Patrick Tornbay quite recently where he
• 32:10
  was talking about the Ferrari 126C.
• 32:13
  And how he was saying, this is an earlier turbo car, like early 80s turbo car.
• 32:18
  He reckoned that you never knew what power you were going to get from
• 32:21
  one minute to another, because they hadn't even figured out the metering.
• 32:24
  In other words, you could go around one corner and the turbo would blow a
• 32:28
  lot, and you could go around the other way and put the G forces the other
• 32:32
  way, and it would not blow as much.
• 32:34
  So, all of these horsepower figures are completely, like, Variable,
• 32:38
  but that's the amount of horsepower he was dealing with at that time.
• 32:41
  And there's their wide tires, wide slick, but relative to the era or modern cars,
• 32:46
  not much error, not very aero complicated.
• 32:50
  I guess the other thing that's very noticeable for us when we look at cars
• 32:53
  like, you know, Senna's 97 and 98 T that was the models there is your ankles.
• 33:00
  Your feet and ankles are in front of the front axle.
• 33:04
  That means if there's an accident.
• 33:06
  there is a little bit of plastic, you know, the brake master cylinder and
• 33:10
  your feet against the barrier, which is why, you know, those eighties drivers
• 33:15
  now they all walk with a bit of a limp.
• 33:16
  You'll see Brundle he walks with a bit of a limp because all of them
• 33:20
  have broken their ankles and feet.
• 33:22
  Multiple times.
• 33:23
  So going back to these horsepower numbers, so I'm leaning a little bit
• 33:27
  on my VW Porsche Audi knowledge, and in 87, the McLaren MP four slash three,
• 33:35
  the predecessor to the famous infamous Sena MP four four was powered by the
• 33:41
  TG Porsche V six, and I remember seeing those cars at the 87 Monaco Grand Prix.
• 33:46
  The things we're talking about in the Porsche books.
• 33:49
  Those Formula One cars were rated at 850 horsepower.
• 33:53
  I didn't think they were making race trim.
• 33:55
  I would say that was race trim, right?
• 33:57
  But I never saw numbers above a thousand in the Porsche world.
• 34:01
  So I would say if we use that as a benchmark in, at that time,
• 34:06
  Formula One had become more of like spec racing, like it is today.
• 34:09
  They had to fit within a certain horsepower window.
• 34:12
  So in race trim, they were all somewhere probably between 830 and
• 34:16
  870 on race day, 7, 000 horsepower.
• 34:20
  No, no, no.
• 34:21
  You, you had a knob.
• 34:22
  There was a gas, there was a gas limit.
• 34:23
  You had a certain amount of gas.
• 34:25
  So if you turn the wick right up and add it making a thousand horsepower, you'd
• 34:29
  pass everybody and then run out of gas.
• 34:30
  That was old school DRS.
• 34:32
  What, well, okay.
• 34:33
  Right.
• 34:34
  But, but what kind of racing is it?
• 34:35
  Like, is this formula one?
• 34:37
  When you're losing the race, cause you running out of gas or, you know, in order
• 34:41
  to pass, I'm like turning up the boost.
• 34:43
  The seats are really relevant for Senna because those early years with Lotus,
• 34:47
  those races that I watched at the barbecue where Simon Leake was the lads.
• 34:51
  Now his dad had a Saab turbo Saab 900 turbo, which I can a nine seven three BMJ.
• 34:57
  So we're not going to play now.
• 34:59
  Isn't that crazy?
• 34:59
  Those races, right?
• 35:01
  Senna would piss off at front and then would break down or run out of gas.
• 35:05
  And there was talk in the British press at the time that this was, it was just
• 35:09
  showboating, you know, he didn't, and of course he was hugely insulted by
• 35:13
  that, and I was thinking about that earlier today, that that completely
• 35:15
  misunderstood who Senna was as a person, that was a, a Paul Troonish move,
• 35:20
  and Senna was nothing, not at all.
• 35:22
  Before we move on just a little bit.
• 35:25
  So I'm coming to the table with a little Porsche knowledge.
• 35:27
  I want to lean on William a little bit.
• 35:29
  Do you remember horsepower?
• 35:32
  Why some of the power figures of what the Ferrari formula cars were putting down at
• 35:37
  that time, just for comparative purposes, as John mentioned, you'd bet you, I mean,
• 35:40
  they all had, you know, back then they were 30 engines, 40 engineers, because
• 35:44
  they would just qualify motor, pitch it.
• 35:46
  You know, what do you like?
• 35:47
  They rebuilt it.
• 35:48
  They got rid of it, but you know, they could crank that up for it But I know back
• 35:52
  then it was about 850 in that range give or take 10 200 that the biggest trick was
• 35:58
  especially during the turbos one obviously mileage wise but is how the power came
• 36:02
  on because You know, you have the guys going, okay, I'm in coming in the apex.
• 36:06
  I haven't hit the apex yet, but I'm putting my foot to the floor because
• 36:09
  by the time I hit the apex coming out, that's when the turbo kicks in.
• 36:12
  So it's all about moderating and be able to know when I handle the horsepower.
• 36:16
  And like John was saying is it was so erratic.
• 36:18
  It was kind of hard to have that flow going to go.
• 36:22
  You know, that's great.
• 36:23
  But I, I, parameter wise, whatnot, I know they're all in that 850 range.
• 36:27
  And what you described is what I've also heard from talking to several
• 36:31
  935 drivers where mitigating the turbo lag was the biggest thing they
• 36:37
  had to do because it would kick them in the chest when it was on boost.
• 36:41
  And after that, they were just done.
• 36:42
  Dogs.
• 36:43
  So they had to really keep them just strung up as much as they could to stay
• 36:47
  in the boost range and then made the cars really twitchy, made it hard to drive.
• 36:51
  And there's just monsters to begin with.
• 36:52
  So I can see that translating to formula one, but 88 for me, as we transition
• 36:58
  into this, I know John wants to go here because it's a special year.
• 37:01
  It's that potpourri.
• 37:02
  It's that mixed bag of formula one that I want us to go back to because
• 37:07
  we sort of ditched the turbos.
• 37:09
  But there were still some turbos around.
• 37:11
  And then you saw the V12 Ferrari return.
• 37:15
  You had, you know, the MP44 Honda engine.
• 37:18
  You had all these different, just awesome cars running together.
• 37:23
  And sort of the end of the turbo era that had started in the 70s.
• 37:26
  Right, John?
• 37:27
  Yeah, they wind the, they wound the boost down.
• 37:29
  So I think so.
• 37:30
  87 Senna, 86 is the last JPS car.
• 37:34
  And he finished fourth that year, fourth year after the Lotus that he had
• 37:38
  in 87 was the model was the a hundred T it was camel sponsored and the car
• 37:43
  just, the chassis wasn't up to scratch.
• 37:45
  The interesting thing about that car was active ride.
• 37:48
  And by that year, you know, Senna won the street races.
• 37:50
  And if it was wet.
• 37:51
  You know, that was, was it so where anywhere where it was, where there weren't
• 37:55
  those two parameters, he wasn't winning.
• 37:58
  So it was really exciting for me when he went to McLaren at last, because that
• 38:03
  was, was a good, you know, they were considered the best team at the time.
• 38:07
  And of course, what you weren't expecting was that that car
• 38:10
  turned out to be arguably.
• 38:12
  The greatest formula one car ever.
• 38:14
  I mean, certainly a completely dominant season and it is worth
• 38:18
  drilling into that, right?
• 38:20
  That there were 16 races and that McLaren won 15 of them.
• 38:25
  And the only one it didn't win was the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.
• 38:29
  Which took place two weeks after old man Ferrari died.
• 38:34
  So it was the first Grand Prix after the old man died.
• 38:37
  I don't know what happened to Prost in the race.
• 38:39
  I need to look it up and see what happened to him in the race.
• 38:41
  But Senna was out in front doing his like aggressive passing of back markers.
• 38:46
  And a guy called Jean Louis Schlesser, a sports car driver
• 38:49
  who was subbing in the Williams.
• 38:52
  Didn't see him coming, turned into him, Senna got airborne in the first chicane,
• 38:57
  crashed out of the race, and the Ferraris were second and third and went on and won.
• 39:02
  And it was all super poetic and McLaren's perfect copy of book
• 39:06
  that year was like, was blotted.
• 39:07
  I guess the thought about that year was quite early on, it was
• 39:11
  clear how much better the car was.
• 39:13
  So it developed into this duel between Senna and Prost.
• 39:16
  And certainly by the time of Monaco, it was clear.
• 39:19
  That when Senna won, Prost finished second, but if Prost won, Senna
• 39:24
  struggled to finish second.
• 39:26
  He tended to not finish second, or just generally have some other,
• 39:30
  you know, Senna esque kind of histrionics that was nowadays.
• 39:35
  There's so much emphasis on winning, completing every race,
• 39:38
  and you get penalized so much in the points if you don't finish.
• 39:42
  But in those days, it wasn't really like that.
• 39:44
  To illustrate that, Prost got far more points through the season, right?
• 39:47
  But in those years, there were 16 races, but you could only count your best
• 39:52
  11 results towards the championship.
• 39:54
  So early on, it became clear.
• 39:57
  The, it wasn't about acquiring points.
• 39:59
  It was about winning every weekend.
• 40:02
  And that I absolutely love.
• 40:04
  Let's pull on the thread here though, because there's some really important
• 40:07
  other things that are happening in the world of motorsport and especially
• 40:13
  in the automotive world, and this leans back into Williams camp.
• 40:16
  When 1988 signifies.
• 40:20
  A very important time in Ferrari, right, William?
• 40:23
  August 14, 1988 is the day Enzo Ferrari died.
• 40:27
  The last car he blessed was the F40 and the Ferrari 640, which would
• 40:32
  be the next year's Formula One car.
• 40:35
  Those were sort of the last two cars.
• 40:37
  I don't want to say he was directly involved in the F40 for sure.
• 40:40
  This is a pivotal moment for Ferrari.
• 40:42
  They're getting their asses handed at them by McLaren with a Japanese engine
• 40:47
  from Honda, and their answer is The Ferrari 640 with a B12 going back to
• 40:53
  Enzo's original methodology, big engine, big power, the hell with the rest of it.
• 40:58
  Well, for 89, they banned turbos.
• 41:00
  Yeah.
• 41:01
  That's what I'm going to guess.
• 41:02
  So I was at 88, you still had teams running some, you know, some had
• 41:05
  a turbo, some were running the Cosmo, it's all that kind of stuff.
• 41:07
  It was kind of across the board, but they didn't develop that engine overnight.
• 41:10
  It was already planned.
• 41:11
  And kind of going back to that one winning two weeks after,
• 41:16
  You go really in deeply in that.
• 41:18
  Some people kind of say it was all rigged just because of that, you know,
• 41:21
  it was Enzo had passed and there was all this colluding going on and whatnot
• 41:24
  saying, Oh, we have to have Ferrari win, at least coming first one, two of you,
• 41:29
  which no, but you know, it just, it's.
• 41:32
  It's one of those situations where it's just kind of, you know,
• 41:33
  that storybook thing is like, oh, it's too good to be true.
• 41:36
  Senna was so aggressive with the passing of Bat Marcus, right?
• 41:40
  When it happened, I remember like being mad, but also feeling like,
• 41:44
  well, it had to happen sooner or later, even at the end, right?
• 41:46
  Even his passing at the end, it was he who lives by the sword.
• 41:51
  We'll surely die by the sword.
• 41:52
  Yeah, exactly.
• 41:53
  You know, and going into 89, though, going through, obviously,
• 41:56
  you know, turbos are gone.
• 41:57
  And that's when you had all, you had V8s, V10s, the V12.
• 42:02
  The biggest Achilles heel they were saying about that was weight.
• 42:05
  That's what the biggest kind of problem was with that car, just
• 42:07
  because the weight that motor added.
• 42:09
  But the diversity that you had, you know, where Formula One was going in regards
• 42:13
  to the cars, what they're able to do.
• 42:14
  And just, you know, development wise, where everything was going
• 42:17
  was, it was such a great time.
• 42:19
  In regards to that, I mean, from, you know, your late eighties into
• 42:23
  your mid nineties was just awesome.
• 42:25
  You know, and then what you're doing with McClare and everything
• 42:28
  like that with the cars.
• 42:29
  I mean, there were epic cars, some of the best F1 and arguably my opinion, some
• 42:34
  of the best looking F1 cars ever built.
• 42:36
  I mean, just gorgeous.
• 42:37
  And what's funny is if you compare those cars to the ones of today, I've made
• 42:42
  the joke and it's not too far off that the wheelbase of a current F1 car is the
• 42:46
  same as a Ford F 150, they're absolutely huge at like 140 plus inches wheelbase.
• 42:51
  If you look at Senna's MP44, which was at car week at Pebble beach last year,
• 42:56
  where John and I were together to use the phrase again, it's like a go kart.
• 43:00
  It's tiny, tiny.
• 43:02
  And to your point from earlier, John, I believe it was Tanner Faust.
• 43:06
  actually drove that car.
• 43:07
  I don't know why it was him, but he drove that car and talked
• 43:09
  about it a couple of years ago.
• 43:11
  And he goes, I don't understand how they drove these things.
• 43:13
  It's like impossible to drive and to drive at the limit.
• 43:16
  He couldn't fathom doing what Senna did.
• 43:19
  And on this theme of greatness, and we're going to touch on this later
• 43:22
  on, but that is the thing, isn't it?
• 43:24
  That motorsport is about leaning out of a high window.
• 43:27
  It's who can lean the furthest out of the high window without
• 43:29
  actually falling, right?
• 43:31
  And greatness is about who can do that You know, the highest window.
• 43:35
  And, and these cars were very high window.
• 43:39
  They were hard to, to drive properly.
• 43:41
  And the, the other thing is, although the, you know, we're talking about
• 43:44
  monster, the circuits are the same.
• 43:46
  The, the runoff was very different.
• 43:49
  And some of the circuits they used were very different.
• 43:51
  You know, they were super unsafe, throwback circuits in
• 43:54
  place of a lot of them all.
• 43:56
  You know, a lot of the circuits now that are very modern and safe and sanitized.
• 44:01
  I guess the aero, you know, we talked about after Senna, one of the things
• 44:04
  after Senna's passing was that they moved the front axle line back.
• 44:08
  And, you know, we were talking about the world of Porsche.
• 44:10
  That's the difference between a Porsche 956 and a Porsche 962 is where the axle
• 44:14
  line is, you know, it, it, it, it, The, I feel like modern cars, they're just so
• 44:20
  much more aerodynamically complicated.
• 44:21
  The aerodynamics were less sophisticated then.
• 44:24
  So, you know, that MP4 strike four, it has the adjustable elements on
• 44:28
  the front wing and the adjustable elements on the rear wing and the
• 44:31
  side pods are just the side pods.
• 44:32
  There's no arrow or anything to do with that.
• 44:35
  The wings of the wings, whereas.
• 44:36
  A modern car, your sense is the whole car is part of the wing there.
• 44:41
  I think the other thing to think about is the turbo technology was going out and
• 44:45
  the way that the turbos went out was first They limited it to four bar and then they
• 44:49
  limited to two and a half bar of pressure and even in the two and a half I think
• 44:53
  89 was the two and a half bar year and the mclaren was still a super dominant
• 44:58
  across the garage easter teams You then have to Pivot somewhere else, right?
• 45:03
  Are Honda going to build us a V8 or a V12?
• 45:06
  Are we going to have to go somewhere else?
• 45:07
  And a lot of the teams, as, as William said, they went back to the DFVs, the Ford
• 45:12
  DFVs they'd been using back in the 1970s before the, uh, before the turbo era.
• 45:17
  And for the time that the normally aspirated cars and the turbo cars
• 45:21
  ran together, the turbo cars were just in a class of their own.
• 45:24
  It was just much, much faster.
• 45:27
  If you wanted to win, you needed a turbo car.
• 45:28
  Well, I was going to say what came along in the background, right?
• 45:30
  That's why I wanted to mention that Camel Lotus 100T that Senna had in 87.
• 45:35
  By the early 90s, by 92, Williams, Nigel Mansell at that time, had got
• 45:41
  the active ride thing completely right.
• 45:44
  They'd also got traction control right.
• 45:46
  They'd also got semi automatic gearboxes right.
• 45:48
  So by 92, We'd almost already moved into that point and squirt kind of era
• 45:54
  that we're in at the moment, where, you know, if you look on film of Senna, you
• 45:59
  know, I think on YouTube, the center on board is like pole lap at Monaco
• 46:03
  in 1991, and he takes his hand off.
• 46:05
  He's taking his hand off.
• 46:07
  The steering wheel to shift, you know, like, well, obviously he would,
• 46:10
  but if you show modern formula one fans that it's quite astonishing that
• 46:14
  he goes through casino square with only one hand on the steering wheel.
• 46:18
  Oh yeah.
• 46:18
  And they say lap of the gods as it's, as it's titled, you know,
• 46:22
  that's where the respect comes in and those guys is to your point is.
• 46:26
  Especially going on something like Monaco, you're driving with one hand
• 46:28
  because you're shifting so much.
• 46:30
  I'm trying to remember what the number is.
• 46:32
  They said how many times you shifted during a race.
• 46:34
  And it was some obscene number.
• 46:36
  Not only just shifting, but heel toe and doing your feet.
• 46:39
  I mean, you have, all your appendages are doing something different.
• 46:42
  You know, it's not like something's doing in units like this.
• 46:44
  It's like being a drummer.
• 46:45
  I'm hitting heel toe gas, you know, clutch and you know, all this stuff.
• 46:50
  And that's where the respect comes in.
• 46:51
  And like, yeah, you see him today.
• 46:53
  And you know, like I said, you started getting the early nineties, some out
• 46:56
  of that gearbox, everything like that.
• 46:57
  And you started getting a lot of the controls on the steering wheel
• 47:00
  regards to stuff moving around.
• 47:02
  Hey, you know, your, uh, brake bias and all about the active arrow and
• 47:05
  all about the active suspension and everything like that, and, you know,
• 47:08
  Those guys go where they could change it for every corner and all this stuff.
• 47:11
  I mean, it was just getting, I would say out of hand, but basically that's
• 47:14
  what it was is because it was who had, again, it's all about money, but who had
• 47:18
  the best engineers built what they could create because there really wasn't any
• 47:21
  limitation on it, a lot of guys adapted.
• 47:23
  Some didn't, you know, it just really kind of changed how you looked, how
• 47:27
  someone raced a car, you know, and had the guys that were transitioning
• 47:30
  through it, you know, instead of.
• 47:32
  Obviously didn't miss a beat his limitation going from that, you know,
• 47:36
  from the McLaren into the Williams.
• 47:38
  Only thing was his McLaren's, you know, the engine would let them down
• 47:41
  in regards to those last few years.
• 47:43
  He was there, you know, he still did all right, but it came down to the car.
• 47:47
  Well, so that's the thing, isn't it?
• 47:48
  And there you go.
• 47:49
  Cause he wanted to have the winning car, but then he goes into the Williams.
• 47:52
  It was such a cool time in regards to what was going on.
• 47:55
  Am I the only one that when.
• 47:58
  Senna left McLaren despite, let's say, the dismal failure of the V10 Honda engine
• 48:04
  versus the turbo, the V6 that it replaced.
• 48:06
  I was disappointed.
• 48:08
  I felt like Senna had somehow thrown in the white flag, like going to Williams.
• 48:16
  For me, as a fan, it felt like defeat.
• 48:18
  No, no, he tested with Williams at the beginning.
• 48:21
  He tested with Williams at the beginning.
• 48:23
  He always had the relationship with Frank Williams and Patrick Head.
• 48:26
  It was always an open door.
• 48:28
  So there was always the recognition.
• 48:30
  And remember, it's all Didcot is not really a long way from Woking.
• 48:34
  The engineers cross pollinated.
• 48:37
  So that English Garage Easter to club, right?
• 48:40
  And for that last year at McLaren, that 1993 at McLaren, because 91 hadn't
• 48:46
  been what did 93 at McLaren, the car wasn't there or 92 wasn't great, right?
• 48:50
  So 93, the car wasn't there and he did individual races.
• 48:55
  He did an individual race by race contract with Ron Dennis.
• 48:58
  They would negotiate before every race because the car wasn't there.
• 49:02
  Cause Flavio Briatore, the Benetton guy had negotiated a deal with Ford that
• 49:07
  they always got the latest spec engines.
• 49:08
  The Senna was stuck on a non spec engine.
• 49:11
  And again, right.
• 49:12
  We're talking about greatness.
• 49:14
  The 1993 European Grand Prix from Donington.
• 49:19
  And we should say it was the only Formula One Grand Prix from Donington
• 49:22
  in the post war period, right?
• 49:24
  The previous one was like in the 1930s when it was the Silver Arrows.
• 49:28
  That race where Senna is, starts fairly low down the grid and then just
• 49:33
  drives past everybody else like they're standing still on that first corner.
• 49:38
  You know, down through the crane of curves.
• 49:40
  This is arguably the greatest opening map in history and definitely is
• 49:44
  a demonstration of Senna's just superior skill when the Grip
• 49:50
  conditions were super questionable.
• 49:53
  So, you know, without that year where he was hyper pissed off and
• 49:57
  arguing with Ron Dennis all the time and on a month to month, you know,
• 50:01
  on a race to race contract, it gave us that Donington Grand Prix, it
• 50:05
  squeezed that brilliance out of him.
• 50:06
  Although I would say Ackernand out qualified him, Ackernand's first
• 50:10
  Grand Prix, he out qualified Senna and it was pure speed again, right?
• 50:15
  You rarely see Senna bested, certainly.
• 50:19
  Qualifying that you did that as that little side note, who is a teammate was
• 50:24
  for the first part of the year, a little gentleman by the name of Michael Andretti.
• 50:27
  Yeah, that's right.
• 50:28
  93.
• 50:29
  Yeah, that's right.
• 50:30
  I got it.
• 50:30
  I will never forget that Australian Grand Prix when Michael, his first race.
• 50:35
  Oh, what a, what a let down.
• 50:37
  Oh yeah.
• 50:38
  Yeah.
• 50:38
  What?
• 50:38
  And.
• 50:39
  And Hockenheim took over, I think, was it after, what, the sixth race, fifth
• 50:42
  race, sixth race, something like that?
• 50:43
  I remember he's at Estoril.
• 50:45
  I remember he out qualified because Senna's first Grand Prix
• 50:47
  victory in 85 had been at Estoril.
• 50:49
  And I remember just being rocking on my heel that Senna
• 50:53
  had actually been out qualified.
• 50:54
  Because again, it's the greatness thing, right?
• 50:56
  He may not have been the greatest or rounder.
• 50:58
  I think you'd struggle to make that case.
• 51:00
  But was he the fastest ever?
• 51:03
  If you look at the poll records, I mean, how long did it take, um,
• 51:06
  Hamilton to eclipse his poll records?
• 51:09
  A really long time that the starts to polls ratio.
• 51:13
  And then Santa had was, was unequal.
• 51:15
  Did the stories that journalists tell of, because he used to get an
• 51:19
  hour to go out and do qualified.
• 51:20
  And yeah, you know, anytime you set within that time, you'd have the
• 51:23
  qualified tire and the qualified motor.
• 51:25
  So you'd only have the three laps, but what Santa would do was
• 51:28
  wait until the very last minute.
• 51:29
  Yeah.
• 51:29
  There was the last person out and then you would know exactly
• 51:32
  the time that you had to do it.
• 51:33
  You could always eat out that extra difference.
• 51:36
  Now, Michael.
• 51:36
  Michael Schumacher could do it as well.
• 51:38
  And it's become as qualifying formats have changed.
• 51:41
  It's become part of a Grand Prix drivers, you know, and anatomy
• 51:45
  years before they didn't do that.
• 51:46
  You know, a guy like Fangio would spend three days working up to that pole time.
• 51:53
  Just like you see the Isle of Man TT guys doing that now, whereas, you
• 51:56
  know, after Senna, Michael Schumacher famously, you know, Martin Brundle
• 52:00
  used to say, you know, you'd spend all week at Silverstone testing.
• 52:03
  Fucking Michael had turned up second lap would be faster than anything you've
• 52:07
  done all week and you'd just be like, what, like, how, how can I match that?
• 52:13
  And you bring up a good point that Schumacher at
• 52:16
  this point is in the shadows.
• 52:18
  So we have to remember that too.
• 52:19
  And he's studying, you know, the rain God, as they used to refer
• 52:23
  to Senna and Schumacher himself was very talented in bad weather
• 52:26
  and sketchy weather conditions.
• 52:28
  But going back to my point from before.
• 52:31
  I, as a fan, we're talking about putting Senna up on a pedestal, you
• 52:34
  know, we're paying tribute to his life.
• 52:35
  We're talking about his career, all this kind of thing.
• 52:37
  I, as a fan, when I saw him put on that Williams uniform for the first time
• 52:42
  and race, I was like brokenhearted.
• 52:44
  I felt like he had given up.
• 52:46
  Like he was the Marlboro man, right?
• 52:48
  He was McLaren.
• 52:49
  He was that Honda, that car in him.
• 52:52
  I don't think about Senna with.
• 52:54
  The Lotus.
• 52:55
  I think about Alex Zanardi as one of the last John Player special drivers, right?
• 52:59
  And that kind of thing coming up at the same time as Senna
• 53:03
  and all this kind of thing.
• 53:04
  I put the two together, the brand, the car, the time.
• 53:08
  Senna is McLaren, McLaren is Senna.
• 53:10
  When he put on that Williams uniform for the last year, it did something to me
• 53:14
  and it makes me wonder, and I'm going to check my conspiracy theories at the door.
• 53:18
  That had he not gone to Williams, had he not been impatient, had he let the
• 53:24
  development team continue to maybe refine the B10, work the bugs out
• 53:28
  of it, it was whatever, development process like happens today, maybe,
• 53:33
  maybe, just maybe, Senna Wouldn't have ended the way he did at Tamburello.
• 53:38
  And we'll talk about more.
• 53:39
  I have to say, and Lego agree with you too, because 100 percent the
• 53:43
  model you got right behind you, the car, everybody aligns with Senna is
• 53:47
  that MP4 for, you know, it's me, I go to Williams and I kind of agree
• 53:51
  that obviously making the decision to go to Williams was based on the car.
• 53:55
  And he felt that was, it was putting the best position, but the problem was, is
• 53:58
  when, and he went into it in 94, they took all those regulations and they got
• 54:02
  rid of, you know, the active suspension.
• 54:04
  And so, so there's a big drop in regards to, Hey, how much
• 54:07
  an advantage the Williams had.
• 54:09
  It wasn't just that was it?
• 54:10
  If you think of it, Williams since 1991, Williams had had a car that did everything
• 54:16
  with computers and then they were banned.
• 54:18
  So Williams had to like go back three years, whereas the other guys, they didn't
• 54:22
  have active right in the first place.
• 54:24
  So they still had a pretty good chassis.
• 54:25
  So Senna, you know, I'd spent all year telling Ron Dennis, no, I'm not committing
• 54:31
  to you telling Patrick head and Frank Williams, I'll drive for you for free.
• 54:36
  Now he's finally got the car.
• 54:37
  The car was bloody terrible.
• 54:39
  Car was virtually undriveable and the race, uh, Interlagos, the Brazilian
• 54:44
  Grand Prix in 1994, he had a half spin.
• 54:47
  He'd not had a half spin.
• 54:48
  I'd not seen him out a half spin since the Lotus years.
• 54:52
  Right?
• 54:52
  So those early years of 1994, when it was clear that the regulations
• 54:57
  had really left him high and dry.
• 54:59
  And let's be clear, right?
• 55:00
  With the benefit of hindsight, it is light.
• 55:03
  It's, no, I don't think it's, I think it's beyond debate that Flavio Briatore
• 55:07
  and Michael Schumacher were cheating.
• 55:08
  They were cheating with the fuel rigs.
• 55:10
  We remember Joseph Verstappen's caught fire.
• 55:13
  In Brazil, it was because they cheated the fuel rig and there
• 55:16
  was too much fuel going into it.
• 55:17
  They were also cheating around traction control.
• 55:20
  So Senna was unfairly beaten in those first three races.
• 55:25
  And this is why we have this bad feeling around Williams.
• 55:28
  If there hadn't have been, just not the cheatiness, if there just hadn't
• 55:32
  have been the cheatiness, there would have been a sense of equal terms.
• 55:36
  So as we arrive at Imler in 1994, Senna wouldn't have had that pressure cooker
• 55:41
  of, you know, of the requirement to, to perform, the failure is, is not an option.
• 55:46
  Of course, the, the business of who's to blame if, if we accept the Italian
• 55:49
  court argument that the cause of the incident was the broken steering column.
• 55:54
  Yeah, if he hadn't have driven a Williams, he would still
• 55:56
  be alive, wouldn't he, Eric?
• 55:58
  Again, I'm not going to put on my tinfoil hat, but.
• 56:00
  I just want to say, I think that's steering column story
• 56:05
  is a load of absolute bullshit.
• 56:07
  Bollocks.
• 56:08
  I'm glad you said it.
• 56:09
  If you just pause and really stop and think about that, you're telling me that
• 56:15
  a Williams mechanic, not some fucking 16 year old straight out of college,
• 56:19
  a Williams Grand Prix mechanic, is not able to weld a steering column together?
• 56:26
  Sufficiently.
• 56:27
  Well, the, after four laps, four whole laps of racing speed over the rough
• 56:32
  bumps of four whole laps, this steering column shears in half so completely that,
• 56:39
  I mean, so you have to, but you know, let's, let's be real about this, right?
• 56:44
  If it wasn't the steering column, I think what happened is that there were
• 56:48
  bumps on the inside of Tamburello.
• 56:51
  And, and I think that at the start of the race.
• 56:54
  Uh, somebody let, I think stalls and somebody runs into the back of him.
• 56:59
  Horrible accident at the start.
• 57:00
  We all go in everywhere.
• 57:01
  There's day break, new process safety car comes out.
• 57:05
  Safety car is a voxel.
• 57:08
  VGSR.
• 57:09
  mm-Hmm.
• 57:09
  Now I never had the GSI model 'cause it had a lofty 170 horseback and
• 57:14
  my company had a policy that you weren't allowed more than 150 i to
• 57:18
  make do with 130 horsepower SRI.
• 57:22
  The bottom line is this is.
• 57:23
  Fucking slow car to be lead in a formula one race and the thought is that the tire
• 57:30
  pressures in Santa's car went down and you can even, you know, he complains about,
• 57:35
  you can see him gesticulating to the safety car driver to, you know, go faster.
• 57:40
  So I think the tire pressures went down.
• 57:42
  I think the car rode lower and, and as for the bumps on the inside of Tamburello,
• 57:46
  Sandra is on record as saying to Damon Hill, his young teammate is bumping on the
• 57:50
  inside of Tamburello to stay off there.
• 57:52
  Now, if you look at the onboard with Michael Schumacher, and this is just
• 57:55
  the Senate thing, this is maybe my idea about Senate, but if you look at
• 57:59
  the onboard, having told he'll stay off the inside of Tamburello, having
• 58:03
  gone and spoken with Ratzenberger's family, having gone to Barrichello's
• 58:08
  bedside, having done that, he then puts the car right on the inside because
• 58:13
  there's no way I'm losing this race.
• 58:15
  I've got to win this one.
• 58:17
  I've got to.
• 58:19
  Prove myself.
• 58:19
  I think, I think that's what happened.
• 58:21
  I'm gonna say one word.
• 58:22
  I'm gonna say sabotage because that is sometimes heard on the winds of
• 58:28
  this conversation that the car was in a very soap opera esque way.
• 58:34
  Maybe the brakes were manipulated.
• 58:35
  Maybe the steering was manipulated with maybe the car just let's call it.
• 58:39
  It was sabotaged.
• 58:40
  I think Senna in some ways And maybe I'm speculating here,
• 58:44
  was a bit of a hypocrite?
• 58:46
  Damon, I don't want you on the inside of Timberello because that's
• 58:49
  gonna give you my line, right?
• 58:51
  Because that is an old racer's trick.
• 58:52
  Never tell them, never show them your actual running line.
• 58:56
  No, no, there's no, the young Senna might have done that.
• 59:00
  But look at the way that Senna was in those.
• 59:04
  It took Hamilton, Hamilton achieved maturity far more
• 59:08
  quickly than Sanna, right?
• 59:09
  Sanna took, or no, the other way around.
• 59:11
  I feel like Sanna achieved maturity more quickly than Hamilton.
• 59:14
  It took Hamilton a while to sort of come out from under the shadow
• 59:17
  of dating the pop star and stop being a, being managed by his dad.
• 59:21
  You know, it took him a while to stop being a boy and start being a man.
• 59:24
  And you can say what you like about him now.
• 59:26
  You know, I know my friends at home think he's an idiot.
• 59:28
  I like the fact that he's doing different things outside of the sport
• 59:32
  and he's experimenting with the notion of what a Formula One champion can be.
• 59:36
  Senna, there was so much self confidence there after those two
• 59:42
  or three world championships.
• 59:44
  That was why he was happy to banter backwards and forwards with, with
• 59:48
  Ron Dennis for that one year.
• 59:49
  And that's why the fire was there to do that stellar lap at Donington.
• 59:54
  That's why the fire Was, was there to, to race this young
• 59:57
  German whippersnapper, right?
• 59:59
  He was because that, that's the great loss, right?
• 1:00:01
  The, that you mentioned Schumacher was there waiting in the wings.
• 1:00:04
  I don't think, feel that he was, he was there at that Belgian Grand Prix the
• 1:00:07
  year before he'd ever really got the, the only races they ever really raced
• 1:00:12
  against each other were those early years.
• 1:00:14
  Uh, were those early races of 1994 when, you know, as I've said, I feel
• 1:00:19
  like Brea Torrey was putting his bum on the scales in Senna's favor.
• 1:00:24
  So look, we've talked for ages.
• 1:00:26
  Let's at least move the conversation a little bit towards whether or not we
• 1:00:30
  think he's the greatest ever and how we might begin to, to answer that question.
• 1:00:35
  So the first thing I want to sort of shoot down.
• 1:00:38
  Is this myth that, that people always say, which is, Oh, you
• 1:00:42
  can't compare people across areas.
• 1:00:44
  And I agree trying to compare Rudolf Karachiola with Nelson Pique, both really
• 1:00:51
  good, neither anybody's greatest ever.
• 1:00:55
  Well, maybe Karachiola was, I don't know, but, but, you know, but what I'm
• 1:00:57
  saying is if you pick people, if you pick, you know, not Richard Petty or
• 1:01:01
  David Pearson, if you pick Bobby Allison.
• 1:01:04
  Or if you pick Kale Yarborough and you try and pitch them against Gerhard Berger,
• 1:01:09
  or you try and pitch them against, you know, Pietro Bordino from the 1920s.
• 1:01:14
  Apples and chainsaws.
• 1:01:15
  Yeah.
• 1:01:16
  But fundamentally, fundamentally, I put it to you, Maldonado versus Buck Baker, easy.
• 1:01:23
  I put it to you, Rossemeyer versus Nicola Mazepa, easy, right?
• 1:01:29
  That you can always tell the greats.
• 1:01:31
  And you can always tell the terrible people who should
• 1:01:34
  have bloody stayed at home.
• 1:01:35
  I think in this case, to your point, we have to boil it down.
• 1:01:39
  If we just focus our attention on the era at hand, let's say the period of 1980
• 1:01:45
  through, let's take it all the way to 2000 just to be fair, so 20 years span,
• 1:01:50
  there's three names we have to look at.
• 1:01:52
  The burgers and the John Lazy's and the Nigel Mansell's and all them.
• 1:01:56
  Okay, fine.
• 1:01:57
  But there's really three names we have to focus on here.
• 1:01:59
  And it has to do with statistics like you mentioned at the beginning.
• 1:02:01
  So it's going to be Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Michael Schumacher.
• 1:02:05
  And I want to bring Schumacher into the conversation because I think
• 1:02:08
  when we talk about modern formula one, as you're alluding to, it comes
• 1:02:13
  down to Even though Roast, even as of last month has been standing up and
• 1:02:19
  saying, Hey, don't forget about me.
• 1:02:21
  You know, I won more championships than Senna did blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:02:26
  Okay, great.
• 1:02:27
  All of that is true on the back of the baseball card.
• 1:02:29
  Roast has more wins than Senna.
• 1:02:31
  Is he greater than Senna?
• 1:02:33
  My answer to that is like, to your point, very simple.
• 1:02:36
  No, is he one of the greatest rivalries?
• 1:02:39
  Is he a villain or vilified in Formula One?
• 1:02:42
  Absolutely.
• 1:02:44
  There's gotta be a bad guy.
• 1:02:45
  But to William's point from the beginning of the conversation, who was the villain?
• 1:02:48
  Was it actually Senna as the bully?
• 1:02:51
  If you think about him with that lens and Prost as the martyr,
• 1:02:54
  or is it the other way around?
• 1:02:55
  Right?
• 1:02:55
  So it's a rivalry.
• 1:02:56
  Fine.
• 1:02:57
  But again, I mentioned earlier, Schumacher is in the shadows this
• 1:03:01
  entire time and using your math.
• 1:03:04
  Which is greatness over time.
• 1:03:07
  It becomes a question about Senna versus Schumacher.
• 1:03:10
  I sort of four criteria that I feel you should apply.
• 1:03:13
  I feel that the first one is like, how dominant were they and for how long?
• 1:03:18
  So clearly, you know, somebody like Valentina Rossi, who was
• 1:03:21
  really fast for a really long time.
• 1:03:23
  We can, we can say that that person's impressive and, and you might want to
• 1:03:26
  think about, Oh, there's some guys in American oval track racing who've been
• 1:03:30
  Really dominant for a really long time.
• 1:03:32
  John force in drag race.
• 1:03:34
  Right.
• 1:03:34
  The other one that I thought that the other thing is, is, is I think
• 1:03:37
  a lot of greatness lies in the ability to be cross discipline.
• 1:03:41
  So Sterling Moss is greatness.
• 1:03:43
  If you went to a British club race in the early fifties, there would be.
• 1:03:46
  10 different races with 10 different kinds of cars and moths would
• 1:03:49
  often be entered in every race.
• 1:03:51
  And he would step from a rear engine 500cc Formula 3 car into a Jaguar touring car
• 1:03:57
  into a Formula 1 car and win everything.
• 1:04:01
  I feel like that skill, I feel Andretti had that, I feel
• 1:04:04
  like Voight had that a lot.
• 1:04:06
  I feel like that is a level of greatness.
• 1:04:08
  And again, uh, by that measure, Senna.
• 1:04:11
  Does that transcend though, because we're talking about the greatest in
• 1:04:14
  Formula 1, And to your point, Senna never really did any other disciplines.
• 1:04:19
  He came up through the ranks, right?
• 1:04:21
  Go karting to Formula Ford and Formula 3 and to Formula 1.
• 1:04:24
  But he never ran other than that Mercedes race that we know of.
• 1:04:28
  He didn't do touring car.
• 1:04:29
  He didn't do rally.
• 1:04:30
  He didn't come to the States and do the Indy 500 like Jim Clark did, right?
• 1:04:33
  Or things like that.
• 1:04:34
  We begin to close the aperture and we're really talking about
• 1:04:38
  the greatest in Formula 1.
• 1:04:39
  And this is Paul Verstappen, right?
• 1:04:41
  How can Verstappen demonstrate greatness When he's only allowed to drive the
• 1:04:45
  best Formula 1 car, and when he's driving the best Formula 1 car, round
• 1:04:49
  circuits designed by Herman Tilke.
• 1:04:51
  Right.
• 1:04:52
  You know, you can demonstrate greatness at the Nürburgring, you
• 1:04:56
  can't if you're on the Tilke circuit.
• 1:04:57
  In the same way, right, you can demonstrate some greatness,
• 1:05:01
  but it, it, it, it's hard.
• 1:05:02
  Let's be fair, Verstappen's gonna be fast probably in anything you put him in.
• 1:05:06
  We've had this discussion before he hasn't proven himself yet.
• 1:05:09
  He hasn't stepped out of his comfort zone, which is formula one.
• 1:05:12
  And so that's where, again, I draw that parallel 40 years later between
• 1:05:17
  Verstappen and Senna is Verstappen the new Senna, if you kind of think about
• 1:05:22
  it, looking and comparing their stories, but then who's the Schumacher, I guess.
• 1:05:26
  Louis Hamilton of that generation.
• 1:05:29
  Yeah.
• 1:05:29
  Except Hamilton feels far more like Sena reborn.
• 1:05:32
  Yeah.
• 1:05:32
  But somebody like myself, Hamilton's whole way of being, the whole way
• 1:05:36
  that that Hamilton race felt like spiritually, it felt the same.
• 1:05:41
  Right.
• 1:05:41
  Sena did everything with passion.
• 1:05:43
  Michael did everything with clinical coldness.
• 1:05:45
  I was a Michael fan in period, but only because he was so much
• 1:05:49
  faster than everybody else.
• 1:05:50
  Right.
• 1:05:50
  And so for a minute that happening could touch him.
• 1:05:52
  And I think, but for most of the time he couldn't like
• 1:05:54
  the competition wasn't there.
• 1:05:55
  And I think that's another measure of greatness that, that, you know,
• 1:05:58
  Senna did have these awesome foils.
• 1:06:01
  So you talked about Prost as, as one foil, I think PK is another,
• 1:06:04
  I think Nigel Mansell's another, and there is that photograph of the
• 1:06:08
  four of them sitting on the bench.
• 1:06:09
  On a pit lane wall somewhere, each of them were talented in their own particular way.
• 1:06:15
  And of course, with the completeness, Nigel Manson with the willingness to,
• 1:06:18
  to race and Senna with just the raw speed and, and, and, and aggression
• 1:06:23
  of those is he the, the, the greatest.
• 1:06:27
  I think so.
• 1:06:28
  Yeah.
• 1:06:29
  Of those four for Prost, the whole business of hero or villain, you know, in
• 1:06:33
  period Senna was definitely the villain.
• 1:06:36
  People didn't like him in period.
• 1:06:38
  He was the villain in period.
• 1:06:39
  And Prost was the established star who drove in a clean way.
• 1:06:44
  You know, he was Le Professeur, wasn't he?
• 1:06:46
  Like reasoned everything, which, which, if you think of it, that's
• 1:06:49
  how drivers have evolved before.
• 1:06:51
  But if you think of how different Le Professeur was from, you know,
• 1:06:55
  sex, the breakfast of champions.
• 1:06:56
  And, you know, that was good enough to win Grand Prix just a few years earlier.
• 1:07:00
  So PK, as I say, PK that early period with the speed.
• 1:07:06
  Those problem years I didn't watch those years.
• 1:07:10
  I really wonder, for me, P.
• 1:07:12
  K.
• 1:07:12
  's hidden, just how fast he maybe was.
• 1:07:15
  But actually, wheel, and actually, you know, wheel to wheel, Nigel
• 1:07:21
  Mansell raced like nobody else.
• 1:07:22
  But, but the reason that Nigel Mansell always raced like that was there was
• 1:07:25
  always some Birmingham esque tragedy.
• 1:07:28
  That he would moan and drone on about in the pit comp in the, and you were
• 1:07:33
  always just like, you know, I, it's, it's as simple as the reason the dude
• 1:07:37
  always has to drive out of his skin was because he bollocks up qualify by
• 1:07:40
  any normal driver would have qualified.
• 1:07:42
  Well, I had the car at the front and just pissed off at the front and then
• 1:07:45
  they wouldn't have needed to be all the, you know, in Leone, the lion, you
• 1:07:49
  know, history audits fighting your way through the field now for all that.
• 1:07:53
  Nigel Mansell is a great Formula One driver, but, you know, not
• 1:07:58
  in the same breath as, as Senna or Prost in, in, in my opinion.
• 1:08:03
  Now, I don't believe in statistics.
• 1:08:06
  Don't really care about the statistics.
• 1:08:08
  To me, it's all the way in which it's, it's, it's done.
• 1:08:11
  So, the fact that Prost has four championships and
• 1:08:16
  Senna has three, so what?
• 1:08:19
  Kind of thing is crossed right to feel a little aggrieved now.
• 1:08:23
  Yeah, because Santa's taken on this sort of James Dean light glow.
• 1:08:29
  Right.
• 1:08:29
  And, and this is, is something that, you know, is worth talking about a little bit
• 1:08:34
  is the work that I've done around Santa, where in 2004, I was living in Italy.
• 1:08:40
  So I, I drove to, to him, alert to, to, You know, do a personal
• 1:08:44
  like, how is this with Senna?
• 1:08:46
  Cause he'd been, it was so important for me.
• 1:08:47
  You know, my crash helmet was a Senna replica and there was nothing there.
• 1:08:50
  There was nothing there and nobody there.
• 1:08:52
  Then I went in 2014, I was about to be a dad.
• 1:08:55
  So it was a important time in my life.
• 1:08:58
  And, and then.
• 1:08:59
  Imola, there were events, there was photography exhibition where they done
• 1:09:05
  a sort of Andy Warhol pop art version of Senna, the Google doodle, when you
• 1:09:12
  go to the Google landing page to do your search thing, there's a little
• 1:09:15
  picture edit the Google doodle was of Senna, you know, he crossed over into
• 1:09:21
  the The realm of, of, of something, you know, of something more than that.
• 1:09:25
  And what that led me to do was, as I thought more about that was to
• 1:09:30
  develop this idea that we've talked about before, Eric, of a sort of
• 1:09:34
  beatification that he's, he's moved from being, you know, a racing driver.
• 1:09:39
  To being a, a saint.
• 1:09:41
  I don't mean it literally.
• 1:09:42
  I don't mean, you know, he's now a saint.
• 1:09:45
  Are you sure?
• 1:09:45
  Because in Brazil, he might be.
• 1:09:47
  Well, all right.
• 1:09:49
  But it's this, it's this pivot from, it's more like Elvis or Marilyn Monroe.
• 1:09:55
  That you move from being an actual pissing, shitting human being.
• 1:09:59
  To being like an icon of the 1950s or the king of rock and roll, you know, and
• 1:10:05
  so Senna has sort of moved towards this sort of the handsome dead racing drive.
• 1:10:11
  I don't know, maybe I'm exaggerating that a little bit because I feel
• 1:10:14
  like, you know, 30 years on, am I still talking about Senna?
• 1:10:19
  We are right now for an hour, you know, but to your point, and
• 1:10:22
  I think it's important because it's that martyrdom status.
• 1:10:26
  He's been put up on a pedestal because he was taken from us at
• 1:10:29
  an early age, like a James Dean.
• 1:10:31
  That's a great analogy here because we don't know.
• 1:10:35
  At 32, 33, 34 years old, what he could have done to today.
• 1:10:40
  I do feel for Alan Prost at this point, because he's standing here
• 1:10:44
  going, guys, I'm from this era.
• 1:10:46
  There's not many of us left, you know, of that time period.
• 1:10:50
  What about me?
• 1:10:50
  For Alan Prost, what about Martin Brundle?
• 1:10:53
  I know!
• 1:10:53
  What about Martin Brundle?
• 1:10:54
  Brundle!
• 1:10:55
  Beat it.
• 1:10:56
  Rumble was the man who beat Senna.
• 1:10:58
  191 Grand Prix starts, zero wins, and now a clown show with Machine
• 1:11:03
  Gun Kelly and Shaquille O'Neal who doesn't even know who he is.
• 1:11:07
  Right.
• 1:11:07
  But my point is, had Senna not died, I don't think we would be
• 1:11:12
  having this same conversation.
• 1:11:14
  The GOAT, the greatest of all time, would unfortunately be Michael Schumacher.
• 1:11:19
  And we know we're not really sure his health and status right now, either.
• 1:11:22
  There's a lot of back and forth on that.
• 1:11:24
  So I think the lens tends to shift if Senna was still
• 1:11:28
  alive, because think about it.
• 1:11:29
  We talk about Fangio and how great Fangio was, but Fangio lived a good, long life.
• 1:11:34
  And then he passed away.
• 1:11:35
  There's other drivers that have lived good, long lives and have passed away.
• 1:11:39
  When Nigel Mansell eventually leaves us.
• 1:11:42
  Are we going to go back and have the same reverence for Nigel Mansell?
• 1:11:46
  I mean, maybe we're going to have it for his mustache.
• 1:11:48
  Yeah.
• 1:11:49
  We're not going to have that for him in the same way we do for Senna.
• 1:11:53
  That's the thing, you know, he passes away.
• 1:11:55
  So, I mean, anything after that is all conjecture because just you don't know.
• 1:12:00
  It's like this comic book he had where he joins Ferrari in 1995.
• 1:12:04
  And there's a picture of him driving for Ferrari.
• 1:12:06
  Could have only wished.
• 1:12:07
  Well, that's kind of what I wanted to throw out there was that's what the
• 1:12:11
  talk was is the only reason he didn't go to Ferrari in 94 was because they
• 1:12:14
  had contracts with the two guys at the time with, um, what's her name?
• 1:12:18
  So, and he had talks, Hey, everyone always wants to drive Ferrari.
• 1:12:20
  I think you do is getting up there in age.
• 1:12:22
  Even back in that time though, was, is when you were in your mid thirties, you
• 1:12:26
  were basically still in your prime, you know, it was not like this day and age
• 1:12:29
  where, Oh, you're over the hill now.
• 1:12:30
  The interesting question would be is, okay, stay in 95, even if it was 96,
• 1:12:34
  he goes, I'm going to go to Farrar, because I want to finish up my career
• 1:12:36
  at Farrar, because I don't want to stay.
• 1:12:38
  Schumacher wouldn't have gone.
• 1:12:39
  Right.
• 1:12:40
  Talk about changing history completely, because you wouldn't
• 1:12:42
  have gone there if Sena was there.
• 1:12:44
  That's right.
• 1:12:44
  That would have been kind of an interesting scenario, but
• 1:12:46
  again, it's all conjecture.
• 1:12:47
  It's all speculation.
• 1:12:48
  You make up whatever you want, because you'll never know.
• 1:12:50
  What if Sena won more championships?
• 1:12:52
  You don't know, because again, it's a scenario where it's Dakar was playing
• 1:12:57
  such a more major role in regards to If you won the championship, well, and
• 1:13:01
  the cars changed so much, didn't they?
• 1:13:03
  The, the, uh, after the center was killed, the cars changed so
• 1:13:06
  dramatically, you know, that the whole parameters were, were different.
• 1:13:10
  And what marred it for me and Prost because of growing up through
• 1:13:14
  the rivalry, all that stuff.
• 1:13:15
  I mean, and a lot of listeners may or may not know Prost and center were teammates
• 1:13:19
  at one point and, you know, they still couldn't stand each other, all that stuff.
• 1:13:22
  But no, they were friends at first.
• 1:13:24
  They were friends at the beginning of 1988.
• 1:13:26
  And there was respect and you'll see interviews between them.
• 1:13:29
  And then there's that interview at the British Grand Prix where Senate,
• 1:13:32
  where process and has a tiny problem.
• 1:13:35
  He thinks he can't kill himself.
• 1:13:37
  Yeah, right.
• 1:13:37
  You can see Santa sitting there thinking you're just a French.
• 1:13:41
  You've got no balls.
• 1:13:42
  You know, you can write that.
• 1:13:44
  You can see that.
• 1:13:45
  And the tension, the other there's later into the film does a really good job.
• 1:13:50
  Uh, showing those kind of you're talking about the center documentary, right?
• 1:13:54
  You keep bringing the center documentary, the Asif Kapadia documentary.
• 1:13:57
  Yeah.
• 1:13:57
  Which, which when you watch now, it doesn't seem that revolutionary, but,
• 1:14:01
  but back when that film was made, not only did that make center come alive, but
• 1:14:04
  that really changed arguably, there would have been no drive to survive without
• 1:14:09
  that center documentary, that center documentary was, was really pivotal.
• 1:14:13
  And Asif Kapadia was not a formula one fan.
• 1:14:16
  He was somebody who saw who Santa was.
• 1:14:19
  Who saw this compelling story and then who was able to dig deep
• 1:14:25
  with the resources, you know, get Bernie Ecclestone's private film.
• 1:14:30
  So the, what you had was something that my wife watched, gosh, these baddie
• 1:14:34
  Frenchmen trying to outmaneuver our hero whilst I was being like, I can't
• 1:14:39
  believe we're in the briefing room at Suzuka and PK is standing up for Senna.
• 1:14:45
  Yeah.
• 1:14:45
  The storytelling.
• 1:14:47
  And of course that's something that I, that Eric, you and I have talked
• 1:14:49
  about a lot that, you know, arguably a lot of some of Senna's greatness is
• 1:14:54
  predicated in the fact that Cappadia Yeah.
• 1:14:57
  made this compelling story about him, you know, without, without the life of St.
• 1:15:01
  Patrick, we don't know anything about St.
• 1:15:03
  Patrick.
• 1:15:04
  He drove the snakes out of Ireland, right?
• 1:15:06
  He did.
• 1:15:06
  He was the first person to see the Loch Ness monster.
• 1:15:10
  But the thing about Frost, what really kind of put the thumb on there and sort
• 1:15:15
  of marred the lens for me, and I will admit, I grew up with the idea that Prost
• 1:15:20
  was the villain and watching the Cartier film, you know, there's some things I read
• 1:15:24
  into the, even the funeral scene and is he really guilty and, you know, blah, blah,
• 1:15:28
  blah, and all this kind of stuff, but you and I have debated that back and forth
• 1:15:31
  several times, but it's what came later.
• 1:15:34
  I look at what he's saying now and think about what happened after in
• 1:15:38
  the, in the nineties, in the two thousands, when he stepped up as the
• 1:15:41
  professor and he bought Jordan Peugeot and turned it into prost racing.
• 1:15:45
  And what happened?
• 1:15:46
  Nothing.
• 1:15:47
  Garbage.
• 1:15:48
  It was trash.
• 1:15:49
  And there was a tragic accident with Olivier Penice.
• 1:15:52
  It was terrible.
• 1:15:53
  But every, you know, that's, I mean, that's the story of Graham Hill.
• 1:15:56
  That's the story of John Surtees.
• 1:15:58
  You know, they, it's hard to go from one to the other, the people that, you know,
• 1:16:01
  we're talking about the greatest ever.
• 1:16:03
  Jack Brabham has to be in with a shout.
• 1:16:05
  The bloody bloke built his own car.
• 1:16:07
  He came from Australia, built his own car, built his own car.
• 1:16:11
  Be everybody in Europe.
• 1:16:12
  I mean, God, he started out front engine cars in the late fifties driving, then
• 1:16:18
  partners with John Cooper, first rear engine world champion, then aero wide
• 1:16:24
  tires, 1970, he's still nearly champion in 1970, if he hadn't have run out of
• 1:16:29
  gas and push the car home at Monaco.
• 1:16:32
  and run out of gas on the last lap whilst he was leading at the British Grand Prix.
• 1:16:36
  He would have been world champion in 1970, not Jochen Rind.
• 1:16:39
  I don't know how you, quantifying the greatness is, is hard.
• 1:16:43
  So what I'm getting at is, in this case, because you're on the big
• 1:16:46
  stage, it's Formula One, you're in the global eye, there's good and bad
• 1:16:51
  press, and these days it's mitigated differently than it was back then.
• 1:16:54
  Ben.
• 1:16:54
  So if you look at the nineties and early two thousands, and that's why
• 1:16:56
  I was saying, we got to stretch the lens of this from the eighties to the
• 1:17:00
  early two thousands for every failure that Prost inherited with his racing
• 1:17:06
  team, the former Jordan F1 Peugeot team, you know, this all French team,
• 1:17:11
  French drivers, and this whole campaign that he had, it was this like, over
• 1:17:15
  exuberant arrogance that I can't define and it just irks me to no end.
• 1:17:19
  But for every one of those failures, it negates his wins.
• 1:17:24
  And so it brings him down the ladder when you talk about greatness.
• 1:17:33
  utter dominance in those Ferrari years.
• 1:17:35
  Did they negate the way Michael crafted the sport in his own image?
• 1:17:40
  It's a black eye on Schumacher's resume.
• 1:17:43
  And if he hadn't come back and run at Mercedes after being done at Ferrari,
• 1:17:47
  he would have left on a high note.
• 1:17:49
  He would be greater.
• 1:17:50
  He would be greater, but he's not.
• 1:17:51
  He has these like two seasons with Mercedes that just suck.
• 1:17:54
  And the same is true of Prost.
• 1:17:56
  It's like, had you just left it alone?
• 1:17:59
  You would have been better off but it's that tragic greek story of Hermes flying
• 1:18:04
  too close to the sun and the wings melt off his shoes and it's all this hubris
• 1:18:08
  and formula one is full of that and to Senna's credit we saw the bravado we saw
• 1:18:14
  yes this animal instinct the aggression his greatness i hate to say it this way he
• 1:18:19
  died on a high note And so there was never a negative if you discount, you know, his
• 1:18:24
  personality, whether you liked it or not.
• 1:18:26
  And if he was a bully and these kinds of things, there's not a lot of things
• 1:18:29
  in the con column where roast comes to the table and says, I'm so good.
• 1:18:35
  I'm going to start my own team.
• 1:18:37
  And it was terrible.
• 1:18:38
  And he was, he took a long time to be world champions.
• 1:18:41
  Well, he fiddled fucked around a lot with Reno, didn't he?
• 1:18:44
  Yeah.
• 1:18:44
  I mean, and let's not beat around the bush.
• 1:18:46
  Job.
• 1:18:47
  We are new and torn by, could they beat me?
• 1:18:51
  Yeah.
• 1:18:52
  Could they be all three of us?
• 1:18:53
  Yeah, probably.
• 1:18:54
  You know, are they in anybody's top 10 form at a one
• 1:18:58
  drivers, whoever sat in a car?
• 1:19:00
  No.
• 1:19:01
  So the competition that he was facing coming up through the French ranks, you
• 1:19:06
  know, just wasn't, That much was it that that's the, and you know, the car that
• 1:19:11
  Renault, those rentals, you get the sense that when they worked, you could win
• 1:19:15
  with them, but they always like caught on fire or blew up or, you know, shit
• 1:19:19
  the bed somehow in the race, didn't they?
• 1:19:20
  They were never.
• 1:19:21
  So it was hard to tell his talent because the car was, was such a light.
• 1:19:26
  Buddy disaster.
• 1:19:28
  I mean, you can argue the same with PK, right?
• 1:19:30
  In those years with the problem with the rub and BMW.
• 1:19:32
  But again, if you, if you compare them with PK, who would I have put in the car?
• 1:19:36
  Who would I prefer in the car?
• 1:19:38
  Prost or PK asked me what year it is.
• 1:19:40
  Cause early on, I'd take PK later on.
• 1:19:42
  I'd take pros.
• 1:19:44
  I was going to say, right.
• 1:19:45
  When we talk about the, the greatness, I feel it's narrowing it down too
• 1:19:49
  much to say only the people from that era, just like Maldonado and
• 1:19:53
  Buck Baker, I feel like you can.
• 1:19:56
  Make comparisons and I feel like Fangio has the status he has.
• 1:20:02
  Because the guy has a 46 percent wins to starts ratio.
• 1:20:06
  And I just need you to really stop and think about that in an era when
• 1:20:10
  the cars weren't that reliable.
• 1:20:12
  And like everybody else for a minute there, he was unknown and
• 1:20:15
  unreliable was the unknown foreign Johnny who was given the crap car
• 1:20:19
  that made up the numbers at the back of the grid, 46 percent win ratio.
• 1:20:23
  He also wasn't world champion until he was 40 and then he was world champion.
• 1:20:29
  four times back to back once, then had a big accident, recovered from the
• 1:20:33
  big accident, then just back to back.
• 1:20:35
  And you might say, well, he was always in the best car.
• 1:20:37
  Well, yeah, that was because everyone knew he was the best driver.
• 1:20:40
  So he just went wherever the best car was.
• 1:20:42
  Again, wouldn't you do that?
• 1:20:44
  When we're considering his greatness, you know, Doug Nye, the British historian once
• 1:20:49
  asked Sterling Moss, you know, he said to Moss, you know, when it would, you know,
• 1:20:52
  with the two of you compare setup and Moss said, I would go and do all the testing.
• 1:20:56
  And then Fangio would always say, I'll have whatever Moss is having.
• 1:20:59
  I think cause after the first couple of races, he trusted me and Doug, I
• 1:21:03
  said to him, well, you know, well, Sterling, did you never try to
• 1:21:06
  like, you know, trick the old man?
• 1:21:08
  And most of his lines.
• 1:21:09
  Yeah.
• 1:21:09
  Once at Dundrod, I went back to the engineers afterwards and said,
• 1:21:12
  actually changed my back axle ratio.
• 1:21:14
  So.
• 1:21:14
  Yeah.
• 1:21:14
  Yeah.
• 1:21:14
  So I beat Fangio fair and squarely at that event and afterwards, I
• 1:21:18
  never wanted to do that again.
• 1:21:19
  I never wanted to cheat like that again.
• 1:21:21
  But think about Fangio.
• 1:21:22
  This is, I just take whatever.
• 1:21:24
  I just, I would just make the most of whatever you're giving them.
• 1:21:28
  This is unlike Senna than what you need in the eighties where
• 1:21:31
  you go back and you change the car and you do this and you do that.
• 1:21:33
  You don't just drive the car until it's all used up in,
• 1:21:36
  in the, in the, in the 1950s.
• 1:21:38
  And so this is why Fangio has the status that he has.
• 1:21:42
  I would say, you know, Ferrari's greatest ever is Tazio Nuvolari, and I would, I,
• 1:21:50
  with Nuvolari, because of the descriptions you get of speed, the, you know, the
• 1:21:58
  gap between him and everybody else.
• 1:22:00
  Whether it's Ferrari talking about the way he took corners,
• 1:22:03
  or whether it's lap times, or whether it's that first newspaper
• 1:22:07
  mention of an audacious young man.
• 1:22:10
  Everywhere you read, when you read about comparisons between Farsi and Novelari,
• 1:22:16
  it's stories about You know, Vartze's smoothness and Nivalari's aggression.
• 1:22:22
  If greatness lies in how it happens, as we've been talking about with Senna, you
• 1:22:27
  know, it's not how many races you won.
• 1:22:28
  It's the way in which you did it.
• 1:22:30
  It's the manner in which you did it.
• 1:22:32
  It's the style.
• 1:22:33
  I feel for, for passion and greatness, you can't equal Nivalari.
• 1:22:38
  I mean, we're going to have to let William probably settle this debate because
• 1:22:41
  you and I are never going to agree.
• 1:22:43
  But and I will get Williams input on this.
• 1:22:45
  You hit on something almost by accident.
• 1:22:48
  And it triggered something in my mind because I realized maybe
• 1:22:52
  this discussion shouldn't be about the greatest of all time.
• 1:22:55
  Maybe there is no such thing, right?
• 1:22:57
  Maybe we shouldn't be trying to single out one person.
• 1:23:00
  And what I mean by that is Fangio, Nuvolari, Schumacher, Senna, Prost,
• 1:23:06
  Mansell, you name it, pick your favorite.
• 1:23:09
  They're heroes.
• 1:23:10
  And if you think about it in that construct, Now we're having this,
• 1:23:14
  depending on which camp you're in, is it DC comics or is it Marvel comics?
• 1:23:18
  You know, who's better Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, you
• 1:23:22
  know, so on down the line, they're all great in their own respective ways.
• 1:23:28
  And together in period, they're unstoppable.
• 1:23:32
  This just justice league of racers.
• 1:23:34
  And if you think about it though, you have to layer it that Fangio
• 1:23:39
  didn't run in the same era.
• 1:23:41
  In the same way, if you think about it from a comic book perspective,
• 1:23:46
  the early DC characters, you know, the Green Lantern with the tin hat
• 1:23:50
  versus, you know, the guy in the super suit that we saw in the 80s and 90s.
• 1:23:54
  They're still Green Lanterns.
• 1:23:56
  We'll use that analogy, but they're not of the same era.
• 1:23:59
  So you have to do.
• 1:24:00
  Fangio and Moss and all the guys from, you know, the meal Amelia that
• 1:24:05
  we talked about on those episodes.
• 1:24:06
  And you have to look at them as heroes of that era.
• 1:24:09
  Now, if we want to get specific, who was the best of the
• 1:24:12
  best in that 20 year period?
• 1:24:15
  So be it.
• 1:24:16
  So the question now becomes, do we really want to put Senna up there by himself?
• 1:24:22
  Or do we want to elevate other names?
• 1:24:25
  Because now you can bring in Andretti's, and Unser's, and Wuton's, and Stuck's,
• 1:24:32
  and Heywood's, and Sullivan's.
• 1:24:33
  The list goes on and on of other heroes, maybe from other disciplines, that can
• 1:24:38
  stand shoulder to shoulder with Senna.
• 1:24:41
  In this glorious Iraq race in the sky.
• 1:24:44
  Right?
• 1:24:45
  So William, where are we with this?
• 1:24:47
  Should we continue down the path of greatest of all time?
• 1:24:50
  Or should we think about it more in the context of heroes?
• 1:24:53
  You have to kind of wonder when guards, like I said, obviously you're set up on
• 1:24:57
  a pedestal, the timeframe that he raised.
• 1:24:59
  So you have all these young kids.
• 1:25:02
  They were into motorsports, whatnot.
• 1:25:04
  They grew up to start racing, so they idolized Senna, because that's what
• 1:25:07
  they watched before they started racing.
• 1:25:08
  So then you got Lewis Hamzah, they were like, they had to say,
• 1:25:10
  Senna's my idol, Senna's my idol.
• 1:25:11
  So then you got this other younger generation, watching Hamilton, Emily,
• 1:25:15
  but then they have, you know, these guys, they're racing up one, that
• 1:25:18
  say, the Emalates, oh, I love Senna, Senna's my hero, da da da, so you have
• 1:25:21
  this, hey, I want to be like Lewis Hamzah, so, oh, I love Senna, you know.
• 1:25:24
  Is that perpetuating his story, his status, whatnot, because
• 1:25:29
  people just keep pushing.
• 1:25:30
  You have these very high profile individuals in that sport, emulating
• 1:25:34
  saying, Oh, Senate was the best, so they have the other people
• 1:25:37
  want to, Hey, I'm emulating them.
• 1:25:38
  So, Hey, Senate is the greatest one, you know, of all time, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:25:41
  I always break down discipline.
• 1:25:43
  I, you know, you can never have that saying, Oh, the grace of all time,
• 1:25:46
  grace of all time, say in that period.
• 1:25:49
  Okay, it's not a hands down, you know, you look at how he did it, what he was able to
• 1:25:54
  do, you know, in the different cars, you know, especially in wet weather, anything
• 1:25:57
  like that, you know, but if you open that up to about just pure drivers, you got to
• 1:26:02
  look at, like you said, the Andretti's, the Foyt's, do we go back and look at a
• 1:26:05
  Clark, Fangio, Moss, you know, the guys that could, you know, especially that is
• 1:26:09
  those guys, you know, To make a living, had to race everything and anything they
• 1:26:13
  could get behind the wheel to earn and support themselves and their family.
• 1:26:16
  You didn't have that day and age, you know, starting in the 80s, you
• 1:26:19
  know, these guys, their contracts could all of a sudden be starting.
• 1:26:21
  Hey, all I need to race is F1 because the money I'm making
• 1:26:25
  in it and blah, blah, blah.
• 1:26:26
  That's all I got to do.
• 1:26:27
  It just got exorbitant, you know, just going up, you know, like John
• 1:26:30
  was saying, you know, that, you know, his last, you know, since last year,
• 1:26:32
  McLaren, that race by race contract, he was getting a million dollars a race.
• 1:26:36
  Yeah, 16 million for the year.
• 1:26:38
  I mean, everyone was like, Oh my God, that's absurd.
• 1:26:41
  And I listen to that, but look what he did.
• 1:26:42
  And it was all just point scoring with Ron Dennis anyway.
• 1:26:45
  It wasn't, he didn't need the money, neither.
• 1:26:47
  They just, I mean, if you look at interviews with Ron Dennis afterwards,
• 1:26:50
  it was just, it was just like, they were just, they just needed.
• 1:26:54
  To have that process, because that's how both of them were, and that was
• 1:26:58
  how their relationship had been.
• 1:27:00
  I do think it's too much of a cop out to say, oh, you know, it's, you can't
• 1:27:04
  compare across different eras, and so on.
• 1:27:06
  To me, no sports car driver is as great as the greatest Formula 1 driver, because
• 1:27:11
  Formula 1's harder than sports cars.
• 1:27:13
  Formula 1's got better people in it than sports cars.
• 1:27:15
  I love NASCAR, but you know, driving a car, With, you know, a roll cage
• 1:27:21
  around an oval is not as difficult as driving a Formula One car.
• 1:27:26
  But is Formula One as difficult as running the 24 Hours of Le Mans?
• 1:27:29
  Because that's a whole nother level.
• 1:27:31
  And in the Indy 500, Is a whole nother level of risk and the argument now,
• 1:27:38
  you know, and what, what Hindi is now versus what Indy was in the fifties
• 1:27:42
  and sixties, you know, is that the Indianapolis that Jim Clark, Jackie
• 1:27:46
  Stewart, you know, the other Englishman and Scotsman who, who, who came, what
• 1:27:50
  they found, that was a much, much bigger.
• 1:27:52
  I mean, Jim Clark, when he won Indianapolis, 500, one more money
• 1:27:55
  in that single event, they need one.
• 1:27:58
  His whole Formula One career up to then and if you go to the Jim Clark Museum,
• 1:28:03
  you know, the, the, there's like all of his Formula One trophies and then there's
• 1:28:06
  like a whole separate cabinet for his Indianapolis 500 trophy, you know, it
• 1:28:10
  was, uh, so, so the proportions, you know, the relative importance of the
• 1:28:13
  different events changes, I, I, I think as well, I just feel like fundamentally
• 1:28:19
  greatness is something that you don't need, you either have it or you
• 1:28:24
  don't, it's either there or you don't.
• 1:28:25
  You don't need to be a soccer fan to see Pelé's genius.
• 1:28:29
  You know, I'm not a soccer fan.
• 1:28:31
  I didn't even know who Messi was until my son explained to me the other day.
• 1:28:34
  But, you know, I know Pele and I've seen Pele do that overhead kick into the goal.
• 1:28:39
  I put it to you, Senna's pass on the craner Donington Grand Prix.
• 1:28:46
  That whole brooding, compelling manner that he has.
• 1:28:51
  In a thousand years time, when they talk about, when they say, well,
• 1:28:53
  you know, what is a racing driver?
• 1:28:55
  What did a racing driver look like?
• 1:28:57
  I just feel like it's more likely to be Ayrton Senna than Alain Prost.
• 1:29:02
  It's the basketball analogy, right?
• 1:29:04
  When you talk about the greatest basketball player or most recognizable,
• 1:29:08
  there's certain icons, right?
• 1:29:09
  And I think that's where we need to make the difference, is that, okay, if
• 1:29:13
  we're not going to do the hero thing, And we're not going to put Senna as
• 1:29:17
  the greatest of all time, then he's an icon, much like Michael Jordan is an
• 1:29:21
  icon and a fun fact, just bringing the comic books back into the situation.
• 1:29:26
  Apparently, you can go to the middle of nowhere of the Congo
• 1:29:30
  and show people the bat symbol and everybody knows who Batman is, right?
• 1:29:35
  It's an icon.
• 1:29:37
  And I think Senna.
• 1:29:38
  That's where we've transcended.
• 1:29:40
  He's an icon, maybe not the goat anymore because Lewis
• 1:29:45
  Hamilton statistically is better.
• 1:29:47
  Max Verstappen can drive harder than Senna ever did.
• 1:29:50
  Michael Schumacher and his records.
• 1:29:52
  But on these Tilke circuits, it's like Senna versus Nuvolari.
• 1:29:56
  Senna drove a much harder car than Nuvolari did, but Nuvolari did like
• 1:29:59
  the Mille Miglia and the Targa Florio and the Nürburgring in the rain.
• 1:30:04
  Now this is far more epic, this is a much greater stage than Senna had.
• 1:30:09
  These modern Tilker circuits, this, you know, this, this whole persona that Lewis
• 1:30:14
  Hamilton has now, this is not Greatness in the sense that the sport used to be,
• 1:30:20
  nobody deserves to be a knight more than a knight of the realm, a certain than
• 1:30:24
  Lewis Hamilton for, you know, going abroad and doing great things and reflecting
• 1:30:29
  well on England and British people.
• 1:30:31
  I eat fully deserves that.
• 1:30:33
  But the sport at the moment doesn't have the epic qualities
• 1:30:37
  it had in the Senate period.
• 1:30:39
  The epicness ended with Senna and shoemaze.
• 1:30:43
  You know, deliberate crashing, a deliberate spoiling of Alonso's pole
• 1:30:47
  lapper, you know, Monaco in 2006, you know, this kind of behavior.
• 1:30:52
  Yes, we saw it in Senna, that kind of what William called earlier bullying
• 1:30:57
  behavior, but, and in Schumacher, it's come along more and more and now everybody
• 1:31:01
  does it and it's just part of the sport.
• 1:31:03
  The sport is less for that, you know, the sport of Nuvolari was
• 1:31:06
  mountain climbing and bullfighting.
• 1:31:08
  The sport of Verstappen is, you know, tiddlywinks and Messi falling
• 1:31:14
  over, pretending he's hurt his leg to get a yellow card, right?
• 1:31:17
  It's the sport isn't as epic as it was, therefore.
• 1:31:22
  It doesn't matter to me how many pole positions or wins or championships a Jimmy
• 1:31:26
  Johnson or uh, or a Lewis Hamilton wins.
• 1:31:30
  Those are not the same as the championships that David Pearson or
• 1:31:35
  Ed Senna or Juan Manuel Fangio won.
• 1:31:38
  I think what you can say it could boil down to is any
• 1:31:40
  genre, any discipline of racing.
• 1:31:42
  You have the guys who can go eight tenths, then you got the
• 1:31:45
  smaller minutes and go nine tenths.
• 1:31:47
  You had that very rarefied few, and what you heard said was, that could drive
• 1:31:52
  that car to ten tenths, lap after lap.
• 1:31:54
  And I think that can kind of define how well or heroic or iconic someone is.
• 1:32:00
  You know, there were very, very few that could do that and
• 1:32:03
  drive that car to ten tenths.
• 1:32:04
  Especially back then, to drive one of those cars at ten tenths.
• 1:32:08
  This day and age, there's so many nanny aids and all this stuff, you know, so
• 1:32:12
  getting there, it's not really the same.
• 1:32:13
  But back then?
• 1:32:14
  To have the cojones for one but the talent to be able to drive that
• 1:32:18
  car that in Any car and basically any weather I just showcased what
• 1:32:24
  his skill and his talent was He was able to squeeze it out of that car.
• 1:32:27
  John knows the answers groupie rally.
• 1:32:29
  That's the answer to everything Yeah, but you see that that is in the greatest
• 1:32:36
  ever surely You have to throw Sebastian Lowe in there if you're talking about
• 1:32:41
  the greatest ever, because even if you say, well, rally cars are the slow and
• 1:32:45
  it's only one discipline and you know, it's the modern era where generally
• 1:32:48
  speaking, when people are dominant, they're dominant for what, you know,
• 1:32:51
  KK Rosberg was champion one year.
• 1:32:53
  Yeah.
• 1:32:54
  Vettel was champion four years.
• 1:32:55
  Arguably the skill gap between them and their peers was no more or less.
• 1:32:59
  It was just the sport was different.
• 1:33:00
  So Vettel's dominance looks good.
• 1:33:02
  You know, so even if you argued that rallying.
• 1:33:05
  Lobe's sheer level of dominance, you know, is compelling.
• 1:33:09
  Yeah.
• 1:33:10
  I bring up rally only because William was talking multiple discipline.
• 1:33:12
  And the reason I bring it up is if you look at it in the, again, in, in our
• 1:33:15
  lens in period, the greatest racing at that time, hands down, even though Senna
• 1:33:22
  was doing miraculous things with the McLaren group B rally was far and above
• 1:33:28
  the best racing that you could watch.
• 1:33:30
  In period more so than F one.
• 1:33:33
  I'll make that argument all day long.
• 1:33:35
  And there's plenty of facts and figures to back that up too.
• 1:33:38
  But, you know, again, it's all about these boxes and how we look at things
• 1:33:42
  and the perspective we're coming at.
• 1:33:43
  So, yeah, cause you couldn't see it.
• 1:33:45
  It wasn't televised like world rally wasn't televised.
• 1:33:48
  Was it?
• 1:33:48
  You couldn't say anything you could in the States.
• 1:33:50
  We had to pay a lot of money to see it.
• 1:33:52
  Yeah, I mean, I, me on my BBC subscription, you didn't, you know, you
• 1:33:57
  didn't see, uh, you didn't see any of it.
• 1:34:00
  I don't know.
• 1:34:01
  Maybe in order to be great, do you need to be seen by a lot of people?
• 1:34:04
  Is Marco Allen's greatness hidden under a Bushell because
• 1:34:09
  nobody was watching rallying.
• 1:34:10
  Nobody saw him because I mean, that's the thing with it.
• 1:34:12
  Even those, you know, because at least formula one, you know, one of the
• 1:34:15
  ways of spotting centers greatness is the car is so visibly on the ragged
• 1:34:21
  edge in comparison to everybody else.
• 1:34:22
  And that Kapadia film does a really good job of showing that.
• 1:34:26
  But if nobody's filming the rallying, how can we?
• 1:34:28
  We can't even see that, you know, and that's a spectacle.
• 1:34:31
  You know, Formula One, the cars are there, you watch them all go
• 1:34:33
  around, the cameras are there.
• 1:34:34
  Rallying's hard.
• 1:34:35
  You're standing on a mountain hillside and the car comes past, and then five minutes
• 1:34:39
  goes by and another one comes past.
• 1:34:41
  How great can that spectacle really be?
• 1:34:43
  It's better now than it was then, that's for sure.
• 1:34:45
  There was a lot of helicopter footage back in the 80s for rally.
• 1:34:49
  That was the thing, wasn't it?
• 1:34:50
  That the chase helicopters were part of the whole, like, over
• 1:34:53
  budgeting danger of Group B rallying.
• 1:34:56
  Well, we'll put a pin in that because we're going to come back to that at
• 1:34:58
  another point, not in this episode, at another point, maybe this season.
• 1:35:02
  So John, we've talked a lot about Senna.
• 1:35:04
  We've talked about his greatness.
• 1:35:05
  We've talked about his life, his triumphs, his tribulations and everything else.
• 1:35:08
  How do we bring this home?
• 1:35:09
  How do you want to conclude this tribute to Senna now?
• 1:35:12
  30 years after his passing.
• 1:35:14
  Yeah.
• 1:35:15
  When you approached me to talk about this, I thought, well, you
• 1:35:18
  know, it is 30 years should sort of have some kind of a conversation.
• 1:35:21
  And then my next thought is, well, do I really want to go over this ground again?
• 1:35:25
  Because I feel like, you know, I did do that work in 2014 where I went and visited
• 1:35:30
  and saw this peculiar beatification and stayed in a hotel where he spent his
• 1:35:35
  last night and like visited his hotel room and all this kind of really quiet.
• 1:35:41
  Morbid?
• 1:35:42
  Yeah, well, morbid, but just odd, just really peculiar, like, and
• 1:35:47
  that was really what set me thinking about the, what's, you know, what's
• 1:35:50
  happening to this guy who used to just be a racing driver who I liked and
• 1:35:53
  is now turning into something else.
• 1:35:55
  And I'm, I'm reminded of.
• 1:35:57
  There was a Roman emperor, Vespasian, who supposedly, when a Roman emperor
• 1:36:00
  would die, they would always be deified.
• 1:36:02
  The Romans would always turn their old emperors into gods who you could pray to.
• 1:36:06
  So the joke is that Vespasian, supposedly, his final words were,
• 1:36:10
  Oh God, I think I'm becoming a god.
• 1:36:15
  So there was a sense of that sort of transition happening, right?
• 1:36:19
  There's a sense of that.
• 1:36:21
  So I suppose, you know, so how should we, You know, how should we remember him?
• 1:36:24
  How do I want to wrap this up?
• 1:36:26
  Maybe a good way to wrap it up is simply to say, you know, we've, we've said
• 1:36:30
  how hard it is to compare across areas.
• 1:36:31
  We've said how it's all subjective from the point of view that, you know, that,
• 1:36:34
  that you're looking at it from maybe the, the, the way to wrap it up is to
• 1:36:38
  say that greatness is, is mostly to do with us being middle aged and looking
• 1:36:43
  back to a time when, when we were young, we're looking back to our own lost youth.
• 1:36:48
  Right.
• 1:36:48
  That center center was the great guy when we were young.
• 1:36:51
  Therefore, we, you know, in our greatest moment, therefore we feel
• 1:36:55
  like he was the greatest ever.
• 1:36:56
  Therefore, instinctively we, we struggle.
• 1:36:59
  We, we feel like we find ways of comparing Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel
• 1:37:05
  and Michael Schumacher with center.
• 1:37:06
  That make him feel less advantageous because it's our own youth
• 1:37:10
  that we're looking back to.
• 1:37:11
  And it's that own feeling of wowee, this is magical and spectacular and awesome.
• 1:37:16
  And this guy's reaching out the TV and touching me in
• 1:37:19
  suburban England in summer 1985.
• 1:37:22
  William, I think he just defined.
• 1:37:24
  Nostalgia, didn't he?
• 1:37:26
  Sounds like it, just a little bit.
• 1:37:27
  Yeah, just a little bit.
• 1:37:29
  This is just a way to date all three of us.
• 1:37:33
  Way to make us feel old, John.
• 1:37:34
  Yeah, Jesus.
• 1:37:36
  Yeah, well, in that, so what that means, right, is that this exercise,
• 1:37:41
  you need to carry on, right?
• 1:37:42
  There needs to be a center at 40 years and center at 50 years.
• 1:37:46
  You know, because there'll be that sense like it's happening with 57
• 1:37:49
  Chevys at the moment that the people who collected them are all dying off.
• 1:37:52
  So they're declining in value, you know, nobody, their greatness is
• 1:37:56
  declining because there's nobody who remembers that greatness to
• 1:37:59
  buy them proper values anymore.
• 1:38:01
  I think my parting thought on this is looking back over the 60 years of Senna,
• 1:38:06
  if you think about his 30 years on this earth and 30 years since he's been gone.
• 1:38:10
  Like I said at the beginning, he has touched our lives, and our is the
• 1:38:15
  global our, the motorsports community, the petrolheads that are out there, if
• 1:38:19
  you're learning about Senna for the first time today, which I don't know where
• 1:38:22
  you've been this entire time, but in my formidable early years, Senna was Part of
• 1:38:29
  what made me a motor sports enthusiast.
• 1:38:31
  And so I just want to say thank you because if it wasn't for Ayrton
• 1:38:35
  Senna, I don't think I'd be invested in motorsport as much as I am now.
• 1:38:40
  That's not to say I don't have respect for Michelle Mouton and Han Stuck and all
• 1:38:45
  these other people that I hold in high regard, but Senna is sort of like Zeus.
• 1:38:50
  on Mount Olympus.
• 1:38:51
  He's the god amongst the gods, and so it's hard for me to break that
• 1:38:55
  illusion because it was cemented.
• 1:38:58
  I imprinted on that at a very, very early age.
• 1:39:01
  I mean, I'm younger than both of you guys, and I'm not trying
• 1:39:03
  to make you feel even older.
• 1:39:05
  Those first impressions, as they say, are lasting impressions.
• 1:39:08
  So when I look back over Senna's time, before and after,
• 1:39:13
  all I can say is thank you.
• 1:39:15
  Yeah.
• 1:39:16
  He is motorsport.
• 1:39:17
  Yeah.
• 1:39:18
  You know, he was like that for me.
• 1:39:20
  As an Englishman, you should have been a Nigel Mansell fan, but you weren't.
• 1:39:23
  It was, or I wasn't, it was, it was all about Senna and, and yeah.
• 1:39:27
  What I called charisma, Eric, you've framed it into being
• 1:39:31
  something larger than that.
• 1:39:33
  It's this almost a lens for understanding motorsport altogether.
• 1:39:37
  Yeah.
• 1:39:37
  And I don't think, I mean, people that are probably huge fans of
• 1:39:40
  him understand or realize it.
• 1:39:41
  Yeah, he had this persona on the track, you know, obviously, whatever it takes to
• 1:39:45
  win, you know, doing what he has to do.
• 1:39:47
  I think that kind of changed how the attitude of drivers that came
• 1:39:51
  after saying, okay, I got it.
• 1:39:52
  Like with Schumacher, hey, if you want to win, win championships, this
• 1:39:56
  is what you have to do to go forward.
• 1:39:58
  So I think he really changed.
• 1:40:00
  You know, the sport in regards to future drivers and what they
• 1:40:03
  had to do if they wanted to be successful and reach the pinnacle
• 1:40:07
  and then be at that level to do it.
• 1:40:09
  It's like, you gotta do what it takes to win.
• 1:40:11
  Hey, you just gotta have that mentality.
• 1:40:13
  F it, you know, I gotta go after it and go get it.
• 1:40:16
  The other side though is, and to this day, I don't think people
• 1:40:19
  understand or know, or probably a lot do, is his off track persona.
• 1:40:24
  I don't think people realize how many millions of dollars he raised and donates
• 1:40:29
  to this day, every year to his foundation, to the underprivileged in Brazil.
• 1:40:34
  If you look at what he's done post mortem, it's incredible.
• 1:40:38
  He did something positive with what he was able to achieve, which is speaks
• 1:40:41
  volumes about the type of person he was.
• 1:40:43
  And you know, he was a huge.
• 1:40:44
  Very, very religious guy.
• 1:40:46
  You know, talking about Prost's comedy things, oh, you know, he doesn't think
• 1:40:48
  he can die or whatever because he's got something with God or whatever.
• 1:40:50
  He's got a God complex.
• 1:40:52
  He was an interesting character, but I think he just kind of set
• 1:40:54
  the precedent for future racing and future drivers for what it would
• 1:40:58
  take to be at that level and do it.
• 1:41:00
  And you look at these guys, hey, it's, it's me, it's me, it's me, it's me.
• 1:41:03
  You know, you don't talk to your teammate, what not.
• 1:41:05
  It's like, hey, you just got to have that mentality.
• 1:41:08
  I got to do and look out for stop with I mean, from day one, whatever, when he was
• 1:41:12
  four or five years old, when he first got a cart, his dad was relentless and brutal
• 1:41:17
  on him in regards to practice and just driving what takes to be world champion.
• 1:41:21
  And look, and that's what he knew and did.
• 1:41:24
  And look at him now he's paying off.
• 1:41:25
  So in 20 years, you know, young kids that are growing up carting
• 1:41:28
  now emulating Max for stopping.
• 1:41:30
  I mean, it's just, that's what people just all sense.
• 1:41:33
  That's what I have to be.
• 1:41:35
  If I want to be world champion in Formula One, I got to be like that.
• 1:41:38
  I got to be like Senna.
• 1:41:39
  I got to be like Schumacher.
• 1:41:40
  I got to be like Verstappen.
• 1:41:41
  You know, it's like you got to have that singular focus.
• 1:41:44
  And you know, like I said before, for what he was able to do in
• 1:41:47
  a car, going on YouTube and just watching what he could do.
• 1:41:50
  I mean, it's just unbelievable what he could do in a car at that speed
• 1:41:54
  doing all the multiple things, you know, it's just, it's incredible.
• 1:41:58
  It's incredible.
• 1:41:59
  And it would have been fabulous if he hadn't passed away, you know, just to see
• 1:42:03
  what he could have done subsequent years.
• 1:42:05
  I think he still had a good another six, seven years in them.
• 1:42:08
  Easily, it would have changed up how the sport played out in the following years.
• 1:42:13
  And I think it would have be able to put the bed in regards to his
• 1:42:16
  legacy in regards to where he would have stood, because if he would
• 1:42:20
  have submitted it in regards to two or three more championships,
• 1:42:23
  more wins, everything like that.
• 1:42:25
  I mean, It really was solidified it I was always gonna have the argument.
• 1:42:28
  Well, I only won the three and understand, but you don't know what
• 1:42:31
  he would done, but he was a man.
• 1:42:32
  That's all you ever really the spiritual is a bit something we
• 1:42:35
  didn't really touch on very much.
• 1:42:37
  And, you know, my, my personal sense is that he felt as if.
• 1:42:41
  God was communicating through him, you know, we talked about Monaco in 1988 when
• 1:42:46
  he crashed into the barriers there, at least in the Cappadia movie when Cappadia
• 1:42:51
  has him talking in an interview, the feeling that you get from him is that God
• 1:42:56
  was speaking through him and I, I used to feel, you know, European kings in the
• 1:43:00
  medieval period felt they had a divine right to rule, you know, God had put them
• 1:43:05
  on earth to be king, so that gave him the right to tell everybody else what
• 1:43:08
  to do because God had made them king.
• 1:43:10
  And I've always felt like Senna had a sort of divine right to pass that,
• 1:43:14
  that he would place the car in such a way that, you know, it was up to the
• 1:43:17
  other guy, whether or not you add an accident, that way of being again,
• 1:43:21
  everybody's like that in Formula One.
• 1:43:23
  Now, nobody was like that before Senna came along, and you can
• 1:43:26
  argue that made the sport worse, but that was the winningness and
• 1:43:30
  part of the greatness, the persona.
• 1:43:32
  Away from the track, the charitable work, this sort of little persona
• 1:43:37
  Sanina, which is sort of a little like cartoon character version of
• 1:43:42
  himself that was involved with a lot of those kind of charitable projects.
• 1:43:47
  I feel like I want to talk to Brazilians about that element of who
• 1:43:52
  he is, because obviously that's very different from the way that PK was.
• 1:43:55
  And I feel like for Brazilians, a lot of Senna's greatness Lies in the fact
• 1:44:00
  that he was so proud of being Brazilian and something that I've written in the
• 1:44:05
  past is I feel like a lot of the British public's affection for Sterling Moss was
• 1:44:11
  based on the fact that, you know, in post war England, there was still rationing.
• 1:44:16
  So people were poor and didn't have a lot of food and.
• 1:44:19
  Didn't have a lot of excitement and life was a bit crap.
• 1:44:22
  And here was this Englishman who was going abroad and racing cars and winning.
• 1:44:27
  And it reminded you of winning foreign victories in the war.
• 1:44:30
  And he was young and handsome and smiling, and it was exciting.
• 1:44:34
  And, and I witnessed that, you know, in my parents.
• 1:44:38
  peer group, if you like, that they all have this warm feeling towards Moss.
• 1:44:43
  And I, I feel like I would like to understand more about, you know,
• 1:44:47
  from a Brazilian perspective, but I do feel like my sense is Senna
• 1:44:50
  had that kind of thing going.
• 1:44:52
  That's his greatness as a man.
• 1:44:53
  None of that has any reflection on his greatness or otherwise as a racing
• 1:44:58
  driver or as a Formula 1 driver.
• 1:45:00
  We'll just ask Rubens Barrichello.
• 1:45:02
  The second coming, right?
• 1:45:03
  Yeah.
• 1:45:04
  But we'll leave that where it is.
• 1:45:06
  I guess, John, it's time to kind of close this thing up.
• 1:45:09
  Why don't you take us home?
• 1:45:10
  It is time to, uh, yeah, thank you very much.
• 1:45:12
  Yeah, thank you very much, Eric, for, uh, steering me through my
• 1:45:16
  rambling and disjointed thoughts here.
• 1:45:18
  Thank you very much, William, for being on board and offering, uh, Ferrari focused
• 1:45:23
  and Porsche focused perspectives here.
• 1:45:25
  Yeah.
• 1:45:25
  Thanks you both and we'll see you next time
• 1:45:37
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