SPECTATOR SPORT
Tut I am Senna'
Frank Keating
I HAVE BEEN known to look smugly into my driving-mirror the three or four times a year I overtake a tractor on mar- ket day — 'that taught him a thing or two' — but, generally, passing at speed is not my bag at all. The snarling din apart, it was exciting, however, to be down at Imola on Sunday to watch Damon Hill kick-start the summer-long European part of the Formula 1 Grand Prix champi- onship with a calm and elegant victory. The dark-eyed and engagingly solemn young man has now won 11 Grand Prix and needs three more victories to over- take his late father's 14.
The poignancy of Sunday, of course, was that it was on May Day a year before that the Brazilian Ayrton Senna (Hill's driving team mate in the Williams), was killed at 190mph at Imola. Last weekend served as a memorial service. They have modified and made safer the part of the track where Senna came off, but the tyre-marks still scar the wall and around it. On the fencing there is now a shrine festooned with flowers and favours and wailing Latin graffiti. It was eerie to stand there, but also very touching.
This top end of motor-racing is awash with money and sponsorship, it might have even reached the point where the dosh takes precedence over the winning and the losing. If so, the game may soon be up. There still remains, however, one of all sports' most fulminating passages of utter intensity — that 20 or so minutes on the grid as they tick off the minutes before the shrieking and palpitating start. High hopes, hi-tech, low thresholds . . . engines being stripped down one last time, feverish tin- kering, tyres being nurtured and coddled; and the drivers on stropped-razors' edge between cold-eyed concentrating calm and fear.
. It is then that you admire, and with a pas- sion, men like the Brummie veteran with the George Robey eyebrows, Nigel Mansell, or young Hill. The operatic nature of Sunday's crowd, picknicking on the tus- socked hillocks all round the snaky track, added to the tensions — this was Verdi and Rossini country as well as that of the blood- red Ferraris.
The pair of home cars, driven by the cal- culating and talented Gerhard Berger and the dashing Jean Alesi, chased Hill all the way, and as the summer unfolds might be the ones to give the Didcot-based Williams team a genuine and thrilling run for its money.
Don't all write in at once if I've missed someone, but would the seven greatest champions of the 40 years since Fl racing started be Fangio, Muss, Clark, Stewart, Lauda, Prost, and Senna? With, all things considered, the latter the very best of the lot. Certainly Senna's ghost pervaded the Bologna plain on Sunday — they call it the `San Marino GP' although that principality is 50 miles away; so what, they've been known to run the Welsh Grand National at Newbury.
The inimitable Senna was a genuine cop- per-bottomed champion all right. It is an exceedingly rare breed. Apparently, there have been all of.,43 books written to his memory in the year. I would not be sur- prised if the latest by Richard Williams (Viking, £12.50) is the very best of the lot. The dust-cover says: 'Once Senna was accused of blocking an opponent. "But I am Senna," he said. Which sounded pre- posterous, until you thought about it. He was Senna, and the cultivation of humility in his working life would not have taken him to the places he found.'
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