Original subtitles

'/8, I came to Europe for the first time to compete outside Brazil

in the world championship.

It was pure driving. Pure racing.

There wasn't any politics.

No money involved either, so it was real racing.

We didn't think that karting

would become a career.

But it's taking on a bigger dimension

and we're a little worried

because he will probably race in formula one.

May god always protect him

from all danger he may face, that's my greatest fear.

I want to thank him for being such a great son,

for his good and honest work this year.

That is more important than any title for me.

Few people really do know my self.

They just don't understand what it takes from a racing driver.

Somebody that has left behind,

thousands and thousands of miles away, family and friends

to live in Europe.

Being so young and always fighting.

Nothing ever has come easy.

The time has come.

Ayrton is ready to drive a formula one car for the first time.

I think god gave me this chance,

which I have been waiting for so long.

And now he is helping me to stay calm, relaxed, tranquil.

I always liked the combination of the man and the machine.

I think that's the real special quality that motor racing in general,

and particularly formula one has.

People say, "it's all about the car, isn't it?"

Actually, it's not, but the car is certainly 50%, probably a bit more.

Even if it's 75% or 80%,

the other 20%, which is represented by the driver,

is absolutely crucial. That can make the difference.

But the cars themselves... You either believe this or you don't.

The cars themselves are beautiful things.

They're a little less beautiful when they're painted like cigarette packets,

or whatever they paint them as now perhaps,

but there's a beauty to the sense of form following function

that the form of the car expresses in some way

the speed that they are going to go at when they start moving.

And the details of the engineering,

even if you're not technically literate, are very beautiful.

They're beautiful bits of sculpture, if you like.

And that combination of those beautiful, inanimate machines

and the hero figures of the drivers,

the sense of courage and romance and that sort of thing

is what attracted me, I think, when I was quite a small boy.

I think formula one in the '80s was

one of the most glorious times in formula one.

The cars were almost simple compared to what they are now.

A steering wheel only turned the car. A gear lever shifted the gears.

It was a time when drivers still made the difference,

and all the engineering expertise and all the electronics

still left a great deal for the driver to do.

You had Alain prost, known as "the professor",

a very smooth, very calculating driver.

You had Nelson piguet, who was Brazilian,

very emotional, very clever, cunning driver.

You had Nigel mansell, who was the British lion,

who was very exciting to watch, a very spectacular driver.

And then you had senna, the virtuoso.

And to see these drivers competing with each other

at more or less the same stage of their careers,

overlapping slightly in a way

but really at their peak together, was phenomenal.

Well ayrton, it's a beautiful city

lovely narrow streets for walking, but not for racing, right?

Yes, exactly. I got here at the last minute

and I'm impressed because it's my first time in Monaco.

I've had a bit of practice

and, luckily, managed to adapt to the track.

There's no room for error, as an error would lead to an accident.

But so far I'm pretty happy.

I was already travelling a lot, reporting on formula one

when ayrton began to stand out. He was driving for toleman.

Toleman wasn't a winning team.

It wasn't a winning car.

It was never going to win a race.

That's why what ayrton did at Monaco showed a touch of genius.

Now, lots of drivers do that. Join a small team,

disappear without a trace. They perform to the level of the team.

But there are a rare breed of drivers, of whom senna was absolutely one,

who can go into a small team

and perform so far above the perceived level of the car

that everybody turns around and thinks, "how did he do that?"

What he had done was make everybody, everybody in the paddock

aware of what he could do, who he was and what his potential was.

That he could take this car, which had nothing,

and deliver a result like that,

in the worst possible conditions for a racing driver.

It's impossible to overestimate how frightening it is

to race in the rain, how difficult it is.

Racing drivers can't see anything in the rain,

especially if they're behind another car with those...

The big tyres they have now throw up so much spray

that it's like driving in thick, thick, thick fog.

Like trying to drive on a motorway in thick fog,

with 20 yards visibility at racing speeds.

And to be able to do that, that really sorts out

the great racing drivers from the pretty good ones.

Alain prost, after a superb start, has got away in the lead.

It's Nigel mansell secona, the two ferraris third and fourth.

Niki lauda is in fifth position.

Sixth is rosberg.

Seventh is manfred winkelhock. Eighth is ayrton senna.

But senna has come up through the field.

He started in 13th place and he's now seventh.

And off goes Nigel mansell.

Ayrton senna has now passed keke rosberg and is in third place.

He comes and devours Niki lauda!

Ayrton senna takes second place

on the most dangerous part of the circuit!

I think we are watching the arrival of ayrton senna,

a truly outstanding talent.

He's catching Alain prost at something like three seconds a lap,

and that is a truly staggering performance.

Prost is waving his hand at the officials. He wants to stop the race.

And who can blame him?

There is, in fact, from a purist and a dispassionate point of view,

no reason to stop the race.

There's an official in front of me with a red flag.

They are going to stop the race.

And the chequered flag is going up.

It is incredible!

Prost is stopping, and senna crosses the line before he gets there.

Ayrton waves his arm wildly!

He is celebrating as if he has won the race!

If it went on for a few more laps,

you can be sure ayrton would have taken the lead.

I had a great chance to win.

But unless you cross the finishing line in first place,

it is impossible to know.

Formula one is political, it is money,

and when you are still small, you have to go through this.

And you have Alain prost, a world champion,

out there leading the Monaco grand prix,

surviving all those wet corners, going by many wrecks,

driving his heart out for a victory at Monaco,

and here comes first-year formula one driver

from some place in Brazil, ayrton senna.

Now, this was one of the wettest races I've ever been at,

and it needed to be stopped.

But what senna could not get was that

it was in a French area, considered a French event,

with the fia being housed in Paris

and run by frenchmen.

To him, there had to be some reason, beside the rain,

that was no problem to him,

to where they took this victory away from him.

He knew that in another three or four laps,

he would catch prost, he would find a way around him

and he would be in the number-one position.

A tragic result for senna. However,

he's not gonna actually be world champion this year.

He will undoubtedly be world champion in the future if his career continues.

Ayrton senna, the new star of formula one!

On the formula one podium for the first time

after a fantastic performance.

What about next year?

Are you going to stay with the toleman team?

- What are your plans now for... - I don't know.

I don't know at the moment. It's still... No decisions and nothing clear.

We have to wait more time to see what happens.

You're not gonna be satisfied until you're in a winning position though, are you?

I believe if you are doing something like competing, like motor racing,

you either do well or forget it.

I remember in Detroit, a couple of weeks later,

it was already a buzz between the media,

the managers, the sponsors looking after him.

I remember Philip Morris making a deal,

a personal contract with him after that.

We knew that he would not stay at toleman for the three years,

the supposed length of his contract,

because the toleman team was not really improving

and the potential of the team was just not big enough for such a talent.

Lotus was the perfect place for ayrton to move to.

It was a team that had won championships and had won many grand prix,

and they worked very, very hard around ayrton to give his talent

all the facilities that it needed fo win.

When [ First come to formula one in '84,

I was starting,

so I had so much to learn and to achieve that anything...

Any good result was a progress,

was a motivation.

Then I changed to a bigger team, to lotus,

and I still went up and up and up.

And I'm still doing it.

So even when I have some problems, I look always to the next race.

Because maybe one race I have no chance, but next one or the next five will be good

against one bad one.

So, you got to try to make the numbers bigger and bigger.

Even when he was very young he already knew what he wanted

and he would make it happen.

For example, he paid extra attention in class

so he wouldn't have to study at home

and have more time to play with his go-kart.

There's no doubt that senna came from a background of privilege.

His family was very comfortably off.

Once they recognised that his ambition was to be a racing driver,

they had no problem backing his early efforts in go-karts.

But it would be a great mistake to think that he was able to buy his way into formula one.

Senna himself realised

that to make a serious, lasting impact on formula one,

he had to fight his way into it by virtue of his talent.

Ayrton was a genius in the rain.

Whenever the conditions were bad and the track got more slippery,

he had something else.

Ayrton senna wins in Portugal!

Ayrton senna winner of Portuguese grand prix '85

he lapped every car but one.

It's marvellous! It's an extraordinary feeling.

I'm delighted because in my second year in formula one,

I achieved my first dream, which was to win a grand prix.

Ayrton senna winner of Portuguese grand prix '85

It's like a drug.

It is something so strong and so intense.

And once you experience it, you keep searching for it all the time.

It was raining really hard. He had no real competition.

He'd have won that race one hundred times.

And it was a very important race for Brazil for many reasons,

including that on that Sunday in Brazil,

the elected president had passed away,

president tancredo neves.

It was a very important political moment for Brazil.

It was the first elected president

after the dictatorship was over.

He had been ill for a while, then he passed away.

There was the risk that Brazil might suffer another coup

or something like that, which nobody wanted.

Senna's victory was very important even in that sense,

for the Brazilian public and people and for us there,

and I'm sure he himself felt it afterwards, in the evening,

when we were having dinner. We went for dinner,

and on the same evening he left the restaurant to fly back to Brazil.

I'm mili okada from Japan TV,

fuji TV, and I'm just a TV personality and not a news reporter so...

I see. Let's make a picture together.

I think there are many Japanese girls

who are fans of mr senna.

I'm so close to mr senna and so nervous.

Come and see Japan, and see you in Japan.

- Thank you. A little kiss. - Thank you.

Bye-bye! Another kiss.

He was very complete.

From the tyre to the engine to every single component of the car,

he wanted to know everything.

He was pushing every mechanic, every engineer to the very limit

to understand, first of all, and to improve the overall package.

And it took a lot of his energy,

but he was concentrating as much on that aspect of the job than driving itself.

And he was the first one, maybe, to stay at the circuit

till 9:00, 10:00 with the engineer and the mechanics.

Didn't want to go back to the hotel or to play golf like Alain prost or a few others.

There's only one word that describes ayrton's style,

and that is "fast.”

He would take a car beyond its design capabilities.

He would brake later, fly into these corners where the car was just over the edge,

and somehow he could dance a dance with that car

to where it stayed on the track.

As I watched ayrton's early career,

what was very apparent was his pace and his dedication.

But in the end, what you're looking for is an intellect,

and I thought, "this guy's got what it takes."

But it pretty soon became apparent that

lotus wasn't going to be big enough for him,

that lotus was actually a team just beginning its decline.

I think when he was there, really,

there was nothing he could do to stop it.

The driver doesn't design the car.

And so, he did what he'd done before and what great drivers do,

which was to move again to an even more competitive team.

Such an important instinct for a driver, that,

to know where to be.

To know not who is competitive this season,

but who is going to be competitive next season.

At that time, the strongest teams

were Williams and mclaren.

Mclaren was...

I'd say that mclaren was always a reflection

of the values observed by ayrton.

In that sense, ayrton and Ron Dennis have lots in common.

Both are perfectionists, both...

I'll use the present tense. Both have

the idea that nothing will go wrong if it's well planned and executed,

and they fought for the same ideal.

Ron comes from

a hard-working background.

He's someone who struggled to get where he is

and succeed. This made them really close.

At the time, the trilogy

"best team, best driver, best car"

was led by Ron Dennis at mclaren.

In the mid-'80s, mclaren was the team to beat.

Ron Dennis was the best manager ahd Alain prost was the best driver.

We all called prost “the professor” because he would do,

methodically, whatever it took to be ahead on points.

If it meant coming fifth,

he would hold the fifth place and collect those points

rather than fighting for a second, third or first place finish.

And he certainly understood the politics of the sport,

and he played that game smarter than anyone.

You're known as the professor of motor racing

because you plan everything out and you know where you're going.

Is that actually true?

I'm very realistic, so I think when I'm competitive,

I know that I'm competing. When I'm not, I know I'm not so.

Why are there no women racing drivers?

I really don't know exactly why women are not very competitive

in motor racing, especially in formula one.

But, you know, you are a beautiful woman, and I know somebody at mclaren

who likes you very much, and I can arrange it.

Alain, you know, if only someone would teach me how to drive a car,

a racing car, I might be able to give up this job and...

There is nothing important I could not teach you.

Does your wife drive you home?

The first time I really met him and tried to talk to him

was in '84 when we had...

In Germany, we had a Mercedes appearance,

and we had a small race in nlrburgring with the new Mercedes 119, I think.

And we had the old... Not old, but some formula one drivers,

plus old formula one drivers.

I remember Denny hulme. I remember a few other drivers,

and we had this competition,

and some people from Mercedes,

they asked me if I could wait for ayrton at the airport.

We were having a 10-, 15-minute time difference,

and I had a car, so I was waiting for him to bring him.

That is the first time that we talked together,

and we had a long drive, something like two or three hours.

So, we had time to talk. He did not talk very much, but he was...

He looked impressed. He looked impressed,

so I was driving very fast on the motorway in Germany.

He said to me, "you're driving fast!"

It was nice, and we were quite close,

because he did not know anybody.

So, he was always close to me during at least the first day.

And then it's very funny because

he looked very open, he looked very nice,

and we were starting the practice,

so then we were fighting together for the pole position.

And I saw him very competitive.

So, I'm at the pole, he was second, and then at the start,

he went before the flag and I said to myself, "shit.

"I have to take care of this guy."

That was in '84.

I did not know that we could have been teammates or whatever.

In formula one, teammate

means this is my main competitor,

this is the person I have to defeat

because it's the only person whose car is just like mine.

I may say that I belong to mclaren, but Ferrari is doing better,

or I belong to Ferrari, but mclaren is doing better, but I can't say

that my Ferrari

is different from my teammate's.

This is the first...

Especially at the beginning of your career,

the driver joins a team

and his main opponent is his mate.

If he does much better than his teammate

he stands a chance in the future.

If that doesn't happen, it's the end of his career.

Prost had already won two world championships there.

He'd been there for several seasons,

he was extremely well-established in the team.

He thought of himself and he thought he'd got the team

to think of him as the number-one driver,

the team leader,

the guy to whom most of their efforts were devoted.

But then, senna joined,

and senna was not going to accept a number-two status, that's for sure.

He hadn't joined the team to be the supporting cast.

We're very confident that we have the best two drivers in the world.

The two most professional drivers, as well.

If we're not consistently in the winning circle next year,

then we certainly won't be able to put the blame at the drivers.

It's a great opportunity for me, professional.

And as a personal point of view, I feel very happy to work together with Alain.

The first year at mclaren was very decisive in ayrton's life.

He was very tense,

it was like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders

because now he had a responsibility

to prove he really was a top driver.

Before senna arrived at mclaren,

Alain prost was considered the destroyer of teammates.

I remember Jo Ramirez

telling me,

"reginaldo, I'm very worried

"about what's gonna happen with ayrton at mclaren.

"I know he is talented,

"but Alain prost is a warrior,

"he creates an atmosphere of war,

"which helps him destroy his opponents

"as he destroyed keke rosberg."

I use the word "destroy" in technical terms.

He destroyed him on the track,

mentally defeating his opponent.

I told Jo Ramirez,

"Jo, it's going to be different with senna.

"Because he has much more talent

"than the other drivers

"with whom prost worked as a team."

And that was what happened.

Alain prost was surprised.

Even with all prost had

and has in terms of talent,

of understanding a race, of intelligence,

of sang-froid, he was surprised

when he started racing with ayrton. He never thought

there could be such a good pilot as ayrton.

Ayrton has, for the first time in his career, the car able to be world champion,

and he doesn't want to let his chance go anywhere.

- That's normal and that is going to push us. - What about you?

- What about you? - It's a little bit different.

So, you're going to let it go?

I have a little bit more pressure than... You put me more pressure.

I think you could see smiles,

but at the same time some slightly strange body language,

as they realised just where they were and what was going to unfold.

Alain, who obviously felt he was well-nested down at mclaren,

and the young pretender coming in and clearly threatening that position.

Both had great intellects and both were very good racing drivers.

Beating each other became far more challenging

than beating the rest of the field.

He had a target. That is obvious that when he arrived in formula one,

he had a target and it was myself.

When I arrived in formula one, I was happy to be there.

We are different top drivers. I never had any target.

Anybody, any driver that, "I want to beat him."

I had a huge respect for the old drivers.

For ayrton, it was different. He really wanted to beat me.

He really wanted to be world champion and beating me and...

That was really his strength,

and that was a plus in his approach

because when you're a racing driver, you want to have motivation.

That day, I suddenly realised that I was no longer driving conscious.

And I was in a different dimension, for me.

The circuit for me was a tunnel, which I was just going, going, going.

And I realise I was well beyond my conscious understanding.

Ayrton was multiple seconds into the lead, had the race in hand

with only a handful of laps to go, and he received a radio message that said,

"you are so far in the lead, slow down."

Ayrton senna has hit the wall.

Senna in the barrier! He's out of the car...

Ayrton senna is out of his car and out of this race.

Ayrton senna goes out of the lead of the Monaco grand prix.

Absolutely incredible!

He never wanted to beat me. He wanted to humiliate me.

He wanted to show the people that he was much stronger.

Much better. And that was his weakness.

His post-accident emotion was pure anger with himself,

and he couldn't cope with it at all.

He actually walked back to his apartment,

and it was two or three hours before he surfaced.

I just came so close to perfection that weekend, that I relax.

I open windows for mistakes, and I learned that there.

And since then

my progressive comeback, because I lost some confidence at that moment.

And progressively, I fight back,

and I got much stronger after that incident.

Somehow I got closer to god and that has been very important for me as a man.

Monaco was the turning point in the '88 season.

Ayrton went on an amazing run,

winning six of the next eight races.

Putting him just ahead of prost in the championship.

What happens now, you two?

Good fun. We will have good fun from now on.

Fight. Maybe we fight outside the car.

I think it's gonna get more and more exciting, the championship.

Is it possible to be equal in the championship?

- No. - Shit.

Can only be one winner.

Fifteenth race of the season.

In the small hours, Brazil is waiting

for ayrton senna to win his first world title in formula one.

His childhood dream.

The pressure was on ayrton.

He was on pole, he was going to be world champion

if he won that race, so the pressure was huge.

They are going to start, let's go, green light.

Senna stalled!

Senna left on the grid.

Prost took the lead, ayrton senna is way behind.

There is ayrton senna in fourteenth place.

I thought, "the championship is over.

"It's all over.”

Senna is already up to eighth place. He is making a fantastic recovery.

But then his favourite thing happened,

it began to rain.

Senna's now in fourth place.

Senna's coming, he's coming, coming, coming!

Senna is getting close. Senna's gonna challenge for the lead.

Ayrton senna goes for it and overtakes prost.

Ayrton senna has got the lead.

I started being thankful as I was doing the last lap.

I thanked god.

I couldn't believe I was actually going to win the championship

with all the anxiety and tension.

I felt his presence.

I visualised, I saw god.

It was a special moment in my life.

An enormous feeling.

I have registered it in my memory,

and it remains a part of me.

Ayrton senna of Brazil!

World champion of 1988!

A fantastic race!

A brilliant win because he came back from sixteenth place.

Ayrton, do you feel like a world champion now?

I just feel peace.

It feels like tons of weight have lifted

from my head and shoulders.

And it is hard to comprehend what being a world champion is.

What do you say about a man who says he's seen god in any circumstances,

never mind on the last lap of a grand prix

when he's a few yards away from winning the world championship?

Most people would be sceptical.

And I think most people would be right.

Senna did seem to be absolutely convinced

that he'd seen god. He didn't say what god was,

how god appeared to him in that moment,

but it's his right to say that.

He must have known that he would risk looking...

Well, not looking a fool, but attracting scepticism.

And who are we to...

Who are we to challenge that, really, when anybody makes such a claim?

But certainly unique in the history of grand prix racing.

When you're talking about god and...

First of all, I believe in god, too,

but I would never use the same words that ayrton did.

When you're on the same team, doing the same business,

and taking risks with the drivers, with your teammates,

these kinds of things do not make you very comfortable

because it's not only believing in god,

it's like using that as a strength

and having always the right.

That means he was thinking that he was always right,

and in this case, it could be dangerous on the track,

and that, I always felt, sometimes, not very comfortable.

Yeah, there were many cynics

in formula one

who challenged whether this was

really an authentic and real

account of what he felt and what his values were.

But I was there to witness it very often

in a more private environment, and he was most definitely Sincere.

This is how he felt.

He felt that he was supported by

the god that he believed in,

and why on earth would I

or should anybody dissuade him from that belief?

Because he...

He was special, he was committed,

and strong beliefs, I think, are a good thing as long as they are positive ones.

He is an incredible person.

He is so humble,

and he raises the image of Brazil abroad.

He shares his victories with us.

I admire him so much.

He's a very brave man.

That's all I know of him.

He is our pride.

One of the few things we can still be proud of.

I once asked ayrton when he would stop racing.

Mum, I'll stop when I become world champion.

I knew deep inside it is not true.

We all know that.

When the 1988 championship was over and he'd won,

it was plain to see how he'd become a different person

because he had, in fact, found himself.

He discovered what he was about,

it was a process which had its closure with that victory.

At Christmas things happen.

We make new friends,

like the one I will introduce now.

He was part of my 1988,

ayrton senna.

Isn't he cute?

I have a question.

Everyone's excited, but no one more than me,

because it's hard to speak now that he's my friend.

Ayrton, what do you want for Christmas?

A Christmas present?

What I really want, I can't say here.

Why not?

Censored, but I just want happiness.

Tell me here.

Happy new year.

Happy 1990.

Happy "91.

Happy "92.

Happy "93.

The 1989 season was somewhat less harmonious than the year before.

Both drivers took on different levels of aggression,

especially when racing each other.

It's curious

that "teammate" means "team companion" in Portuguese.

I've used many times the term "team enemy".

If you have two pilots, as it used to be the case

with ayrton and prost,

as teammates,

it's inevitable that there would be

an internal dispute.

As a journalist and as someone who was

in a TV production meeting every weekend

talking about what's the story,

we loved the rivalry.

We loved it on the track, in the garage and in the motorhome afterwards.

Ron was really behind ayrton.

But I understood that very quickly.

It's a business. For him it's a business, and I always understood...

When I was with Niki,

he was really half and half, I would say, at the beginning,

and then suddenly he went, obviously, behind me

because I was the new generation, and ayrton was,

when I was with him, the new generation.

Throughout their periods at mclaren, they always had equality.

We would go, at some points, to quite extreme lengths.

I mean, engine choice, for example. Once we had determined

which two engines were going to be used for the race,

then it would be, literally, a number out of a hat routine.

We'd put the two engine numbers in some sort of container,

and then the drivers would alternate.

This was probably...

This was trying to eliminate the view that

Honda was selecting which engines went to whom.

But it was...

Yeah, there was a degree of paranoia because it didn't need much.

A slightly better engine or a slightly better setup,

that would determine who won the race

and who became world champion.

When it was prost versus senna in the same team,

the romantics would certainly go with senna,

and the pragmatists would go with prost.

And senna could be a bit cruel about it,

but there was some truth that

prost was one of those who made excuses quite a lot,

which you never like to hear from racing drivers.

You'd rather they just fessed up.

"Car wasn't good enough," or, "I wasn't quick enough on the day,"

or, "that's the way things go sometimes,"

but prost would tend to go into the minutiae

of why the car wasn't good enough or things that worked against him or...

It was... that can...

Even though every element of the explanation might have truth in it,

somehow it's unattractive. You don't want to hear it, actually.

That's when the gloves come off within a team.

That's when engineers stop sharing information.

That's where drivers start looking over their shoulders to see

who is getting what from whom.

And ayrton, with his love of truth,

wasn't as in tune as Alain prost

with adding another dimension, the politics of the sport.

Senna v prost, prost v senna,

the order of the grid is always one or the other.

It is war between them

because the French driver Alain prost

thinks that his team-mate has been disloyal towards him.

And it seems that this quarrel could have consequences

for the rest of the season.

Race by race, they were growing further apart.

"He wants war.”

Sometime after that

they split completely, they didn't speak any more.

Of course, I think French fia president Jean-Marie balestre at the time

was helpful for Alain because they were close.

I remember Jean-Marie balestre was the man in charge

when senna was denied the chance to win the Monaco grand prix

in a toleman when he was a novice in formula one.

And balestre was a very divisive figure, very confrontational,

argumentative, autocratic. Very autocratic.

And balestre was still in charge in the late '80s

and right through to the beginning of the '90s

when prost and senna had their famous collisions at suzuka.

And balestre was the man who attempted to sanction

and suspend or whatever senna,

who felt that he was being discriminated against,

probably with some justification.

Mr balestre had the room beside me and also on the other side,

and I entered into the room and balestre is there,

and he came into my room and we had a talk.

And don't forget that

I had a very intense collaboration

with president balestre for the safety.

But ayrton was convinced

that it was a conspiracy, and the story started like this,

and I'm very sorry about that.

I'd like you all to welcome the president of fisa, mr balestre.

Please, gentlemen.

All the drivers in the world are looking at you on TV

because they think, stupidly, that you are an example.

It is a big mistake, but they think that.

I repeat.

No danger for the end of the world championship.

Very clear.

Now it depends on you.

And, for me, the rest was very simple.

It was very clear that I was quicker.

Believe me or not, but I was playing with him during this race.

I was really fast. I knew that normally he could not overtake.

But I said to Ron and ayrton two, three races before suzuka...

Because every time ayrton tried, especially at the start, to overtake me,

I opened the door 'cause I did not want to have a crash.

I always said to them,

"from now, no way I will open the door any more.

"We are fighting as... I don't care about the team spirit.

"I fight for myself."

The championship is neck-to-neck.

Senna has to win the Japanese grand prix

to keep the points battle going on fo the last race.

Prost knows that if senna does not finish, he will be the formula one champion.

Prost is first, senna is second.

Prost jumped into the lead.

Prost makes a better start.

The opportunity that senna's looking for, and he's going through.

Oh, my goodness, this is fantastic.

They crash and it is better for prost.

If this is the end, prost wins the title.

Once again, only a victory will do for ayrton senna.

It's difficult to make people, when you are pro senna, that...

You say, "okay, it's done not on purpose.”

To be honest, I don't care so much because

I promise you, I did not do it on purpose. But I did not open the door,

which is very, very different, especially through this corner.

But if you're not a racing driver, in this corner, knowing the track

and knowing the chicane, you cannot judge.

It's a waste of time to try to explain this situation.

It is my opinion. It's a race incident,

especially when you are fighting for the championship.

Knowing that if I wanted to open the door,

I could not make the chicane myself.

It was a little bit less than not yielding. There was a level of aggression

that caused the cars to collide.

Which was, let's say, motor racing.

But, really, it was then what unfolded which was just so wrong.

Nannini goes by.

He goes by to take the lead.

Senna is still in the pit.

Senna rejoins far behind nannini.

It's going to be almost impossible.

It is all or nothing, five laps to go.

A suicidal race for senna if he tries something.

Prost saw ayrton rejoin the race

and went straight to the race stewards' office.

Nannini is first, senna is second.

Senna forces it, blocks nannini.

Senna overtakes!

Brazilian flags are waving.

Everyone is on their feet.

Ayrton senna.

The chequered flag!

Senna celebrates inside his cockpit.

He pounds his helmet.

Ayrton senna from Brazil!

Visibly emotional,

he flips open his visor and wipes his tears.

It was a fantastic victory,

the like of which I have never seen before.

I went back to the pits,

and I saw ayrton being pushed by the marshals and start again.

And obviously, I was not that happy,

and that's it. I went into the garage, I had a very strong argument with Ron,

and that's it.

Yeah. No, I did not...

Interviewer: You went to the tower first or to the garage first?

Garage or no.

I believe you went to the tower first.

Maybe to the tower.

Maybe you had the argument with Ron in the tower.

In the tower, yeah. Because Ron was already in the tower,

and we had a strong argument there. But it never...

In no situation, I was, for example, in the tower

with mr balestre alone, for example.

That did not happen. I read that many, many times.

We had the argument, they had the...

I even did not enter into the race control.

It may be in 20 minutes.

Fucking hell.

Want a cup of tea?

It was unheard of for the podium to be delayed.

Nigel, Nigel, he missed the chicane.

He went through the slip road.

The longer we waited, the more we feared things were becoming political.

The decision taken by the stewards,

by the stewards at the Japanese grand prix.

Excludes car number one and its driver ayrton senna

from the final result of this race.

Just after the race

this giant screen

repeatedly showed the accident

and senna rejoining the race.

After reviewing these images, the stewards concluded

that because senna did not drive through the chicane

to rejoin to the track,

he infringed article 56 of fia regulations.

You're the world champion, Alain?

Apparently, yes.

I was not 100% sure, I know the regulation,

but you never know how it's going to be interpreted.

But to be very honest, I mean, I'm quite happy to leave,

because I think it becomes absolutely impossible to work with ayrton,

and that's a good end of championship.

What I'd like to do now

is show you some footage which I think is quite relevant.

Because we're told that you can't use escape roads to rejoin the race.

Escape roads are not for escaping through, they're in fact for stopping in,

turning round and going out of.

Very important to remember, no exclusions,

no penalties, no disqualifications.

And for that he's excluded from the Japanese grand prix?

Where's the consistency? It can't be right.

That is the first time that a team has done an appeal

and a request against its own driver.

So, I was in this kind of mood where, honestly,

I wanted to be world champion, but everything was possible,

and looking at your own team going so far,

I did not know what could happen.

Prost was very, very political.

I think it's probably fair to say

that he was with several teams during his career,

and I don't think his relationship with any of them ended happily.

Alain, you said that you took a normal racing line.

I would put it to you that from the aerial pictures,

it looked as though you had turned in quite early.

It wasn't a normal line at all.

I won 39 races and now three championships,

do you think that I would do something like this on purpose?

You know, you know, I had already turned for the corner,

maybe a little bit earlier, if you want, but that was my corner.

The court of appeal pronounces

a six month suspended ban of senna's licence,

which is a warning not only for ayrton senna,

but for all drivers,

and also a $100,000 fine.

Even if you are one of the biggest drivers in the world,

you don't have the right fo cause a stupid accident.

The way the whole affair has been treated,

it's like I have total responsibility for everything that took place there.

I was blamed for everything and I was penalised for everything.

I was treated like a criminal.

And this is totally unacceptable.

They took the championship away from him,

and they suspended his licence for a period.

To me, it was the worst use of power, political power,

in my 15 years on the formula one circuit.

And ayrton would never forget it.

Alain prost, somewhere, I know, deep down inside, was ashamed of it.

And the rule was actually changed later

to allow what ayrton did to become legal because of it.

That was a huge blow for ayrton

because balestre's attitude was even worse than prost's.

He almost gave up racing in formula one.

Left him alone for a while.

I gently persuaded him if you are true to your values,

if you believe that your values are correct values,

then walking away from the dark forces

that you're faced with in life just doesn't become an option.

The 1990 season he came back wiser, the team is harmonious.

Prost has gone out of mclaren to Ferrari,

and senna is in a perfect position to compete for the title.

All drivers go on their limit.

My limit is different from prost's, that is the reality.

And instead of trying to improve his own skills,

he found if easier to attack me.

Ayrton has a small problem. He thinks that he can't kill himself

because he believes in god and things like this.

And I think that's very dangerous for the other drivers.

Because I believe in god and have faith in god,

it doesn't mean I am immortal.

It doesn't mean I am immune,

as has been claimed.

I am as scared as anyone of getting hurt,

especially driving a formula one car.

It's a constant danger.

Is that him?

Who is it?

Martin Donnelly.

I was in the pits. Practice was stopped.

I hear by different people there was an accident, was Donnelly.

Was bad, was foo bad, was disaster.

And I decide to go to the place to see myself.

Million things went through my mind. In the end, I...

I realised I was not going to give up my passion,

even just having seen what I had seen.

And I had to put myself together,

and walk out, go to the racing car, and do it again.

And do it again, and do it even better than before,

because that was the way to kind of cover that impact it had on me.

I was just not ready to give up. As much as I was scared to continue,

I was not ready to give up my aim, my target, my objective,

my passion, my dream, my life. It is my life.

As far as I hear, he is out of danger, life danger,

which is a lot considering the accident.

And as it happened to him, can happen to any of us.

There are some things that you can calculate,

but there are things which are unexpected,

and those unexpected things are the most dangerous ones,

like it happened to him today.

I hope we don't see those things in the future.

Amazingly, for the third time in a row,

the championship hinged on the race in Japan.

But this time if prost didn't finish, ayrton would be champion.

Gentlemen, morning.

Number of laps from green light to chequered flag will be 53 laps.

Dangerous behaviour and/or dangerous manoeuvres

will be immediately investigateq,

and may lead to suspension of the licence

for one or more formula one world championship events.

Any questions?

There was a big fuck-up last year with ayrton.

Why do we have to repeat the same thing?

The safest thing is...

If you miss the chicane, the stewards stop you.

When you have no traffic, they let you go.

If you have to turn around and go backwards

against another car, that's dangerous.

Okay.

Does everybody feel that way?

Yeah. Yeah.

- Thank you. - Thank you very much.

I can't stand it. I can't stand this. It's a joke.

After what happened last year, it's a joke, this situation.

You just proved here... I said nothing, and you see somebody raising the point,

and you see everybody agreeing. And last year was really bad for me.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but I have to leave.

The story down in the pit Lane and on the grid is one of tension.

With the world championship up for grabs, everyone is extremely tense.

Ayrton senna actually walked out of the drivers' meeting today.

He thinks that the pole position should be

on the left hand side of the grid, not on the right.

Normally, if the inside was clear, the inside for sure is better.

Because it's dirty, the outside is better. Like Hungary, or like...

The racing line is the line where the cars most normally drive.

It's the fastest line around the track.

It's really important to have the pole position on the racing line.

If you are on the opposite side, you are on a part of the track that is rarely used

and has half the grip.

On the outside than the inside.

Because on the inside you have no traction.

We'll have a look.

Please.

But would the chief steward, would the fia, would balestre, agree?

Ayrton senna will be in pole position for tomorrow's Japanese grand prix.

Prost was second fastest.

Pole position was his,

and then suddenly pole position was mysteriously

moved to the dirty side of the circuit, which he felt was unjust.

That decision was influenced by balestre.

I know that, we know that.

I was fucked many times by the system.

I told myself, "today, there's no way."

Today has to be my way.

I don't care what happens, it has to be my way.

And senna sprints away,

but Alain prost takes the lead! It's happened!

Senna is trying to go through on the inside...

And a collision.

Crash! They both crash.

Senna has been hit.

Alain prost and ayrton senna have come together again,

and they are both off the racetrack! This is unbelievable!

And if the race continues, it is the end of the championship.

We don't know yet whether we're going to see a red flag.

We haven't seen any yet,

so it looks as if the race is going to continue.

The championship is over.

And ayrton senna is the 1990 champion.

That's a very sad way for this year's world championship to finish.

I circled around the back of the tower

and was standing right in an illegal place

at the pit entrance.

And as soon as ayrton crossed the line into the pits,

I came over the wall,

and in my ear,

all the way back in Bristol, Connecticut, they were saying,

"ask him about the incident. Ask him about the crash.

"Ask him about who did what to whom."

Can you tell us what happened on the first lap, ayrton?

Well, unfortunately, we touched in the first corner

when we were fighting for the lead, and we both went off.

Do you think that's because the pole position

is on the wrong side of the track here? You wanted to change that.

Absolutely. You fight, you break your... to be on pole,

and then they put you on the wrong side of the circuit.

How do you feel about being world champion?

It's not a bad feeling at all, is it?

Congratulations.

What was very clear with ayrton, when he got back,

is his body language, his mannerisms showed that he was in massive conflict.

He was certainly not proud of himself.

Certainly not revelling in the fact that

this had determined the world championship.

Formula one world championship for drivers, ayrton senna.

I call on the world champion, ayrton senna.

He knew I was right with him.

He moved to the inside line, going towards the first corner.

I just chased him then, and he opened the gap.

And knowing me like he does know,

he must realise that if there was a gap, I was gonna try to overtake him.

Okay. Let me ask you another difficult question.

If I were to count back all the world champions,

the number of times they had made contact with other drivers,

that you in the last 36 months or 48 months

have been in contact with more other cars and drivers

than they might have done in total.

I find amazing for you to make such a question, Stewart,

because you are very experienced and you know a lot about racing,

and you should know that by being a racing driver

you are under risks all the time.

And by being a racing driver means you are racing with other people.

And if you no longer go for a gap that exists,

you're no longer a racing driver.

Because we are competing. We are competing to win.

And the main motivation to all of us is to compete for a victory.

It's not to come third, fourth, fifth or sixth, right?

But hasn't that always been the case?

But I think it's all irrelevant. All what you're saying, Jack,

is really irrelevant.

Because I'm a driver that won more races than anybody over the past three years.

I'm a driver that has been on pole position more than anybody in history.

And I'm a driver that won two titles in the past three years.

And I don't think how... I cannot comprehend how

you can try to turn things around

to say that I've been involved in more accidents than anybody

because that is not true, as well.

The rivalry between ayrton and prost

was the biggest rivalry I've seen in sports

in all my career. As well as spending 38 years in formula one,

I covered football, world cups, the Olympics

I've worked in many other sectors,

but I've never seen a similar rivalry as between ayrton and prost.

It involved everything.

There was criticism, mainly coming from prost,

of ayrton's behaviour as a person.

But he really was a pure product of kart racing.

And he brought to formula one a way of racing that,

until that time, had been particular to karts,

which was a very no-compromise kind of approach to racing.

Head-to-head against your rivals,

physical contact between the machines was okay, was fine in karts.

It was safe enough.

But to bring that into cars was something quite different.

And I think that was one of the things that shocked his slightly older rivals.

They weren't used to that.

The kind of etiquette that they'd grown up with was different,

was rooted in a belief that you didn't make contact

with another rival's car,

because if you did that, you were likely to die.

Two of the greatest champions in the history of formula one

ended up in the sand and wasted a championship.

Each accused the other, but prost was hurt the most.

Let's listen to his extreme reaction.

I wanted to punch him in the face...

But I was so disgusted,

I could not do it.

He revolts me.

Senna versus prost, which went on for a couple of seasons, well...

It was just absolutely wonderful for formula one's appeal.

Some sports news now. It is the end of a love story.

The television ratings improved, you know, everything went up.

People talked about it.

It was controversial, shocking, fascinating.

The success of the sport also grew, you know.

Commercially and... Bernie ecclestone was very clever

in the way they distribute television.

But to keep an audience, you need personalities

and, of course, the prost-senna story was a big hit.

And ayrton became very famous outside the sport,

thanks to the impact of formula one on TV.

I feel so worried for the people because...

And we push them away.

They're nice people and it's not a good feeling to see them being pushed away.

I feel so sorry, you know.

In Brazil it was very different.

The people were unhappy under the regime that was ruling them.

Poverty was just desperate.

So his appeal there, at a hard time, was extraordinary.

The situation in Brazil was very negative and depressing.

But what happened is, when ayrton won numerous times,

instead of trying to hide his Brazilian origins, as others did,

he did the opposite, he'd wave the national flag.

Ayrton would do this every Sunday.

And people were inspired, that's why they loved him.

Attending a Brazilian grand prix,

there's nothing like it.

And when ayrton senna is on top,

it is just an out-of-body experience to be involved,

to be in the paddock, to be on the grid.

People ask me,

"what was your greatest experience in 15 years on the formula one circuit?"

And they're amazed that I say,

"the first time that the race went back to Sao Paulo,

"to interlagos."

Senna is on pole position,

it's the start of the race,

and there's 300,000 Brazilian fans at that circuit,

singing, "ole, ole, olé! Senna, senna!"

When the engines started, you could not hear the engines right next to you

for the sound of the fans singing his praise,

singing with love for his accomplishments

and for love of the person.

He wanted to win the Brazilian grand prix.

He wanted to win his own grand prix,

and here it is, seven years into his career,

and he has not won the most meaningful race.

Ayrton had never won the Brazilian grand prix.

Ever since he'd been in formula one, it was his dream to win at home.

The Brazilian grand prix is about to start.

Red light, green light.

He starts well.

Come on, senna!

And senna gets away in the lead.

Ayrton pulled out a lead.

He was then, really, faced with a very easy race win.

Here is senna... it's raining.

It's raining, stop this.

And then, the gearbox jammeq,

and he was faced with several laps to go

only having a sixth gear.

It should have been impossible to drive a formula one car stuck in sixth gear.

He wanted to stop. He couldn't drive any more.

But he had tried so many times to win the Brazilian grand prix,

that he found a special inner strength.

After this corner, senna is on the home straight.

He is going to win.

Ayrton, ayrton... ayrton senna from Brazil!

Leading from start to finish, he wins at interlagos!

A great victory for senna.

I don't believe it.

Fucking hell,

['ve won.

Prost, you son of a bitch!

He won, then passed out.

It was his most heroic moment.

Because of the huge physical effort,

I had muscle spasm in my shoulders and neck.

The pain was absurd.

The physical and mental stress this weekend was huge.

But there could only be one result.

Finishing the race with nothing left.

What's wrong?

My shoulders, my shoulders.

Just my shoulders.

Come here, dad. Come here.

Come here!

Touch me very gently.

Don't touch me.

Calm down, ayrton.

Don't touch me!

Do you need any help?

Bring the flag for me.

I fought so hard.

I needed to finish, I needed to finish first

because he is greater than everyone

and he gave me this race.

And that is what happened.

God gave me this race and I am very happy.

It was very exciting.

Brazil cherishes your victory, senna. Congratulations.

Thank you, Brazil, thank you, fans.

The human heat this weekend was so great

that we had fo win this time.

It couldn't be any other way.

We did it.

Life can be very difficult in Brazil. You have...

Brazil have all the extremes. You have the fantastic nature.

You can have all the good material things that money can buy.

But at the same time, you have lots of problems.

Social problems and poverty. Some violence as a consequence.

I try to help

a little bit. For children, particularly.

Because ayrton was so widely known in Brazil,

many people would ask him for help,

personal requests, hospitals,

charities would ask him for help for instance.

Ayrton would donate and keep it going without fail.

But, he no longer wanted to make random donations.

He wanted to develop something, plan it, organise it,

to help Brazil, especially children.

Ayrton in '91 was in great form.

I think it was his strongest year.

He won seven races, constantly on pole position.

The intensity was every bit as high as ever.

But there just seemed to be a further wisdom,

a further bit of growth.

But then the car bit him hard.

For the first time he really thought he could be hurt in a formula one car.

Neurological examination

to check the chest and the blood pressure, the abdomen

and the limbs.

- And how did you feel about him? - He's fine. He's good.

- No problems to worry about? - No, none at all. No.

It's the deepest personal relationship that I've ever had with any driver.

Whenever I got to the circuit and ran into senna,

he was usually being interviewed or surrounded by people.

And the moment he saw me, his face would always light up with a beautiful grin.

Because he had that wonderful humility,

which is not common amongst racing drivers.

- All right then. - Pleasure.

Be careful.

You've still got too much to do.

Yes, a few more.

Question? Yes.

We talked about the chicanes and the barriers

that we had there with the tyres.

If you happen to hit those tyres,

it's very likely that the tyres throw you up in the air

and you end up rolling.

That's what happened with me in Mexico

and that can happen here with other people.

I agree that for the moment

it's not the ideal thing that we have done.

The president has talked yesterday with mr moll.

No, no, no, forget mr moll.

And he has...

Forget...

Okay, the president of fisa...

No, forget the president.

Now speak for the question of mr senna.

About what we do today for the race.

For the race we can do anything.

I think it's better to not have those tyres there.

I happened to lose the braking point at the first chicane yesterday.

Let me finish, let me finish!

And as I drove straight, it was blocked, the road.

And I couldn't turn back.

If we move the tyres, we must place the cones.

Yes, that's fine. And that way there is a run-off area...

Yes.

No, you must restart from the same place.

Because you must respect the distance of the race.

You cannot come back.

I'm sorry, that is the regulation, it is the regulation!

It's written in the regulation, we got the letter yesterday.

Page three.

Very good penalty for you.

Jean-Marie, it's the same.

No problem, ayrton, no problem.

Whatever is the decision, it's the right decision, Jean-Marie.

You must understand.

The best decision is my decision.

I have a feeling for that.

No, because you don't know my decision.

It's the best every time, my decision.

My decision is...

Democratic vote, only the drivers.

By hand.

Who are in favour that we replace the tyres by the cones?

Your hand.

Stop.

Against?

Abstention? Everybody agree, okay?

Immediately, the work. You replace the tyres by the cones, okay?

Alain, what happened going into that chicane?

I tried to overtake senna. It was...

He blocked me during the whole race, not very correct.

I think everyone knows prost by now.

He is always complaining either about the car, or the tyres,

or the team, or the mechanics, or the fuel, or the other drivers or the circuit.

Always somebody else to blame. It's never his fault.

Yeah, no problem,

but I have nothing to lose. I can't win the championship,

but if I find him again the same way, if he is correct the same way, I push him out.

Prost was sacked from Ferrari because he criticised the car.

The only thing he could do, really, was to take a year off,

telling everybody he was on a sabbatical.

My favourite part of a grand prix was the starting grid,

and I used to do the pit walk and walk down the centre of the grid

and give an update on every team that was on the grid.

Now, I don't know if it was because

I was getting closer to the front of the grid

or closer to the start of the race,

but I swear to you, as a fact,

when I stood next to ayrton senna's car,

at certain times, the hair would stand up on my arms.

There was an energy, there was a force,

there was a spirit in that cockpit,

that you could not find around any other car on that grid.

It was absolutely electrifying.

If I finish second place, the championship will be over.

If mansell does not win,

then it's almost certain that the championship will be over, as well.

Mansell tries to overtake, but he goes straight on!

Mansell goes straight on!

The world championship is over because he can't restart!

Ayrton senna from Brazil, triple world champion!

A whole life dedicated fo this moment

by a genius of international sport.

Triple world champion, and many titles lie ahead.

And he is still only 31 years old.

Thirty-three victories, three world titles.

Breaking record after record. Celebrating as only senna does.

Ayrton senna's third world title ensures that he will be ranked among the all-time greats.

This is a very special gift to me.

I thank you from my heart.

I followed senna, walked together with him

on the streets of many countries in the world,

especially to arrive at the circuits, such as in Japan,

when you have to walk for about 1km from the hotel

fo the track, crossing an amusement park.

I used to think, "how can anyone be adored so much?"

An adoration that knew no limits.

I kissed senna's left hand, triple champion.

I want senna. I want to hug and kiss him.

I have a box full of paper cuttings and pictures.

Everything you can imagine.

He is the only good thing in Brazil.

After that third world championship, I saw another senna.

He was very satisfied, very confident. He knew the sport better than ever.

He saw it with real eyes, for the good and the bad,

and he still loved it as much as anyone in the paddock.

I think it is an incredible party

and anything goes.

Did you talk about formula one today?

Formula one is so square, today is carnival.

Have any of your girlfriends asked, "go faster, ayrton"?

Yes.

To ayrton, becoming triple world champion

was the culmination of a script that he wrote for himself

before he even entered formula one

because he knew he was capable of that and much more.

He was already the idol of Brazilian sport,

and now he became a great idol of world sport.

There is a great desire in me of improving.

Getting better. That makes me happy.

And every time that I feel I am slowing down my learning process,

my learning curve is getting flatter, or whatever,

then it doesn't make me very happy.

And that applies not only as a professional, as a racing driver, but also as a man.

Of course,

I shall have a lot more to learn as a man than a racing driver

because my career could last not many years.

My life hopefully will go still for a long time.

Maybe I'm only at the half of my life right now,

so there is a lot to go, a lot to learn, a lot to do still in life.

And happiness will come when I feel complete as a whole,

which definitely I don't feel today.

But I have plenty of time to fulfil that, too.

For the next season, the level of competition was distorted

by what was going on technically with the Williams car.

The car balanced itself. Each corner was controlled by a computer.

All the driver had to do was put his right foot down and go as fast as possible,

so in a car without that, you were at a serious disadvantage.

Mclaren are still well off the Williams-Renault pace,

with the result that three times world champion ayrton senna

has no chance of retaining his title.

When you go into this sort of

electronic war,

you can find yourself completely stuck.

The electronics do a given situation,

and no matter who you put in the car,

the electronics will do the work and not the driver.

And I don't think that is really what you want

to have a truly world championship

of drivers.

The negotiations are long,

and we still don't know who Alain prost's team mate will be.

The triple world champion

signed a two-year contract with Williams.

He will start testing the car this week.

The only thing I asked in the contract

was that I don't want to be a teammate with ayrton.

It has fo be clear.

And they had accepted that very quickly.

And said, "no, it's not our intention.”

That is the only thing I asked in the contract.

Because I wanted to be a world champion.

I did not want to lose the opportunity.

I realised that when I drove the car in September, in estoril,

and the first few laps I did, it was wet,

and the car was absolutely unbelievable.

I never drove a car like this in my whole career.

An active car, the time was, minimum, a good second quicker.

It's no secret that I've been

trying very hard to get some...

Some deal with Williams.

Situation's very complex.

It is...

It's not nice. It's not clear either.

I am very certain of one thing.

I am the one who has most to lose

if I have to stop for one year or more.

Because I am at the peak of my career,

and the career of a formula one driver is limited.

So no one has more to lose than myself if I stop,

professionally and in my personal life.

In 1993, ayrton's driving was pure genius.

For me, it was the best season.

He did accomplish some of his greatest drives.

Even though he spent most of his time looking at the back of a Williams car,

which was much faster than his.

French racing driver Alain prost

has won the formula one world drivers' championship for the 4th time...

Prost won the championship and duly retired,

thus getting out of the way.

It seems like a little goodbye from you to mclaren.

Do you think it was the last season for mclaren?

I think so. I think it will be my last season.

I have a two-year contract.

Then I have a moment where, in July,

I have a phone call from frank saying,

"il need to talk to you. I have a big pressure from Renault,

"and I need to talk to you about something."

I said, "okay, frank. I think I know what you want to talk about.

"But I am on holidays." I had a four, five day holiday in my house.

"If the Renault people, they want to talk to me,

"they come to see me."

And, in fact, he comes himself with his plan,

comes to see me and trying to explain to me that

Renault, they're thinking of adding ayrton in the team with me

the year after.

I said, "okay. That is not fair. We have a contract.

"Even thinking about that is not fair in the middle of the season.

"So let's put this away. Let's wait a little bit,

"a few races, and we'll see what happens."

And in fact, I'm going to tell you something

that nobody knows, or very few people know,

but it's good to talk about that in this.

I did not want to be a teammate with ayrton again.

I did not want to continue with this perception of the people saying,

"okay, ayrton is a poor guy with the small car,

"and Alain, when he wins, it's normal because he has the best car."

I said, "okay, you want ayrton in. I understand very well.

"But you pay me the contract for next year and I stop."

I did not want to stop.

I really did not want to stop. But to see a situation going again,

and especially in your own country,

going in this direction again,

I took my decision, myself, very quickly.

But I wanted to tell them just one month or two months later

because I wanted to be a world champion.

I did not want to lose the opportunity.

When I saw that I was going to be world champion,

I said, "okay, you pay the contract, I stop. I have enough. Okay?"

That's what I've done. I did not want to stop.

I stopped formula one only because of that.

Otherwise I wanted to continue.

Ayrton really fought to win the race in Monaco, didn't succeed,

fought to win the race in suzuka, didn't succeed,

and when he fought to join Williams,

it was the end of his career.

Sometimes, there's no point in... We always say

that you have to fight for your ideals, for what you want in life.

But sometimes this fight may not bring the results you expect.

Let's try and do it the best we can for both of us.

Of course.

Okay, we'll put behind us what happened.

For sure.

Good.

Even without you saying anything, that was my goal.

Yeah, okay.

Even without talking to you, if we didn't talk at all,

I wouldn't change... I would just do exactly as I always tried.

Ayrton, what did Ron Dennis say to you when you first got from the car?

It's never too late to change your mind.

But anyway, he said he was happy for me, and...

It's funny, but that's what he told me, too.

That's Ron!

I said, you know, we must keep the good times, the good moments,

and let's finish that way, finish with the good things.

It was senna's last race for mclaren,

prost's last race for Williams.

And although nobody knew at the time,

it was the last time either of them would be on the podium.

But from this moment, where I am on the podium,

close to him, on the same level,

he changed completely.

He was really another person.

You have before this podium and after this podium.

It is absolutely unbelievable.

It was a different person,

a different driver, in my opinion,

and a different personality.

He just behaved completely differently.

At the press conference,

it was lucky that we had all the TV waiting for us,

but he was talking and speaking and asking questions to me all the time

and talking as he has never talked before.

It was certainly right to go to mclaren after lotus.

That was absolutely the right choice.

And to pit himself against Alain prost

was a very brave and a very shrewd thing to do.

Shrewd because he knew, or he believed,

that he was better than prost,

and by measuring himself against the man

who was accepted as the yardstick of formula one at the time,

he could prove for good and all his own quality.

So he could see

that there was another team that had a better car than mclaren,

that had the best car by a mile in the early '90s.

In '92, they walked the world championship with Nigel mansell

and in '93 they walked it with prost.

So he wanted to be in the car for '94.

And that was where his instinct let him down.

Probably, given the known factors, given the parameters,

it was the right decision.

And you would go back and look at the conditions

and make it come to exactly the right decision.

Exactly that decision. It happened to be the wrong one.

But there was no way he could've known that

until he actually stepped into the Williams car for the first time in '94.

Ladies and gentlemen, Brazilian driver ayrton senna.

Ayrton is arguably the best driver available, the best driver currently racing.

The team is geared to being successful,

all our partners, investors, sponsors, expect that of us,

and that is therefore the best piece of equipment, if you like,

you could put in the machine to deliver to our requirements.

The international motor sports federation

has banned some of the controversial computer devices

which help drivers in formula one motor racing.

The ban is designed to stop the domination of the richest formula one teams,

like Williams-Renault, the world champions.

Ayrton senna is in a race against time.

He needs fo integrate into his team and adjust to the car.

He says that he is uncomfortable with little space.

This car doesn't have

the electronic components used on last year's cars.

It doesn't have traction control,

special brakes or electronic suspension.

The cars are immediately less stable

without the electronic suspension.

As a consequence, they are harder to drive,

and we'll have more cars spinning and going off the track.

More cars spinning is more excitement for the viewers,

and for us, if nothing happens to the driver.

Otherwise it's not very comfortable.

Senna in second place.

Almost 8 seconds between them now.

We're certainly not happy with the way

things are with the car right as they are at the moment.

The handling isn't particularly good.

The cars weren't supposed to have any of the electronic aids

that they'd come with the previous year.

But senna became convinced

that the benetton being driven by Michael schumacher,

who had won the first two races of the season, had retained some of those,

particularly the traction control, the thing that eliminates the wheel spin.

It didn't stack up that he was being blown away by the benetton.

He wanted us to protest,

which we didn't do.

If he carried any emotion going into that race

that was different from previous races,

it would probably be the frustration

of knowing that his principal rival was driving a car

with an illegal system on it.

And that would always incense his sense of fair play.

I would put anything,

anything that was abnormal in his behaviour

just down to that knowledge and belief.

I must say that what he said because I cannot judge myself,

but he was convinced that the benetton was cheating.

He was very upset, and he was in big trouble because of that.

And, again, not very happy with the car, with the performance of the car.

So he was obviously not very happy,

saying that he could not find the motivation.

Many times he told me, "I cannot be motivated against Michael,

"against other drivers,"

and he was really like...

If he had not lost his passion,

he had problems with the car, problem with the team, safety,

maybe some small personal problems.

Possible, but he has lost his skill.

That was very surprising.

It was very apparent to me and to several other people around ayrton.

Josef, his trainer and probably one of his closest friends,

sid Watkins, all three of us,

for different reasons, very quickly formed the opinion

that ayrton quickly regretted leaving the team.

Not specifically because of competitiveness or un-competitiveness

but more because he didn't expect to find himself in such a different culture

and one which was quite alien to the way he was.

We are here starting from zero, so basically our championship starts here.

It's not a comfortable position to be in, but that's the reality.

Now you've won here three times already. You really do need to make it four.

I would love to.

I'd never seen senna as tense as I did that weekend.

At no moment did I see him smile.

He was constantly focussed, annoyed,

saddened really.

It's the balance.

Changing balance.

The car is worse.

Is it generally more one balance than the other,

or is it changing too much?

There was a bit more understeer.

Bit of understeer on the first lap,

then on the second lap, it's just changing balance.

Oversteer and understeer?

Yeah.

During the middle of a corner...

Breaks away at the entrance.

When it is supposed to break away, it breaks away even more.

He was getting into a car that was like a kind of an unbroken Colt, if you like.

It had a lot of problems, a lot of vices

that needed to be worked on, and ironed out,

and some of them seemed to be pretty fundamental.

One thing that a driver hates above all else

is a car that changes its behaviour in the middle of a corner.

There are two things, oversteer and understeer.

Oversteer is what we used to call the four-wheel drift,

when you steer a car with the throttle

and you turn the steering wheel to balance it

in such a way as you appear to be going in the opposite direction

from the way you want to go, but actually the car drifts

or slides around the corner.

Understeer is when you have to put more steering on than you expect

to get round a corner.

And the worst thing is most cars

have the characteristic of one or the other,

but really bad cars have both.

And they change from one to the other in the blink of an eye,

in the middle of the corner, when you're least wanting that to happen.

And that's very, very disturbing for a driver because it destroys his faith

in the integrity of the car.

And that's absolutely crucial to particularly formula one

to developing,

for the driver to develop that complete trust

in the car's temperament and behaviour.

And it was very clear at the beginning of the '94 season

that the Williams absolutely didn't have that.

It had this really unpleasant characteristic of changing its balance.

And that takes a lot of sorting out.

We saw, by the end of the season, that Williams had sorted it out.

Damon hill was winning races, challenging for the title.

And for the next season and the two seasons after that,

in '96 and '97, Williams won the title again

because they had gone through that bad period.

But senna's arrival coincided with it,

and I think that was very disturbing to him,

because he'd gone there expecting something else.

He'd gone there expecting to be able to walk into a championship-winning car.

Instead of which, he found himself with a serious job

of helping the engineers

purge the car of its vices and make it competitive again.

Do you already know ayrton or shall I introduce you?

No, I already know him.

Do you know him by name or have you met him?

I know him because I follow formula one,

so I've met him before.

Why are you so nervous?

Because when you're close to someone like him,

you always get nervous.

Well, good luck to the champion and the future champion.

Fuck.

You have seen rubens?

He's all right. He's all right. He's shocked, of course, but he's all right.

Did you talk to him?

Yes, yes.

You take care, rubens.

Then I arrive in imola,

and the first thing I see on the screen,

where he has recorded, "Alain, we miss you,"

or, "we miss you, Alain."

"To my friend, Alain. We miss you." Or, "il miss you."

So I am very happy.

Honestly, it's maybe the best thing he has done to me.

Because this message is very important,

not only because that happened, unfortunately,

the day before his death, but...

When you're...

Try to put yourself in a driver's head, in a driver's position.

When you do that, why ayrton would think about myself

at this time of the day?

I always thought about that. It is unbelievable to me.

And this message is very strong, it's very strong.

And it has been something really important to me.

Ayrton was still uncomfortable in the new relationship,

and he was very uncomfortable with the car.

But he struggled, and put it on pole position.

Fuck.

I just need to get myself under control.

I'm doing things with that car that no-one...

Throwing it around a bit?

320 km/h there...

Ladies and gentlemen, the San Marino grand prix organiser

has received a report from the maggiore hospital in bologna

that the driver of car number 32, mtv simtek Ford, Roland ratzenberger,

succumbed to injuries sustained in the accident

which took place at imola circuit

during Saturday qualifying practice April 30th.

It was the first time we had to face a dead formula one driver for our generation.

The whole atmosphere was very heavy that afternoon.

Everybody was thinking about, "what are we doing here?"

Or, "what's the point?”

Ayrton got very, very upset and cried a bit.

And that's when I said to him,

"you know, ayrton, you've been three times world champion.

"You're the fastest man in the world.”

And he liked fishing, so I said, "why don't you quit

"and I'll quit and we'll just go fishing?"

He said, "sid, I can't quit.”

On Saturday, at dinner, frank Williams had doubts

if senna was going to be on the grid.

I was certain that he didn't want to race.

The last time I saw ayrton was on that Sunday.

He was very agitated.

Some friends went to speak to him.

He was very agitated, going from the Williams' motorhome to the box,

going to and fro. Before assuming

my position in the press box,

I always ask a question about strategy

to all the Brazilian drivers and to the ones I'm closer to.

Some of them answer the question, others don't,

but they always say something important

I can tell the audience during the race.

I was there waiting so I could ask

ayrton this question, but I was not able to.

I realised it was not the right time to ask the question.

On that morning when he woke up,

he asked god to talk to him.

He opened the Bible

and read a passage which said

god would give him the greatest of all gifts.

Which was god himself.

A crash!

Everyone goes around, look at that!

Lamy arrives at full speed.

And there is lehto!

Terrible crash. Lamy and lehto are very lucky.

The safety car goes out on track.

I was told that ayrton mentioned to a few people before the race

that he was carrying an Austrian flag in his overall pocket.

If he won or if he got to go up the podium,

which would also be an opportunity,

he would show the flag as a tribute to Roland ratzenberger.

The safety car's lights are off

which means the safety car is going into the pits.

And here we go, senna in front,

schumacher is second.

And Michael schumacher tries to pressure senna on the sixth lap.

Senna crashes hard!

At tamburello corner.

A very serious accident.

We got him out of the cockpit,

got his helmet off and got an airway into him.

And I saw from his neurological signs

that it was going to be a fatal head injury.

And then he sighed, and his body relaxed.

And that was the moment... I'm not religious...

That I thought his spirit had departed.

Seeing the helicopter going to the hospital,

I was still hoping.

I didn't realise.

During the live commentary, I didn't realise.

I mean, okay, he was going to be hurt

and he was going to be maybe in bad shape,

but I didn't realise he was dead.

Didn't want to realise, probably.

It was unreal.

Ayrton's accident was caused

by problems with his own car.

And certainly were

in no way connected to the competitiveness

of any of the cars around him.

Again, there are people who would claim

that his, let's say, pursuit of Michael in the benetton

was overly aggressive, because of his necessity to compensate

for the inadequacies of his car.

But again, I think that's nonsense.

It's just people trying to rewrite the script.

Simple fact is,

ayrton almost certainly suffered a car failure,

which caused the accident,

and it was one of those things. These things happen.

For sure it's a mechanical problem.

I'm very careful about what I say

because they made the steering column different.

It could be a possibility.

I have really no idea, precisely.

But for sure it's a mechanical failure.

The gift that he has had to be used.

He had an obligation to whatever force or powers gave him that gift,

and an obligation to pursue his career, pursue his passion.

And of course, those thoughts,

They were very much with me

when he lost his life,

Because even in the moments of realisation,

because at the time, no one really knew, but even in the moments of realisation

that he'd lost his life,

I found myself

strangely uncomfortable with the fact

that he wouldn't have done anything different.

That's what he wanted to do.

And if that was the outcome that was

Linked to his career,

I don't think he'd have changed it, even if he'd had the knowledge.

We find out that it was serious just at the end of the race.

So you always have some different messages.

I remember that we had some people coming into the commentary cabin,

saying he had a broken arm and that's it.

And maybe five minutes later, we had very bad news.

I even said, I remember, "okay. There's no point to say

"unless we know exactly what he has."

And then we did not know during the commentary.

Then we had big rumours, as always.

And during the trip going to 40 to the airport,

then we understood that it was really bad.

Interviewer: Did you go to see frank after the race?

No. I did... yes, yes. Sorry.

I went to see frank in the garage, just after the race.

After the commentary, that is the first thing I've done.

Frank and Patrick, they were together, but they did not know at the time.

That was just after the race. They did not know exactly what...

They were really shocked,

but, again, they did not want to make any speculation and waiting for that.

We only knew, from the track to the airport, more and more,

that it was quite serious.

You reflect on the difficult things in your life and extreme emotions,

and inevitably, things don't get better, in that regard,

with the process of thought

and the pain only increases, and for me,

my emotions then were a small fraction of the emotions that I had

when I went to Brazil for his funeral.

All those people in Brazil,

for all his fans around the world,

he will always be young.

Ayrton senna will always be fast.

He'll never be old.

He will always be

the champion

of Brazil and of the world.

The grief, even today,

may be the greatest statement I can make about what he did.

When I meet a Brazilian,

soon after that, I have to say,

"I knew ayrton senna, and I interviewed him over 100 times."

I was on a cruise in the nile river,

and there were 33 Brazilians on this cruise with my wife and I,

and I told one of them that I had interviewed ayrton senna 100 times.

Sometime during the next week,

every one of those Brazilians had to come to me.

They had to talk to someone who had talked to ayrton senna.

Even had to touch someone who had touched,

who had shaken hands with ayrton senna.

It was like I had known and talked to

and touched and shaken hands with god,

and they had to do the same through me.

These were people who were eight and 10 years old

when ayrton won his championships.

And as children, they were taught

that this was one of the greatest men that lived

with a Brazilian passport.

When you dedicate 15 years to a sport,

you're wondering, did you spend those years wisely?

And I think I did. And I know ayrton senna...

And I know that ayrton senna thought he had.

Can you imagine? I mean, I would've loved to see

ayrton with children and grandchildren out on that beach.

But can you imagine hearing a news report,

"ayrton senna dies of cancer after a long battle at the age of 50"?

I don't know. It's in some poetic,

unjust way, it was almost fitting

that he died in a race car.

Even at racing speed, tamburello is not a corner

that you would make a mistake on.

Something on the car would have to go wrong.

Maybe the power steering failed.

Maybe it was the tyre temperatures

that made the car skate straight off the road.

It will always be a mystery.

Was there a cause?

In my opinion the steering column broke

and the car became uncontrollable.

But above all, it was fatal because

the car crashed at the exact angle for the suspension shaft

to hit his helmet.

Ayrton ran out of luck.

If that piece of assembly

would have gone six inches higher or six inches lower,

he would have walked back to the paddock.

I was lucky to arrive

at the airport half-an-hour before his plane arrived.

And I saw the coffin put onto a fire engine

and taken on the road into the city from the airport

on a six- or eight-Lane highway

where all the traffic was going in one direction

following the fire engine.

Vehicles of every kind you could possible imagine.

And it was just extraordinary.

And we all followed, many of them with flags and banners

and portraits of him taped to the sides of cars and lorries

and every kind of vehicle you can imagine

on this high-speed run into the city,

past houses and windows filled with people,

apartment blocks and flags, banners

over Bridges crowded with people,

all come out to salute him.

And then people queuing when the body was lying in state,

people queuing for seven or eight hours.

Children, old people, every kind of person,

with a predominance of young people,

because Brazil is a young country, demographically.

And young people seemed to have a special relationship with him.

But old people, as well, all kinds of people.

Queuing for hours and hours and hours just to go past the body

and leaving little keepsakes by the coffin.

An amazing sight.

And another motorcade up to the cemetery for the funeral.

Again, with people hanging off every wall and tree

and every conceivable surface.

And the sky filled with helicopters, news helicopters, all kinds of things.

And then the jets from the Brazilian air force,

their equivalent to the red arrows,

drawing a kind of senna "s" in the sky with smoke.

Amazing.

I went to the funeral of Bob Marley,

which was very, very similar, like an entire nation coming out

to acknowledge someone

who represented them to the world.

He was an idol for me. He represented the best of Brazil.

I kiss you, senna.

I will never forget you.

Brazilian people need food, education, health

and a little bit of joy. And now that joy is gone.

Nothing can separate me from the love of god.

Who is or has been

the driver that you get the most satisfaction of racing against...

Past or present?

I would have to go back

to'78 and '79

and 1980, when I was go-kart driving.

I came to Europe for the first time to compete outside Brazil

as a team-mate for fullerton.

Named fullerton. He was very experienced.

I enjoyed very much driving with him

because he was fast, he was consistent.

He was, for me, a very complete driver.

And it was pure driving, pure racing.

There wasn't any politics then, right?

No money involved, either.

So, it was real racing.

I have that as a very good memory.