BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — May 1 marked 25 years since the death of racing legend Ayrton Senna.
The weekend of the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix was a horrible one. Roland Ratzenberger was killed in an accident during qualifying and then Senna lost his life in a single-car crash during the opening laps of the following day’s race.
Back in 2004, 10 years after Senna’s accident, McLaren team boss Ron Dennis met with a small group of journalists, including yours truly, to reflect on the life and times of the Brazilian who drove for McLaren from 1998 through 1993 and won three world championships with the team.
“When he joined our team, he did not have a sense of humor,” Dennis recalled. “That doesn’t really go down well in our team. Some of you consider us gray and uninteresting and lacking passion and ‘esprit de corps.’ But it is just not like that inside the team. If I reflect back, he didn’t have a sense of humor, and it was important that he had one.
“I started the process of trying to give him an understanding of the value of laughter, and what a great way it was to break tension in a situation. Of course, it became an amusing mission for (teammate) Gerhard Berger and myself. Practical jokes ran consistently through the team and they were sometimes extreme.
“Once he (Senna) realized that this had an element of competition about it, who could do the most outrageous thing to the other, then he very entered into the spirit,” Dennis added. “Of course, the end result was that it broke the tension down and was a good adhesive in the relationship between the drivers and management. He really entered into it because that gave him the environment to open up a little bit.”
The practical jokes between Senna and Berger were wild indeed.
“In Australia, Gerhard stole Ayrton’s passport,” Dennis said, “and we surgically removed the picture from the passport and cut out of a very dubious magazine an equivalent sized photo of male genitalia and carefully put it back with cello tape so that at a glance you didn’t realize that anything had taken place.
“When Ayrton came back to Europe he immediately got on an airplane and flew to Brazil. He had to go through Argentina and that was the first time anybody looked at his passport. They were not amused and he spent 24 hours in Argentina because they would not allow him to pass through Argentina without the passport being rectified.”
Senna was a tough negotiator when it came to contract time. During one negotiation, Dennis and Senna were half-a-million dollars apart.
“It became a point of principle — who was actually going to win that last part of the negotiations,” Dennis said. “His English wasn’t perfect at that stage, so the moment came when I suggest to breaking the deadlock by tossing a coin. It was something that clearly didn’t happen in Brazil — the concept of tossing a coin to break a deadlock. So it took a while to explain it. Then, of course, it got quite serious because we realized that if we were going to do this as a way to break the deadlock we should be very clear about the rules. I literally had to draw a picture of a head and a picture of a tail and select a coin and say this is you and this is me, it can’t land on the side. It has to be flat.
“When we got the rules and had been over them several times, then it was who was going to toss the coin, were we going to catch it, was it going to fall to the ground?” Dennis explained. “We had a couple of practice runs. It was a very small office with a brown shag carpeting, so it was not a particularly good surface on which this coin was going to land. We threw the coin, and it rolled under the curtain. He lifted the curtain and it was flat, it rolled off the side of the curtain onto the parquet flooring. I won the bet.
“It wasn’t until I was driving away that I realized that it was a three-year contract and in fact $1.5 million that we had thrown a coin for,” Dennis added. “I somewhat doubt that anyone has tossed a coin for $1.5 million. That sounds like we were disrespectful for money, but it was nothing to do with that, it was simply a way to break the deadlock.”