Senna and Brazil Sunday mornings, the flag, the Tema da Vitória

For 10 years Brazil watched him on Sunday mornings. The European races started in the Brazilian morning, and the races at Suzuka and Adelaide in the small hours. TV Globo had shown Formula One live since 1972 and every race since 1981; its commentator, Galvão Bueno, became the voice of his career; and from 1986, whenever he won, Globo played the same music.

After his death a reader wrote to Folha de S.Paulo that Senna had been a friend who cheered him on Sunday mornings and in the small hours of Suzuka and Adelaide, and who sweetened his beer at eight in the morning or two at night. Banco Nacional, his personal sponsor, placed an advertisement thanking him for the Sundays he had given them. In Greater São Paulo the Italian Grand Prix of 1993 drew 29 Ibope ratings points; the same race in 2008 drew 20.1.

The country

His 11 seasons in Formula One ran through Brazil’s return to democracy. He made his debut at Jacarepaguá on 25 March 1984, while the campaign for direct elections filled the streets; its great rally in São Paulo came three weeks later, and on 25 April its amendment failed in Congress by 22 votes. His first win, at Estoril on 21 April 1985, fell on the day Tancredo Neves, the first civilian elected to the presidency since 1964, died without taking office. The acting president, José Sarney, telephoned Senna before the podium, Folha recalled in 2020.

His sister Viviane has described what he meant in those years.

He was a hero and represented this bright side of Brazil, in a time where Brazil was dark. He had a profound role in Brazil’s psyche. … It was like we were as one. Ayrton and Brazil were as one.

The money came apart. Official inflation was 1,972.91 per cent in 1989 and 2,477.15 per cent in 1993; in April 1994, the last full month of his life, prices rose by 42.68 per cent. Brazil went through five currencies in those years before the real arrived, on 1 July 1994, two months after he died. And the football team, champions of the world in 1970, had not won the World Cup since.

The Tema da Vitória

The music was not written for him. Globo’s artistic director, Aloysio Legey, asked the composer Eduardo Souto Neto for a theme to close its broadcast of the Brazilian Grand Prix, and the band Roupa Nova recorded it in 1981. It was first played on 13 March 1983, when Nelson Piquet won at Jacarepaguá, and a year later for Alain Prost, winner of the race in which Senna made his debut. When Senna won for the first time, at Estoril, it did not play at all: Globo still kept it for the Brazilian Grand Prix.

From his win at Detroit on 22 June 1986, Globo played it for every Brazilian win, and for his it played 38 times, more than for anyone. It played at Suzuka in 1989 for a win that was taken away, and at Adelaide in 1991, where the race was stopped in the rain, on the podium. After his last win, at Adelaide in 1993, no Brazilian won a Grand Prix until Rubens Barrichello at Hockenheim in July 2000, and in between it was silent in Formula One. Its last Formula One airing was for Barrichello at Monza in 2009.

The music found its character, Souto Neto said many years later: whatever the song was worth, it needed someone to embody victory. After Senna’s death people telephoned him asking for a recording, and Som Livre released one.

The flag

In Rio in March 1986 Piquet won and Senna was 2nd, and below the podium the pair of them waved a single Brazilian flag. Three months later, at Detroit, the day after France knocked Brazil out of the World Cup, he won, and on the slowing-down lap a fan’s small flag behind the fence caught his eye. Instinct, he called it; a marshal fetched it for him, and he finished the lap with it in his hand. That was the first of his flag laps, and Brazil did not see it live. Globo was showing Argentina against England, and Galvão was in Mexico for the World Cup; the race went out afterwards as highlights, and in December, on air, Senna complained. The whole day is told in 1986.

The flag and the music became one gesture, his and Globo’s. At Detroit in 1987 a marshal handed him a flag again. Twice, by Banco Nacional’s account, he wore the bank’s cap on the podium as a homage to Brazil and was reprimanded by FISA, because the tyre maker’s cap was compulsory; the bank gave away about 1.5 million signed caps. When he won at home in 1993, by StatsF1’s account, he grabbed a Banco do Brasil flag by mistake before he found a Brazilian one.

Before the Brazilian Grand Prix of 1994 the FIA banned flags passed into the cockpit, so that nothing could alter a car’s weight; stopping on the track after the finish had been forbidden since 1993. At Interlagos he said: “Races, above all, are made for the fans.” The next day he said more.

Desde o ano passado já era proibido parar na pista depois de cruzar a linha de chegada … Mas, mesmo assim, eu fiz algumas vezes, porque a emoção era mais forte que a razão. Fui até ameaçado de desclassificação. Aqui, na teoria, não posso fazer. Mas na hora do vamos ver o coração fala mais alto e a gente acaba contrariando o regulamento. Domingo eu pretendo me controlar e usar a razão.

Since last year it has been forbidden to stop on the track after crossing the finishing line… But even so I did it a few times, because emotion was stronger than reason. I was even threatened with disqualification. Here, in theory, I can’t do it. But when it comes to the crunch the heart speaks louder and you end up breaking the rules. On Sunday I intend to control myself and use reason.

A friend told Folha that he had a small flag ready in the cockpit that weekend. At Imola five weeks later he carried an Austrian flag, to raise, it seems, in tribute to Roland Ratzenberger had he won. After his death the former president José Sarney wrote that Brazilians had raced with him and shared in the victory the little flag stood for as it crossed the line, an emotion that caught the throats of the old and made the young cry. On Folha’s children’s page Ruy Castro wrote that he had had the whole world in front of him and had not turned his back on Brazil: he liked being Brazilian.

Interlagos

Formula One came back to a rebuilt Interlagos in 1990, after nine years in Rio. He had advised on the new layout, and the downhill S after the pits is still called the S do Senna. That March, before more than 100,000 people by Globo’s count, he took pole and led until he tangled with Satoru Nakajima, and finished 3rd.

A year later he won there at his eighth attempt, with only sixth gear left at the end: the race is told in 1991. About 70,000 people, by Motor Sport’s account, held their breath through the closing laps. Brazilian television had tapped his team radio, not then open to the public, and the country heard him screaming at the flag; that evening Fantástico ran a report with an interview after the race.

Só voltei à realidade quando vi a bandeirada. Aí senti um imenso prazer em viver, em estar em Interlagos, na minha terra e vendo a minha gente feliz. Não foi a maior vitória da minha vida, mas foi a mais sacrificada.

I only came back to reality when I saw the chequered flag. Then I felt an immense pleasure in being alive, in being at Interlagos, in my own land and seeing my people happy. It wasn’t the greatest win of my life, but it was the one that cost the most.

In 1993 he agreed to race only four days beforehand, and the paying crowd was small, 32,000 in the grandstands by StatsF1’s count. When he won, after a cloudburst, a stop-go penalty and the safety car, the crowd swarmed over the circuit, he rode back aboard the safety car, and it was Juan Manuel Fangio who gave him the trophy.

On his 34th birthday, 21 March 1994, he flew his own helicopter into Interlagos, and said that all he wanted was a happy crowd there on the Sunday. Every ticket was sold. The cheap seats of Sector G were full by 11 in the morning, and the fan club, the Torcida Ayrton Senna, spread a 600 m² flag bearing the face of Senninha, the cartoon boy of his children’s comic, which 10 people had taken nearly 48 hours to make. He took pole in his first race for Williams, and spun out of 2nd place on lap 56. Many of the crowd went home.

Compatriots

He was Brazil’s third world champion. Emerson Fittipaldi won the title in 1972, when Ayrton was 12, and again in 1974; Nelson Piquet won it in 1981, 1983 and 1987.

Emerson was his hero. As a boy he watched the Grands Prix on television on Sunday mornings, and in 1990 he called Emerson the greatest of the drivers he had admired. In May 1994 Emerson flew in overnight from the United States for the lying in state, and walked with the drivers who escorted the coffin at the cemetery.

At the lying in state Emerson told reporters that George Harrison had telephoned him from Australia on the Monday night to say, in English as Folha printed it, “Ayrton for me was invencible”: invincible, Emerson added, on the track and in life.

Piquet was a rival, and no friend; Rivals follows their feud from his pass at the Hungaroring in 1986 to his verdict on Tamburello the day after Imola. He did not go to the funeral.

And there was the next one. Barrichello, from São Paulo, came into Formula One in 1993, and Senna helped him. At Aida in April 1994 he finished 3rd, his first podium, and Senna said it was a delight to watch the young drivers growing up. In Friday qualifying at Imola he crashed heavily, and Senna visited him in the medical centre. A month later, in a national Datafolha poll, a third of Brazilians named Barrichello as the driver they would follow now; 57 per cent said they had no interest in the rest of the season.

What he meant

The news came at 13:40 Brasília time on Sunday 1 May 1994; what followed in the streets is told in Farewell. In the days after, the country argued in its newspapers over what he had meant. The finance minister, Rubens Ricupero, wrote in Folha that he had been a hero in a nation of few heroes, and that the real Brazil had Ayrton Senna’s face, not that of Macunaíma, the lazy trickster of Mário de Andrade’s novel. Folha’s editorial the next day wrote that unemployment, violence and poverty made it hard to dream in Brazil, and that Senna had been the opposite of all of it, one of the few reasons for pride in a country that broke records for inequality, inflation and illiteracy. Clóvis Rossi called him a sedative for the nation’s soul, a part once played by the football team: every Formula One Sunday, Brazilians had only to sit in front of the television to ride in his car and carry the flag to a place it had never really held, first.

Others were cooler. Marcelo Coelho noticed that everyone now called him Ayrton Senna da Silva, as nobody had while he lived: dead, he was more Silva, more theirs. In weeping for him, Coelho wrote, people wept for Brazil, and his displays of unfriendliness, even arrogance, had been forgotten. Folha’s editorial page called the closing of São Paulo’s schools and state offices for the arrival of his body an absurdity, and an attempt by politicians to use his prestige.

The banner

On 20 April 1994, three days after he retired from the Pacific Grand Prix, he kicked off Brazil’s friendly against a Paris Saint-Germain side at the Parc des Princes. He had worried that French boos would upset the players, and Galvão Bueno persuaded him to go; the goalkeeper Taffarel remembers the mostly French crowd applauding him. When he died, Taffarel said later, the squad resolved to win the World Cup for him.

At the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on 17 July 1994, Brazil and Italy drew 0–⁠0, and as soon as Italy missed their last penalty, the Brazilian players opened a white cloth in the middle of the pitch. On it, in black capitals, was written Senna… aceleramos juntos, o tetra é nosso!: Senna… we accelerated together, the fourth title is ours! It was Brazil’s first World Cup since 1970.

The road that carried his coffin in from the airport became the Rodovia Ayrton Senna da Silva in December 1994, and the metro station in the district where he grew up is now Jardim São Paulo–Ayrton Senna. In 2014, asked by Datafolha, adults in São Paulo named him Brazil’s greatest sporting idol, ahead of Pelé.