Beco The early years, 1960–⁠1972

The street had no paving, and the neighbours stood and watched. Some time around 1964, in the Santana district of São Paulo’s north zone, a boy of about four drove his first laps in a kart his father had made for him. One of the watchers, João Alberto, a neighbour six years older, said long afterwards that it gave him goosebumps: from the very first lap of that dirt street, everyone was struck by the feel the little boy already had.

He had been born Ayrton Senna da Silva on 21 March 1960, in the early hours, at a maternity hospital in the centre of the city,¹ the second of the three children of Milton da Silva and Neyde Joanna Senna. His sister Viviane was not yet three. His brother Leonardo would follow in 1966. To all of them, from infancy, he was Beco.

It was a family of immigrants, and of money that had been earned rather than inherited. All four of Neyde’s grandparents had been born in Italy, and her surname had reached Brazil with a single n: Luigi Sena, 23 years old and travelling alone, landed from Genoa in March 1893, and was written down as Luiz Senna when he married in Espírito Santo three years later. Milton’s mother had come from Tíjola, in Andalusia, as a child of four; his father was a driver at the state forestry institute. Milton himself began by buying and selling cars around the Carandiru prison in Santana, put the proceeds into a metalworks that supplied the young Brazilian motor industry, and went on into building and, later, cattle farms.

When Ayrton was born the family was middle class. The prosperity came over the next few years, and by 1964 Milton could move them out of his father-in-law’s house and up the hill.

A house on the hill

For his first four years home was his grandfather’s. João Senna’s house stood on a corner of Avenida Santos Dumont, less than a hundred metres from the Campo de Marte airfield, and on Sundays the street was given over to the children. In 1964 the family moved up the hill to a two-storey house of their own, with a garden and a garage, on Rua Condessa Siciliano, beside the Mirante de Santana and one of the best views in the city. Ayrton lived there until he was about 12. Then came a house on the steep Rua Pedro, in Tremembé, and later a bigger one, with a pool, on Avenida Nova Cantareira. All four homes were in the north zone, and the last of them stood out towards the forested ridge of the Serra da Cantareira.

Milton, Miltão to family and friends, was a quiet man with a strong personality, as a friend of the family put it, and an enthusiast for cars and racing. He had not set out to make his son a racing driver: the kart was a toy. On television in 1986 the commentator Galvão Bueno told how Milton had once said that, before Ayrton was born, he had seen a kart and vowed to build one like it for his son, and had cried as he said it. Ayrton laughed and denied the tears; that part, he said, was a carioca’s tall story, a tale from Rio. Neyde remembered something of the kind herself: a miniature Formula One car in the Mesbla department store while they were engaged, and Milton saying it would be their son’s first present.

Viviane, the eldest, would become a psychologist and, in his adult life, the sister he confided in. Leonardo shared Ayrton’s bedroom. In 1990 Ayrton told the writer Gerald Donaldson that he had grown up with love at home, a good education and anything he wanted on the material side, and that his father was a self-made man.

He never pretended otherwise. On the same television programme in 1986 he said that his family had been able to give him everything he wanted, and that he raced because he loved it, not for the money. Years later Viviane spoke of his privileges and his wealth, and of how, in spite of them, he knew that something had to be done about the gap between rich and poor in Brazil.

Milton paid from the first kart onwards: for a real kart when the time came, then for engines and mechanics, and in the end for a year of racing in England. And the kart could be taken away.

Too fast at everything

Beco was a family name, and only the family and a few close friends were allowed to use it.² The small boy who answered to it was, by his mother’s account, a clumsy one. Neyde remembered a child with no coordination at all, always grazed, for whom three stairs were an odyssey; she bought his ice creams two at a time, because one was sure to end up on the floor. His parents took him to a specialist, a neurologist, who found nothing wrong. As his biographer Ernesto Rodrigues tells it, the doctor’s explanation was simple: the boy was too fast at everything he did. He was left-handed, and stayed so, although a teacher once offered to make him write with his right hand.

He was restless and generous at once. In a street where he had the finest toys, he lent them all and sat on the kerb to watch the others play; a neighbour remembered him as so good-natured that some of the children took advantage of him. At three he went about with a catapult round his neck, and never broke a window or aimed it at a bird. A family photograph shows him one Saturday afternoon in a makeshift cassock, baptising his sister’s doll over a basin of water set on a covered gas cylinder, with a small friend holding the candle. He was hopeless at football, and a devoted supporter of Corinthians all the same.

After pre-school at the Colégio Jardim São Paulo he went to the Colégio Santana, a strict Catholic school, for his first four years, and left only because it had no boys’ classes beyond the fourth; the Colégio Rio Branco came later. A teacher at the Colégio Santana remembered a polite pupil with ordinary marks who came back late from break, red in the face and sweating from running. At 12, by Richard Williams’s account, his overall mark was 68 per cent. He had a system, the family said: pay close attention in class, so as not to have to study at home, and keep the time for the kart.

Neyde sent him to judo to use up some of his energy, and it had the opposite effect. By his own account, in a magazine interview of 1989, he grew into a scrapper, and hit a good many boys at school just for the practice.

Behind the wheel

The kart itself was a toy, not a racer. Milton had it made at his metalworks, and it had an engine of about one horsepower.³ At weekends and on holidays he loaded children and karts on to the lorry and drove out to empty ground: a plot beside the Fernão Dias highway, building sites along the Marginal do Tietê and, above all, the new and still empty streets of Palmas do Tremembé, with Milton or the family driver, Pedro, keeping watch. João Alberto tried to race him there and could not keep up. He was about 12, he said, and Beco was six.

He learned in anything with an engine. As a toddler he steered from his father’s lap. At about seven, on the family farm, he took an old Jeep out on his own and drove it through all four gears without the clutch, going by the sound of the gearbox, while his father watched and could hardly believe it. At about eight he was brought home by the police after driving on his own: by Rodrigues’s account the police chief at Itanhaém, on the coast, stopped his father’s Chevrolet Veraneio and thought at first that nobody was at the wheel. At 10, behind his parents’ backs, the neighbours Norberto and Vera Vieira Lima let him drive their Puma sports car, with a cushion under him because he could barely reach the pedals. He was daring, Vera said, but always level-headed, and nothing ever happened. Twenty-three years later, after the 1993 Japanese Grand Prix, he met her in a street in Morumbi and put her 12-year-old son at the wheel of his Mercedes for a drive round the block: payment for the Puma.

The first kart lasted some years, until his father bought him a real one. The old one went to Leonardo, who drove it round the metalworks, looked back when the others shouted to him, slid into a wall and very nearly went under a lorry. Milton was so upset that he threw it away. It ended, Ayrton said in 1990, as scrap in some junkyard.

At eight or nine he talked his way into his first race, an unofficial one, against drivers of 18 or so.⁴ His father did everything he could to keep him out of it: he withdrew the entry and put the kart away, then gave in on condition that the boy start from the back, and lost that argument as well. The grid was drawn from slips of paper in a helmet, the youngest drawing first, and he drew number 1. Small and light, he pulled away on the straights and led for lap after lap, until, near the end, one of the bigger boys hit him from behind and put him out. Milton ran to the corner fearing the worst, and found his son already on his feet, dusting himself off and glaring at the boy who had done it.

More than 20 years later he still remembered every moment of it, and that he had almost won.

Sunday mornings

Indoors his heroes were on television. First came National Kid, a Japanese hero who saved the Earth from invaders from Venus, and then Speed Racer, whose car had been built by the hero’s father. On a Grand Prix Sunday he was up early to switch on the set. Asked in 1986 to name the best drivers, he gave the ones he had watched that way: Jackie Stewart and Emerson Fittipaldi, with a great admiration for Gilles Villeneuve’s daring and Niki Lauda’s professionalism. Four years later he told the Brazilian edition of Playboy: “Jackie Stewart, Gilles Villeneuve, Niki Lauda and, without doubt, Emerson Fittipaldi. He was the greatest.”

Emerson won his first Grand Prix in October 1970, when Ayrton was 10, and on 10 September 1972, at Monza, he became world champion. São Paulo gave him a parade through the city centre under a storm of confetti from the office windows. Ayrton was 12.

He could not race officially until he was 13, but he had long outgrown the home-made kart. At 10, Christopher Hilton wrote in 1990, he already had a more powerful one, and every weekend he drove it at a track in the Anhembi park. When the engine tuner Tchê took him on, in 1974, he asked the boy who had taught him to drive like that. He had taught himself, the boy said, at Anhembi. So Tchê remembered it, 30 years later.

On 11 February 1973 Interlagos held the first Brazilian Grand Prix to count towards the World Championship, and Emerson won it; Tom Rubython writes that Ayrton, a few weeks short of 13, was there to see it. The kart track stood just beside the circuit. In March he turned 13. On Sunday 1 July he lined up there for his first official race.