Farewell Mourning, the funeral and what followed

In Brazil the San Marino Grand Prix had started soon after 09:00 on Sunday morning, and the crash had come at about 09:17; by the time the race was restarted, the streets of São Paulo and Rio were empty. At 13:40, Brasília time, TV Globo broke into its programming, and its reporter Roberto Cabrini, on the telephone from the hospital in Bologna, told the country that Ayrton Senna da Silva had died. It was, he said later, like announcing the death of a close relative of every Brazilian.

Shortly after the announcement almost half the television sets in São Paulo were on. The afternoon’s football went ahead, and in the stadiums there were banners and chants of his name. That evening, at a Labour Day concert in Ibirapuera Park, Milton Nascimento, a friend of his, sang Canção da América twice to some 40,000 people; he introduced it, without naming him, as the song he had liked most.

His parents, Milton and Neyde, had watched the race on television at the family farm at Tatuí, in the interior of São Paulo state. Neyde drove back to the family’s flat in the city, and after the announcement about 200 people gathered outside.

That night the government announced three days of official mourning, an exception, it said, since he had not been a head of state, and on the Monday President Itamar Franco decreed it. He also admitted him, posthumously, to the Ordem Nacional do Mérito with the rank of Grand Cross, for having embodied, in his own field, the determination and courage of the Brazilian people.

On the Monday Rubens Barrichello, his nose broken and his right arm in plaster after his own accident at Imola, landed in São Paulo and spoke to reporters at the airport.

Quando você vai a um jogo de futebol, você não sabe quem vai ganhar. Mas nas manhãs de domingo que havia corrida, todo mundo sabia que o Senna venceria.

… É triste precisarmos perder o melhor piloto de todos os tempos para depois acontecer as alterações.

When you go to a football match, you don’t know who’s going to win. But on Sunday mornings when there was a race, everybody knew Senna would win.

… It’s sad that we had to lose the best driver of all time before the changes happen.

From Bologna

Italian law required an autopsy, and the family, who had hoped to bring him home on the Monday night, had to wait a day. On the Tuesday morning two pathologists of the University of Bologna, Michele Romanelli and Pierludovico Ricci, concluded that brain death had been instantaneous. At the Institute of Legal Medicine his body lay beside Roland Ratzenberger’s. Hundreds of flowers came for Senna and a single bunch for the Austrian, and Ricci, Folha de S.Paulo reported, protested to his students that everyone spoke of the one and nobody of the other.

At 17:15 on the Tuesday a Mercedes hearse carried the coffin out under a Brazilian flag, and about 2,000 people applauded and threw flowers. An Italian Air Force DC-9, sent by President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, flew it to Paris, where it was put aboard VARIG’s flight RG723 to São Paulo, an MD-11. It travelled in the cabin, not the hold: two rows of business-class seats had been taken out and the space curtained off. Four people sat with it through the night, among them Galvão Bueno, TV Globo’s commentator and his friend, and his physiotherapist, Josef Leberer. Aircraft crossing the Atlantic radioed their condolences to the captain.

Lying in state

The airliner landed at Cumbica, São Paulo’s international airport, at 06:12 on Wednesday 4 May. Military Police cadets set the coffin, under the flag, on the open back of a fire engine, and for two hours and 25 minutes it crossed about 30 km of the city. Taxi drivers at the airport had parked their cars in the shape of an S. Opposite the ground of Corinthians, the club he supported, the crowd sang of him to the tune of the club’s anthem; in the city centre confetti fell from office windows; and on the Santa Ifigênia viaduct a black flag bore a single word, Silva. Datafolha, counting from aerial photographs, put the crowd along the route at about 250,000.¹

At 09:25 the fire engine reached the Palácio 9 de Julho in Ibirapuera Park, the seat of the state’s Legislative Assembly, the Assembleia Legislativa. He lay in state in its great hall, in a sealed coffin with no window, draped in the flag, with his helmet on top; the family would not have it opened. They held a private service first, led by the Presbyterian pastor Sabatini Lalli, whose son was married to Viviane, and Neyde was taken ill and helped out.

The doors opened to the public at 10:45. The first in line was Márcio Putnoki, 13, who had queued for nearly 19 hours. By the afternoon the queue ran for 7 km, and people waited up to seven hours. Damon Hill came with mechanics from Williams and McLaren, and Leberer gave the family the small Brazilian flag Senna had carried in his cockpit. When the doors closed at 08:10 the next morning, about 110,000 people had filed past, by Datafolha’s count.

In the afternoon Leonardo read a short statement to the press. The family could not understand, he said, how there had been no protection of any kind on that corner; in Formula One people seemed to think only of money. They had known that the Brazilian people adored his brother, but not that the love was so great. A week later the FIA replied that there were no tyres at Tamburello because the leading drivers had asked for none.

That evening President Itamar Franco flew in from Brasília for about 40 minutes, and Viviane embraced him at the coffin. Emerson Fittipaldi, off an overnight flight from the United States, reached the hall at 04:05 and could not bring himself to approach the coffin for half an hour.

The funeral

Alain Prost arrived at 08:45 on Thursday 5 May and stood for a few minutes at the coffin.

At 09:35 the family said goodbye in five minutes of silence, broken only by the cameras. Neyde rested a hand on the helmet, and Viviane held it to her chest. The flag was folded and given to Leonardo. As the coffin was brought out, four Army cannon fired a 21-gun salute, a rite, Folha noted, normally reserved for presidents, and people on the roof threw rose petals. He was buried with the honours of a head of state.

Who came, and who stayed away

Frank Williams and Ron Dennis, the two men he had driven for in his last seven seasons, rode to the cemetery in the same van. Adriane Galisteu, his companion of the last year, came on both days but was kept apart from the family, and at the cemetery she walked to the gate; Xuxa Meneghel, his former girlfriend and a friend of the family, stood beside Viviane.

At Imola Bernie Ecclestone had told Leonardo that his brother was dead, and then corrected himself; accounts differ over how the mistake arose.³ Ecclestone was in São Paulo and apologised in public, but the family had let him know that he was not welcome, and he stayed away. Max Mosley, the president of the FIA, went instead to Roland Ratzenberger’s funeral in Salzburg on the Friday. About 250 people were there, Berger among them, straight from São Paulo. Everyone had gone to Senna’s, Mosley said later, and it mattered that somebody went to Ratzenberger’s.

The world’s response

In Rio the cable cars to the Sugarloaf stopped in mid-air, and rose petals were scattered from them. The branch managers of Banco Nacional, his sponsor, were told to stop work for three minutes at the hour set for the burial. In England flowers, letters and photographs were left at the gates of the Williams factory at Didcot. The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, condemned the decision to race on at Imola.

The show at Imola went on despite everything and death itself was made into a brutal spectacle … The roar of the motors and the spark of the sponsors prevailed over death, silencing man

At Monaco, a fortnight after Imola, the drivers met for four hours on the Friday and revived the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, to press for safety. On the Sunday the first two places on the grid were left empty and painted with the flags of Brazil and Austria. Before the start the drivers stood in silence around Niki Lauda, and Christian Fittipaldi, Barrichello and Heinz-Harald Frentzen held a banner with his face and two words, Adeus Ayrton: goodbye, Ayrton. In November 1994 Viviane founded the Instituto Ayrton Senna; not long before Imola, by her account, he had asked her to. Its work is told in Legacy.