Richard Williams
Ayrton Senna’s car, the one he died in, went home a few days ago. Without fuss or fanfare the magistrates in Bologna released Williams FW16B/2 from the legal sequestration in which it has been held for almost eight years and allowed it to be shipped back to the team’s headquarters in Oxfordshire.
What happens next will be a private matter, negotiated between Sir Frank Williams and the Senna family. No doubt Patrick Head, the team’s technical director, will want to take a close look at the chassis, having been denied the chance of anything more than a cursory inspection in the aftermath of the accident at Imola on May 1 1994.
His chances of finding anything interesting or enlightening are remote and probably non-existent. The car has been examined by judicially appointed technical experts, and various significant components were sent for detailed analysis at the University of Bologna and the Italian aeronautical institute. And still, of course, no one could come to a firm conclusion over the cause of Senna’s dreadful accident.
After Head and his engineers have had a look, goodness knows what will happen to it. What do you do with the car that killed the most famous driver of his generation? What will not happen, at least in the short term, is easy to predict. The car will not be put on exhibition. Nor will it be rebuilt, which is what happened to the Lotus in which Jochen Rindt died at Monza in 1970.
After languishing in a police lock-up for several years Rindt’s car was quietly sold to a Japanese collector, who spent a lot of money to put it back into its pre-accident state. The value of Senna’s car to someone of those instincts and proclivities is probably beyond calculation.
Racing fans certainly like looking at cars, particularly cars with a bit of history attached, although the watchers do not always make a pretty sight. I once went to a grand prix with the great cartoonist Ralph Steadman, who does not know much about cars but certainly has an idea of what makes people tick. When he drew a group of enthusiasts standing in adoration over a Formula One car he borrowed the gormlessly mesmerised look he had seen on the faces of the fishes that had gawped through the glass of their tank in a restaurant the previous night.
I felt like one of those fish-fans myself earlier this week, when I made a journey simply to stare at a stationary racing car. Christie’s was auctioning a 1948 single-seater Maserati in London and I wanted to see it because it was exactly the car that appeared in the range of Dinky Toy grand prix cars in the early 1950s and which probably did as much as anything to establish a lifelong and sometimes mystifying addiction to grand prix racing.
So there I was, leaning over to peer into the cockpit, admiring the lovely old dials and the huge wooden steering wheel, standing back to examine the elegant bonnet and the enamelled badge bearing the trident of Bologna, and reciting the known facts of the car’s history to myself. How it had been designed by two fine engineers named Vittorio Bellentani and Alberto Massimino, both alumni of Enzo Ferrari’s pre-war team. How it was built in Modena in 1948, first called the 4CLT and then nicknamed the “San Remo” after Juan Fangio had taken one to victory in a race along the seafront at the fashionable resort on the Gulf of Genoa.
This particular car had been raced in Europe by a team called Scuderia Milan before being shipped to Argentina, where Juan Peron had funded a team through which a bunch of talented local drivers could demonstrate their abilities.
Equipe Argentina Peron’s cars were repainted in the national racing colours of blue and yellow.
So Fangio probably sat in this very cockpit, I mused to myself the sort of thought that fills a fan with a warm glow. Much of its subsequent history is obscure, although at some point during its life in South America it suffered the indignity of having a V8 Chevrolet engine shoehorned into the slender chassis. Now a proper supercharged Maserati straight-six has been reinstalled, its cherry-red livery has been restored and the car can think of itself as a thoroughbred once more.
Anyway, it went for exactly a quarter of a million pounds after a brief flurry of telephone bidding, and good luck to whoever bought it. I took a last look at the lovely red machine and went home to polish my old Dinky, feeling about 10 years old.