JANUARY 2008-SENNA
Just scanning through the pages of CAR India to see if its Editor Adil Jal Darukhanawala has used any of my cartoons this month when I see a picture on the back page that takes me back to the British Grand Prix of 1985. The picture is of a young Ayrton Senna sitting in a black painted John Player Special Sinclair C5 in the Silverstone paddock. What was so special about that you may ask? Well I had sat in that very same car on that very day and it had been Ayrton Senna himself who had asked if I wanted to sit in the car.
At that time I was a friend of Colin Chapman’s daughter Jane and we were both standing next to Ayrton each clutching a glass of champagne from the nearby Lotus marquee when he asked if I would like a go and so I jumped in. I had to pinch myself while he knelt alongside and ran through the simple controls. After all he was a rising star then after winning his first Grand Prix only a few months earlier in Portugal and here he was telling me how to drive a pedal car! I wasn’t worried though, after all I couldn’t possibly embarass myself in a car that could barely manage 30mph, could I?
Racing drivers are infamous for the excuses they come up with but not many can have trotted out the fact that they couldn’t pedal fast enough. I only managed a hundred yards before the battery died. Ayrton had been running along behind me and told me that the car’s battery couldn’t hold a charge. I got out and we talked for a couple of minutes about the car and if it was going to be the revolution its inventor Clive Sinclair hoped it would become. Both of us thought it no more than a toy. Then he was dragged away by a Lotus minder for qualifying and I never spoke to him again.
Almost ten years later following his death, I couldn’t work. It wasn’t the time to be funny or even political. I had thought briefly of drawing a cartoon about how appalled I was at how the Imola Grand Prix had continued even though the organisers knew that Senna was dead. The show must go on, money was involved and money and the making of it is far too important to be stopped just by the death of the best driver of his generation. So for a few days I stopped work and instead I built a long brick wall in my garden. I looked at it again the morning I saw the picture of a young Ayrton Senna sitting in a pedal car and I remembered that day.
As for the pic I don’t know who’s photo it is. I thought it might be Jeff Bloxham’s but he says no. So if it’s yours and you want me to take it off please get in touch.