The young Brazilian is a capable driver but he is yet to show the genius of his uncle Ayrton Senna, who died driving a Williams
Given that his uncle Ayrton died in a Williams-Renault car, the announcement that Bruno Senna will drive for the Oxfordshire team in 2012 might have seemed an odd choice on both sides of the deal. The historical and emotional resonances, however, will take a distant second place to performance on the track as both the driver and his new employers battle to assert their Formula One credibility.
At 28, and about to embark on his third year in the sport’s top tier, the amiable Brazilian with the familiar features and the famous name remains something of an unknown quantity. A season with the hopeless rookie HRT team in 2010 proved nothing. Last year he was put into the cockpit of a much more competitive Lotus-Renault halfway through the year, replacing the sacked Nick Heidfeld, and conducted himself well. While not definitively eclipsing his team mate, Vitaly Petrov, he convinced most observers that he can be a useful grand prix driver.
The genius that distinguished his uncle has not made itself apparent, which is no surprise since most authorities would place Ayrton Senna among the half-dozen greatest drivers in the sport’s history. His much repeated remark – “If you think I’m good, you should see my nephew” – has yet to be substantiated but, of course, it was made when Bruno was a small boy, before the tragedy at Imola in 1994 led him to put his racing career on hold for 10 years.
That self-imposed exile from the sport meant that, after a promising start in kart racing, the younger Senna missed out on the apprenticeship served by all recent champions, including Michael Schumacher, Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton, Jenson Button and Sebastian Vettel. Their teenage years were filled with constant competition in national and international series, building up a store of priceless experience of how to work with engineers and how to race against each other.
Nowadays it is unthinkable for a driver to come straight into the sport as an adult, as Graham Hill did in the 1950s, and turn himself into a champion. In that sense Bruno Senna’s achievement is even more remarkable, and it also suggests that there may be more scope for him to develop than would normally be expected from a driver in his late 20s.
“Until you understand how things work, you’re going to be struggling a little bit and you’re going to be beaten,” he told me. “You need a strong head to accept that. But I had a different life from other drivers. I had an almost complete education, and that makes a difference in how I look at things and how I deal with my career.”
To date, his most significant achievement was a victory in the GP2 race at the Monaco Grand Prix meeting in 2008. This is a showpiece event closely observed by all the F1 team managers and talent scouts, and Bruno’s win was the high point of a successful season that led to him finishing runner-up in the championship to the vastly more experienced Giorgio Pantano.
That should have been the cue for an entry into the top tier and he was promised a seat alongside Button in the Honda team for 2009 – only to learn, a few months before the start of the season, of the Japanese company’s sudden decision to withdraw from the sport. When the team’s British management pulled off a rescue act, led by Ross Brawn, it was decided that the slimmed‑down operation, now functioning under Brawn’s name, would derive more benefit from the experience of Rubens Barrichello, an older Brazilian, alongside Button. That piece of bad fortune cost Senna a seat in a team that went on to capture the championship, while he, rather than mope around the fringes of Formula One, occupied himself with a season in sports cars.
Now, after two seasons of intermittent promise, he is back. The 2012 Williams team is different to the one his uncle joined 18 years ago, with a diminished reputation. Sir Frank Williams is still the figurehead, but the team is now run by his protege Adam Parr and a revamped technical team following the retirement of Patrick Head. Eyebrows were raised when it was announced that the team’s new technical director would be Mike Coughlan, who was at the centre of the scandal in 2007 when, while working for McLaren, he accepted confidential documents from the Ferrari employee Nigel Stepney, leading to a 0m fine for his employers.
Last season Williams posted their worst overall performance in three and a half decades, their drivers, Barrichello and Pastor Maldonado, collecting a mere five points between them. Those 113 grand prix wins – the last of them in 2004 – and nine constructors’ championships seemed to belong to history rather than a vibrant present. A switch from Cosworth engines back to Renault, who powered the Williams cars of Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve during the glory years, ought to help bring the new pairing of Senna and Maldonado closer to the frontrunners.
But F1 is an unforgiving world. A glittering history is simply the yardstick against which a team’s present performance is judged, and the advantage of a famous name ends the moment the engines start up.