“I’m not going to celebrate like some people that it’s 20 years on,” says Alain Prost of the anniversary of Ayrton Senna’s death at Imola on May 1 1994. “I can answer these questions about him, no problem – he was an exceptional guy – but I just don’t see it the same way as the other guys do.”
To understand why, you have to appreciate the background of their shared history: Prost and Senna fought out what was arguably Formula 1’s greatest rivalry. After becoming team-mates at McLaren in 1988, the first spark flew when Senna aggressively shoved Prost towards the pitwall at Estoril, later prompting the Frenchman to state: “Sometimes I admit I was frightened by him; he was prepared to do anything.”
Apart from several media spats that occurred before Senna was crowned world champion in 1988, the true ignition point for their bitter conflict was Imola ’89. Senna passed Prost on the approach to Tosa at the restart after Gerhard Berger’s fiery crash, breaking what Prost saw as an agreement not to pass each other there. But Senna was adamant he had the move completed before the corner, so in his mind that didn’t count.
Whether it was gamesmanship on Senna’s part or twisting logic in his own favour, Prost was furious and their enmity would run and run. Their successive title-deciding collisions at Suzuka in 1989 and ’90 tarnished F1’s reputation and moved the goalposts in terms of the lengths drivers would go to win.
Both felt hard done by: Senna that the FIA had manipulated the ’89 result in Prost’s favour – “a result of the politics we had,” he’d claim – while Prost questioned Senna’s ethics and sanity. But the antipathy that rumbled for half a dozen years was ended by Prost’s retirement following his 1993 title success with Williams.
From that point on, these sworn enemies became friends. Which is almost unbelievable, given what had gone before when Senna had often refused to refer to Prost by name, never mind shake his hand or speak to him directly.
Senna and Prost had a frosty relationship while both were active, not least due to several on-track clashes
Photo by: Ercole Colombo
“I don’t keep the bad moments or any bad souvenirs in my mind about him,” Prost says today. “I keep the last six months [of his life] in mind. That’s when I knew Ayrton much more than ever before. He was a completely different person, I understood who he was and why he was acting sometimes.”
When you considered the ferocity of their duel,…
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