Special episode with Dax Shepard: F1 and the 30th anniversary of Ayrton Senna’s death

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Welcome to a bonus episode of The Drive. I'm joined today by my friend and fellow car enthusiast, Dax Shepard.
The purpose of our podcast today is to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Ayartun Senna's death, May 1st, 1994. The idea for this podcast came up a couple of months ago when Dax and I were talking about this upcoming anniversary.
And Dax has sort of had a fascination with my obsession with Senna. Dax was not a fan of F1 at the time of Senna's death, but has more recently in the last five or six years become a fan of F1.
And so he wanted to sit down with me and better understand why it is that I have such a fascination with Senna's career and remain an enormous fan all these years after his death. So in many ways, that's what this episode really is.
It's sort of a discussion between us that focuses on a lot of things that have to do with racing, F1, some of it in the modern era, but really most of it focuses on Senna's life, his death, the circumstances of his death, and his lasting impact and legacy on the sport. So I hope you enjoy this very special episode of The Drive.
Oh, this is delightful. Yeah, man.
Great to have you. I'm in your house.
Yeah. You asked me to come do a Senna episode.
I was very forthcoming and said I'm a three out of 10 on Senna. But the reason I wanted to do it is so that I could pry and figure out what's really going on with the Senna obsession.
Yes. Yeah.
And I'm curious how much you're aware of it or not. Probably not.
It's probably at this point, sort of like the David Foster Wallace fish in water thing. Like it's the water I swim in.
Yeah. So I don't actually notice that I'm obsessed with Senna.
Do you remember what year it started? Did it start with the dock? No, no, no, no. I mean, I remember growing up when you grow up in Canada, for whatever reason, motorsports actually pretty popular in Canada.
Yeah. And I don't know why it might be because of Jill Villeneuve.
Right. Although I don't have any real recollection of Villeneuve.
So Villeneuve died in 1982. I was nine years old, but for whatever reason, like I don't even recall his death being on my radar.
But IndyCar was incredibly popular and F1 was incredibly popular. Because you always had the Montreal race.
You have Montreal for F1 and you always had most sport. You always had the IndyCar and Toronto race.
And because my dad was in the restaurant business, meaning he was buying beer by the truckload and Molson was the beer in Canada. They would give you tickets and stuff.
They would give you tickets or something like that. And did you go to races? Yes.
The 80s, right, which is sort of when I came of age. I also think that there was just, I don't know, I just think there's some boys that get really into cars.
Not to say that there aren't girls that do, but I think it's a boy thing. What did you have posters of on your wall? It was cars and boxers.
Those were the two things I had posters of. Yeah, I didn't have boxing posters, but I loved those 80s boxers.
My dad was super obsessed. You and I have even bonded over like the Tommy Hearns, the Hagler, the Sugar Ray.
That whole sweet era of boxing was huge in my house. And I loved cars from the jump.
My dad was super into cars. My mom and dad drag raced in high school.

My mom had a record at the drag track for the Powderpuff series and a 68 Chevelle.

So they're crazy car people.

My dad sold cars.

My mom worked at General Motors.

My stepdad was riding handling engineer in the Corvette group for the 84 VAT, that series. I don't know what that would have been a C3 or C4.
Yeah. Yeah.
So obsessed with cars, but never overly obsessed with racing. Would go to Belle Isle to see any car.
Cause again, cause we, my family worked in the automotive business. We too would end up with tickets and you'd go and it was just, there's no TVs anywhere.
There was no coverage. And you virtually just watch the profile of a car for one 10th of a second.
And I'm like, I don't know. I can't buy in.
Even today, I would say F1 is one of the sports that is infinitely better from a total experience in terms of understanding what's going on on television, especially given how good TV is now. That said, I still go to probably three races a year, sometimes four, because the sound is, even though nowhere near as good as it was in the era we're about to discuss.
And once the hybrid era came in in 2014, it sort of, I think forever took a little bit of what purists love about the sport away. Yeah.
So I'm so late into the F1 obsession. The first racing I started actually loving was MotoGP probably 20 years ago.
So very into MotoGP, would watch F1 occasionally. I'm like, this is the stupidest sport.
They don't ever pass. Nothing happens.
And then I'm a drive to survive convert. Now, have you watched the last couple seasons? Yes.
I've watched every- And do you think it's horrible? No, I love it. Oh my God.
I think it's- You hate it. I can't stand how bad it is.
Oh my Lord. What's your issue? It's boring as hell.
It's like a bunch of nonsense you don't care about. What did the first seasons have that the latter ones don't have? I mean, I think that the first three seasons still kind of focused on the racing.
And I feel like they're trying a little too hard now to make it about the off track drama. The reality showness of it.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I think I think some people, there are clearly some people who like Max, I love Max's approach to it, which is, I don't give a shit.
Yeah. I'm not participating.
Get out of my way. But then there's too many people who are trying a little too hard.
I won't name names. Sure.
Sure. You were just close to one of them recently.
So the first season, initially, I was like, hold on a second. Mercedes budget is four or five hundred million dollars a year.
That's the first thing that really got me where I was like, this is enormous on a scale that I didn't even know was possible relative to NASCAR, Indy or MotoGP, anything. It's 20x the budget of any other racing.
So I was like, oh, that's really fascinating. then finding out about the aerodynamicists and how relevant they are in it and just how high

tech it is that all

that interests me. I love the technical aspect of that sport enormously.
What I think this show

still does great is it really shows you the drama that's existing between 14th and eighth place,

which when I'm watching normal season,

I'm largely missing that.

It's like I'm vaguely aware that Pierre and Okon

hate each other, but not in the way

that like a whole season can give me or a whole episode.

And so I think the show's really good

at letting you know how much drama

still happening below 8th place,

how important it is that these teams finish in the points

or to get one point.

Thank you. good at letting you know how much drama still happening below eighth place, how important it is that these teams finish in the points or to get one point.
So it's almost like I rewatched the season now caring about all the folks that aren't on the podium. Yeah.
I don't know what changed for me. I feel like 2021, 2020 and 2021, where I think it's best seasons, actually.
With Max and Lewis.

The Max Lewis season of 21 was exceptional.

Yeah, perfect time for me to join the sport.

The last two episodes of that season were two of the finest.

The season before, I think, honestly, Man on Fire, which was the Grosjean episode, which I think was 2020.

Yeah.

I think one of the best single episodes ever.

Obviously, for those of us that were watching that live, it was unbelievable. It's something we'll talk about today, which is when you're watching a sport like F1 or MotoGP or anything for that matter, there is a real chance a person could die.
And it's really frightening when you see some of these accidents. Yeah.
But for the most part, I don't know about you, but for the most part, that's not even on the table for me. And then occasionally one of these things happen and I go, oh, that's right.
They are going 205 miles an hour. It doesn't really matter how you build this thing.
There is some likelihood that something. Well, maybe that's why because I've been a fan for so long, I still have the visceral reaction to big shunts because there was a day when those were almost all fatal.
Yes. Yeah.
I don't know what the chart is from the 70s till now, but obviously it's just been in a nose. Yeah.
So I can tell you basically in the mid 1960s until the early 1980s. So about a 16 year period of time, F1 was a killing field.
And that meant that on average, probably two to four drivers died a year. I want you to think about that in the context of what you watch today.
You and I have been talking all week about the many things that have changed so dramatically that it's almost impossible to reconcile that it used to be that way. We were both watching Turning Point.
Yeah. A great doc you recommended.
And I'm watching it. And again, I have awareness of this.
I remember learning this. But to learn that in one night of bombing of Tokyo, 87,000 people died.
That's more than all of Vietnam by a factor of 30,000 one night. And you're like, oh, we don't have the appetite for any of that stuff anymore.
I don't think if the sport, two people were dying, that would be one in 12 races we would see someone die. I just don't think it would exist now.
Right. And again, I wasn't watching the sport during that period of time, but not long after I was going back and watching video of it.
Yeah. So when do you start watching it religiously? In the eighties.
In the late eighties. You're a kid.
Yeah. Anyone, your friends watching it with you or you're all alone on this? No, not really.
It's not my obsession. My obsession is much more boxing.
Did your dad watch it with you? No. And then by the way, it was very hard to watch live because again, another thing you take for granted today, cable, you can watch things whenever you want.
Like back then it was like always odd, bizarre hours and stuff like that. Like you would have to wake up at 2am.
Yeah. You catch it on delay.
By the way, when I got to med school and became friends with a guy named Paul Conti, haven't you had Paul on your show? I know that name. Yeah.
I feel like you might have gotten to that point. 800 people, I'm like starting to forget some names.
It's embarrassing. Anyway, Paul, who's no stranger to this show, when we met first day of med school, immediately connected over both our shared obsession for F1 and for Senna, that was like talking to a guy who was going through kind of a similar experience of like, you know, watching things at odd hours and things of that nature.
But just as the 80s was kind of a golden period for boxing with the fact that you had Hearns, Hagler, Duran, Leonard, Wilford Benitez, like all of these guys that each of them are hall of famers. And yet they were all fighting each other all the time in an era where it meant something to be the middleweight champion of the world or the welterweight champion of the world.
Julio Cesar Chavez. He was a little bit lighter.
Yeah. Yeah.
Lightweight. But yeah, a guy who fought 90 fights or something.
Yeah. I mean, he was undefeated into his 90th fight.
But F1 was like that as well. So when you think about the 80s, you had Niki Lauda at the end of his career still winning a championship in the mid 80s.
And then the arrival of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell, of course, Nelson Piquet, and Senna. And so you really have this golden era of F1, I think, in the late 80s and early 90s, where it is insane depth of talent.
Also, for what it's worth, I just think the cars were aesthetically, they're most beautiful during that period of time. It's not that I don't think the cars today are masterpieces.
They're so tiny. If you're me and you came into the sport post hybrid area and now you go, like I walked through McLaren through the boulevard and I'm like, oh, they're go-karts.
They were V10 go-karts. They were just so small.
Yeah. They were 500 kilo cars back then, but still could with boost in qualifying could make over a thousand horsepower at a thousand pounds.
Yeah. Wow.
Which is actually a really funny story that kind of brings us to Senna, which is there are many things that made Senna special, but his qualifying is the most remarkable thing. If you look at his record, so by today's standards, Senna wasn't around very long.
Most of the drivers on the F1 grid today have already had more races than Senna did when he died. He died in his 161st race.
So Max is only 26 years old. He's long past that number of races, right? Lewis is at more than 2x that number of races.
And yet Senna's qualifying percentage, how many times was he on pole position in there? Nobody's within a country mile. He's 65 poles.
Yeah, in 161 races. That kind of framed it for me because, again, I only know that he won three titles.
Technically four. I'm going to explain to you why.
He had one stolen from him. Yeah, with the not turning around in the turnoff area.
Yeah, sure. Four.
But obviously Schumacher's record,wis's record some of these records it begs the question why is this the guy everyone's so obsessed with because he what had 10 years in yeah yeah 10 years but when i saw that 65 polls stat i was like okay that's very telling that says a lot but before you explain that to me to know, it would appear that, and this is another thing I've come to love about F1, is P1 in qualifying to P20 is often three-tenths of a second? Usually a little bit more. Let's just say, and within the top five, the first three are often in the hundreds of seconds.
That's right. And then maybe six is a tenth.
Yeah, yeah. The margin is so unfathomable.
People really, just take a stopwatch if you've ever taken a stopwatch and just try to double click it as fast as you can. And you'll start realizing how tiny a hundredths of a second, that you can't even get a hundredths of a second.
I used to play this game as a kid. It was one of my favorite games.
Me too, on the Casio watch. Absolutely.
Sit in class. What was your minimum? I think my minimum was like 11 or 14 one hundredths I think I could get.
I can't even remember. I just remember all of us in a circle like doing it over and over again.
Something like 0.08 and us all freaking out. But the notion that you have 10 different teams with 10 different approaches, 20 different drivers.
I mean, the amount of variables on the table are incalculable. Yet you slam it all together and somehow it's all within a second or it's all within three tenths of a second or hundredths of a second.
That part is, I think, almost incomprehensible. I think in the 80s, the delta was much bigger, yeah? Not necessarily.
And by the way, the Delta between teammates is the Delta that matters. That's where you're seeing the Delta between drivers.
Because let's use my favorite example, which is arguably considered one of the most epic legendary stories of Senna, which is qualifying for the 1988 Monaco race. So at this point, Senna is the rookie on the team.
This is in the MP44, the car that to this day is regarded as the greatest car ever in F1. This is what you have a replica on.
This is this car here. Yes.
I'm shocked you don't have that tattoo, but we'll talk about that later. At some point.
We should discuss that. Imagine that down my back.
Yes. It'd be glorious.
It would be so sweet. Your wife would be so excited.

So that car won 15 of 16 races.

Between he and Prost.

Yep.

And the race that it didn't win, Senna got taken out by a backmarker.

So it's like they would have won 16 of 16 races.

So the closest we've seen to that is last year's Red Bull, which won all but one race.

But the reason most people would still argue that that was the technically superior car

was the race that Red Bull did not win last year, which was Singapore.

They didn't lose because of some fluke.

The car legitimately couldn't perform in Singapore because of the bumps in the road and the ride

height.

So Sen is the rookie on the team.

Prost is the two-time world champion, the reigning world champion. They're at Monaco, which is generally regarded as the most difficult circuit.
The margin for error is non-existent. Another feather in his cap, right? He's got the most wins at Monaco.
He has won Monaco six times, officially seven times if you include what happened in 1984, which we can talk about. Yeah.
This is where he puts it into the wall of the 56. No, that's an 88.
In 1984, what happened was he started at the back of the field. He was in a Tolman, a piece of garbage car.
In rain. But it was raining like cats and dogs.
And of course, the other thing that makes Senna very special, we keep adding to why is he special? No one could ever drive like he could in the rain. That's the real marker.
Like a three standard deviation. Yeah.
So you've got a field of world champions in superior cars in front of him as a rookie, not just a team rookie, his F1 rookie year, 1984. He's in the Tolman.
He's driving a garbage truck back there, but it starts raining cats and dogs. And he is by two thirds of the way through the race, he is closing in on Alain Prost.
And in the final lap of what would become the final lap, he passes him. But Raid's stewards decide to halt the race at the preceding lap.
And he is still awarded second place, which is unfathomable as his first podium. The first major fucking he receives from the FIA, right? Exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This would become would become a pattern well then we should add to monaco is the hardest track to pass on in the whole calendar today it's impossible to pass on back in the day you could pass because the cars were smaller i would not advocate for getting rid of monaco but one could make a case that the cars have outgrown the circuit right but monaco to this this day is still one of the most exciting qualifying.
Oh, by far. Yeah, because the stakes are so high.
So in 1988, Senna not only qualifies on pole, something he would do repeatedly, he does so by a margin that is deemed impossible to comprehend. Now, you have to remember who his teammate is.
His teammate is arguably one of the greatest drivers of all time, Alain Prost, driving the same car and he out qualifies him. Do you know how much? No.
1.47 seconds. Wow.
1.47 seconds is a day and a half. And consistently through the three qualies? Back then it quali ran a little bit differently.
Okay. 1.4.
And so Senna was already on pole when he decided he wanted to go out and do one more lap. It's the stuff of F1 lore because the lap was not captured on camera.
So this was back when cameras were on cars, kind of in its infancy. But because back then you didn't have endless amounts of streaming video, like the TV station had to decide who were we going to focus on this lap.
And because Senna was already on pole, they didn't record the lap. Sure, sure.
So all you have is the timesheet. He went this fast and he was out of this world.
So then the next day in the race, he is leading by so much that the team is telling him to slow down. Yeah, they're begging him.
They're begging him to slow down. There might have been eight laps to go and he's ahead by 30 seconds.
Yeah, I just recently rewatched the thing and at the point he crashed, he was 56 seconds ahead of Prost. Yeah, he could have pushed the car to the finish line and still won.
And he lost concentration for a nanosecond, a very rare event in his life and crashed. And then devastated.
So angry. She mentioned the self-loathing.
He's so angry that he literally got out of the car, threw his stuff and went to his apartment. His apartment.
Yeah. For three hours.
Yeah. And nobody could find him.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Joe Ramirez, I, eventually went and found him and his housekeeper had to let him in because she was instructed to tell everyone that he was not around.
Yeah. That's just an insane example.
And the other thing about Senna during qualifying is the reason he was so good at qualifying, especially in that era, is the cars in that era ran a much higher horsepower during qualifying. Okay.
Right. They dialed them way up.
They dialed them way up in a way that they don't do it today. Today, you're not playing with that.
Today, you're playing with tires, fuel load, and battery pack. Basically, today on a quality setup, you can discharge battery much more, and you basically aim to finish on fumes and no battery life.
Back then, it was a totally different different horsepower and you couldn't race at that horsepower because you didn't have the reliability. And truthfully, a lot of drivers, including Prost, including Lauda, were like, it's too freaking dangerous, man.
That's way too much. Yeah.
At some point, right, they're in the 12 and 1400 horsepower. Certainly 1200.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. These are naturally aspirated V10s, V12s.
Yeah. The compression must've been ear splitting.
I think at some point these things were redlining up to 18,000 RPM. If you can believe that even the physics of that is possible in a car.
Out of a V8 or a V10? Probably the V10s were probably the most screaming. I mean, that's more than a motorcycle motor revs too.
I don't know. The MotoGP up to 18 000 didn't they well if you recall there wasn't really consensus when the person said that uh yeah one guy said 18 another guy said 16 i but i don't know i don't know i think it's more around 15 but whatever either way it's just incredible it's terrifying senate has so there's the record there's the dying early that's very james dean there's a lot of elements that bolster people's fascination with them for me i like him because he seemed like an outsider the brazilianness of it all makes me like him more but also and i don't know how comfortable you're with this word.
He's very sexy. He's a very Mick Jagger kind of rock star, sexy, aloof, always focused and not really a people pleaser.
I think there's an added element why we love Senna. These intangibles that aren't about the record.
And I wonder what personality wise you think of him.

Well, it's really funny because I would bet that you have examples where you will relate to what

I'm about to say, which is I think growing up and through his life and death, it was mostly about

son of the racer. It's after his death, I've learned much more about him because remember,

he died in 1994. I was in college when he died.
When he died, I didn't have an internet to read more about. So much of what I know about him today is based on things I can read that I couldn't read then.
Also, I've become close to people who knew him well. And so I can now learn about him as a person.
I know things about him that aren't publicly known. I've met his family.
I know his niece quite well. I've met his brother, who is obviously one of the few people that was there when he died in Italy that day.
Joseph Leberer, who was his trainer, who was one of the closest people to him. So in many ways, my appreciation for him today is tenfold what it was when I just evaluated him through that lens.
The other thing that you alluded to is I didn't really appreciate, as I don't think many people did at the time of his life, what he meant to Brazilians. Oh yeah.
It's outrageous. And at a time where Brazil was struggling beyond belief.
Yeah. So just to give you an example of that, as you know, my youngest son is named after him.
Anytime we encounter a person from Brazil who discovers that fact, it's like everything changes. Come into my house for food.
Yeah. Yeah.
And for someone in Brazil, if you're over the age of 35 today, you take JFK 9-11 squared. The challenger.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's what May 1st, 1994 was. Because the entire country, every Sunday would stop to watch this.
It's not like the NFL here where a lot of people watch it. No, no, no, no, no.
This was the religion. Yes.
The country stops. Yeah.
Everybody watches. There was a Brazilian God on planet earth.
That's right. Yeah.
Yeah. In fact, and because of the religious culture of Brazil, right, it's a Catholic country, obviously.
There's so much religious symbolism. And I think he is the closest thing to a deity for the people there.
And by the way, you know, a close second is Japan. Oh, really? Yeah.
Why do you suppose? Because of the relationship with Honda. So all three of his titles were in Honda powered cars and the engineers at Honda loved him.
He was also other, as I imagine the Japanese felt entering F1. There weren't a lot of brazilians well he's one of three maybe brazilian f1 well it's really interesting so nelson pk who is also brazilian also a three-time champion one of my favorite things to do whenever i meet someone from brazil who's old enough is to say we obviously got talking about senna blah blah blah what do you think of pk and they're all like a piece of shit.
Oh, really? Oh, can't stand him. Because he deserted the place? Yeah.
He was like not proud of what he was. He was also very unkind to Senna.
He referred to him as the homosexual from Sao Paulo. Although he didn't use that word.
You can imagine what he said. Sure, sure, sure.
Back when you could let those rip. No problem.
Still have all your sponsors. PK was very jealous of Senna because of how much Senna was loved.
But Senna was loved because of how much he loved back. He was so proud of Brazil, right? So every time he wins a race, Brazilian flag is out.
And he loved Brazil. And one thing people didn't know about him until after he died was how much money he was pouring into education in Brazil.
Yeah, So how did their salaries back then compare to current salaries? When you adjust for inflation, probably reasonable if you were at the very, very top. So Senna was making a million dollars a race.
A race? Yeah. And doing 16 races a year.
That's just base salary. That's not that far off from what, I mean, Max is the highest paid guy in F1 today.
I believe he's making 50 million euros. Uh-huh.
And keeping 50 million euros living in Monaco. Yeah.
Anytime you hear their salaries, you really got to double it when you're trying to comp it to like baseball players or football players. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Senate, of course, also had many sponsors, right? So he was loaded. Yes.
The family was already loaded. He came from a wealthy family.
He was not without, but he probably made somewhere on the order of a quarter of a billion dollars in his lifetime. Oh, wow.
In the eighties and nins. Yeah.
Wow. That's impressive.
I have to imagine there's some archetype about him that you like beyond the racing. And I'm wondering, is it the outsider-ness? Well, I think it's the fact that he was, look, if we're going to get really deep and philosophical, I think it's that he's flawed.
He's not a perfect person and nor did he try to represent himself as that, right? Like he could be overly emotional. And I think even though it's very sad, I'm sure we will talk about his death in detail.
I don't believe the most commonly held view of his death, which was that it resulted from the steering column failure. I actually don't think that's what happened.
Oh, really? No. You have a different take.
I do have a different take. Although I used to for many years, for probably 26 years, I believed that he died because the steering column failed.
I thought I had heard that, like, is it an aileron? What is the piece that was on the suspension that that had come off? Oh, I'm sorry. That's what actually killed him.
That's not in dispute. Okay.
Okay. Yes, yes, yes.
Why did he crash? Why did he crash? Yes. Okay.
Yes. And people have said, I don't even know this, that the steering column failed.
Yes. So the conventional view, the widely held view of Senna's death.
So maybe just to tell people how the circumstances of the death. So he was

in a race called Imola, which took place on a horrible, horrible weekend, April 29th, April 30th, and May 1st, 1994. Going back to something we talked about earlier, there had not been a death in F1 since Gilles Villeneuve died in 1982.
Now, 12 years later, on that Friday, during the first practice, another Brazilian driver, Rubens Barrichello, has a brutal crash. He's just laying in the fucking straightaway.
What's amazing is he was only concussed and split open, but actually survived. Senna was shaken up.
That was in practice. It was an FP1.
Senna was, this was like a kid that he was mentoring. Okay.
And he saw him in the hospital and was very shaken up. The next day, a rookie, Roland Ratzpenberger, who Senna also had taken under his wing and had actually introduced that weekend to Joseph Leberer, his physio,

who was also Austrian. Roland was Austrian and Joseph was Austrian.
So Senna had introduced

them that weekend. Roland was killed in practice that weekend.
This was the first death in F1 in

12 years. Wow.
I'm going to tell you a weird sidebar to this. So do you know Craig T.
Nelson?

Yeah. He was racing that weekend there.
He was at that race. He raced prototypes for years.
Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, he was so, so he paved Willow Springs at one point when he was on coach.
He has a lap record and a prototype there. It was his life.
He spent every penny from coach on racing and he was there that weekend, weirdly. Wow.
Yeah. Racing.
And he said it was quite an eerie weekend as well. Yeah.
There are so many things about that weekend that are really upsetting. One of them is that the race should have been canceled after Roland's death.
So if a driver dies on the track in Italy, the law is the race is done. Oh, really? Yes.
Roland died on the track, but the organizers of the race wanted the race to go on. So they airlifted him out of there to pronounce him dead at a hospital.
Oh, wow. But they were doing cardiac massage on him at the track.
He was absolutely dead. Senna, against the instructions of the marshals, got into a car, drove to where he died, and was reprimanded terribly for doing so.
Joseph told me that night he'd never seen Senna more angry in the entire time he knew him than that evening because of how pissed he was at how the marshals had been so angry at him for going to see Roland at the site of the accident. Which is a pattern of his, right? He also had gone out on P1 and kind of stood where that had happened.
And that's kind of a thing he did, right? This is the thing about Senna that's also kind of an interesting paradox, right? Like on the one hand, he was the most competitive and he did things at times, and we can talk about things, where he's literally put other drivers and his own lives in danger out of pure competitive drive and yet he would be the first person to stop and rescue you and help you if you were hurt. Joseph was telling me he was so angry he said how dare they tell me I can't go onto track to see a driver who is injured and ultimately dead when they don't care that we're driving around here.
Like, in other words, like, don't tell me who's taking the risk. I take the risk.
You don't take the risk. You can grant me this.
Yeah. No problem.
And so Ratzenberger dies. That should have been the end of Imola.
Senna should still be alive. He shouldn't have died the next day because the race should have been canceled.
Is it also relevant? This is race number two of the season? Three of the season. Three, and he hates his car.
Hates the car. He had gone to Williams thinking he was going to get the electronically adjusted suspension.
That gets taken away. Right.
So Senna in 1988 arrives at McLaren. He's driving for what is the best team.
By the way, this is another interesting metric. I'll come back to this point.
But when people say, well, you got to just look at the stats. Lewis has the most wins and Schumacher and Lewis have the most titles.
I'm like, put all that stuff aside. There are other metrics, even if you just look at the length of life.
Senna was only in the best car four out of the 10 years he raced. So you always have to look at how many years was a driver in the best car.
All of these things factor into it. So Senna's in the best car in 88, 89, 90, 91.
He wins three of the titles in those four years, although he should have had four out of the four. And then the tide changes.
This is always the case in F1. There's a regulation change and the power shift happens.
And at this point, the power shifts from McLaren to Williams. So in 92 and 93, Williams was so technically superior to not just McLaren, but everyone else on the field.
And Senna wanted to go. Frank Williams, the owner of the Williams team, had always loved Senna, always loved him.
He was one of the first people to see Senna race coming out of Formula 4, all of these other lower classes, but there just wasn't a seat on the team at the time. And he got Prost.
Specifically, I won't race. Right.
So Mansell races for Williams in 92, wins the title, immediately retires. Prost comes out of retirement, takes the seat for 93.
Williams says, great, we'll bring out Senna. And Prost says, no way.
My contract has a clause that says, I'll never race with Senna as a teammate again. So Senna spends one more year at McLaren.
Funny story there, by the way, is he was having a contract holdup with McLaren and to sort of flex his muscles a little bit, He came to the U.S., did a day of testing in IndyCar. Oh, really? And actually was driving faster by the end of his first day of testing than any of the IndyCar drivers were driving.
Wow. Because that transference hasn't gone as well in the last 20 years when F1 drivers have gone to Indy.
It's hard. Yeah.
I mean, IndyCar is really hard. Only Alonso has done well.
But he didn't do as well as you would have expected, given that Alonso basically won the 24 Hours of Le Mans, his first crack out there. Yeah, yeah.
So Prost retires at the end of 93. We should come back to the last race of 93 at Adelaide with Senna and Prost on the podium together.
And then finally, Senna gets his wish, which is he finally gets to go to Williams. He finally gets to go to the team that has won the last two titles and basically will be the most dominant car for the next four years, although nobody knows it at the time.
But perhaps unbeknownst to Senna, because the F1 that year had taken a pretty hard rule change and removed what's called active suspension, The car for the beginning of the 94 season was an undrivable technical debacle. Yeah, because they're scrambling to reinvent their entire suspension at that point, right? Right.
Because they just got to ditch everything. Right.
So I've become really good friends with Damon Hill, who was his teammate that year. And I actually had Damon on the podcast probably five years ago, and he's just such an incredible human being.
I think Damon's one of the most underrated world champions in F1. Damon won the world championship in 1995.
He's the son of Graham Hill, a two-time world champion, making him one of only two father-son F1 champions. And I've talked at length with Damon about what that car was like at the beginning of the 94 season.
Damon drove it in 93. So he knew what that car was like when it was the best car ever.
And then he knew what it was like later. And Damon basically said, look, the car was goddamn undriveable.
It was so scary. It was like being on a knife's edge every minute of every lap of every drive.
He said he just pulled way back. So again, maybe for people watching us who don't understand what it's like to drive a race car, the goal of driving a race car is to be at the limit of the car.
You're always at the limit of what the car can do. And Damon was like, you couldn't drive that car near the limit.
It was so unpredictable. Yeah.
If you got within 10 yards of the limit, the car would flip you into another planet.

But Senna still managed to drive it close to the limit.

So in the first race of that year, which was in Brazil, Senna gets on pole.

It's hard to imagine how he could put that car on pole, but it was like wrestling that

car into pole position.

He's in pole.

He's leading that race. And then with a few laps to go, he actually spins out on a corner.
Just couldn't control this thing. So next race, he again gets it on pole.
It's not clear how he could put that car on pole again. And by the way, he's got Michael Schumacher, a young Michael Schumacher, just biting at his heels.
And he's in the McLaren? Oh, he's in the Benetton. Oh, right.
Yeah. And that was kind of the best car that year? Yeah.
That was the best car that year. A lot of controversy about whether that car was cheating that year.
Right. He had believed it had traction control, right? That's right.
And it probably did. Yeah.
It's weird that they would be able to hide that. Yeah.
Oh yeah. I know.
Yeah. In that race, he's on pole, but he gets hit from behind first corner.
He's out of that race. So now we go into Imola.
Remember, this is a 16 race season. Two races are down and he has zero points.
Schumacher has won both of those races. He's got 20 points.
Yeah. So he's feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders.
He has to be perfect for the rest of the season. And certainly he has to win this race in Imola.
Non-negotiable. Now, up until that point in time, Senna already has the record for most wins at Imola.
This is a circuit he knows well. It's a very hard circuit.
I actually just started driving it in the simulator a few months ago, getting ready for my trip out there. And it's tough.
I remember, was it two years ago, three, it was just an entire yard sale lap one, then a complete restart, then another yard sale. That one has spectacular crashes.
Everything goes wrong, right? So you start out with what we talked about on Friday, you've got Barrichello nearly dies. On Saturday, Ratzenberger dies.
Senna is in no mood to drive on Sunday. So that Saturday night is Joseph's birthday, Joseph Leber.
His birthday is April 30th. These guys always celebrate Joseph's birthday.
And on that night, they're out at a pizza place. Obviously, it's just the most somber mood and they're not celebrating anything.
And Senna is incredibly angry about the scolding he took for going to see Ratzenberger. And he is very unhappy with the car, doesn't feel that the car is safe.
That day he had spoken with Nicky Lauda and Nicky had encouraged him as now the most senior driver in F1, now that Prost had retired, that he needed to bring back the Drivers Association for safety. Okay.
So that didn't exist at that point. It had sort of fallen by the wayside.
This is something that Jackie Stewart had led in the early 1970s when the drivers sort of said enough is enough. Like we can't just be dying at this rate.
We have to take safety. We have to make it a high priority.
And so Senna agreed that the next race at Monaco, they would reinitiate the driver's safety sort of group. And Senna said to Joseph that night that it was like kind of the first time ever he didn't want to race, didn't want to really race the next day.
And Joseph said to him, he goes, look, no one will fault you if you don't right now. And Senna said, there's no way I can't race.
The people of Brazil need this and they're hurting way more than I am. So you asked me like, why am I obsessed with this guy? It's kind of like the death wish in a way, but also realizing like it's bigger than him.
He really felt like, I don't want to do this. I don't feel safe doing this, but there's a hundred million people who need me to do this and they're in worse shape than I am.
did you read the fountainhead ever because this would be a good parallel the people

i read the fountainhead loved it The lead character is roughly based on the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, but he is a man who always knew what he wanted, always had a vision, never compromised, pissed a lot of people off Howard Rourke, but ultimately was always right. And I think that

archetype, when you're a young man, is incredibly appealing. It was to me.
Like, yeah, maybe I just, I know what's right. I don't have to listen to anyone else and then I'll be proving I'm right at the end of it.
And I just wonder how much of his high level of disagreeability, wouldn't you think oh yeah Prost was great at playing the political game the head of the fia was also french clearly was helping him the whole with every dispute between he and senna and senna was just so disagreeable and outspoken and didn't give a shit if anyone liked him is that part of his personality yes but also there was a, it's I'm going to win or it doesn't matter. So Prost's nickname was the professor.
The reason for that was among other things, he was very smart and very strategic and very calculating. And if he was in a race and he was in third place, he would think to himself, logically, I'm playing the long game here, which is I'm better off coming in third and getting my six or seven or eight points here if I don't think I can win.
Senna only wanted to win. He would crash out of a race to take a shot at winning.
He just didn't care for second, third, or fourth. Well, the Monaco incident that we already talked about where he was 60 seconds out ahead and puts it into a wall, in his own description of that race, which is kind of appealing, is he was on a perfect drive.
Spiritually, he was on a perfect drive. Right.
He wasn't competing against anybody else. He was competing against what perfection could be.
Yeah, he was on a perfect right he wasn't competing against anybody else he was competing against what perfection could yeah he was getting very close to having race the perfect race and could feel it and could not stop pushing because it was within his touch or grasp to see that someone is in pursuit of something that's even higher than first place is appealing as a character type but there's some punk rockness to him that i also think is in the stew for you i'm guessing yeah look i you're just a record junkie yeah yeah i think if you're a record junkie you would just have to have lewis as your favorite driver if you're just looking at numbers or Schumacher. Yeah.
So here's an analogy. I don't know how much you cared for football when you were growing up, but Barry Sanders doesn't have the records.
He's not the leading rusher. He doesn't have the most yards.
He doesn't have the most touchdowns. He has no Super Bowls.
By any statistic, Barry Sanders is not actually the best. Right.
But my son, my son, who's obsessed with football and we read football books every night, I've already explained to him 10 ways to Sunday, Barry Sanders was the greatest running back of all time. Yes.
Because there are intangible factors. And he would bench himself as well, just shy of a record.
Yeah. Didn't care about the records actually.
Yes, he truly didn't. Didn't want to be in the public eye.
Yeah. Yeah.
He's impressive. He's the greatest running back of all time.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Even though statistically there were many that were superior.
And I think with Senna, there's a characteristic of his driving. And I do think most drivers would agree he's the greatest of all time.
I would bet that if you polled current and past F1 drivers. You think Max would say so? You know, it's interesting.
I don't know. Because I feel like Max would say Schumacher.
Well, I know Seb would say Schumacher. I'm close with Seb.
And Schumacher, we must acknowledge, is on another planet. Yeah, look, I think you could make a case that the three greatest of all time would be Senna, Schumacher, and maybe Max.
Yeah. We might be getting to the point where we can start to say Max is in the top three.
I'm new to it. So of course I'm intoxicated with the flavor of the day, but Max to me, even when I watch different documentaries or learn the history of other drivers, he definitely is ahead of everyone else.
And there's a kid who came in a week after his 17th birthday, won a race at 17. I mean, that's inconceivable.
Yeah. I struggled to figure this out myself because like, where does Fangio belong in all of this? Like, it's not just that he won five titles.
It's, are you judging a driver against his peers? Because if so, Fangio was really, I mean, five titles in four cars. Right.
It didn't matter what car you put him in. He was going to win the title.
Well, this becomes the same challenge as evaluating boxers. Because you really have to look at who they were fighting, right? Yeah.
I think Ali gets such a huge bump when you think about how formidable Foreman was at the time. Or these battles he had with Frasier.
Like, Frasier was Mike Tyson. Like, you put Mike Tyson and Frasier in a ring, I don't know who wins that fight.
They're the similar. So, yeah, the fact that this dude probably took on two out of the ten best heavyweights of all time repeatedly, I think, is relevant.
Whereas a lot of these guys didn't really have a huge- Right. But if you just evaluate them on physical prowess, the evolution of athletes is such that they are clearly getting better as time goes on.
Yeah. So it's always hard to sort of have that discussion about like, who's the greatest.
Now explain some of these kinks he has, because I do end up coming across videos all the time where people are pointing out that like Senna had this very unique habit of stabbing the gas, which to me seems completely counterintuitive to what you'd want to do. And I'm curious, like, if you know what his rationale, what was that getting him and how unique was that? It was very unique.
And just so people understand what you're saying, Senna had a habit of when he was coming out of a corner. So the way the regular mortals like us drive is we come back onto throttle gradually.
Roll it on. Roll it on.
If you come on too much, you're going to lose the rear of the car and that's the way you go. So you're coming off the brake, you're coming onto the throttle.
Smooth is fast is the mantra. Smooth is fast.
And if you look at the telemetry of Senna, because of course in race cars, you're measuring to the millimeter and to the PSI exactly what's happening to each pedal. Senna did something very different, which is when he came on throttle, he was stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, and then on full.
Yeah. So it was hypothesized that this was done because of the turbo lag.
Rubbing the turbo up. Yep.
So you would get rid of the turbo lag and he would get back to full power quicker than everybody else. Right.
So he was just like keeping it activated until he went full power. Keeping the RPMs as high as possible.
Yeah. Such that when he got back to full power, there was no lag and he was gone.
Yeah. So people actually hypothesized that he would struggle when they went back to naturally aspirated cars.
And here's the weird thing. He kept doing it and he didn't struggle.
That's one of the things I don't think I have a great explanation for why he was doing it. Other than he had clearly always been doing it.
Like this is how he drove carts. Yeah.
If his results were different, it would be so obvious. It's just not a good strategy.
Right. But somehow it worked.
Yeah. His car control really was remarkable.
And that's one of the beautiful things about that era of F1 is the cars were so much harder to drive. Yeah.
Less downforce. Less downforce, no power steering, manual shift, like a manual gearbox.
In fact, if anybody's just doubting what we're talking about here, you just need to pull up, and we'll probably include it in the show notes, a couple of onboard Senna drives in places like Monaco, where you have to be able to drive the car. Most people would take it within a foot of a wall.
He would take it within three inches of the wall to maximize the size of the track for him. And he's doing this one-handed, no power steering while shifting.
Yeah. Totally different animal.
Were those sequential? Yep. At least? Yep.
And did they have to use a clutch? Yep. They did.
Oh, yeah. So he's clutch.
Okay. He's clutch, blip.
Shift. Yeah.
There's also, I just recently saw a great video of him driving in an NSX. Oh, yeah.
The loafers? Yes. With the loafers on and he's just sideways on the pedals and he's so fucking busy.
Incredible. What seems obvious is it might be his first time ever driving the car.
He's just driving at 100.1%. Yeah.
Well, he helped them develop that car. That's another reason why there's such a love relationship between the Japanese and Senna is the Honda engineers loved him.
I've actually sat in his NSX. So he actually had an NSX and it still sits at his brother's home in Sao Paulo.
Oh, really? And when I met his brother, he said, you want to come down and sit in the car and start it up? And I was like, is this a trick question? Yeah. So where does he rank? Because to my knowledge, Schumacher had an incredible engineering mind.
He was very, very mechanical. And they say he could help them develop the car in a way that most drivers couldn't do.

Where was Senna's technical aptitude for actually developing the car? Yeah, very similar. There is footage of him actually building an engine on his go-kart and stuff.
Yeah, very, very similar. And he was very, very committed to giving feedback.
So where I think the engineers, and I'm hearing this secondhand, not firsthand, but where people would talk about this was the feedback he could give to the engineers was remarkable. There's a great story about him getting injured, right, and not being able to drive the next day during testing.
And one of the other drivers having to come in and sort of cover for him. And Senna came in just to listen to how the other driver gave feedback to the engineers to make sure that it could even be trusted.
So they didn't mess up the car with that feedback. Yeah, he was just that particular about everything you have to be able to say.
And as someone who drives a car myself, like it's hard to put in words like how dumb I am. I'll go out in a car and I'll know that it's not right.

Yeah.

But I can't tell you why.

I know. So I raced for a season in the Super Trofeo series in Lamborghinis.
And by the way, I have rebuilt engines and cars. I am really mechanical.
but actually articulating what i think needs to happen i find to be like an entirely different

knowledge that i don't have currently i can tell you if it's understeering or oversteering i can tell you some basic stuff but to come in and go like it needs two clicks on the suspension on the right rear for turn seven i'm like i can't do that i'm furious that I don't have that knowledge. That's exactly how I feel.
I can tell you about the balance of the car. I can tell you if I have too much or too little front grip or rear grip, that's the extent.
I know. And it's like 10 years I've been driving and that's the best I can do.
And by the way, I think it still exists dramatically in current F1 crop of drivers. I think there's very few that can give them super specific feedback the way that like Schumacher or I guess Senna would.
I don't think there's a lot right now that can do it. I know some personally that have admitted that they know very little about what's going on with the car.
Yeah. But again, I feel like Max, even when I hear him communicate on the radio, I'm like, well, he's definitely a grade above everyone else as far as his understanding of what's going on with the car.
And then Alonzo also seems to have a really deep knowledge that he can articulate to them. But I feel like that's this big chunk that no one really talks about all that much that I think is really important.
The longtime champs seem to really have that. Yeah.
I don't know what Lewis's aptitude is. I haven't been able to really assess that.
So let's go back to the day of the dreadful race. So Senna manages to somehow wrangle pole for the third consecutive race of that season.
A terrible car. With the undrivable car that is on a knife's edge

that he somehow manages to put on pole yet again.

And he has to win this race.

And on the first lap, he gets away clean

and seven cars behind him,

one of the cars stalls on the grid,

gets plowed by another car, immediate safety car.

This was back in a day when the safety cars were insanely slow. They were like little Pintos.
Today, most people would notice that they have the fastest street cars available as the safety cars. Yeah, they got the GTR AMG.
Yeah. And the reason for that is these cars have to be kept moving quickly to keep the tire temperature high.
Again, this is something that I understand that if you've never driven a race car, you've never thought of, because when you're driving on the street, it doesn't matter. But the temperature of the tires is everything.
If the tires are cool, they are bricks. It's like driving ice bricks under the car.
People are watching F1. They maybe notice during a formation lap or during a safety car, the cars will weave side to side.
That's to put friction in the tire. You have to keep the tire warm.
And so you want a safety car to be able to go as fast as possible. Can we add one thing? This is one of my favorite things to try to get people to wrap their heads around when they're learning about F1, which is you have this team that in some cases may have $400 million at its disposal.
They have literally the best aerodynamicists on planet Earth. They're better than, Adrian Newey is better than anyone at NASA.
The little tiny bits of carbon fiber wing, if you sit up next to close to a car, it's boggling how advanced and technological this thing is. And then the engine itself, this 1.6 liter motor that's making a thousand, all of it is so next level tech.
But then you have to remember, all of it has to transfer through four rubber tires. This is great neutralizing fact about Formula One.
It's like, it doesn't really matter what you do to that car because at the end of the day, you will have the built-in limits of a piece of rubber touching asphalt. And they all have the same tires.
Yes. I think it's one of the most fascinating aspects of it is just how much tech leads up to, at the end of the day, four pieces of rubber on asphalt.
And you'll never transcend that aspect of it. Yes.
And today, it's such a differentiating factor, not because they use different rubber. They don't, they all have the same compound, but the difference between say Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc is not necessarily who's faster over one lap where Leclerc may be actually faster over a lap.
It's that Max is way better in terms of getting more pace out of a tire for longer. And that's why head to head, there's no comparison between Max and Charles is one guy always knows how to maximize the life of his tire.
Yeah. They generally give credit to the car design in that situation.
You'll hear them go like, oh, Ferrari's rough on their tires. They heat them up really quick, which is why Charles is able to get pole position a lot.
But in a race, their tires go out three laps before everyone else. Yeah.
So it's hard to parse out like what is driver. But then you watch their teammates, I guess, is the only way to really figure that out.
And yeah, Max is almost never in tire trouble. Right.
And this is actually, I think, during Lewis's prime, because he's obviously on the down slope of his career now. but when Lewis was at his prime, it was probably one of the things he did better than anybody else on the grid.
It's not a sexy thing, so you don't get a lot of credit for it. Yeah.
But when you can really, quote unquote, manage your tires, it's a remarkable advantage. And you're right.
At the end of the day, it's like all the engineering in the world still has to be transmitted through those four contact points. It's kind of comical.
Yeah. So safety car comes out, and this is again, back in the era when safety cars were slow.
Senna was a very big critic of this. So he was a very vocal critic of how slow these safety cars were.
And he would be on his radio yelling, saying that thing has to go faster. It has to go faster.
It has to go faster. So they spend through the fifth lap cleaning out these cars.
So as the safety car pulls in, it is the end of the fifth lap. So the sixth lap is the first flying lap of the race.
On cold tires. On cold tires.
Yeah. Now, there's another important concept that needs to be explained, which is the first flying lap of the race.
On cold tires at this point. On cold tires.
Yeah. Now, there's another important concept that needs to be explained, which is the fastest lap of the race.
It's always documented. Today, a point is actually given for it.
For qualifying. No, no, no.
In the race. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Of the race. Yes.
In the race, the person who does the single fastest lap gets an extra point, provided they were in the top 10. Back in the 80s and 90s, they weren't giving points for it, but it was still noted.
You can still go back and look up any race and say who had the fastest lap. It shouldn't be surprising to people that the fastest lap is almost always in one of the two or three last laps of the race.
Why? Because the cars have the lowest amount of fuel. Also, they're not conserving anymore.
Yeah, they're all out. So a car today might weigh 700 kilos, so they're much bigger than they were back in the day.
But they start the race with 100 kilos of fuel. So just give you a sense of how much of the weight is fuel at the beginning of a race.
So at the end of the race, they're down to 2 kilos of fuel or 1 kilo of fuel. So think about the relative change in weight.
And obviously that's why if you look at any race over the last 20 years, the fastest lap is going to occur in the last couple of laps. Yeah, it's like 15% reduction in weight.
So here we do flying lap number six, first flying lap of the race, and Senna is off like a dart. To put that lap in context, a couple things stand out to me.

So Damon Hill explained this to me in great detail.

The curve where ultimately Senna would die on the seventh lap is called Tamburello.

It's a curve that no longer exists at Imola.

It's deemed too dangerous.

There were too many bad accidents there.

Senna's being the final and most deadly.

It's a high speed.

It's a very high speed left-hander.'s an all out corner to death. It's today a chicane, which means they have slowed it way the hell down.
Every corner has a driving line, meaning there is a line you take to get the best angle. And there are a few times when drivers do not take the driving line.
As Damon explained to me, nobody took the driving line at Tamburello because it was too bumpy. Oh, okay.
And to be on a bumpy line when you're going 100 and probably 205 miles per hour, you would just choose to go a little slower and drive on a smoother part of the track, even though it's a longer distance. So Tamburello is near the beginning of the lap.
So Tamburello is like the first big curve of the lap. So as they come past the start finish line to lap six, Damon notices that even though they're on really cold tires, Senna takes the racing line through Tamburello.
And he's thinking to himself, what in the hell is he doing? Why would you take this risk? And his car is bottoming out. So it is sparking like crazy.
Now we will never know if indeed Senna had a slow puncture in his tires, meaning that he run over some debris during the four laps when they were going over where the crash was, that was leading to a slow loss of pressure in his tires? Or was it just that his car, the tires didn't have enough temperature in them? That's why the pressure was so low. But either way, he is sparking like crazy, taking the racing line through Tamburello.
And right behind him is Schumacher and right behind him is Hill. And of course, they're not going to take the racing line.
They're offline taking the smoother part of the curve. Well, at the end of the sixth lap, Senna has driven what will be the second or third fastest lap of that race.
Really? On a full tank of fuel and ice cold tires. Wow.
That just gives you a sense of how hard he was pushing. Yeah.
Do you almost think it's in response to having been rattled going into the race? Because I certainly have experienced this where you're scared and then the inner monologue starts going, fuck you, you fucking pussy. You're going double hard.
Like as a response to the fear, do you think there was an all in-ness to it? I think, I don't know that it was in response to the fear. I think it was, he had to win that race.
And there's something that people didn't know until after the race. There was that, but also when he died, you know what they found in his car? An Austrian flag to honor Ratzenberger who died the day before.
So he always carried a Brazilian flag in his car every race and he would wave the Brazilian flag and he wanted to win that day, not just because he needed to for his season, but he wanted to be able to wave an Austrian flag for Roland. Oh, fuck.
So I don't think there was any way he was going to lose that race. He was going to win that race at any expense.
And this is a guy who's normally possessed to win every race. So you just take that up a notch.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so as they finish lap six, he's now pulling out from everybody. They enter lap seven and this is the footage that people have seen a thousand times before.
It doesn't matter how many times I see it. I keep waiting for a different outcome and it never happens.
And as they're entering Tamburillo, he drives straight off the track. Really? Straight off.
Do you see him attempt to turn? So now I've watched this a hundred thousand times and I will tell you what I believe is happening. And I will also tell you what Damon believes is happening.
And I think that in many ways, even though Damon's view, which is now my view, and by the way, it's also Adrian Newey's view. Adrian's written an amazing book for people who are interested called How to Build a Car, which is the definitive book on car design.
He goes through every one of his cars that he's built. So it's a chapter per car.
We should add for fun, you can debate all day about who was the best driver, whether you think it's Schumacher. You can't debate who the best designer is.
He has 14 titles or something. That's the most winningest human being to ever do this.
Yeah. It's sort of like I was telling my son, we can debate who the best quarterback and running back and things are.
You can't debate who the best wide receiver is. It's the only position in football for which there actually is no debate.
And that is? Jerry Rice. Jerry Rice is so in a

league of his own in football that it's really a question of who's second or third. But you're right.
Adrian is in a league of his own. So when you read the chapter on the FW16, which was the car that Senna died in.
Was that an Adrian car? Yes. Oh, it was.
Oh, yeah. Oh, wow.
Oh, wow. I mean, Adrian has talked at length about how difficult it was to carry on.
What does it mean when you lose a driver in your car.

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I mean, Adrian has talked at length about how difficult it was to carry on. What does it mean when you lose a driver in your car? And by the way, Patrick had Adrian Newey to this day, if not for the statute of limitations in Italy, would be in jail.
Really? Because the Italian courts found them liable for that. Really? Yeah.
But by the time they got to that decision, the statute of limitations had expired for whatever it was deemed manslaughter. So draconian rule, but really short statute of...
Yeah. Counteracted by...
But the view of the Italian courts was that this was a design failure of the car. So let's maybe back up for a moment.
When Senna got to Williams, he hated the car, not just because of how it handled, but he didn't like how he fit in the cockpit. Okay.
So again, it's like all these things that he kind of took for granted at McLaren, which was having a car that was built around him. He gets to Williams and he doesn't fit in the cockpit.
Right. And he doesn't like where the wheel fits.
He's taller than most? No, no. He's not.
It's just his style. He wants the wheel in a certain place and it's not.
So they actually have to extend the steering column by some six inches to put it where he wants it. Okay.
Well, in doing so, they had to make the steering shaft narrower than what the spec was called for. Really? To keep weight down? To keep it at an angle that got it out of the cockpit, got it where he wanted it.

So what both Adrian writes, and I have spent so many hours discussing this with Damon,

and I have gone back and watched onboard footage so many times, and the best onboard is from the

car behind him, which is Schumacher's car. This is what I truly believe happened.
As he entered

Tamburello, which is a left-hander, he lost rear grip of the car when it bounced. So the way these

Thank you. what I truly believe happened.
As he entered Tamburello, which is a left-hander, he lost rear grip of the car when it bounced. So the way these cars work, they have a huge Venturi effect.
Like there's a perfect amount of air that must be between the floorboard and the ground. And when you bottom out, you momentarily lose all of that aerodynamics.
The downforce. That's right.
Yeah. And so what happened is he's going into Tamburello and because the car is bottoming out, either just because of how bumpy on the line that he is or, and or because his tires are cold and or because he has a small, slow leak of air due to running over debris, the bottom of the car slides out.
It's possible I am convincing myself I can see this on the Schumacher onboard because I now am believing this, but I really believe there's a split second where you can see the rear move. Now, it's worth explaining to people what that's called.
That is called oversteer. Oversteer is when the rear wheels of a car are moving or turning faster than the front wheels of the car.
Oversteer is a phenomenon that a driver will feel long before you see it. So you will see oversteer because you're spinning this way, but you feel it in your butt before that, and you can almost hear it in the tires.
You hear the loss of traction.

So it's not surprising to me that you don't have to see much oversteer for Senna to have felt it. Right.
So what do you do when you oversteer? So when a car is oversteering this way, you course correct by countersteering into it. So if the car is oversteering to the left, you counter steer right,

and that snaps the back of the car in direction. And then you're backing a little bit off throttle, and you're coming back to throttle, and you're going.
You don't have to be doing the throttle correction if you catch it quick enough. So you could stay full throttle and counter steer back.
Yeah. What I believe happened is the car oversteered due to a loss of rear traction, sent a counter steered, and it immediately regained grip and shot him straight off the track.

What the telemetry shows is that he went on max brake and hit the wall.

Okay. Now, the steering column was broken when the car was recovered.

And so the question is, did the steering column break from the collision or did it break beforehand? It's very hard to know, but if you look at the lights and I have the steering wheel that he used the day before in qualifying. So I actually have the steering wheel so I can see what the lights were.
And if you look at the video of the lights, you can see that he was counter steering before he left the road.

Now, I have heard very confusing reports.

Some say that the wheel had no torque in it when he left the track.

And that would certainly suggest that the steering column was broken.

But what you don't see is you don't see him turning the wheel.

Also just... he left the track.
And that would certainly suggest that the steering column was broken. But what you don't see is you don't see him turning the wheel.
Also, just the odds, even though it was a smaller diameter than it was supposed to be, the notion of torque braking through steering a steel rod seems really unique and weird. There would have to have been some metallurgical issue with the piece of metal to begin with.
I don't think in a million years he could turn it hard enough to snap. Well, and he wouldn't be at that point.
It's a delicate move when you're counter steering. It's not hugely abrupt.
But again, if it were the wheel breaking, you would see his hands doing this as he's going straight off and you do not.

Yeah.

Also, perhaps some unintended, the front wheels could go in any direction that they wanted.

So he hits the wall.

Gosh, I'm blanking on the exact speed that he hits.

It's in the ballpark of 150 miles an hour by the time. He's in full break.
He's fully breaking on the way to the wall. I didn't see Tamburello for the first time in person until five years ago.
It was my first time going to Imola. And to see the wall that he hit after watching that crash 87,342 times, I was blown away how much closer it was than I would have expected.
Really? On the TV, it looks really far. That's where you sort of lull yourself into a sense of, oh God, I just can't believe he wasn't able to slow himself down enough that it didn't matter.
But it turns out there's a ravine right behind Tamburello. And so Senna had many times petitioned for the wall of Tamburello to be moved out.
One of his best friends, Gerhard Berger, had crashed there nearly fatally a couple of years earlier in 91 in the Ferrari. And they were like, we're going to abort this race if you guys don't move the wall out further.
And they said, we can't move the wall. There's a ravine there.
So the dryers were like, all right, well, I guess we have to keep this wall here. And what was the surface of the wall back then?

Was there anything to-

Nothing. Concrete wall.

Absorb any energy.

Just a concrete wall. Yeah.

Nothing by today's standards of F1 safety. Just literally a concrete wall.

Yeah. Oof.

And so he hits the concrete wall, the right front wheel comes off and it's actually the suspension rod of that wheel that punctures his helmet. It's clear that he actually died at the track.
I mean, died a brain death at the track. His heart was beating.
They were doing CPR on him and they airlifted him to the hospital and he was not pronounced dead until that night with a beating heart, but brain dead. I've talked with Joseph about that as well as when Joseph got to the hospital, Sid Watkins, who at the time was the medical physician of F1.
How good were those guys? I'm always trying to figure that out. Yeah, no, Sid was the real deal.
And he was a part of F1 in the seventies. He was certainly a part of making F1 safer.
I think Bernie Eccleston brought Sid Watkins in to F1 in the late 70s, and he had done a lot to improve driver safety. The drivers had enormous respect for him.
Legend has it, although again, Sid is no longer alive, so I don't know if this is true, but there's an interview where Sid talks about how the night before the race, he and Senna were talking and he told Senna, you should just retire. You got nothing left to prove.
This is after Ratzenberger had died. He could tell Senna was distraught.
He said to Senna, you should just retire. Let's you and I both retire and go fishing.
And Senna said, I can't. And so when Joseph got to the hospital, Sid was walking out of the ICU and didn't say a word, just looked at Joseph, but didn't say a word.
And that's when Joseph knew he was dead. He went in to see him and he said, there was not a scratch on his body.
Really? Not a scratch on his body. So this- Other than obviously the head trauma.
Where'd it go through his helmet? It's not clear. Fortunately, there are no images of it.
This is one of the nice things about it is nobody's ever taken a photo of his body. God knows what happened to that helmet or anything like that.
So I don't know what part of the helmet was punctured. But I know this.
Sid said that when he arrived at the body and they pulled him out of the car, he knew he was dead. He knew that this was an unsurvivable head trauma.
And I can tell it's heartbreaking to you that that happened. What is your overall assessment of athletes dying? What is your relationship with that? Because I have a very specific compartmentalized view of all that.
And it may seem sociopathic on some level. Well, I can imagine what you're about to say, and I don't know that I would push back on it.
Look, let's take a step back and think about things, right? You alluded to this earlier. There's something about James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and JFK that creates a legend status in them.

And part of it is like they died in their prime and they were at the peak.

We never saw them get old.

We never saw them decline.

They didn't have to adjust to a non-exciting life.

That's right.

They didn't have to fight.

And Senna was truly at his best.

He died at the third race into the 94 season.

Most observers, myself included, would say Senna peaked in 93. His best season, even though he didn't win the championship in 93, he was in a very inferior car, still managed to win five races and give us some of the most heroic performances we've ever seen, including Donington.
And so when you have a person who dies at their prime doing the thing they love, there's a part of you that says there are worse ways to go. The context is such that it is sadder than I think it would normally be in that one guy already died, another guy almost died, and he had those reservations about driving.
That complicates my verdict on the whole thing but in general i find that i sometimes i'm talking to people and the singular measure of life for a lot of people is just longevity it's just duration duration and i look at some of these people i remember when paul walker died this is. Did you know Paul? I never met Paul.
Shockingly, because we were like. It's amazing.
Intersecting car culture stuff. It seems like I would have.
And I have friends that were friends with him and adored him. But when he died, obviously it's super sad.
But there was some part of my brain that was like, if you were to have measured somehow the amount of experience he had had on planet Earth in that period, I would argue very, very few people had lived a bigger life or more of a life or had traveled more and met more people and had more experiences and had more heightened everything. So what I would not want is a very boring, subtle existence with no mountains and valleys for 130 years.
That just doesn't appeal to me at all. And then I also am not overly saccharine about death in general in that I always remember, I remind myself, it's sad for the people left behind.
I mean, if I believed in a higher power and stuff, maybe I would have a different view. But for me, it's like you're alive and then you're not, and you don't know you're not.
So there's no period of being sad that you're no longer alive. So when I just put all these things into evaluating, I don't know that I'm as sad as other people are, because I think a lot of these people ended up living 10x the life of someone that lives to be 110.
If you presented me with the options, if I live like Senna to 34 or I live like some of my neighbors growing up to 105, I would pick Senna.

I think I would.

And I even I engage in a lot of behaviors that are dangerous and people scratch their head at. And I just feel like this is the only version I want of it.
So whatever the consequences, I am knowledgeable of it. I accept it.
Obviously, a family complicates that. I was just about to ask you that question.
The legend has it that Enzo Ferrari used to keep tabs on his drivers based on different milestones in life, and he would discount their lap times based on that. So once a driver had a girlfriend, two-tenths slower.
Once he got married, five-tenths slower. Once he had a kid, one second slower.
And it's just, as the stakes get higher, you naturally just can't be all out anymore. It's interesting.
So there's things I do or that crosses my mind, and there are other things that simply don't. I think maybe from years of being an addict, my compartmentalization is very strong, psychopathically strong.
So I can be doing one thing. I can rule out the whole rest of the world if I choose to.
So when I'm driving on the 405 in Los Angeles on my Multistrada and I'm lane splitting and I'm fucking flying like I did when I was a motorcycle messenger. Those times I go slow down.
I want your little girls to have a dad for as long as they can. But when I'm on the track just Monday at CODA, that's why I like the activity is not only did no one in my life enter my mind, none of my problems entered my mind.
None of my anxieties entered my mind. None of my goals in life were on the table.
It's turn to turn, turn to turn, present, present, present, present. And in the present, it's just me and the motorcycle and the track.
And for me, that buys me so much in the rest of my life. It is like, I imagine what people who do three-month retreats in India

get from meditating.

It's just this very specific,

elevated moment of clarity and presence

that I don't know how I would get otherwise.

In that situation on the track,

I don't ever think about it.

I had a single moment

where I had a race in Fontana

and it was when our oldest daughter, Lincoln, was probably only about 11 months old. She had never had a big cold yet or a sickness, and so she was really sick, which made her, if you have kids you know, extra snuggly, extra docile.
And I remember picking her up out of the crib, and I was holding holding her and she was so snuggly. And I did think, I got to get on the road to get to Fontana.
And I thought I really should stay here the rest of the day and snuggle this little girl. And the whole ride to Fontana, which is pretty far from where I live in LA, the conversation was, okay, you've gotten five trophies this year.
What are we after? What is the number of trophies before the ego feels like you did it? You're a big boy. You're a man.
What's the number? We should at least know. Are we after 20 trophies? Are we after three? Is four enough? And I do think that line of thinking does enter my mind on many topics.

Like how many movies did you want to direct?

You should kind of know.

You shouldn't just kind of aimlessly be doing it.

So it's interesting.

I bounced back and forth, but I did decide after Fontana, I'm like, I'm giving this a rest.

Also a dude in the same series died in Europe.

It runs the Super Trofeo series.

I think ran in three continents and a guy burnt to death

that same weekend. And so I was like, all right, we're not doing this.
We did it. We're proud of

ourselves. We're a man.
We're all grown up and we're going to stop this. And about two years ago,

I was like, I think I'm ready to race again. So it just changed.
What's your analysis?

I completely hear that argument. And yes, Senna lived 10 lives in his 34 years.
And not only that, I mean, he's one of the few people who still matters in his death. He truly matters.
You almost don't go through a single telecast of a race currently where you don't hear his name once. Yeah.
And even beyond just that, in terms of what he stood for still matters. If you look at the Senna Foundation, before he died, he had spoken to his older sister and said, I really want to get more formal in my giving.
Up until that point, he had just been very quietly giving mostly to education, mostly because as you can understand, the poverty in Brazil was so significant at that time. But he said to his sister, Viviane, I want to make this more structured.
I want to create a foundation where we do this right. And of course, he would go on to die very soon after that, but his sister honored that wish.
And now the Sena Foundation, which has probably given over half a billion dollars to education in Brazil, is one of the most important foundations. And so in that sense, he does live on.
He lives on in the sense that anybody who thinks about this sport knows what greatness was. Even if you don't like him, believe me, I have a friend who doesn't even really like him that much.
It's hard to be friends with him sometimes. No, I'm just kidding.
But he's adamant that Lewis is better than Senna. And he sort of has a negative view of everything Senna.
He thinks of, oh, Senna was horrible when he crashed into Prost in Suzuka in 91, or it was 90 actually. But that said, his impact on the sport is, if we're ever changing.
The other thing that's worth mentioning, and I don't think anybody would dispute this, his death did change the sport forever, in the sense that it changed safety instantaneously. It's not that he was the first driver to die.
And you could even argue that there was a comparable death in the 1960s when Jim Clark died. Jim Clark was the reigning world champion when he died in 1960, God, 1967,

I believe. But the death, first of all, he died in a Formula Two race.
Back then, drivers would drive all series. Even if you were an F1 driver, you still drove F2 to pay the bills.
The sport was so much smaller back then. So Jim Clark actually died in an F2 race, but it wasn't seen by the world.
By the time Senna died, the sport was much bigger and it completely changed everything. Meaning the sport got so serious.
It was like Earnhardt dying in NASCAR. That's right.
You get a Hans device immediately. Yeah.
Although it wasn't the Hans available before it was available, but it wasn't mandatory. Yeah.
Yeah. Earnhardt refused to wear it.
right? They all did. Like goalies that wouldn't wear a face mask.
Again, this male pride macho-ness. Yeah.
Hans would have saved him. He had a Baszler skull fracture.
Yeah. So upsetting.
You know, it's interesting. There's a really eerie interview of Dale Earnhardt the day Senna died.
So it's May 1st, 94, and Earnhardt's being interviewed, having won a race. and they're like, hey, even though it's NASCAR, totally different series, like, hey, we just want to acknowledge Senna's death.
And, you know, Earnhardt said a lot of nice things. He loved him too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He seems to be very unifying in people's love.
Yeah. It would be incomplete to say it's all statistics-based, because it's not.
Dare we say in public why we both aren't drawn to Lewis? I wonder if in exploring that, it would reveal why we like the ones we do. Well, I mean, it's all different for me.
Obviously, I have a very close personal connection to Sebastian Vettel. And also, I had stopped paying attention to F1 after 1997.
Okay. So in 1997, Jacques Villeneuve, also Canadian and the son of Gilles Villeneuve.
So I grew up paying a lot of attention to Jacques Villeneuve because he was racing IndyCar before he went to F1. When Villeneuve won the title in 97, I was in medical school.
And that was kind of a period of my life when I just decided like, I'm going to start paying more attention to school than sports. I stopped watching football.
I didn't pay any attention to F1 at all, beyond a little bit. So here we entered.
So Hocken and won 98 and 99. And then Schumacher had that run of five victories.
I will say this deep down,

there was a tiny, tiny part of me that didn't like Schumacher and held him. And this is going

to sound ridiculous, held him partially responsible for Senna's death because he was the one applying

the pressure. And he was driving a car with that I felt was illegal and Senna believed was illegal.

Senna also believed he was outrunning a car that had traction control when his car was undriveable.

Yeah. Well, we must also admit Senna had gone to Williams to drive a car that was going to have a

Thank you. also believed he was outrunning a car that had traction control when his car was undriveable.
Yeah. Well, we must also admit Senna had gone to Williams to drive a car that was going to have a huge technological advantage over everyone else.
So it was like anyone would have used whatever. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
But the difference is active suspension was fully legal. Williams just had a better.
Sure. Yeah.
Although, you know, it's really interesting. If you go back and look, the active suspension of Senna's car in 93 was probably just as good as the Williams.
The reason the Williams car was so dominant was it had the Renault engine that was incredible. And the Honda engine in 93, the Ford Cosworth engine was nowhere near as good that year.
And so Senna, I mean, again, because he still managed to win five races in a season where his car was clearly outclassed. But the point is everybody could have active.
It's just McLaren and Williams had a better active than everybody else. Williams also happened to have the best engine by far, so it was hands down the best car.
But the detuning of the active was hardest on them to recover. But I didn't come back to paying attention to F1 until Vettel's years.
Okay.

So Vettel won his first title in 2010. He won four in a row.
Also Adrian Newey's cars. So 10,

11, 12, 13. And then what happened is you had that huge rule change into 2014 and that created the new...
So every time there's a rule change, right? That's typically when you create a new

dominance. And that's when the dominance shifted from Red Bull to Mercedes before it's now coming back to Red Bull.
Because they nailed the engine, right? They nailed the engine. Absolutely nailed the engine.
And Red Bull spent the next six seasons with a lawnmower engine. And then it was only in 2020 that they got the Honda back.
And then by 2021, Max wins, even though Lewis actually has a better car in 21. He does.
I would argue a much better car. Yep.
Yeah. If I had to say, first of all, what I like about Lewis is something I also like about Senna, which is this is an outsider.
He brings like a rock star quality to it. He's like fashionable.
he transcends the sport i think all those things are cool it's awesome that there's a black formula one like i can't help but love that but by the time i started watching it the mercedes was just so dominant and alonzo was someone who came out last year and said this publicly which is like like, you have to kind of evaluate these people by, did they win first against their teammate or did they win first against another team? For Alonzo, it's more significant if you win against another team. And if you just look at where Mercedes was finishing all those years, it's one, two, it's one, two, it's one, two.
And the fact that Lewis was complaining last year that Red Bull was so dominant when in fact there's just reams of data of him qualifying 1.4 seconds ahead certain times of second place, you know, Max was the underdog. Like when I entered, it was just very easy.
This dude's won seven years in a row. I don't want to see that again.
And the car is so significantly better. It's not even remotely fair.
I would come to learn it's never remotely fair, but at that time I was shocked. Well, this is an interesting point though, that people ask me a lot about, which is what's the difference between F1 today and F1 in the 80s? And one of the biggest differences is F1 has always been a sport about the limit of mechanical potential and the limit of human potential and how do you merge those.
But the difference is in the 80s and frankly into the late 90s or at least the mid 90s, the balance between driver and car was about 50-50 just to put a stake in the ground. Meaning it was 50% the car and 50% the driver.
That's unimaginable right now. Correct.
Today, it's probably 75-25, maybe 80-20. Yeah.
I mean, with certain drivers, you could put it up to 25, but in general- Right. In other words, the difference is if you put Max into the Al-Williams car today, he wouldn't win a race.
He can't win. He can't win a single race.
No. But unless it's raining.
Right. But here's the point, right? You go back into the 80s.
Senna's in a Tolman that first year, and he basically wins Monica. Schumacher's originally right in the Benetton car, which is not competitive

and he's podium. Yeah.
But he eventually did win in that. But if he, again, if you just go back and look at how much Senna was able to do before he got into the McLaren.
Perfect car. Yeah.
Before he got into the perfect car, he was still clobbering it. Yeah.
Not every race, but there's also, there's another set of variables, which I think made the racing back then more fun too, is that reliability was an enormous factor too.

So like you could have the best car,

but every car is going to DNF two races a season because the reliability just wasn't there. So that threw things into a much more unpredictable.
Now, when you see Max retire because of a mechanical failure, you're like, how did this happen? Someone's getting fired. This doesn't happen.
Right. But back then it was like every three races, you lost a handful of cars, grenaded their motor and did all kinds of stuff.
Yeah. So that made it more interesting.
I think it's, you look at the Donningtons, you look at these races where Senna's ability to drive in the rain was so magical. There's a few dudes in MotoGP currently that are that way.
It's like it starts raining and you're like, okay, Jack Miller, you're up. You're going to destroy today on a way less competitive bike.
Angelo Pirello, who just passed away exactly a year ago. But Angelo, who I never knew in person, but I got to know him through video.
So I FaceTime with him a few times and had the chance to speak with him several times over the last five years prior to his death. Angelo was the team principal for DAP, which was the premier karting team of the seventies and eighties.
So Senna and another guy, Fullerton, were sort of the two biggest names in European karting in the late 70s and early 80s. I remember him saying that as good as you think Senna was in an F1 car, he was even better in a kart.
Really? He said he was so good in a kart and so good in the rain that when it was raining, he would usually try to petition the marshals to cancel the race and just give Senna the trophy. He's like, why bother ruining the carts today? We know who's going to win.
Just give Senna the trophy. And then of course they would say no.
They race. Senna would win.
I mean, double lap everybody. And it's a cool aspect.
Yeah. I'll say this, like as a really, really lousy driver, it's hard to put in words how much more difficult it gets in the rain.
Yeah. I immediately go straight to the motorcycles.
Watching MotoGP and watching them in the rain and admitting to myself, they're turning faster lap times at that track than I can on drives. In the drives, yeah.
Is so humbling. And yes, Senna on any track in the world, full downpour, would destroy you on the perfect day, which is so humbling.
And again, it's like watching what he's doing. And you can see, there's some amazing video when he's in the John Player special in 85.
His first delivery every by the way. Yeah, it is.
When he wins his first race in Portugal that year, it is pissing rain. He is driving down the straights and the car is doing this hydroplaning, literally dancing as he's going down the straight.
And other drivers

are spinning everywhere and anywhere. Yeah.
That's a very special feel. And by the way, you look at Max in the rain, he's head and shoulders above the others.
He don't care. Back to Lewis.
So I can acknowledge that he is absolutely brilliant. I mean, the guy's absolutely brilliant.
He's so smooth. He's so savvy.
If I'm critical, he doesn't fight. And so who I've ended up loving in MotoGP is like Valentino Rossi's the God of all gods.
I think he's the God of all motor sports. What he did, I don't think any car driver's ever done.
And his willingness to fight, literally kick his opponent while they're in a turn is that X factor that I'm so drawn to. And how many people don't like him for the same reason? Because again, there are people who would say, look, nobody fought harder than Senna, but then there's a subset of people that would say, well, they don't like that.
Yeah. Yeah.
Now he has those two incidents where a, he was crashed into to take him out of winning a championship. And then he also crashed into somebody to secure his championship.
For me, I get it. That's what he's there to do.
I like, I have defended Max. Now listen, when Max would not let Checo, he wouldn't help Checo at all, which was such a bummer.
If any driver in the history of F1 deserved the help, it was Checo because Checo fell on his sword in 2021 over and over again to help him beat Lewis. The last race of the year, he sacrificed his quali lap to tow him.
Yeah. And then he held up Lewis.
I mean, this guy did everything. Did Max do that because he believed Checo had purposely crashed in Monaco that year in quali? No.
Well, personally, I've not asked Max this, but for me, it's so crystal clear. He's even been on the radio saying it out loud.
So we've heard him say it. He's like, no, no, never doing that and it's true max gets in a car and he's gonna finish as high up as he can period nothing else in the world matters no other humans there's no paying back a favor he can't not try to drive as fast as he can at all times period i love it if you hate max of course you hate that.
It's deplorable, but I love him. So I'm like, he is a cyborg.
He gets in the car and he's got to get the very best outcome that's possible, period. Yeah.
It's like the scorpion who asks the turtle for, you know, the story of the scorpion. So a scorpion and a turtle are on one side of the river and the scorpion says, Hey, can you help me get to the other side of the river? And the turtle's like, are you kidding me? Like, you're a scorpion.
You're going to kill me. Yeah.
And he's like, why would I do that? Like, you're going to help me to the other side of the river. And this turtle thinks to himself, well, it's true.
He can't kill me because we'll both drown. And sure enough, the scorpion hops on the turtle's back.
They're going across the river and halfway across the turtle's like, ow, what the hell is that? And he turns and he says, the scorpion says i'm sorry it's my nature like you know he just can't you know it's like this yes and yes i think there's something to your nature i overlook it because i don't think he has the capacity to be generous i think he has a single focus and that's what i love about him that's why i love watching him drive and he'll die it's so obvious he'll fucking die in any given turn that 2021 season is the greatest thing ever what a time to like i had only watched maybe two years up until that point and to land at that moment and of course i love max people love lewis i fought with many people over that last race which is so ridiculous i find it so do we have the same explanation, which is like, we always unlap cars. What is everyone talking about? The weird thing that happened was that they didn't unlap the cars quicker.
Yeah. And that the purists would argue, yes, you should have always unlapped the cars, but they should have unlapped all the cars.
Yeah. So let's say they would have unlapped all of them.
We're in the same situation. They didn't do them all.
Great. But what is absolutely standard is they should have been unlapped and probably earlier than they were.
And so the other issue that everyone likes to neglect is that people refer to that as the greatest injustice in F1. It only tells me how shallow their history is of F1.
Well, also, it's very reminiscent, in my opinion, of the Prost-Senna battles. They always went to Prost.
He got the call every time. And sorry, but from my point of view, Lewis had gotten every call that year.
Absolutely. Every time they went into the turn at the same time would have been ruled a racing incident.
Any other time, Max had to give up his spot to Lewis 10 times that year. And certainly if the roles were reversed, he would have been going in with more points to begin with.
Also, he would have not given up a lap earlier in the race. Like there's a lot of things I think actually what you saw is like him succeed in spite of the fact that every call went to Lewis that whole season.
Yeah. To me, that's the most interesting season because the better driver beat the better car.
That's the first time you really saw that in a decade. Yes, totally.
The evidence is clear through, what's his name? Our favorite Finnish man, his teammate. Oh, Valtteri.
Yeah. Botas.
Botas is winning races. He's getting pull.
I love Botas, but I think his post-Mercedes career gives us a sense of where he's at in the pack. Yeah.
And so the fact that he was regularly winning races and getting pole position, it's hard not to want to see them on the same team, but I don't even think it would be that fun to watch. Yeah.
If you had to order who you think the fastest drivers are right now, what would you dare say out loud in public? I think Max is the fastest by quite a bit. I think Fernando is the second fastest.
Again, you're asking me who the best drivers are not taking into consideration their cars. Correct.
Yeah. Yeah.
I think Max is- They're all in the exact same spec model. That's even a difficult question for the following reason, right? Which is different cars have different styles.
Sure. The Red Bull is really built around Max's style.
Yeah, he likes oversteer. There's certain things he loves.
Yeah. And the way Max drives, again, this is another reason why I think Max is so good, is he drives a car that has a couple of features.
It's a car that can be driven very fast, but has a very narrow operating window to be driven fast. Very hard to drive fast.
It's very hard to drive it fast. I think in many ways, it's a testament to how far Checo has come that he is now at least three races into this season.
He's doing well this year. doing quite well.
Yeah. And I think he deserves credit for that because a lot of other drivers got spit out.
Gastly and Albon got absolutely evaporated. I couldn't love him more.
I really, I think he is like the most standup guy out there. I love Alonso for so many obvious reasons.
Yeah. So I think Alonso is the second best driver on the grid.
My question marks are, I think it's possible Lando is insanely talented. Yeah.
I mean, I would love to see Max and Lando in the same car to see what would go down. I think that Lando is over achieved in that McLaren every single year and does things that are impossible.
I also love Charles. It's interesting.
Science is dominating him this year. But in general, I think, and again, we look at the pole position, why we would say Senna is so great.
Charles' one laps are some of the best I've ever seen where you're like, oh, how did he just pull that out? I think he's so special. So for me, I'm confused whether I think Charles or Lando's faster.
Well, I mean, the problem is Charles, I think he makes too many mistakes in the races. If you asked me three years ago, look at all the guys on the grid, how many of these guys will win a championship in their career? I would have said Charles.
I would have said Lando. I would have said George.
I'm not positive it will be any of them. I mean, it should be.
It's hard to imagine at least one of them not winning a title. I don't think it's a guarantee anymore.
I don't either. It just really drives me mad to see them in such different cars, especially Lando and the McLaren.
It's just like, it was a dog. It was garbage.
It was good for a few races last year. You're like, are they back? And then this year, there's no consistency, so I don't know what it is.
But I was shocked to see how much faster he drove the car than Danny, who I love. What do you make of Danny's stint at McLaren? I've never asked him and we're friends and I think that's why we're friends.
I don't ask him any questions about F1, but my armchair expert analysis would be A, the car was built for Lando in the same way that the car is built for Max. I think that's very obvious that the car is solely designed for Lando's strengths.
I think that's a big issue. I also think that third team in two years is unsettling and disruptive.
And I just don't know that he ever found his rhythm there. I think some of it was mental.
But I was shocked. I was quite shocked.
I mean, he did win a race in Lando, didn't it? Which I love. And that gets into this other weird thing, the magic of people who can win and not win.
It's like there have been basketball players that are as good as some of the guys that won. And there's some people are winners and some people aren't.
I don't know what that magic thing is. But like Lando, as good as he is, he just can't finish above second.
It's so interesting. And that Danny, who has won disproportionately for how consistent he's driven, of course he got in there and won.
It's just interesting. And it was a great race to win at Monza.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was exciting.
Carlos, I think, is having a great year. I want him because Carlos has been so inconsistent.
If there's something we can be critical of Carlos, it's like he drives like a striped ass eight, three races in a row, and then he crashes three races in a row. And you're like, what is going on with him? But somehow the consistency seems to be there.
And I think the cosmic joke of all jokes, which is happening right now, it's the only thing I think is interesting about this season. As that Ferrari is getting rid of their fastest driver to overpay for the second fastest driver on Mercedes.
It's so Ferrari. It should be a t-shirt.
What are they thinking watching this season? Yeah, who knows? I'm also surprised that Lewis is going to Ferrari because I believe Mercedes will be a better team in 26 than Ferrari. In other words, I have more confidence in Toto than anybody else to turn that team around.
And I just think the Ferrari of the Schumacher era is a totally different team. It has nothing to do with the team today.
You know, I think Fred is more competent than his predecessor, but I still think that culturally that team struggles. Well, someone was saying, which I thought was kind of an astute observation I didn't realize, is they said, you have to realize Ferrari operates as a national team.
It's not like any of the other teams. That is the nation's team.
It's in the newspapers what they should do. There is some sense there that is very unique to Ferrari.
Well, that's why Ferrari was so successful in the Schumacher era, which is it was not an Italian run team. It was a French run team.
Oh, really? Yeah. All the leadership was German, French.
It wasn't being run by Italians. A lot of people say that, yeah, it's more of a committee than any other team because of it being the national symbol of Italy.
my whatsapp group my F1 WhatsApp group, the thing that gives that group the most joy is watching how bad Alpine is doing right now. That's the source of the most amusement.
And why did they previously hate Alpine? That's been the biggest drop in performance I've seen since I've been watching it. Alpine last year to this year.
Yeah, but even last year they finished. I think they really underperformed last year for what was expected.
Right. But those two were like getting into the points every other race.
Now they're like 19 and 20 every race. Yeah.
They're worse than Williams or Haas. Yeah, I don't know.
I think there's just, it's very confusing why Alpine would do so poorly because they do well in other series. their supercars and hypercars and prototypes.
These other cars, they do a pretty good job. So that's interesting.
And I just love how much those two hate each other. That's amusing as well.
I think they're the most hated teammates. And my wife is obsessed with Pierre.
She loves him. Loves Pierre.
He's got a following. Girls love Pierre.
He's having fun. My wife loves her some pierre is that number one for her yeah it is really yep and she's got a pierre signed hat it's to jill from pierre the tripod did he sign at the tripod no you know that famously last year he was in an interview and they said what's your nickname and he said he said, Tripod.
Stop it. Yes.
In an interview on TV.

And my daughter loves Danny and she's got a Danny autographed hat and it's to Olivia

and it's like, oh, she's obsessed with Danny.

And I'll tell you something really funny.

I don't know Danny, but I've met him a few times.

And the last time I bumped into him, which was last year, well, he knew who I was.

So he said, hey, Peter, we got chit chatting, blah, blah, blah.

And then he said, how's Olivia doing?

And I was like, what?

No, how do you know?

And a year earlier, he had met my daughter, taken a picture with her and signed a hat for her.

That's impossible.

And I was like, how do you remember that?

I couldn't believe. And I even asked my friend, Luke, did you tell him? And Luke was like, no, Danny's like that.
He remembers details. That's freakish.

I will say this. So I interviewed Danny and we got along really well.
And then we set up a hang. Then he loves motocross.
So every time he's in LA, I take him to ride motocross. And we definitely developed this friendship and it's been lovely.
hang then he loves motocross so every time he's in LA I take him to ride motocross and we definitely developed this friendship and it's been lovely but then he came over to the house for dinner and he shows up with like three presents he brought my wife a candle I show up and I've barely remembered to be fully dressed when I go to parties you bring gum yeah I bring all my nicotine products and that's it. But the thoughtfulness, the manners, I think he has a persona on drive to survive, which is awesome.
It's very entertaining. It's cocky.
It's arrogant at times, but real life Danny is like insanely sincere, incredible manners, clearly raised perfectly. Like the fact that he remembers your daughter's name a impossible, but also not shocking for him.
Um, he's a really fucking good dude, impossibly good dude. And by the way, I think on average, that's probably true of more F1 drivers than it's not.
Well, you know what I've learned from him that I really enjoyed finding out is that I think Max also has a persona which is very different from who he actually is. And I've learned from him that I really enjoyed finding out is that I think Max also has a persona, which is very different from who he actually is.
And I've learned this from Daniel and a couple other drivers, and then mostly the girlfriends of these drivers. I'm always mining for Max details whenever I'm talking to someone.
And across the board, they're all like, he's just the shyest, sweetest guy. He's like an introvert and he's shy.
And him being on camera or having to be anything public, it's just not for him. So I think it brings out this protective side of himself.
But in general, unanimously agreed that he's a sweet, shy boy, which is so counter to Yost, it's hard to imagine. I know.
You think about the trauma of growing up under that guy. Oh my God.
You know, we did a whole, on the F1 podcast, we did a whole episode on Yost. We're obsessed with Yost.
The amount of criminal activity he's been a part of is impossible. Like convicted for fracturing a guy's skull at the go-kart track with his own father.
So dad and grandpa beat a guy to the point where they fractured his skull. He was momentarily arrested for attempted murder, T-boning an ex-girlfriend in an intersection at full speed and claiming that it was just an accident.
The hostility that's just purpling out it makes me really compassionate to max i'm like god this kid really survived this and adores him clearly yeah they have this incredible relationship i'm like my dad was really nice and i could barely get along with him because i had so many issues i've never met max but a good friend of mine knows him very well and has said like because you could sort of think like what is max's Max's superpower? Because he's so good in a car. Yeah.
He's so head and shoulders above everybody else. I couldn't agree more.
You don't realize it. But he said part of his superpower is just that nothing phases him.
It's hard to put in words how big a deal that is in driving. Before we were recording, I was showing you some video from my driving this week.
I was telling you like, it was like worst day I've ever had on a track, right? Like spinning nonstop. And the problem is I've never done anything in my life where the psychology of performance compounds more geometrically.
When you start making mistakes, they pile up in a way that is unique. Yeah.
Intellectually, you understand, I have to be a goldfish in this moment. I have to forget what just happened.
At least for me, on this particular day, I couldn't. And it started in my first session.
So first session out, I had a lockup. And for people who don't understand what that means, it means the tires were a little too cold.
I hit the brakes a little too hard. They locked.
We don't have ABS in these cars. And now you can't turn.
I can't turn. I can't stop.
I can't do anything. And this circuit I'm on has no runoff.
So it's like when you lock up, I had three nanoseconds to realize it. By the time I realized that it was actually off the track.
Right. And I just never got out of that

funk. Because you were beating yourself up for that? Partly beating myself up for it, but then partly not wanting to lock up again, because now you have a flat spot on the tire.
So now you're more susceptible to a lockup. So now I had to pull my braking further back.
So now every session, I'm comparing my telemetry of this day to my telemetry the last time I was on the track. And my coach is like, look, dude, you are breaking 50 feet too early.

Yeah.

And it's caught. telemetry of this day to my telemetry the last time I was on the track.
And my coach is like,

look, dude, you are breaking 50 feet too early. And it's costing you literally eight tenths of

a second on this lap. And I'm like, okay, I'll go out there and I'll break 50 feet later,

which is where I used to break. I get there and I'm like, nope, you're going to break a little

earlier and a little lighter because you don't want to lock up again. And it's like, that's just

one example of how the psychology of it just destroyed me. And then what happened was like, now I'm second guessing myself here, second guessing myself there, spin the car here, spin the car there.
It gives me an enormous appreciation for how awful this sport is. It's a very lonely sport.
It's kind of similar to golf. It's like tennis, yeah, or golf or boxing.
It's very mental. Yeah.
I do want you to start riding motorcycles because the interesting thing about the motorcycle is it really can only go through one way. Like you can't go slower through because now you can't hang off the bike as much.
Like there's all these things that are kind of built into they have to happen the same way. So even if you had a moment on a previous lap, you can't enter slower because then you can't lean as much because you don't have enough centrifugal force pulling you out.
So it's almost like you don't really have the option, if that makes any sense. Like in a car, you could skate through a turn, but on the bike, the way it works right is it has to be going through at a certain speed so you can be off it as much as you need to be and all these things.
Otherwise you're just kind of driving it straight up and down. Yeah.
I thought about that a lot after we got back from Coda. I talked to my wife about it.
I even sent her a picture of the bike that you want me to get. It's really funny.
She didn't even entertain it. Her only response was shut it.
Like no way. Yeah.
Like this is so dumb. We're not even going to talk about it because you're so stupid that you would even think to add another dumb hobby to your life.
Okay, that's fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't even think she was opposing it from the standpoint of danger. It's just, you got too much shit going on.
You got to pick something. Like, you have too many things that you do and waste time and money on.
Why would you add another one? Because it exists. I have to do everything.
No, but then I thought about it. I was like, well, in five years, I will have a lot more free time.
In 10 years, the kids will all be gone. But then I was like, oh, but you know, will I be too old to do it? And there are some old dudes out there.
I'm kind of encouraged. I'll see some.
Yeah, but they probably started younger, right? That's for sure. Yeah.
Yeah. It is quite special.
The best example I have of it is I was at Laguna and I was there for three days and the third day they were mixing cars and bikes. We were sharing the track with some driving club.
Literally at the same time or trading off sessions? Trading sessions. And I had driven my AMG E 63 station wagon up there for the track days.
So I was on the track for two full days on motorcycles and then half the day, the third day. And I talked to the club guy.
I was like, can I go out in a session in my car? And he's like, yeah, of course. So I go out and I'm in the e63 that's a great fucking car that's not a boring car to drive on the track it's 600 horsepower and dual clutch trans it's awesome and i did three laps and i was like this is so boring i can't even believe it and the acceleration is so weak up the hill and the breaking down the hill is so

laborious because the car weighs so much and i was like never again will i mix those two days i can go do a track day in the car if i start there and it's fun but the comparison between the two is shocking are you gonna come drifting again before koda this year oh i would love that yeah we had a lot of fun. You should bring Danny.
Oh yeah. I brought Seb two years ago and it was incredible.
So you recall- Did he do almost as good as me? You did great. But even Josh Robinson, who leads the Drift Academy- Does it professionally.
Yeah. He's a professional formula drifter, and he runs this awesome school that people should all sign up for called the Texas Drift Academy.
By the way, it's the main reason I still have YouTube ads on my YouTube. Why I haven't subscribed to YouTube to eliminate ads is I'm holding out hope that I will see another ad as transformative in my life as that one.
Oh, because that was just four years ago. I'm watching car videos on YouTube and an ad comes up for the Texas Drift Academy.
I watch the ad. I go to the site.
I sign up for a class. I meet Josh.
The rest is history. Yeah.
So now I'm a driftaholic. Yes.
And sure enough, I go out with Seb. So the holy grail of drifting is doing tandems.
One guy's drifting in front and the other guy behind him is doing everything. Matching.
You know, they're two feet off each other. And it might take a year to get to the point where you can do a lead follow tandem.
Yeah. Seb was doing it within three hours.
And they let him. Lead and follow.
Yeah. Yeah.
And it was really funny. At one point, I wasn't doing my lead follows.
I was out there doing my thing, which is pretty cool. Like I'm doing the full circuit, doing all my thing.
It's so fun. And then Seb comes out with me and he's like, let me sit in passenger while you go and haul ass.
So I'm out there doing this. And then the funniest thing he said, he goes, is it okay if I give you a pointer? Yeah.
And I'm like, dude, are you kidding me? Yeah. It's okay if you give me a pointer.
My ego can handle receiving advice from a four-time F1 world champion. I can handle- Three times? I don't know, but four.
Right, right, right. And he's like, lay off the throttle a little bit more here and just do this and then counter steer a little bit more this way.
And I'm like, the fact that he could figure this out in three hours and it's taken me three years and I'm still not that good. You also realize like there are people that are just so much better.
It's actually part of why I enjoy my hobbies is I actually really enjoy being so lousy at these things. You do.
I need to aspire to that. It's frustrating.
But you're constantly in a state of the learning curve is still so steep for me. I suffer greatly on the bike.
I recognize it. The bike is one thing and I'm good.
And then I am in no way ever approaching the AMA guys or the super bike guys, but it's just staggering. And I have no illusion.
I could do it. My ego in the car is I could do whatever they can do if I had the time and had been encouraged to do it.
The car thing I have in my mind that I could have been capable of anything. I don't, and I don't know, maybe it's possible when I was younger, it's different, but I have too much built-in self-preservation to ever be a good driver.
I am destined to be mediocre for the rest of my life. I think that's the healthiest version.
Yeah, perhaps. When I'm with Daniel, it literally goes through my mind where it's like, I can almost not accept that.
Of course, he would be much faster if we got in an F1 car. I go, but why?

We have hands and feet and I understand it. What could it be? The motorcycle, I am fear limited.

I am not going to go through some of these turns at 135 with my elbow dragging. I don't have the

gumption to do that. But in the car, I have that erroneous sense of safety.
I don't ever consider

I can get hurt in the car. So it's like, I don't have a fear thing.
So then what would it be? Yeah, but don't you have some concern of like just shunting and trashing the car? Yes. Even if you're going to be okay? Yeah, I'm real big on Hit and Run, this movie I directed.
I did all the driving and that. And yeah, the stunt guys threw away like four cars.
And the pride I had was like, yeah, I didn't throw any cars away. And I never threw away the Lamborghini.
Yeah, I have a big thing that I, my story about myself is I don't crash. And the notion of having to pay for a race car I was in is a real bummer.
but I don't even consider it's a possibility.

I have some delusion in that department. I have a hard time wrapping.
Like I even had the arrogant

fantasy. I'm going to try to do a TV show with Danny and I, where we go drive everything,

snowmobiles, motorcycles, dirt bikes, everything that you put gas in, he and I are going to race.

And in my delusional mind, I'm like, I'm going to get close and I are going to race. And in my delusional

mind, I'm like, I'm going to get him on six of these tonight things. There's no way he can ride

a snowmobile as good as I do. You've ridden bikes with him though.
Dirt bikes. Yeah.
He's slightly

better on a dirt bike than I am, but I'm not good on a dirt bike. I recognize that.
So where my fear

kicks in is like being 30 feet in the air, already having several shoulder surgeries, I'm out. I like

Thank you. but I'm not good on a dirt bike.
I recognize that. So where my fear kicks in is like being 30 feet in the air, already having several shoulder surgeries, I'm out.
I like to trail ride. I like to ride little tracks, but I don't have that.
I know my limits, but snowmobile, razors, let's go, Ricardo. I feel like I'm just going to stick with cars.
You're going to. Have you ever ridden a snowmobile? Never.
Even though I grew up in Canada. Oh, so fun.
So fun. Really good one for husband and wife.
The learning curve is very quick. Yeah.
My wife has no interest in speed, period. She won't get in a car with me.
We were laughing a lot when we were at the track this weekend. Yeah.
About the bummer of your wife not appreciating how valiant and skilled you are behind the wheel that when she watches a drifting video, she's not like, oh my God, Peter, how are you doing this? I know I bring all these videos home of me driving and drifting. And all she says is why would you wreck all those tires? Yes.
It makes no sense. That seems wasteful.
Yeah, and she's right. Well, what else can I tell you about Senna? Well, let me just tell you something really quick.
Hold on. If you know me, you know who my wife is.
I think that's standard. This is what happened.
My wife was perusing Etsy. Does Jill go on Etsy? Oh, yeah.
As does this one. She loves Etsy.
I've never gone and looked around myself. Oh, I could spend hours on Etsy.
Okay. So she found these for me and I felt like I didn't deserve them.
And I insisted that she get them so that I could give them to you. Is that an MP4-4? Yeah.
These are Senna cups. Wow.
That's beautiful. Pretty cool, right? Etsy.
So cool. And then I bought this for myself, but my arms are too ape-like and long, so I've decided to pass it on to you.
Whoa. Look at this glorious item.
Look at that. Someone made this.
You got this on Etsy as well? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How great is that? That is so- I put it on.
I was very bummed that the arms only came up to midway down my wrists. I mean, are you sure you don't just want to do sleeve roll-up? I'm positive.
I want you to have that. Thank you so much.
And the glasses. And that was a third of my suitcase I brought.
And now I have room to amass something else. It's cool though.
You know, what's really interesting? Cause I'm a real stickler for detail. Sure.
This is the season that he died. Really? That's the helmet from the season he died.
He always ran the Brazil colors, right? There was no deviation. He always ran this color going back to his karting days.
Okay. But this is the Renault engine, the Rothman's sponsor.
So he only would have had this helmet for three races. Three races.
Yeah. Wow.
It's a beautiful. Well, there you go.
You got a couple more bits of Senna. How does Jill respond to the amount of stuff that's in this house? I would want anyone who's listening to walk through your house at some point.
You can't go six feet without something significant from the Senate collection. Yeah, I think I've won the wife lottery, obviously, in terms of just met my wife and you understand like incredibly supportive and understanding.
Look, I thought it was going to be a bridge too far when I wanted to name our son after him. Yeah.
That's a big swing. That is, that was a swing.
Yeah. Yeah.
Did you like set the perfect evening? Did you try to like wine her and dine her before you broached it? Or do you throw it out randomly? Believe it or not, I had a harder time with our previous son whose middle name is Feynman. That was a harder sell.
I understand. But for that one, I had a harder time with our previous son, whose middle name is Feynman.
Okay. That was a harder sell.
I understand. But for that one, I had a subtle ploy, which was I started with a name that I knew she would never go for.
Okay. But that was plausible that I would like it.
Okay. Which was? Secretariat.
Because I love Secretariat as well. And so I was like, look, the greatest horse of all time, right? Even if another horse wins the triple crown, at that point, American Pharaoh hadn't yet won the triple crown again.
I was like, no horse will ever win by that margin again. To be able to negative split five quarter miles in the Kentucky Derby to win the Belmont by 30 lengths.
Like we could do a whole podcast on secretary. Okay, great.
I hope we do. So it's a really fitting name.
And she was like, let me see how clear I can make this for you. There is no fucking way we are naming our kid after a horse.
So then when I pivoted to Feynman, she was like, okay. Okay.
I can live with that. As a middle name.
As a middle name. Yeah.
And also my brother had just named one of his sons after Pat Tillman. Okay.
Which I thought was awesome too. Great book, right? Yeah.
Did you read the Krakauer book? Yeah, of course. So I think she was just probably a little beat down between the Atiyah brothers by the time our youngest was born.
And also by that point, she had become aware of all the stuff we talked about, right? Like she, you know, at that point, not only had she seen the documentary, but there are a whole bunch of other really cool things. My wife loved the documentary and doesn't care about racing.
Yeah. It's a very good documentary.
It's not a doc. I mean, I would encourage anybody who's gotten, who's still listening.
It's possible there's nobody listening anymore. Yeah, these things happen.
But if anybody is still listening and they haven't seen the documentary, it's a no-brainer that you would go and see it now. Yeah.
You'll fall very head over heels in love with Senna. And you don't have to be a racing fan.
It's not a racing story. It was nominated for best documentary, I think, for the Academy Award.
So yeah, it turned out to not be that hard to sell. Her biggest concern was, will people know how to pronounce his name? Well, that would be a concern of mine because I, every time I say Ayrton, I'm nervous as I'm saying it, that I'm not going to get it right.
I struggle with it. How do you say it? Well, it's funny.
We mostly call him Airy. Right.
Because that's just easier. But it is Ayrton.
Ayrton. Ayrton.
Yeah, forget it. I can't do that.
She has a very legitimate concern. And we're very, very lucky that we have had two Brazilian nannies in the entire time that he's been alive.
Oh, so they have a particular shine. they just had an immediate affection for this like little kid named after the deity yes yeah yeah well we named i pitched lincoln for our first daughter after my lincoln continental which is like my most oh so it's not an abe lincoln no it's not although very worthy worthy of naming someone or Lincoln, Nebraska or whatever.
There's some options, but I have a relationship with this 67 Lincoln Continental. It's just the most profound of any vehicle I have.
I've had it forever. I've done everything to it.
I made a movie about it. It's just very important, this car.
And we thought for no real reason that she was pregnant with a boy. We were both certain of it.
I don't know if you guys have ever proclaimed this without any reason, but we were like, yeah, it's a boy. Lincoln, no problem.
It's going to be Lincoln. And I pitched, let's do Lincoln Bell Shepard.
They might lose Shepard, but they'll always have Bell. That was my kind of horse trading.
And we were at an ultrasound appointment and the technician said, well, it's a girl. And we were both like, no, that's not possible.
And a very long time went by without either of us saying anything. And the technician said, is that okay? And we're like, no, fine.
We'll be happy to have whatever. And then after that, it was like dealing with the adjustment of, okay, it's going to be a girl.
And then I said, oh, and then the name, I don't know about the name. And then I will say to Kristen's credit, she's like, Lincoln's an even cooler name for a girl.
And I was like, oh, you're right. So then once we named Lincoln, Lincoln, my friend who you just met on Sunday, Steve DiCastro, who's a stunt coordinator and a stunt man.
When Kristen got pregnant a second time, he jokingly sent a text. You name the first girl Lincoln.
What are you going to name the second girl? Navy SEAL, Delta Force,

Airborne, you know, making all these jokes. And I'm reading this to Kristen and then I go, Delta is a pretty bad-ass name for a girl as well.
And she was like, I hate to say it, but he's right. So then Delta came out of a joke, but also bell.
I was smart enough to give her last name in the middle for a little added, you know. I have a friend who's got a Lincoln, a Kennedy, a Reagan, and one other president as the first name.
Spanning the political divide, too. I like that.
Just going for great presidents. Have you read the Grant biography by chance? No.
The Chernow one? Amazing. Couldn't sort of u.s presidential obsession kind of mostly is like lbj is a huge fascination have you read those carol books yeah yeah those are great especially living here yeah really exactly having lbj library and all that stuff yeah and even what he did to the hill country and you know all this stuff Yeah.
Fascinating. But it ends there at LBJ.
No, it's a lot of LBJ and forward, like LBJ, Nixon, the last 150 years, I suppose. Yeah.
Grant's super fascinating because he's an abject failure at everything in life except for war and his presidency. Terrible with money, insolvent, duped many times, but he had a genius and it was just so specific and it was unrivaled.
It's such a good book. I think you and I are similar and I want to be kind of good at everything.
I have my appetite to want to do stuff. It's just so enormous that I'd be like pretty good at or even moderate at a bunch of things.
The notions of specialists really interest me because I'm just so not that way at all. I want to be able to like talk to anyone I meet and hopefully have a hobby in common or something.
I'm not trying to get super esoteric with like your brain surgeon friend that's over. and I think there's some drawback to that but I am fascinated by people

who just do Max. I doubt Max can balance a checkbook or go grocery shopping.
He's probably not a great boyfriend, but boy, he can do that thing. Yeah.
Speaking of Max, I think a lot of drivers don't like to spend that much time in simulators. Like when they're away from the car, they're away from the car.
Yes. And that's not Max.
Literally after he wins a race in the highest division of the highest sport. Yeah.
When anybody else would be out partying, he's on a sim race competing against the sim racers around the world. Yes.
Within hours. Yeah.
And they'll spend three

hours sitting there doing it. And that's just another aspect to it.
It's like, I don't think anyone on that grid spends as much time thinking about racing. You know, it's funny, you know, that we've talked about it.
I really would love to know what Max thinks of Senna and how much he is historically aware now that Max's own legend grows. By the end of this year, he's going to be a four-time world champion.
And even though he's only 26 years old and he could easily race another 10 years and eclipse every record ever if he chooses to, I wonder where he sees his place. And I wonder if he has an appreciation for the legends of the sport.
Yeah, that's an interesting question because he regularly threatens to quit all the time. That's the other really contradictory thing about him is he's really haphazard about threatening to quit.
He doesn't like sprint races. He hates those.
Well, I think Max quitting doesn't mean he wouldn't drive. It just means he wouldn't drive F1.
Max and Alonso are probably the two people who I think will drive forever. Just a question of where.
Yeah. Alonso for sure.
It makes me think one more time of Valentino Rossi. In his last season racing, he was like Alonzo.
He was maybe 44 still racing against

these 19 year old kids. And he was going through a turn and a guy had crashed just before the turn

and came off the bike and the bike was just flying unmanned. And then another guy crashed.

And so two bikes, he's in the turn already committed. There's nothing he can really do.

One bike goes right in front of him and one goes behind him at the same time it's like the most impossible moment in all of racing motorcycles he's a foot away from the one in front of him and a foot in front of the one behind him both of them flying with a t-bone and would have killed him and everyone in the real world normal people are like like, what's he doing out there? He's already 44. He's not competitive.
Yes. Nine championships.
He's done everything. Why would he be in that situation? And his response was, yeah, that was close.
But, uh, you know, if I'm not there, I'm doing something else equally dangerous. I'm somewhere going to be, it won't stop.
To him, it's like, yeah, it would have

been in a rally car or it would have been there. It doesn't matter.
That's what he does. Everyone else was like, oh my God, he just barely avoided death.
And for him, it was nothing. He's like, yeah, this is what I'll be doing until I'm dead.
I'll be in some situation that scares the shit out of me. I can't help but wonder, and I know that I'm far from alone in this, been wondering what would have been had Senna not died that day.
I think most observers believe he would have driven another four years until the next regulation change and at the end of Williams dominance. So Williams ended up being the most dominant car the year he died.
So despite the fact that it was an impossible to drive vehicle for those first three races, the brilliance of that team did figure it out. And his teammate, Damon Hill, almost won the championship that year.
In fact, he was one point behind Schumacher going into the final race of the year. Wow.
Schumacher crashed him out of the race, crashed himself out of the race. And in doing so, Damon actually looked like he was going to win the race, but it broke his suspension rod.
So Damon ended up finishing that year one point behind Schumacher. So he would have definitely won.
He would have absolutely won. Yeah.
Schumacher won the next year. It was close.
Damon Hill won the next year in the Williams and Jacques Villeneuve won the next year in the Williams. So I don't think it's an enormous stretch to say, look, Senna probably would have won four consecutive championships in 94, 95, 96, and 97.
Putting him at seven. Putting him at seven or eight, if you include the one that was stolen.
There's talk that he always had a soft spot for Ferrari, like every driver and would have maybe gone to Ferrari. But he also would have been 37, which not that old, but I could have seen him retiring.
But what a lot of people question is, given his absolute love for Brazil, would he have gone into politics? Right. And would it have made a difference in the presence of Brazil? This is a guy that was so loved.
There's no example we can point to of someone who turns to politics with that much of the support of a nation. Now, you know- Pacquiao.
I don't know if Pacquiao was even as loved by the Philippines as Senna was by Brazil. Really? Well, because again, I don't think people took Pacquiao as seriously.
I don't think people took him- I loved him. Yes.
No, no, I'm an incredible fighter. Yeah, what a warrior.
But I don't know that the people of the Philippines took him as seriously as people would have taken Senna. And who knows? There's no reason to believe Senna would have been a good leader in that regard.
We have no idea. It's just kind of an interesting game of what if? How involved would he have still been in Formula One after? Would he have been an ambassador of the sport? I've seen these AI generated images of what Senna would look like today.
To me, going back to your original thought of like, to have somebody who dies in their prime doing what they love. Okay.
It's not a tragedy in some ways. It is in some ways, but I always wonder what the counterfactual is.
What other spell would have been cast by this genius? Yeah. As I said, I think kind of prepping for this and stumbling upon the poll record, I think it did elevate my assessment of him.
I always thought he was definitely one of the greats, but again, you get into all this hypothetical. It's like, yeah, I don't know what the next four years is.
You play the car lottery. The point you're making is valid, which is the team was great and he was on the team.
But I do think that pole thing for me really pushed it in a direction of like, I can concede that he was likely whatever that tie is. For you, he's clearly above.
Yeah. I will concede that I think it's very difficult to compare drivers across eras.
If you asked Senna who was the greatest, he would have said it was Fullerton, was the greatest guy he ever raced against in karting. And if you asked him in F1, he would have said Fangio.
That was his hero. we have to give Schumacher a lot of credit the fact that he goes to Ferrari which is a shitty team and just sticks

it out and develops that car and then

I mean it's hard to undercount him. Yeah.
I would say, look, if you put a gun to my head and said, who's second best, I'd put Schumacher. Yeah.
But that could be Max. Yeah.
Right. Like, give Max another five years, and maybe it's going to be Max number two.
And you never know, maybe one day I will even say Max is the greatest of all time. Yeah.
The fun thing ahead, and I don't want it for him because I want him to just be the most winningest champion of all time, but Red Bull will have an evolution with the rule changes. And I'm actually most excited about seeing Max driving the second fast car once again, because I think that was the most exciting thing ever.
That he just had to out drive Lewis. And did consistently.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, my friend. Thanks for having me to learn more about Senna.
Yeah, it's bigger than a driver. He's got some kind of a rhythm to him that's really intriguing.
There's an artistry to him that Schumacher doesn't have. There's some kind of artistry for sure to Senna that captivates the emotions a lot more.
Yeah, absolutely. Have you ever been to Sao Paulo? No, I have not been to anywhere in South America.
That's where they keep the cocaine. So I've stayed away.
They have farm to table cocaine. Guys are stomping on it in the background and then it comes right in the door.
I want to go. I want to go desperately.
You've got to come to Interlagos with us one year. Every single year it is the most incredible experience.
And we also usually go to the cemetery every year as well. Oh, okay.
He's buried there. He is buried in Sao Paulo in a beautiful cemetery in the middle of the city.
Sao Paulo is so big, it's hard to believe. We don't have a reference for that.
It's not like LA, Chicago, New York, big. Geographically? Yes.
Okay. Both.
Was there like 25 million people there or something? Yeah, probably close to 30 million people. We always stay at a hotel in the middle of the city.
And when you're in that hotel and you're in the top floor, which is where the gym is,

and you're looking out for 360 degrees, you cannot see the end of a city.

Oh, wow.

It's so big.

Wow.

And yet you see the highways named after him. You see the murals of him on the wall.

Yeah.

And then here's the most amazing thing is when you go to where he's buried,

it's the most unassuming thing. It's just a plaque in the wall.
You just, and then here's the most amazing thing is when you go to where he's buried, it's the most unassuming thing. It's just a plaque in the ground.

And are there always people there?

Usually not. Every time I've gone now there's always hats there, flowers, pictures.
It's

clearly a place where fans go, but it's very quiet. Every time I've gone, I've been alone just with the people I've gone with.
I've taken my daughter a couple of times and it's really, I mean, I know that sounds so weird. It sounds like I'm too obsessed, but it is the closest thing I would have to a religious experience.
Where do you place all his religious stuff? I mean, you can't find audio of him not talking about God at some point. Yep.
I think he drew strength from it, right? Clearly. He really believed in his God-given right to win every race.
Yeah. But there's a duality to it.
On one hand, it presents his humility, which is he's like regularly thanking God for this gift. So that's humble.
But then for me as the cynical atheist, I'm like, but you're also saying God cares more about you than anyone else. So there is also like a deep arrogance to it that like God has picked me to win a race.
It's a push for me. Yeah, that's interesting.
I have a hard time figuring out what I feel about that. If you believe in God and you feel chosen by God, is that super humble? I don't know.

I don't know. I can't relate.
I definitely don't feel chosen. But speaking of listening to things that he talked about, it's amazing how often you hear interviews of him and you hear him talk about

mortality. He did not have a view of immortality.
He always knew that he was on the limit and his

time could come. And he spoke very modestly about that.
Yeah. Well, and the mom was super vocal as well.
Almost all the interviews she's in, she's saying she hopes he quits after he wins or he said he's going to quit if he becomes a world champion, but I don't believe him. That's a bit of a bummer too.
It seems like she was very fearful of that. And that was the outcome.
Yeah. At his gravestone, one of the things it says there is quotes a verse from the Bible that he had called his mom the morning he died.
He hadn't had a good night's sleep. He was not in a good headspace to race that day, but he called his mom and shared with her something he was reading in the Bible about God looking after him and protecting him.
That sort of verse is there on his stone. So it would be hard to make a movie that would live up to his life.
I know that Netflix is actually working on a docudrama. He wasn't married when he died, was he? No, he had a girlfriend.

He loved women, right?

And the doc, he's with another, he liked blonde.

Yeah.

And he liked meeting people on talk shows.

He seemed to date many of the people

that interviewed him on a talk show.

Yeah, at the time he died,

he was dating a very, very famous Brazilian model.

He had a Kennedy thing too.

Like him out on the boats and everything.

The family's kind of rich. There was also some kind of Camelotti vibes to the family.
Yeah. Yeah.
40 years, 30 years, 30 years ago, which is another thing, by the way, I guess you don't remember the day he died because you weren't a fan. I didn't follow the sport.
The very first formula one driver I became aware of by name was Schumacher and mostly because Valentinoino Rossi rode in the two-seater with him and said it was mind-blowing. I was like, oh, wow.
So I think another example of feeling old is I still remember the day he died very clearly. I remember every detail of the room.
I remember hearing it on the radio. I mean, I remember what my radio looked like.
I remember everything. That's a little odd.
I'm sure anybody can relate to an experience like that where you think, how did 30 years go by so fast? Oh yeah. And then I think, well, in 20 years, when it's the 50th anniversary, that's not that far from now.
No. Two seconds.
Yeah. Unfortunately.
We'll be sitting right back here. We'll look a little different.
Well, hopefully not with your help. We'll still look jacked and ready to race.
But this has been a blast. I think it's funny for people like now that you and I are buddies and people go like, what's the thing? Is he your doctor? I'm like, oh, no, no.
I interviewed him.

Cars didn't come up once.

We step outside and all of a sudden he's like, what cars you got?

Okay, I got this.

And I'm like, oh yeah, it's all motorsports.

It's like the greatest connector, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's been fun.

Well, thanks for making time, Dex.

Yeah.

It's such a pleasure.

And thank you for these awesome gifts.

I mean, Jill can complain, but there's room for a little more. She has yet to complain.
To answer your question, I still have leash. What a woman.
I know. She's also gorgeous.
You really knocked it out of the park. Yeah, we both got lucky.
You're fortunate when you have a wife that can tolerate your obsessions. Yeah.
Anytime I watch videos of you talking about the questions you ask her, I'm like, okay, yeah, we got a very similar thing happening at home. Thanks for having me.
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