Ayrton Senna: Do the Best With What’s Left

A note to young leaders.

Prepare well enough and the future will look after itself.

The young believe this lie because they have not yet met the future – which has no manners at all.

Ayrton Senna on 24 March 1991, at Interlagos.

By then, Senna was a double world champion, garlanded everywhere except home. Brazilians spoke of a curse. Senna spoke of a duty. The difference between those two words is the difference between a victim and a victor.

Senna led from pole, and serenely expanded his lead to forty seconds with 12 laps remaining.

Then his gearbox began the excruciating business of dying. Fourth gear went first, third and fifth followed, until he was left with sixth alone: a ratio built for flat-out flight.

Driving a Formula 1 car locked in top gear should be impossible. Senna had to haul his car through slow corners the way you might waltz a piano down a fire escape. And behind him Riccardo Patrese’s Williams was gaining four seconds a lap.

The physical toll was brutal. He started to cramp. Then it began to rain, which made the corners all the more treacherous. A cushion of forty seconds thinned to less than three.

Despite all this, somehow, Senna crossed the line in first place by a margin of 2.991 second. Another lap and he may have lost the race.

He was so exhausted that he needed help getting out of his car, and on the podium could barely raise the trophy above his shoulders.

You too one day will prepare meticulously and not get the car you were promised. At some point, probably the worst possible point, the gears will start disappearing, and then it will start to rain. Your duty at that moment is what it has always been: do the best you can with what you’ve got. Not with what you deserved, or what the plan assumed, or what your rival was given. With what’s left.

If you can do that when all about you are cursing and blaming, you may still be beaten. Senna spent the last twelve laps expecting to lose. Do it anyway.

Senna’s trophy was that day’s accident – the determination he showed was the guarantee of a lifetime.