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Formula 1
COOPER: Bruno Senna - What’s In A Name?
Despite being the nephew of the late great Ayrton Senna, Bruno Senna has had little handed to him...
Bruno Senna is excited to be joining the Williams team. (Photo: Williams)
The 2012 season is slowly grinding into gear, and Kimi Raikkonen’s two-day test with an old Renault in Valencia was the first sign that the real action is not too far away. Kimi seems to be settling in well with his new team, and after his first run there seems to be a little less cynicism about his comeback.
It’s easy to forget now that just over two months ago he was still in the frame for a seat at Williams, until he made a late change of direction. His arrival at Lotus contributed to Bruno Senna losing out on a seat with the Enstone team. Bruno in turn has landed on his feet at Williams, at the expense of his countryman Rubens Barrichello. Such is the way of F1.
If Raikkonen has something to prove in 2012, then so too does Senna. The Williams will give him a great chance to do that, assuming that the team makes the step that it hopes it will with Renault power and a new technical team.
The problem for Bruno will be the extra attention that has inevitably been generated by his association with the Williams-Renault name, and he’s going to have to spend a lot of time this year dealing with the inevitable questions about Ayrton. He’s done that for his whole career, of course, but this time it will surely be more intense.
There’s no escaping the fact that he was helped into the Williams seat by a useful package of sponsors from Brazil, in the form of Embratel, Gillette and the OBX oil company. If he’s managed to find a budget then good luck to him – he’s far from the only driver on the grid to bring funding to a team.
Nevertheless, he will still have to get the job done in the cockpit, and show signs of upward momentum. No doubt Pastor Maldonado, who gave Barrichello a run for his money in what was a very difficult 2011 car, will be tough competition.
I first met Bruno at Imola in 2004, at the very start – or rather before the start – of what has been an unusual career. Indeed at that stage he had yet to drive a racing car, and plans to do so were only just coming to fruition. Famously, he did not have the sort of teenage professional karting background that so many youngsters enjoy, and when his family did allow him to race later in 2004, he had a lot of learning to do.
He did well, and by 2007 he was in GP2 and showing that he was capable of winning races. Indeed by the end of 2008, Honda, which had such a close relationship with Ayrton, was seriously interested in hiring him to join Jenson Button for 2009.
It very nearly happened – and then Honda pulled out of F1. Trying to salvage his team and reduce the unknowns, Ross Brawn opted to keep the experienced Barrichello, and Senna’s chance slipped away.
“Before the end of the year it was fairly close,” Bruno recalled when I asked him about it. “But by the time Honda pulled out, everything became much more difficult. We kept pushing for that, we felt it was the right way to do it, but it wasn’t meant to be.”
Had he landed the Brawn seat, Bruno would have had gone straight into a winning car. Would he have sunk or swum alongside Button in 2009? We will never know. Instead he drifted into a season of sportscar racing, where he was off the radar.
“I think the lack of racing was the biggest problem, and I didn’t add to my experience of racing itself. It was just kind of a difficult year. But, for sure, there was experience, with tire management and car management, and some of that I can use these days. So it was a good school, but the best school would have been to be in a single-seater again.”
There’s no question that he lost the edge he’d had in GP2, and when he drove the awful HRT in 2010, having finally landed his F1 chance, he didn’t get much of a chance to prove himself.
“It was a difficult year," Senna said. "The first year will never be easy, no matter what team you have. There are always difficulties in your first year. For me what matters is that I learned a lot. For sure I got opportunities because of it. Being in F1 was quite beneficial, quite important. It was not necessarily the best team in terms of image, but at the end of the day you’ve got to work with what you have, and that was the opportunity I had. I wish I could have done better, but that’s just wishful thinking.
“Sports in general are very cruel. It’s the result that counts, especially in motor racing where it’s a sport that’s highly directed to the driver. There’s a team thing but there’s a driver thing, as well, and if you as a driver get only bad results, not through your own fault necessarily, then it rubs on you. There’s not much you can do about that.”
He could have faded away, a one-season wonder like so many drivers in recent times. But he kept plugging away that winter, and finally landed a last-minute job as third driver with LRGP for 2011. Then almost immediately, Robert Kubica was injured – but rather than give Bruno his chance, the team went for Nick Heidfeld. So for a second time he saw a great opportunity slip away.
“When Nick got the drive it was a bit disappointing because I wanted to drive, but not because I felt replaced. It was simply because I wanted to drive," Senna said. "At the end of the day it happened the way it happened, and I got the drive eventually. It didn’t make it any easier, but at the same time it was just one of those things.”
But then his luck turned, and as the team grew frustrated with Heidfeld, Bruno was given a chance to do FP1 in Hungary.
“It was a very difficult situation in the beginning of the year with not knowing what was happening, then Nick getting the drive, and then jumping into the car in the middle of the season. All these things were very difficult," Senna said.
“At the time of Robert’s accident I was coming into the team, and I’d been there a week when everything happened. So it was a crazy mess. I was super happy already with the fact that I had a job, because I didn’t have one at the start of the year. When I got the news that I was going to test the car, I was very nervous, as everything happened so fast.
“We’d been pushing for Fridays for a long time. Where we wanted to have a good Friday was Barcelona, because it’s a good track for me. We were pushing to have a Friday there, and it’s not a track where you miss a lot because everybody has many laps on the track. It took a long time for it to happen, and it was in Hungary.
“It was not a particular amount of movement inside the team for me to race the car; it was just for them to assess me. I think that Friday put things into much better perspective, because the guys didn’t know what I was able to do. In the heat of the moment on a Friday they were happy with the result, and I think it gave them some more security or safety to try me on a race weekend. And I don’t think I disappointed them too much.”
Over the summer break, the relationship between LRGP and Heidfeld unwound, and Bruno was confirmed as a race driver just before the Belgian GP. He didn’t have much time to think about it.
“The possibility started to grow up maybe a couple of weeks before the actual race, but they were still very careful, we were pushing, pushing. On the week of the Grand Prix they told me the chances were really good, but it still wasn’t solved with Nick.
“I only got the word that I was going to drive when I arrived in Spa on Wednesday evening, so that’s how late it was. In fairness, if everything had happened two weeks before, it would have been much easier, because I would have been purely focused on doing that, and had more time to make a seat. Everything would have been easier.”
The Spa weekend got off to the worst possible start when he crashed heavily in the first practice session.
“It wasn’t my proudest moment,"Senna said. "It was a very difficult situation, a very slippery track, and I wasn’t the only one to crash there. Paul [Di Resta] had a moment there, as well. It’s a very difficult situation because you’re trying to prove yourself, and I was going fast, the lap times were pretty decent. But I knew there was more there. It’s just so difficult to take everything out of it in the first session you have in the car, and it’s wet, and Spa. ... I ended up making a mistake, and it put me in a slightly difficult condition.
“To be honest with you, come Saturday afternoon I was much more nervous than I was on Friday morning, when we got to qualifying and everything was drying up. I knew that in the dry it would be much harder. That weekend was a very thrilling weekend, and for sure I lost a few days of my life just for the stress of the weekend!”
He more than made up for his mistake by qualifying an amazing seventh, only to crash at the first corner. A solid recovery drive at least brought a finish, and some useful experience.
He subsequently regularly qualified in the top 10, although the only good finish was a ninth at Monza. There were certainly races where he could have done better, but given the fact that drivers thrown in at mid-season often struggle, it was perhaps inevitable that it would not be easy.
“Monza was a very good race, and Spa was a very good race, apart from the first corner," Senna said. "Even with the drive through, the safety car kind of put me back into contention. The only properly poor race I felt I had was Korea. I just got stuck behind other cars, and my car was full of rubber [debris], I lost loads of downforce. That was bad. Race craft only comes with racing, and I need a bit more time with that.
“At the end of the day, speed can be there, and sometimes you struggle up and down. If you can deliver fast, then it’s always great. If it takes people by surprise, then people start to pay attention. Everybody was paying attention to my qualifying performances.
“But there’s no way around race craft, and if you look at it properly, the last time I had a race was at the end of 2008 in GP2. In 2009, I did endurance races, which is very different type of racing. In 2010, I wasn’t racing, I was pushing to do fast laps, but not really racing, never attacking. And in 2011, I had no racing whatsoever [until Spa]. All this period without racing has set me back massively on the actual racing.”
He’d done enough to earn the chance to stay at Lotus, until in the end the team went for Raikkonen and Romain Grosjean. But others had been watching, and Frank Williams – the man who has in the past hired a Hill, a Villeneuve and a Rosberg – obviously liked the idea of having a Senna on board once more.
Had Bruno not raced for LRGP last year, and thus been able to put the HRT season behind him, the Williams chance is unlikely to have come along. In other words, his stock was higher.
“I think for sure it took the edge off last year’s bad image. The poor performance, even though it doesn’t come from you, it rubs on you," Senna said. "I’m sure that in 2010 I could have had the best race of my life, and still no one would have noticed it! There’s still some of that, but that bitter taste is kind of going away. I think I’m on the map much better than I’ve ever been.”
Plenty of people think that Bruno has had it easy, and certainly the name has gotten him attention that someone like countryman Lucas di Grassi – a man of comparable talent – has never had. But, equally, he’s had setbacks, and he’s had to fight.
“I believe that I became a much stronger or resilient person, because those two years were very difficult for me, it was a very rocky road after the end of GP2, very rocky in terms of things going up and down, and it’s very difficult to deal with those situations," Senna said.
There’s no question that having a budget helped to open the door at Williams, but that money wouldn’t be there had he not shown such promise, especially in GP2. And if he wasn’t such a thoroughly nice guy, with a personality that wins over anyone he meets. Stuff like that matters when it comes to getting sponsors.
When I spoke to Bruno, before the Williams deal came to fruition, he admitted that having funding gave him some bargaining power: “I think so. It’s very important to be able to offer a good package to the team, as you say. Most teams need money these days, and if Brazil can supply some of that backing, why not? I’m sure that 90 percent of the drivers on the grid came in with a good chunk of money, so until you actually understand how F1 works, you kind of fight against it.
“Then you understand this is the way it works. The important thing for me is to get the opportunity to show what I can do, and then after that everything becomes automatic. I hope we can get the right opportunity.”
That opportunity came a few weeks later – and now it’s up to Bruno to make the most of it. How good the new Williams will be is another question entirely.
Adam Cooper notched up his 27th season as a racing journalist in 2011. He has written about F1 for SPEED.com since 2005. Follow him on Twitter.
The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED
It’s easy to forget now that just over two months ago he was still in the frame for a seat at Williams, until he made a late change of direction. His arrival at Lotus contributed to Bruno Senna losing out on a seat with the Enstone team. Bruno in turn has landed on his feet at Williams, at the expense of his countryman Rubens Barrichello. Such is the way of F1.
If Raikkonen has something to prove in 2012, then so too does Senna. The Williams will give him a great chance to do that, assuming that the team makes the step that it hopes it will with Renault power and a new technical team.
The problem for Bruno will be the extra attention that has inevitably been generated by his association with the Williams-Renault name, and he’s going to have to spend a lot of time this year dealing with the inevitable questions about Ayrton. He’s done that for his whole career, of course, but this time it will surely be more intense.
There’s no escaping the fact that he was helped into the Williams seat by a useful package of sponsors from Brazil, in the form of Embratel, Gillette and the OBX oil company. If he’s managed to find a budget then good luck to him – he’s far from the only driver on the grid to bring funding to a team.
Nevertheless, he will still have to get the job done in the cockpit, and show signs of upward momentum. No doubt Pastor Maldonado, who gave Barrichello a run for his money in what was a very difficult 2011 car, will be tough competition.
I first met Bruno at Imola in 2004, at the very start – or rather before the start – of what has been an unusual career. Indeed at that stage he had yet to drive a racing car, and plans to do so were only just coming to fruition. Famously, he did not have the sort of teenage professional karting background that so many youngsters enjoy, and when his family did allow him to race later in 2004, he had a lot of learning to do.
He did well, and by 2007 he was in GP2 and showing that he was capable of winning races. Indeed by the end of 2008, Honda, which had such a close relationship with Ayrton, was seriously interested in hiring him to join Jenson Button for 2009.
It very nearly happened – and then Honda pulled out of F1. Trying to salvage his team and reduce the unknowns, Ross Brawn opted to keep the experienced Barrichello, and Senna’s chance slipped away.
“Before the end of the year it was fairly close,” Bruno recalled when I asked him about it. “But by the time Honda pulled out, everything became much more difficult. We kept pushing for that, we felt it was the right way to do it, but it wasn’t meant to be.”
Had he landed the Brawn seat, Bruno would have had gone straight into a winning car. Would he have sunk or swum alongside Button in 2009? We will never know. Instead he drifted into a season of sportscar racing, where he was off the radar.
“I think the lack of racing was the biggest problem, and I didn’t add to my experience of racing itself. It was just kind of a difficult year. But, for sure, there was experience, with tire management and car management, and some of that I can use these days. So it was a good school, but the best school would have been to be in a single-seater again.”
There’s no question that he lost the edge he’d had in GP2, and when he drove the awful HRT in 2010, having finally landed his F1 chance, he didn’t get much of a chance to prove himself.
“It was a difficult year," Senna said. "The first year will never be easy, no matter what team you have. There are always difficulties in your first year. For me what matters is that I learned a lot. For sure I got opportunities because of it. Being in F1 was quite beneficial, quite important. It was not necessarily the best team in terms of image, but at the end of the day you’ve got to work with what you have, and that was the opportunity I had. I wish I could have done better, but that’s just wishful thinking.
“Sports in general are very cruel. It’s the result that counts, especially in motor racing where it’s a sport that’s highly directed to the driver. There’s a team thing but there’s a driver thing, as well, and if you as a driver get only bad results, not through your own fault necessarily, then it rubs on you. There’s not much you can do about that.”
He could have faded away, a one-season wonder like so many drivers in recent times. But he kept plugging away that winter, and finally landed a last-minute job as third driver with LRGP for 2011. Then almost immediately, Robert Kubica was injured – but rather than give Bruno his chance, the team went for Nick Heidfeld. So for a second time he saw a great opportunity slip away.
“When Nick got the drive it was a bit disappointing because I wanted to drive, but not because I felt replaced. It was simply because I wanted to drive," Senna said. "At the end of the day it happened the way it happened, and I got the drive eventually. It didn’t make it any easier, but at the same time it was just one of those things.”
But then his luck turned, and as the team grew frustrated with Heidfeld, Bruno was given a chance to do FP1 in Hungary.
“It was a very difficult situation in the beginning of the year with not knowing what was happening, then Nick getting the drive, and then jumping into the car in the middle of the season. All these things were very difficult," Senna said.
“At the time of Robert’s accident I was coming into the team, and I’d been there a week when everything happened. So it was a crazy mess. I was super happy already with the fact that I had a job, because I didn’t have one at the start of the year. When I got the news that I was going to test the car, I was very nervous, as everything happened so fast.
“We’d been pushing for Fridays for a long time. Where we wanted to have a good Friday was Barcelona, because it’s a good track for me. We were pushing to have a Friday there, and it’s not a track where you miss a lot because everybody has many laps on the track. It took a long time for it to happen, and it was in Hungary.
“It was not a particular amount of movement inside the team for me to race the car; it was just for them to assess me. I think that Friday put things into much better perspective, because the guys didn’t know what I was able to do. In the heat of the moment on a Friday they were happy with the result, and I think it gave them some more security or safety to try me on a race weekend. And I don’t think I disappointed them too much.”
Over the summer break, the relationship between LRGP and Heidfeld unwound, and Bruno was confirmed as a race driver just before the Belgian GP. He didn’t have much time to think about it.
“The possibility started to grow up maybe a couple of weeks before the actual race, but they were still very careful, we were pushing, pushing. On the week of the Grand Prix they told me the chances were really good, but it still wasn’t solved with Nick.
“I only got the word that I was going to drive when I arrived in Spa on Wednesday evening, so that’s how late it was. In fairness, if everything had happened two weeks before, it would have been much easier, because I would have been purely focused on doing that, and had more time to make a seat. Everything would have been easier.”
The Spa weekend got off to the worst possible start when he crashed heavily in the first practice session.
“It wasn’t my proudest moment,"Senna said. "It was a very difficult situation, a very slippery track, and I wasn’t the only one to crash there. Paul [Di Resta] had a moment there, as well. It’s a very difficult situation because you’re trying to prove yourself, and I was going fast, the lap times were pretty decent. But I knew there was more there. It’s just so difficult to take everything out of it in the first session you have in the car, and it’s wet, and Spa. ... I ended up making a mistake, and it put me in a slightly difficult condition.
“To be honest with you, come Saturday afternoon I was much more nervous than I was on Friday morning, when we got to qualifying and everything was drying up. I knew that in the dry it would be much harder. That weekend was a very thrilling weekend, and for sure I lost a few days of my life just for the stress of the weekend!”
He more than made up for his mistake by qualifying an amazing seventh, only to crash at the first corner. A solid recovery drive at least brought a finish, and some useful experience.
He subsequently regularly qualified in the top 10, although the only good finish was a ninth at Monza. There were certainly races where he could have done better, but given the fact that drivers thrown in at mid-season often struggle, it was perhaps inevitable that it would not be easy.
“Monza was a very good race, and Spa was a very good race, apart from the first corner," Senna said. "Even with the drive through, the safety car kind of put me back into contention. The only properly poor race I felt I had was Korea. I just got stuck behind other cars, and my car was full of rubber [debris], I lost loads of downforce. That was bad. Race craft only comes with racing, and I need a bit more time with that.
“At the end of the day, speed can be there, and sometimes you struggle up and down. If you can deliver fast, then it’s always great. If it takes people by surprise, then people start to pay attention. Everybody was paying attention to my qualifying performances.
“But there’s no way around race craft, and if you look at it properly, the last time I had a race was at the end of 2008 in GP2. In 2009, I did endurance races, which is very different type of racing. In 2010, I wasn’t racing, I was pushing to do fast laps, but not really racing, never attacking. And in 2011, I had no racing whatsoever [until Spa]. All this period without racing has set me back massively on the actual racing.”
He’d done enough to earn the chance to stay at Lotus, until in the end the team went for Raikkonen and Romain Grosjean. But others had been watching, and Frank Williams – the man who has in the past hired a Hill, a Villeneuve and a Rosberg – obviously liked the idea of having a Senna on board once more.
Had Bruno not raced for LRGP last year, and thus been able to put the HRT season behind him, the Williams chance is unlikely to have come along. In other words, his stock was higher.
“I think for sure it took the edge off last year’s bad image. The poor performance, even though it doesn’t come from you, it rubs on you," Senna said. "I’m sure that in 2010 I could have had the best race of my life, and still no one would have noticed it! There’s still some of that, but that bitter taste is kind of going away. I think I’m on the map much better than I’ve ever been.”
Plenty of people think that Bruno has had it easy, and certainly the name has gotten him attention that someone like countryman Lucas di Grassi – a man of comparable talent – has never had. But, equally, he’s had setbacks, and he’s had to fight.
“I believe that I became a much stronger or resilient person, because those two years were very difficult for me, it was a very rocky road after the end of GP2, very rocky in terms of things going up and down, and it’s very difficult to deal with those situations," Senna said.
There’s no question that having a budget helped to open the door at Williams, but that money wouldn’t be there had he not shown such promise, especially in GP2. And if he wasn’t such a thoroughly nice guy, with a personality that wins over anyone he meets. Stuff like that matters when it comes to getting sponsors.
When I spoke to Bruno, before the Williams deal came to fruition, he admitted that having funding gave him some bargaining power: “I think so. It’s very important to be able to offer a good package to the team, as you say. Most teams need money these days, and if Brazil can supply some of that backing, why not? I’m sure that 90 percent of the drivers on the grid came in with a good chunk of money, so until you actually understand how F1 works, you kind of fight against it.
“Then you understand this is the way it works. The important thing for me is to get the opportunity to show what I can do, and then after that everything becomes automatic. I hope we can get the right opportunity.”
That opportunity came a few weeks later – and now it’s up to Bruno to make the most of it. How good the new Williams will be is another question entirely.
Adam Cooper notched up his 27th season as a racing journalist in 2011. He has written about F1 for SPEED.com since 2005. Follow him on Twitter.
The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED
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