Ayrton Senna
49 quotes
Biography
Ayrton Senna da Silva was a Brazilian racing driver and philanthropist who competed in Formula One from 1984 to 1994. Senna won three Formula One World Drivers' Championship titles with McLaren, and—at the time of his death—held the record for most pole positions (65), among others; he won 41 Grands Prix across 11 seasons.
"I started racing go-karts. And I love karts. It's the most breathtaking sport in the world. More than F1, indeed, I used to like it most."
"It's important that the drivers stay together, because in difficult moments we have each other. If we are not together the financial and political interests of the organisers and constructors come to the fore."
"Racing, competing, is in my blood. It's part of me, it's part of my life; I've been doing it all my life. And it stands up before anything else."
"By being a racing driver you are under risk all the time. By being a racing driver means you are racing with other people. And if you no longer go for a gap that exists, you are no longer a racing driver because we are competing, we are competing to win. And the main motivation to all of us is to compete for victory, it's not to come 3rd, 4th, 5th or 6th. I race to win as long as I feel it's possible. Sometimes you get it wrong? Sure, it's impossible to get it right all the time. But I race designed to win, as long as I feel I'm doing it right."
"Whoever you are, no matter what social position you have, rich or poor, always show great strength and determination, and always do everything with much love and deep faith in God. One day you will reach your goal."
"I believe in the ability of focusing strongly in something, then you are able to extract even more out of it. It's been like this all my life, and it's been only a question of improving it, and learning more and more and there is almost no end. As you go through you just keep finding more and more. It's very interesting, it's fascinating."
"On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit. And you then go for this limit and you touch this limit, and you think, 'Okay, this is the limit.' As soon as you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high."
"We are made of emotions, we are all looking for emotions, it's only a question of finding the way to experience them. There are many different ways of experience them all. Perhaps one different thing, only that, one particular thing that Formula One can provide you, is that you know we are always expose to danger, danger of getting hurt, danger of dying."
"I won and I'm happy and that is it."
"If you take away Eau Rouge, you take away the reason why I do this."
"If I ever happen to have an accident that eventually costs me my life, I hope it is in one go. I would not like to be in a wheelchair. I would not like to be in a hospital suffering from whatever injury it was. If I’m going to live, I want to live fully, very intensely, because I am an intense person. It would ruin my life if I had to live partially."
"Basically our championship starts here. Fourteen races, not sixteen. It's not a comfortable position to be in, but that's the reality. The team is conscious about the challenge we have to make to recover the ground over Benetton."
"There are no small accidents here."
"Ayrton Senna may be a genius, but he is a flawed genius."
"Senna really is the best racing driver in the world, not only the fastest."
"The best driver in Grand Prix racing, the best driver in the world by a long way."
"Without any doubt the best driver in Grand Prix racing today."
"Without doubt the greatest racing driver ever."
"The guy is head and shoulders ahead of everybody else currently in Formula One."
"Probably the greatest racing driver of all time."
"Ayrton Senna is a genius. I define genius as just the right side of imbalance. He is highly developed to the point where he's almost over the edge. It's a close call."
"I tried to find weaknesses in Senna, but I couldn't. He is 100 per cent in everything. I learned a lot from him, so for me it was a good three years. And I still like Senna. We had good fun, a good relationship."
"Senna was the greatest driver ever and when someone like him is killed you have to ask yourself what is the point of it all."
"To my mind, he was the best driver Grand Prix racing has ever seen."
"He might have been the greatest driver of all time. There was not a weakness in Ayrton Senna."