The first time I saw Ayrton Senna was at the 1983 British/European Formula 3 Championship race at Silverstone. I had bought the previous year’s car from Dick Bennett of West Surrey Racing, but I had no idea how to set up the gear ratios at that track, so I went to his team for advice. Ayrton, who was racing for the team at the time, was sitting on a toolbox, learning about gear ratios. The next time I saw him was at a party after the Macau GP, and we actually spoke. But the mood was not very friendly. He had set the fastest lap of that race, but there was a problem with the timing so it was officially mine. Ayrton was not happy about it, and he came up to me at the table. Of course, I knew about the measurement error, but I pretended otherwise. I guess he wanted the fastest lap in addition to the win and the pole. I knew then that he had uncompromising ambitions. We were basically of the same generation and we were both new stars in F1 at the time. When Ayrton was at Lotus and I was at Ferrari [in 1987], we were competing at about the same level. He would win, then I would win, and so on. Until I moved to McLaren, I had the wrong perception. I had always beaten my teammates, so I naturally thought that Ayrton was next. I underestimated his true strength.

In my first race with McLaren, the season-opener in the U.S.A., I listened to a lot of advice. One of them was that Senna was invincible in the rain. But on the first day of free practice, it rained, and I was ahead of Ayrton. The qualifying day turned out to be dry and I went on to take pole position. For me, it was a logical turn of events, but I think he was a bit surprised. He probably couldn’t sleep that night. I was ahead in the race, but then we had a problem. I couldn’t sit properly in the cockpit because the car was built for Alain Prost, and my foot got caught between the pedals and I crashed into a tire wall. And so Ayrton won the race. Still, at this time I thought he would eventually become my second driver. I soon found out that was not the case. Ayrton saw the big picture, identified my weaknesses, and started to fight back. I wondered if I should follow the same path as Prost. In other words, should I defend myself by all means, including political means, by criticizing the car and disrupting the harmony of the team? But in the end, I decided that the only way to beat him was simply to become a better driver. I was a little faster in the high-speed turns and he dominated in the low-speed turns. I lacked the patience and discipline to drive perfectly in the low-speed turns. I was more sensitive to the chassis setup, and he was more sensitive to the engine’s tuning. But overall, Ayrton was far superior to me. He was physically superior, could grasp the big picture of a race, and basically his speed was phenomenal. He was much more experienced than I was, having been familiar with karts from an early age.

And, like any outstanding driver, Ayrton had enormous ambition and a pathological egotism. It was the same off the track. I was flying home with him after a race. My destination was on the way to his. The natural course of events would have been to stop at my place first and then head to his house. But that would have delayed his arrival by 30 minutes. So we flew to his place first, and then to mine. His plane had to go back and fly around for two extra hours, but Ayrton still chose to go home first.

Then came that day in Imola. It started out like a normal race weekend, then there was an accident, and another, and another. I still wonder to this day how that could have happened. Nothing had happened in the previous ten years, but it all happened at once on that weekend.

A few days later, everyone gathered in Sao Paulo for Ayrton’s funeral. I had never seen anything like that before. It looked as if the entire country had gathered to bury their king. It was the moment I realized how much he had influenced his native Brazil.

For me, Ayrton was a great inspiration. But in the four years after I quit Formula 1, I had to admit that I would never be able to be like him. He was, undoubtedly, very special.