FORMULA ONE:SEVEN SECONDS. Just about enough time to sign his name on the programme stuffed into his hand by a fan as he walks towards his team's Sepang Circuit hospitality unit.
It’s a name cloaked in the stuff of legend. Senna, three-time champion, 41 wins from 161 starts and 65 pole positions. This, though, is a different Senna, the name Bruno scrawled lazily across the page, and the sort of victories his late uncle Ayrton weaved legend from, are, for the moment, a long, long way away.
Transfer those seven seconds to the track here in Malaysia and you get the shape of the gap separating yesterday’s quickest car, the McLaren of 2008 world champion Lewis Hamilton from the Hispania Racing car of F1 latest Senna.
It’s a splinter of time when scribbling your name across the page of a magazine but on the race track it’s different, those seven seconds stretching into another kind of existence – one driver hoping for a finish on the top step of the podium, the other just hoping to finish.
Hamilton’s post-session comment was succinct, the words of a man used to operating at the front of the grid. “I’ve got a good feeling in the car,” he said. “We’re still trying to get a better feeling for the tyres, but we’ve made some positive first steps.”
For Senna things are different. “At the moment we are giving all the feedback, all the input to set the car up. This is very difficult because we have a very new relationship with the engineers and it’s very hard for them to quantify what we are talking about. But we’re getting a little closer to the ballpark.”
Not close enough, though. The massive gaps between the three new teams (Hispania, Virgin and Lotus) and the established field in F1 have led to accusations that the sport has rushed into repopulating a grid thinned by the withdrawals of Honda, Toyota and BMW and that the grid has developed into a three-league affair with a tiny coterie of competitive teams chased by a globular midfield all of whom are being hampered by glacially slow backmarkers.
Senna, though, disputes this perception, suggesting that without the grid expansion drivers such as he, passed over by the established forces, would never get the chance to prove their worth at the highest level. But despite Senna’s admission that the car is “not well sorted at all” he is quick to find an upside to the problems. “You need to adjust your objectives and expectations,” he insists. “And as things develop we will be adjusting those objectives towards better achievements.”
This afternoon in qualifying, the Senna name will once again appear on the timesheets, but to find it you’ll have search beyond the glamour of the space occupied by names like Hamilton, Vettel (second quickest yesterday), Button and Schumacher (fourth and fifth in free practice).
It’s a place the Senna of legend would have rarely found himself but which his nephew believe he would appreciate. “I hope he’s proud because I’m not being lazy that’s for sure,” he says.
“All I can do is be the best I can be every time I drive the car. That’s the sort of thing other people notice and that will get you noticed inside this team as well and maybe the chance exists for another year. Only time will tell.”
