Tag Archives: Ayrton Senna

senna

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJKtOYmK8I0

A vintage clip, uploaded by Motorsport.ie, of a 22 year-old Ayrton Senna, two years prior to his Formula One debut, winning the Benson & Hedges EuroSport Leinster Trophy Race in 1982 at Mondello Park in Kildare.

Alex Eustace writes:

The future Formula One star is driving his FF2000 Van Diemen and he is still racing under the name of Ayrton Da Silva. The race finishes at about 15 minutes in the video and you can catch Ayrton in all his helmet-less glory doing a victory lap.

G’wan the Joey Greenan from Belfast, who (as Alex also points out) actually overtakes Senna early in the race and pushes him for most of it.

“In the excellent film ‘Senna’, the documentary currently showing in cinemas on the life of the Brazilian racing driver, there is a scene where suddenly a new racing car comes on the circuit that starts winning everything.

Senna, like all the racing drivers, becomes obsessed and wants the same technology as this car so he too can burn up the track.

“The scene could be a metaphor for what happened in Irish banking. Everybody, or most at least, in Irish banking sought to ‘out-Anglo’ and the carnage at the end has not, metaphorically, been much different to what happens at the end of the Senna documentary.”

Executive chairman of Allied Irish Banks, David Hodgkinson, at the MacGill Summer School yesterday.

Ayrton Senna: A phenomenally gifted driver who drew millions of new fans to Formula One. Considered a saint in his native Brazil he fought with officials throughout his career for tougher safety measures on Grand Prix circuits.

AIB: Regulation-free, bonus-crazed “faintly dim rugby players” turn profitable, 200-year-old conservative lender into cash-starved, state-funded zombie.

Metaphor sturdiness: poor

Senna And AIB’s Drive For Success (Deaglan De Breadun, Irish Times)