The Senna family is fully supportive of the famous name’s return to Williams.<\/p>\n
18 years ago, Brazil was in mourning over the death at the wheel of a Williams of the great Ayrton Senna.<\/p>\n
The tragedy also halted for many years the young Bruno Senna’s formative karting career, as the sporting world’s attention moved to Italian courtrooms, where Williams bosses were accused of manslaughter.<\/p>\n
So almost two decades on, how did the Senna family – including Ayrton’s once grief-stricken and angry parents and sister – react to Tuesday’s news that their grandson and son had inked a deal to drive for Williams in 2012?<\/p>\n
“Everybody is ecstatic,” the 28-year-old told reporters.<\/p>\n
“I spoke to my grandparents before even I spoke to my mother (Viviane) yesterday when I got the news and my grandmother was so happy, my grandfather had a great laugh.<\/p>\n
“In the family everybody is smiling, everybody has worked very hard for it.\u00a0 It’s very much a family business in our case and we have a great unity and everyone is super-happy about it,” insisted Senna.<\/p>\n
His next responsibility is to safeguard the reputation of the family’s name, after his first two seasons with HRT and Renault did not set the F1 world alight.<\/p>\n
And Bruno also faces the task of shaking off “the stigma” of being arguably a pay-driver, Ayrton Senna’s 1994 teammate Damon Hill said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
But Senna insists he is not a pay-driver.<\/p>\n
“Initially they (Williams) wouldn’t even talk about any type of sponsorship.\u00a0 They just wanted to assess me before anything else,” he said.<\/p>\n
“The only way they would ever give me this chance was if they were comfortable with my performance.”<\/p>\n
According to former F1 driver Luciano Burti, however – now a pundit for Brazil’s TV Globo – the situation is “not ideal” for Williams.<\/p>\n
“For Bruno it’s very good for him to be able to continue his career.\u00a0 As for Williams, at least theoretically the situation is not ideal.<\/p>\n
“The team now has two inexperienced drivers, although in practice Maldonado has shown some speed and Bruno has also shown that he can do a good job,” he said.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Senna family is fully supportive of the famous name’s return to Williams. 18 years ago, Brazil was in mourning over the death at the wheel of a Williams of the great Ayrton Senna. The tragedy also halted for many years the young Bruno Senna’s formative karting career, as the sporting world’s attention moved to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[2329,381,5262,5340,595],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14960"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14960"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14961,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14960\/revisions\/14961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}