Rubens Barrichello: ‘There was a spiritual link between Ayrton and me’

Where do you begin when you are interviewing a man who has started 322 Formula 1 grands prix, who has won 11 of them, who has stood on 68 F1 grand prix podiums, who has bagged 14 F1 grand prix pole positions, who has driven 17 F1 grand prix fastest laps – much of that magnum opus compiled in Ferraris – yet who, even now, is still racing and indeed still winning? That’s right: in August of this year, at the wheel of a Ford Mustang, 53-year-old Rubens Barrichello won the NASCAR Brazil championship, and, more remarkable still, he did so at his first attempt.

Although he retired from F1 in 2011, he has never stopped racing. In 2012 he dipped a toe into IndyCar – briefly – then he embarked on a career in Brazilian Stock Car Pro, which championship he has won twice, in 2014 and 2022, and in which series he continues to race to this day. So where do you start when your interviewee has done so much, so well, over such a long time? There is only one answer: at the beginning. “What are your earliest memories of motor sport?” I venture.

“I lived the first 20 years of my life in Interlagos,” he says, smiling via video call from a visibly comfy house, which is in a significantly posher suburb of São Paulo than Interlagos. “I was born in Interlagos – and I think that if you live in Interlagos the chances are that you’re probably going to race a car, or at least a go-kart, at some point. But, before I ever did that, I used to ride my bicycle to my grandma’s place, and she lived right beside the circuit. Her house had the best view you could get, right between Turns 1 and 2 of the old Interlagos.

“So I used to watch the cars going round and round and round, from my grandma’s place, and my dreams were inspired by that early experience. And my uncle, Darcio dos Santos, who was a racing driver [and more recently a race team owner], a very good one actually, a Brazilian champion, was driving in Formula Vee back then, and every time he drove out of the pits he would look up at my grandma’s window and give me a wave if I was there.

“My dream was: I want to do that. Then, when I was six years old, my grandpa gave me a kart of my own, and then my dream became: I want to do Formula 1. And, to make that possible, not only my dream but also my obsession then became: I want to develop as a racing driver. And, you know, I’m jumping forward many years now, sorry, but when I first started racing in F1, in 1993, the second grand prix I did was at Interlagos. The circuit was different from how it had been when I was a boy, and a grandstand had been built between the track and my grandma’s house, but I could still just about see her house from my Jordan F1 car, and I could still remember the six-year-old boy I’d been, who’d dreamed big. And now I was living that dream.”

“That’s an extraordinary story – and an inspirational one, too,” I reply, but my interlocutor is already in full flow and he does not need another question to trigger further reminiscences: “Because of the layout of the old Interlagos, I could see almost the whole circuit from my grandma’s house. I could see almost everything. I remember so well the 1980 Brazilian Grand Prix, when I would have been seven. I was watching all those beautiful F1 cars, and I have a particular memory of Mario Andretti’s Essex-sponsored Lotus 81, because he spun off after just one lap right in front of me, and I said to my grandma, ‘Let me climb down and touch that car,’ but she wouldn’t allow it.

“Then, when I started karting, my father used to take me to the circuits, and straight away I had a good feeling for what my kart was doing. I used to come back to the pits and say to my father, ‘Look, Dad, it’s misfiring at the first stage of the throttle opening,’ but he wouldn’t believe that a little kid could be sensitive to something as subtle as that, so he’d pretend to adjust something, but actually do nothing, then tell me he’d fixed it, and I’d go out again then come back in and say, ‘Dad, nothing’s different, it’s still misfiring.’ He was amazed. I’ve always had that special sense for what a race car is doing – and, when I got to F1, super-experienced engineers like Gary Anderson [at Jordan] and Ross Brawn [at Ferrari and Brawn] used to say, ‘Rubens is a superstar at setting up the car.’ And I had that from the very beginning.

“Ayrton was always very kind to me. He was like a big brother”

“From early on I kind of became part of my kart, part of its movement, at one with its tyres, dampers and suspension, and I always wanted to save the tyres, because my father didn’t have enough money to buy new ones. That made me a driver who never wanted to slide a kart – or, later, a car. I wanted to drive on the limit, not over it, and keep everything straight. And I won five Brazilian karting championships, first as a kid then as a teenager, and one of my rivals was Christian Fittipaldi, and beating someone from that famous Brazilian racing family made a lot of people pay attention. I still enjoy karting now. I qualified this year to race in the masters section of the Karting World Championship in Bahrain. I love it all. I always have. For example, when I was just four, I was taken by my father to watch my uncle race his kart, and one of the other karters in that race was Ayrton Senna da Silva. Ayrton was leading, but he was taken out by another karter. And Ayrton sat in his kart by the side of the track and waited for the guy to come round again, and, when he did, he took the guy out, and after that it was a mess, like a boxing ring. Then Ayrton started to do well, really well, in Europe, and we used to read about him back home. Then when I got to England, later, I bought or rented every VHS tape of his races that I could find, all the races he’d done before F1, and I watched every minute of all of them.

“Ayrton was always very kind to me. He was like a big brother to me, because he knew I didn’t have a lot of money, so he always did his best to help me. He introduced me to people. He did whatever he could. But he was a hero as well as a big brother. I always used to watch his hands in the videos I’d bought or rented. The way he drove – wow! – I was just in love with that. So, yes, from early on, he had a very big impact on my career.”

Now seems like an opportune moment to move our conversation on to F1 – after all, we have 322 grands prix to consider. Rubens warms to the theme. “I was only 20, and I was testing the 1993 Jordan car at Silverstone, the small circuit, and after just 10 laps Gary [Anderson, the team’s technical director], said to me, ‘Rubens, you’re the guy for me.’ Like I said before, it was the way I was translating what the car was doing. Gary said to the other engineers, ‘We can really develop this car with this boy.’

“My first grand prix was at Kyalami, in the Jordan, and I remember the amazing feeling of being in the same driver briefings as people like Ayrton, Alain [Prost], Michael [Schumacher], Gerhard [Berger], and so on. It was so…” – he hunts for the mot juste, then he settles for – “…nice. It was so full of energy. But I had a gearbox failure in that race, Kyalami, and another gearbox failure next time out, at home at Interlagos. Then the next race was at Donington, when it was so wet, and I did well, because I was always good in the rain, but then I ran out of fuel. And that weekend I met George Harrison, the Beatle, and he said to me, ‘You have a musical name, because ‘bari’ is a musical term, short for ‘baritone’, and so is ‘cello’. So that’s why I wanted to come and say hi to you.’ It was an amazing experience for a boy from Interlagos.”

“Eddie Jordan and Jackie Stewart were legends but very different”

The following year, 1994, Barrichello remained with Jordan, but, although he kicked off the season with fourth place at Interlagos and third at Aida – his first F1 podium –everything went terribly wrong next time out, at Imola. “There was a spiritual link between Ayrton and me,” he says solemnly. “There was something that somehow drew us together. I had that enormous accident at Imola, then he had an even worse one. And maybe it was my huge crash, but, although I know I carried his coffin at his funeral, and I’ve seen photographs of me doing that, I have no memory of it. I think I lost a bit of my memory after my massive Imola shunt, but actually I think maybe God was protecting me by blocking those memories, because, always, even straight after he’d died, when I think of Ayrton I think of him smiling.

“But, all the same, him not being there in 1994 was hard. I don’t think many people understood how bad it was for me, how much I was suffering. Then I decided, and I said, ‘I hope that, although Ayrton is no longer with us on track, I hope I can do things on track in his place that will make Brazil proud.’ I wasn’t trying to compare myself to Ayrton, but I wanted to do well for him and for Brazil. And, when we raced in Brazil in 1995, which was the first race of that season, the grief really hit me. When I looked at all the spectators, I said to myself, ‘Jesus, this is up to me now. Me and [the two Forti drivers] Roberto Moreno and Pedro Diniz are the only Brazilians in the race – how am I going to manage?’ And someone said to me, ‘Perhaps you don’t understand how much Senna loved you, but, believe me, he did, and he’s looking after you.’ And although that made me miss him even more, that sadness was an amazing feeling.”

Barrichello had a decent ’95 – the highlight was second place in Montreal, followed by strong points finishes at Magny-Cours, Spa and the Nürburgring – but 1996, still with Jordan, was better still. He often qualified well, and he raced and scored points in Buenos Aires, the Nürburgring, Imola, Silverstone, Hockenheim, Budapest and Monza. Even so, after four seasons with Eddie Jordan’s eponymous outfit, for 1997 Rubens was on his way to a brand-new team, also eponymous, also founded by a larger-than-life F1 character: Jackie Stewart’s Stewart Grand Prix.

“Eddie and Jackie were both legends, but they were very different. People didn’t understand Eddie until they knew him. But I knew him, and he and I always hugged each other when we saw each other, right up to the very end of his life. I was the first driver to get him a pole position; I was the first driver to get him a podium; he gave me my F1 chance. Then, at the end of 1996, when he signed Ralf [Schumacher] and Fisico [Giancarlo Fisichella], I started speaking to Jackie. I liked what I heard. He was very serious about his plans for 1997, very focused, and he had Bridgestone tyres [rather than the Goodyears with which Jordan would be persisting for 1997], which appealed to me. And at Monaco, which was only the team’s fifth race, I finished second, beaten by only Michael and Ferrari, and that was fantastic.

“And you know something else I’m proud of? Jackie used to take almost all his drivers to Oulton Park, and coach them there, even F1 drivers. But he never did that with me. I had great respect for him – he was a great man and he’d been a great driver – and I like to think he had great respect for me, too, and that that’s why he didn’t try to coach me. I think he could see that I wasn’t sliding his F1 car, that I wasn’t trying to force it to do things that it didn’t want to do. I think our driving styles were similar. We both aimed to be smooth – instinctively. I see it when I sit next to him when he’s driving a road car. I see it when we play golf together.”

Barrichello spent three years with Stewart – 1997, 1998 and 1999 – and, apart from that superb second place at Monaco in 1997, the highlights were three third places, all of them in 1999, at Imola, Magny-Cours and Nürburgring. “That Nürburgring race? Well, I was happy for Jackie, of course I was, and also for Johnny [Herbert, who won it for Stewart], but obviously I’d love to have won it. But I don’t mind, because I love Johnny.”

Perhaps another reason he did not mind was that he knew he was about to bag the biggest prize that any F1 driver can ever dream of: a Ferrari deal. He spent six years at the Scuderia, and he won nine grands prix in rosso corsa. “I started talking to Ferrari at Monaco in 1999,” he recalls. “One of Jean Todt’s assistants came up to me in the paddock and said, ‘Mr Todt wants to talk to you,’ and he gave me a piece of paper with a message that said, ‘Meet me at the Hotel de Paris.’ So I went, on my moped, and I met Jean Todt. He said, ‘How would you like to drive for Ferrari?’ And I said, ‘Very much.’ But I knew that the team was built around Michael, so I added, ‘But only as long as there’s nothing in my contract that says that I have to give way to Michael. But, yes, if you want a serious racing driver, someone who’s going to race to win for you, then, yes, I’d absolutely love to do that.’

“They gave me a contract, and it was written that way. There was nothing in it about me having to give way, or having to obey team orders, or having to be number two to Michael. So I signed it. I knew that Michael was a superhero, I knew that Michael was something special, and I knew that I was just the boy from Interlagos who’d always dreamed big. But I was excited, because I wanted to be given a chance against the very best, and, according to my contract, that’s what I now had. What I didn’t know, but I found out later, was that all those clauses were in Michael’s contract, even though they weren’t in mine.”

“For him to be number one, do you mean?” I suggest.

“Yes. Yes, exactly. So many times when I was looking good they told me to drop the revs, when there was no need for me to drop the revs, and other things like that. So many times I would have been able to do better, to win more races. OK, Michael was probably better than me, but he was probably better than everyone. But how much better than me was he? We’ll never know.

“So all I can say is that nine grand prix wins for Ferrari, in that situation, is pretty good, but I know that no one will give a damn about that except me. It’s the same as: no one will ever give a damn about the fact that Ayrton was brilliant at Donington in 1993, of course he was, but I went from 12th on the grid to fourth place on lap one while he was going from fourth on the grid to first place on lap one. People see what they see, but I know what I did, and I’m proud of it, and I hope that my sons and their kids will always be proud of it, too.

“Also, at Ferrari, I was always the one who developed the car, much more than Michael did. I was the one who tested the tyres, who tested the suspension options, and I loved that, and the engineers loved it too, and the fact that I was good at that meant that there was actually a lot of harmony in the team.”

“How did you get on with Michael?” I ask.

“Michael often stayed with me when we raced in Brazil,” he begins. “He liked hanging out with me and my friends in Brazil. But he was always a little reserved, always holding something back, unless he’d had a drink. If he’d had a drink, he used to open up a bit more, and then he used to say to me, ‘Rubens, you’re bloody good, you know. You’re bloody quick.’ But even then, even if he’d had a drink, if you tried to go deeper, to ask something more personal, he’d change the subject. But, even so, when we were talking like that, perhaps a little tipsy, I felt that he wanted – no, maybe even needed – to say a little more. But he always stopped himself. That was Michael. He was a very private person.”

“You have to remember that Michael wanted to win at all costs”

Michael Schumacher is an enigma. Was he one of the greatest drivers in the history of our sport? Yes, he was, undoubtedly. But, equally, there is mystery around him, and that mystery will surely never now be unravelled, owing to the diminished situation in which he now exists. Nonetheless, although his abilities were god-like, there was also something of the devil about him. He was sometimes vicious on track, unnecessarily so. “Why?” I ask.

There is a pause. “OK, look, I’m not saying that he was bad. I’m not saying that at all. I’m just saying that he and I were different…” – there is another pause, a longer one this time – “…but, you know, on the day that those guys [Michael and his brother Ralf] lost their mom [April 20, 2003], when we were at Imola, they were first and second on the grid, and they raced each other hard. Well, that didn’t feel right to me. That could have ended in tears. There’s a time and a place for two brothers to race each other hard, and maybe that wasn’t it.” For the record, they finished first (Michael) and fourth (Ralf). Rubens was third.

“Look, I’m not saying they were wrong. I’m just saying that that’s not the way I’d act if it was my mother and my brother. But you have to remember that Michael wanted to win at all costs – at any cost perhaps. That was just the way he was. At Hungaroring in 2010, when he was in a Merc and I was in a Williams, he gave me no room, no room at all. We’ve all had loads of opportunities to do something like that on track, something…” – again he searches for the right word, and I fancy he selects a softer adjective than the one that perhaps he first had in mind – “…silly. But I didn’t do that stuff. That just wasn’t my way. And I wanted – and I want – my sons to know that that isn’t how I race, and I want them to race the way I did, and I do. You can have all the trophies in the world but they’re worth nothing if you don’t race with…” – again he pauses for thought – “…dignity. So, to sum it up, Michael was a supernaturally gifted driver, but sometimes he was a bit too ruthless, and he was a very nice person, but he was even nicer if he had a glass of good red wine in his hand. I wish he was able to respond, to give his opinion, but very, very sadly he isn’t.

“Let me tell you this. One time I met Michael’s son Mick at a restaurant in Brazil. We had a really lovely chat and I got the feeling that he kept expecting me to ask him details about Michael’s physical condition, but I decided not to. I decided not to because I know how private Michael always was. And at the end of the evening, Mick looked me in the eyes, and he said, ‘Can you tell me something funny about you and my dad?’ And I told him a story about Michael, Ross and me getting tipsy together at the Montana Restaurant in Maranello, and we lost Ross. We just lost him. Suddenly he wasn’t there any more. And when we looked for him, with our driver driving us, we found him walking on his own in the middle of nowhere, still a few kilometres from his house. And Mick laughed, he hugged me and we said goodbye.”

I figure that that seems as good a place as any to curtail my Schumacher enquiries, but Rubens wants to add a few more adjacent thoughts: “Maybe I should have won more races in my F1 career. Maybe I could have done, if I’d behaved differently. But so what? The best time I’ve ever had in my racing life was when I won the Brazilian Stock Car Pro championship in 2022, with my sons on the podium with me. That’s the kind of thing that matters to me most.”

In 2006, 2007 and 2008, Barrichello raced for Honda’s F1 team. The stats reveal that they were not great seasons for him: 53 grand prix starts; one grand prix podium (Silverstone 2008). Towards the end of that final year, 2008, the world was becoming ever more seriously mired in global financial crisis, and the board members of multinational automotive corporations such as Honda were beginning to feel mighty nervous. Subaru and Suzuki withdrew from the World Rally Championship, and Kawasaki ditched MotoGP. In December 2008 Honda pulled the plug on its F1 team and it appeared that Barrichello, and his team-mate Jenson Button, would be left high and dry.

We now know that what happened was the opposite of that. Ross Brawn and Nick Fry bought the team for £1, which price looked even keener when you factored in that Honda had committed to cover any redundancy payments, effectively giving Brawn and Fry a free Formula 1 team, fully functioning, unencumbered by financial baggage. Better still, thanks to something called a double diffuser, which Williams and Toyota also adopted but Brawn mastered better than their two partners in that technical jiggery-pokery, compliant as it was with the letter if not the spirit of the regulations, the Brawn BGP 001 was a winner straight out of the box.

“During the winter of 2008-2009 I had no idea whether or not the team was going to survive,” Rubens remembers. “No one did. Even so, I kept in touch with Ross often, calling him twice a week, and I trained like crazy in the gym. I wanted to be ready – just in case Ross’s and Nick’s plans came through. And in the end they did, I flew to England, I signed a contract – for just four races at first, with much less money than before – and we went down to Barcelona to test the car. After that test I hugged Jenson and he hugged me, because we knew something magical had happened. We knew our car was a winner.”

“I hugged Jenson and he hugged me. We knew our car was a winner”

For Rubens, however, the same trouble that he had encountered with Honda in 2006 – brake pads that did not suit his braking approach – now prevented him from matching Button’s early season speed. His results in the first seven grands prix of the year were second, fifth, fourth, fifth, second, second, and DNF – pretty good – but Jenson won six of those races, missing out only in Shanghai, where he finished third.

“But when I finally solved my brake pad issue, I was faster than Jenson, and in the second half of the year I won in Valencia and Monza, whereas he never won at all. But by that time it was too late for me to challenge him for the world championship because Red Bull and McLaren had come on well and they were winning almost all the races by then. It is what it is. But I was pleased for Jenson when he became world champion, and I was absolutely delighted for the team.”

And what of Barrichello’s final two seasons in F1, 2010 and 2011, with Williams? “What took me there was two things: first, the story of someone, Frank [Williams], who was fantastically courageous, and, second, the certainty that there wouldn’t be team orders. Because at Ferrari I’d had team orders, and even at Brawn it had been clear that, once Jenson had started the season so well, Ross wanted him to do the winning rather than me, to secure the drivers’ world championship as well as the constructors’ world championship. But Williams was a disappointment to me because when I got there it soon became clear that it wasn’t Frank in charge. Even so, I enjoyed the first year, 2010, with Nico [Hülkenberg], but the second year, 2011, with [Pastor] Maldonado, well, they needed money, which is why they hired him, and it all got very political. I’d like to have had one more year with Williams, but they chose Maldonado and Bruno [Senna] for 2012. As I say, they needed money. It would have been my 20th season in F1, which would have been cool.” He shrugs, then smiles.

“But I’m a happy man,” he continues. “I love my family, I love my racing even more than I did when I was younger, and I’m so grateful that I’m not only still racing but also still competitive. My sons are both racing – ‘Dudu’ [he means Eduardo] in WEC this year and ‘Fefo’ [he means Fernando] in Euroformula Open and Formula 3 this year. They’re both doing well. I have my dogs, too, and they’ve all got names related to racing. So I have Enzo [Ferrari], Skip [Barber] and Stocky [stock cars]. I love music and when my friends come to my house, we all sing together. And I’ve even learned something from Michael: the love of good red wine.”

Born: 23/05/1972, São Paulo, Brazil

• 1978 Begins karting in São Paulo.
• 1990 Wins Formula Opel Lotus Euroseries – six wins from 11 races.
• 1991 Wins British Formula 3 title.
• 1993-96 At 20, becomes F1 driver with Jordan; one podium – 1994 at Aida, Japan
• 1997-99 Switches to Stewart. Second at Monaco in ’97; three third places in ’99, including team 1-3 at the Nürburgring.
• 2000-05 Hits his stride at Ferrari as team-mate of Michael Schumacher. Nine F1 wins; second in drivers’ standings in 2002 and ’04 but only eighth in ’05.
• 2006-08 Joins Honda; fails to score any points in 2007 for first time in F1 career; single podium in 2008 at Silverstone.
• 2009 Team-mate to Jenson Button at Brawn; chance of an F1 world title missed. Wins in Valencia and Monza.
• 2010-11 With Williams but unimpressed. Best result: fourth, Valencia, 2010.
• 2012 IndyCar with KV Racing – 12th; starts Stock Car Pro racing in Brazil – wins title in 2014 and ’22. Still in series today.
• 2017 Le Mans 24 Hours: 11th overall.
• 2025 Wins NASCAR Brasil Series at 53.