MAY 7, 2019

The burning bet with Senna

In 2004, on the tenth anniversary of Ayrton Senna's death, McLaren team principal sat down with a group of journalists to talk about Senna. One of his memories was of a bet with Senna that had ingoing and outgoing burning consequences.

Ayrton Senna, Pacific GP 1994
© The Cahier Archive

By Dan Knutson

In 2004, on the tenth anniversary of Ayrton Senna's death, McLaren team principal sat down with a group of journalists to talk about Senna. One of his memories was of a bet with Senna that had ingoing and outgoing burning consequences.

"We were in Mexico for the first Mexican GP," Dennis recalled, "and we were sat waiting for the meal to come, and there was a whole range of these hot sauces and some sort of crackers that you dipped into them. You can imagine that this stuff was varying in heat. Everybody tried a bit, and it was eyes watering.

"He said you couldn't eat any of that, but I am from Brazil and I like spicy things. I said I could eat the whole bowl for a thousand dollars, and he took the bet. I thought clearly it is not going to kill me, and clearly it is going to burn. But if I eat it very, very quickly, before the chemicals start to work it will be inside me I will be a thousand dollars better off. So I got a spoon and ate it as fast as I could, much to his surprise. Then I suffered the initial aftershock, but it was comfortably balanced with the thousand dollars. He didn't have the money on him, of course."

"I was drinking water and after half an hour I'd managed to completely neutralize the chemical effect. By the time I'd had a couple of glasses of wine I was thinking that was the easiest thousand dollars I ever earned, only to find that after a few hours it not only had the ingoing chemical effect, but it had an outgoing chemical effect. I took the showerhead off the flexi house and had a administer a liquid coolant for a period of time. As was with many of the things that took place between us, the most important thing was to never to admit that it ever happened."