I must be thinking of a different Brazilian who punted Prost off in the final race of the season to win the world championship.
I thought it was Mauricio Gugelmin...Watch the tape again and look closely.
Ayrton Senna wasn't the first to punt other drivers off the course, but he was the first to make shady maneuvers on other cars on a regular basis. In the 1950s and 1960s, there's very few incidents caused by two cars striking each other. Look at the result tables for race retirements, and you will notice very few collisions between drivers because hitting each other could mean injury, ejection from the car, or possibly death. I will say, that it is possible that driver's attitudes were a little less intense with one another, and the cars were a tad stronger (in the 1950s) compared to the cars that followed up with a lighter materials and smaller sizes, which probably says a bit about a lack of car-to-car collisions.
As the cars and circuits became safer in the 1970s, you see more collisions between cars caused by other drivers, but rarely so, since reputation was a bit more on the line, when teams chose drivers (teammates actually preferred to get along, since it helped the team and each other in terms of shared set-up information in ages before computers), and crashes could still be quite dangerous, but a little less so at road-car speeds. By the 1980s, the racing cars were much safer, and the ultra-professional attitudes took over a lot of drivers; it became more of a mental game to psyche-out your opponent and close the door on opponents. Part of this is possibly because the cars stopped, reacted, and handled quicker than their predecessors, so close incidents between cars scrapping appear "closer".
I'm not saying Ayrton Senna caused all the unsportsmanlike behavior in Formula One, but he definitely found himself in a pattern of
many more incidents and collisions between drivers. Michael Schumacher took it up a notch and applied those tactics to almost
all overtaking maneuvers after a few years in the business. But unlike Senna, Schumacher would
regularly force-out other drivers during the pass to ensure they could not overtake. There's a difference between letting your car get loose or making it wide to prevent overtaking, and steering into the path of the other car because you're a nose-cone ahead (thus ensuring it's "the other guys' fault").
Some drivers are more sportsmanlike than others, and all drivers eventually find themselves in incidents. I think people saw someone like Gilles Villeneuve and realized he also rarely endangered other drivers. If he drove like a nut, most racers felt he was on his own, and not for the purpose of knocking other cars out. Sure, he caused a bit of chaos now and then, but he never took out other cars during overtaking once he'd been driving for a year. Even Jean Alesi, who found himself in a few dust-ups with other drivers, and was known for driving over the limits of the car, rarely if ever, found himself complained about for tactics that were unsporting (except once or twice in his rookie year).
It pains me as a Schumacher supporter that he would use those tactics as he reached his championship year, usually not during initial overtaking, but in the mid-process of doing so that bothered me. I see that a little bit in Lewis Hamilton, but it kind of shows that each generation is learning a little from the previous one. Sometimes, they're not always picking up all the right things. I'm not saying Hamilton can't win without those tactics, but he's fighting in Formula One, and the loser doesn't always get a seat the next year, which is the state of the sport all around these days.
