Ask Ron Dennis what he misses most from the time when Ayrton Senna was driving for his McLaren Formula One team and the answer might come as a surprise.

It is not the success, the domination or the three world driving championships and 35 races the Brazilian won over the six seasons they were together that the boss singles out.

Instead, it is the fun.

"I remember the laughter and the fun," Dennis reminisced to reporters at McLaren's Woking factory ahead of the 20th anniversary of the champion's death at the San Marino Grand Prix on May 1, 1994.

The increasingly extreme practical jokes played out between the serious-minded Senna, prank-loving Austrian teammate Gerhard Berger - who replaced Alain Prost in 1990 - and Dennis have gone down in Formula One legend.

There are the stories of Berger dropping Senna's supposedly indestructible carbon-fiber briefcase from a helicopter, of the Austrian filling the Brazilian's hotel room with frogs and replacing his passport photo with a picture of a penis.

Senna retaliated in his own fashion, glueing Berger's credit cards together and putting a whiffy French cheese in the air conditioning of his hotel room.

At Monza one year, Dennis returned to his plush hotel room at the five-star Villa d'Este to discover it had been re-wallpapered with pornographic pictures.

"Needless to say, when one of the group got back to his room later that night there was nothing in it. Nothing. No furniture. No clothes. Nothing," said Dennis with a smile.

"I remember the laughter and the fun. Normally there'd be things verging on the slapstick and not so funny, especially damaging property, which frequently happened. It was childish, but at the same time created a really good feeling inside the team."

Senna was in a dark mood heading into 1990 after a controversial Japanese Grand Prix in which Prost won the title after the Brazilian was disqualified in what he considered as a conspiracy by the French-run FIA.

He decided to retire, but returned to find a very different teammate.

"Gerhard gave me the perfect weapon to deal with Ayrton because he brought humor to the team," said Dennis. "I would say the concept of telling a joke and Ayrton laughing at it was not even possible before Gerhard joined the team.

"It got to the extreme. Gerhard has no limits. I mean, no limits. He'll go to the point where it is positively dangerous. There was one moment where we were scuba diving up in Hamilton Island. We were at quite a good depth and Gerhard just swam over and turned off my air off. He thought that was hilarious."

On another occasion, on Dennis's birthday in Australia, Berger and Senna threw the boss off a yacht and then chucked bait into the water to see if they could attract sharks.

(China Daily 04/27/2014 page12)