England The junior formulae, 1981–⁠1983

It rained at Brands Hatch on Sunday 15 March 1981, and the Formula Ford final ran late. When the cars formed up among the puddles on the Indy circuit, the black-and-yellow Van Diemen numbered 31 was on pole, and 15 laps later it was more than 9 seconds clear. It was the third car race of a 20-year-old Brazilian whom the programme called Ayerton da Silva, and his first win. His wife of a few weeks, Lilian, kissed him before he was out of the car and joined him on the podium.

He had arrived in February, newly married to Lilian de Vasconcellos Souza, a friend since childhood, to drive a works Van Diemen for Ralph Firman, whose team was based at Snetterton, in Norfolk. The Brazilian driver Chico Serra had pressed Firman for two years to take him on, and interpreted at their first dinner, where the karting star opened by asking to be paid. They settled it the other way round: Senna brought about £10,000, and Firman made up the rest. The couple rented a bungalow at Eaton, on the edge of Norwich. In Britain he raced as Ayrton da Silva.

The three-car works team was a tinderbox. At Mallory Park in March his Argentine team-mate Enrique Mansilla pushed him on to the grass on the last lap; in the paddock afterwards Senna took him by the throat. But the day after his first win Van Diemen made him its test driver, and began to make the changes he asked for. He started 20 races that year, won 12, was 2nd in five and finished every one. He raced for two of the three national Formula Ford 1600 titles, and won both: the RAC series, clinched in pouring rain at Snetterton on 9 August, and the Townsend Thoresen series at Thruxton three weeks later, with his parents and his brother watching.

Ayrton was tough and hard on the track, … as most of them are, but away from it I always just considered him a normal bloke. The main thing with him was his extraordinary focus – even during downtime. He’d win a race, then be in the office by 9am on Monday complaining that his engine hadn’t been good enough. I’d reply, ‘Jesus, you won by eight seconds’ – but he still wanted me to contact our supplier Minister to ask for more power.

Then he stopped. On the podium at Brands Hatch on 27 September, 2nd to Rick Morris, he told the circuit commentator, by Tom Rubython’s account, that he had finished with racing, and on 8 October he flew home to São Paulo. He had promised to ring Firman on a set day about the Formula Ford Festival, and he did, ready to fly back; but Firman, unsure that he would return, had given the car to Tommy Byrne, who won the Festival in it. The reasons were several. He could find no sponsor, and felt overshadowed in the Brazilian press by Nelson Piquet, Roberto Moreno and Raul Boesel. His father, who had paid for the season, wanted him in the family business. Many people thought, Rubython writes, that he had gone home to save his marriage; he never said so. He said later that he went back to Brazil eight months after the wedding to work for his father and give up racing, and that it did not work.

In the early months of 1982 he made up his mind to go back to Europe, to racing, and to separate. The marriage, he said, had been a mistake; they had been very young.

Twenty-two wins

Firman placed him with Dennis Rushen’s Rushen Green Racing, in a Van Diemen RF82, for the British and European Formula Ford 2000 championships. Rushen had first seen him at Snetterton the year before, pulling away in the rain, and had walked back to the pits to find out who he was. This time Senna lodged in Norwich with a young Brazilian driver, Maurício Gugelmin, and his wife, Stella. The mechanics called him Harry, because Eye-Airton, the proper way to say his name, was too much for them. He learned his first English words from them: two of them, of four letters.

He won 22 of his 28 races that year, the first six from pole with the fastest lap. At Snetterton on Good Friday his front brakes failed on the opening lap; he set the anti-roll bar to fully soft, threw the car about like a kart, came back from 7th to win, and afterwards told his team-mate Kenny Andrews, who had asked how he could improve, to brake later, since he had been braking later than Andrews with no front brakes at all. He clinched the European title at the Jyllandsringen, in Denmark, on 22 August, then got drunk, by Rushen’s account for the first time, and did wheelies up and down the street on a scooter that was not his. Wins at Oulton Park and Silverstone on consecutive days in early September settled the British title.

At some point that season, by Rushen’s account, he stopped being da Silva. He saw a namesake in a Brazilian paper, was teased that da Silva was Brazil’s Smith, and announced that he would simply be Ayrton Senna, taking his mother’s name. The British press took until the next summer to catch up.¹

Formula One was already interested. That year Ron Dennis of McLaren offered to pay for a season of Formula 3 in 1983 in return for an option on his services, and Toleman’s Alex Hawkridge offered much the same. He turned both down. He wanted, Hawkridge remembered, to choose for himself who he would drive for. Two days after the European title he told the São Paulo paper O Estado de S. Paulo, known as Estadão, that going straight into Formula One would be risky: he was still young, and there was time.

What he wanted first was a year of Formula 3, and on 13 November 1982 West Surrey Racing gave him a taste of it: a non-championship race at Thruxton, shown on BBC television. He took pole by three quarters of a second and won by 13 seconds. That evening he shook hands with Dick Bennetts, who ran the team, on the whole of 1983.

Brundle

The 1983 season began as a procession. In the West Surrey Ralt RT3/83-⁠Toyota he won the first nine rounds of the Marlboro British Formula 3 Championship, between 6 March and 30 May, with eight poles and seven fastest laps, breaking Piquet’s record of seven wins in a row. Martin Brundle, a car dealer from King’s Lynn in his second season of Formula 3, was 2nd in eight of them. The British press, still thinking of him as da Silva, found him a name, Silvastone: he won six of the eight Formula 3 races held there that year.

There’s always a genius driver who comes along to spoil your day, and Senna’s reputation preceded him.

… There was a ruthless streak in him, but strangely, as we saw later, there was also compassion in him.

… There’s no doubt, Ayrton was my toughest rival. I could beat him on my day but that’s the key phrase, on my day, because the great drivers have many more of their days, and he did have that natural talent, that sixth sense they all have.

Then Brundle began to win, and Senna began to crash. At Silverstone on 12 June, in a round that also counted for the European championship, he spun and then went off at Woodcote chasing him. At Cadwell Park a week later he wrote his car off against a marshals’ post in practice early that morning, and did not start. At Snetterton in July he tried to pass Brundle at the Esses and rode over his rear wheel. Brundle won all three. Senna won twice more at Silverstone, in July and August, but at Oulton Park in August he landed on top of Brundle’s car at Cascades, and his licence was endorsed; at Oulton again in September he crashed trying to go round the outside at Druids; at Thruxton his engine failed. At Silverstone on 2 October, in the first of his races that TV Globo showed live in Brazil, Brundle won again. Going into the last round, he led the championship by a single point.

For the final round, at Thruxton on 23 October, Senna drove to Novamotor in Italy himself, watched his new engine run on the dynamometer and brought it back. He taped over the oil radiator so that the oil would warm up in one lap rather than six or seven, and on the sixth lap he loosened his belts, reached out of the cockpit to tear the tape off, and nearly lost the car at the chicane. Brundle, behind him, saw the arm come out. Senna took pole, fastest lap and the race, and the championship by 132 points to 123, with 12 wins from 20 rounds.

Four tests

Formula One had come to look before the season was out. On Tuesday 19 July, three days after he had won the Formula 3 race at the British Grand Prix, Frank Williams let him drive Keke Rosberg’s Williams FW08C-⁠Cosworth at Donington Park, the car carrying the world champion’s number 1. Senna was in the pits at 8.15, three-quarters of an hour before the track opened. Williams himself was late, his Jaguar broken down on the M1, and the chief mechanic started without him.

Within about nine laps he had matched the time Jonathan Palmer had set for the team there. At one stop he asked a mechanic how many gears the car had; six, he was told, and he said that so far he was only using five. After 83 laps, tired, and hearing the engine note change, he stopped rather than risk an engine worth US$50,000 for 10 more laps. His best, as Estadão reported the next morning, was 1:00.09, faster than Palmer.² There was no seat to offer him: Williams had Rosberg and Jacques Laffite.

He took to it like a duck to water. It was very easy for him.

His prize from Marlboro for the Formula 3 title was a test with McLaren at Silverstone, on Thursday 27 October, with Brundle and Stefan Bellof.³ He blew an engine on his quickest lap, then talked Ron Dennis into a second run, in Niki Lauda’s car, as the light went: a run the others did not get. His best was 1:13.9. Dennis, by his own account, took care not to show how impressed he was. McLaren had signed Alain Prost three days earlier.

Toleman tried him at Silverstone on Wednesday 9 November, in the TG183B. Within two flying laps he was faster than Derek Warwick had qualified the car for the British Grand Prix, and before the day was out he had done a time that would have put it 8th on that grid. Alex Hawkridge offered him a contract again. He waited: he still hoped to join Piquet at Brabham.

Five days later, at Paul Ricard, Bernie Ecclestone gave him 30 laps in a Brabham BT52B-⁠BMW, to Roberto Guerrero’s 45. On used tyres he did 1:07.9, the time Mauro Baldi managed on new ones. But the seat was not to be won with a stopwatch. Piquet did not want a Brazilian team-mate; Parmalat, Brabham’s sponsor, apparently wanted an Italian; and behind Guerrero, Senna told Estadão, stood three million dollars of Colombian coffee money. If Brabham did not work out, he added, perhaps he would sign for Toleman.

London, 9 December

Brabham had still not decided when he made up his mind. On 7 December he met Lotus, who asked him to test for them; the same day Toleman announced Johnny Cecotto as one of its drivers for 1984. Toleman’s designer, Rory Byrne, had told Hawkridge to do whatever it took to sign him. On Friday 9 December, after almost two days of negotiation by telex with his manager in Brazil, Senna signed a three-year contract with Toleman in London. Hawkridge remembered him arriving to go through it with a copy of the Oxford Concise English Dictionary.

The next morning he flew home to São Paulo, a Formula One driver at 23. His first Grand Prix, at Jacarepaguá, was 15 weeks away.