The kart 1973–⁠1982

Spectators at Interlagos thought he was slow. From 1974 the boy in kart 42 went out to practise with a stopwatch in his left hand. He had divided the track into four sections and, on each lap, went to the limit in one of them only, trying a different braking point or a different line. His engine tuner, Tchê, never saw anyone else do it, before or after, in more than 30 years of karting. When official qualifying came, kart 42 was almost always the fastest.

He had first raced there on Sunday 1 July 1973, three months after his 13th birthday, the minimum age for official racing, and he had won.¹ The kart track had opened in 1970 beside the Grand Prix circuit, behind what was then its back straight. It carries his name: he attended a ceremony naming it after him in March 1991, though the circuit dates the renaming to 1996.

The driver to beat in 1973 was Maurizio Sandro Sala, who had started six months earlier. Whenever they fought over a place that season they collided, spun or went off. Thirty years later Sala admitted that Senna had been the faster; it was he who would not let him by. They stayed friends for life.

In June 1974, on another driver’s advice, Milton took his son to a Spanish-born engine tuner, Lúcio Pascual Gascón, known to everyone as Tchê. The price was 361,000 cruzeiros, and Milton thought it too cheap to be any good. It would be good, Tchê told him, and if the boy drove properly he would win. The first lesson, in practice that week, was to stop throwing the kart sideways and drive more smoothly. Tchê prepared his engines from then until Senna left karting for cars, and Senna wrote to him that his father had put him into karting, but that Tchê had set him in the right direction and taught him almost everything he knew.²

Number 42

In Brazil he raced as number 42, and his rivals called him by it. The titles came in order: the São Paulo junior championship in 1974, his first; the state’s 100cc title in 1975; the South American championship at San José, in Uruguay, in April 1977, where he lent tyres to his rival Walter Travaglini for the deciding final; the Brazilian championship at Tarumã, near Porto Alegre, in July 1978, when, newly licensed, he drove his father’s pick-up more than 1,100 km with two karts in the back and won all three heats; and the Brazilian title again in 1980.³

Only a wall separated the kart track from the Grand Prix circuit. Tchê said the boy never bothered to look over it until practice for the 1979 Brazilian Grand Prix, when a roar sent him scrambling up to see Gilles Villeneuve’s Ferrari go by. Formula One, Senna told a magazine 10 years later, was then an absolutely unattainable dream.

One title got away. At the 1976 Brazilian championship, at the Maqui-Mundi track in Rio de Janeiro, he took pole, then steered round a puddle at the Ferradura, the Horseshoe, in the first heat, and Luiz Eduardo Lassance went past him there. The puddle was cleared for the second heat, but Lassance passed him at the same place again, and when Senna tried to take the place back they touched and he went off. He finished 3rd overall, and the magazine Autoesporte reported him saying: “I was immature; I should have driven over the puddle every time, then he couldn’t have beaten me.”

His great rival at home was Mário Sérgio de Carvalho, whose father made the parts both of them used. At rolling starts the two tried so hard to anticipate the flag that the clerk of the course often sent them both to the back, behind 15 karts or so, and one of them usually won anyway. In 1976 it was Mário Sérgio, not Senna, who was São Paulo champion. Yet that same year they shared kart 22 to win the Três Horas, the three-hour race at Interlagos, and, by the account of his biographer Ernesto Rodrigues, still did not speak to each other.

Milan, 1978

After the South American title of 1977 he told the Gazeta Esportiva that he would go to the World Championship only if he could arrive a month early to choose the best karts and engines; the family decided to wait a year. In the summer of 1978, at 18, he arrived at DAP, the Parilla family’s kart and engine firm in Milan, a few weeks before the championship, as the paying newcomer. The paid number one was Terry Fullerton, a Londoner of 25, who in 1973 had been the first British world champion in karting.

They had no language in common and got by with signs. At the first test, at Parma, Senna was a couple of tenths faster than Fullerton on the day; he was also about 10 kg lighter, Fullerton noted. Afterwards he asked the Englishman what he thought of his driving, was told that his aggression gave him too much oversteer out of the corners, and took it in at once.

At Le Mans that September, his first World Championship, he finished 6th; the American Lake Speed won. For the World Championship, in 1978 or 1979, each country’s drivers had to share one livery, and the Brazilians asked the São Paulo helmet painter Sid Mosca for a design at a few days’ notice. Mosca painted a yellow helmet with a green stripe round the top of the visor opening and a blue one round the bottom: he wanted, he said, something aggressive to come out from the driver’s eyes. Senna asked to keep it as his own. On the year it first appeared the sources disagree, and so does his official archive.⁴

In 1979 his letters to the Brazilian journalist Antonio Carlos Cechinatto ran to a dozen pages and more. In June he described how, at Wohlen in Switzerland, he had studied the leader and feinted at him where he had no intention of passing, until the man tried too hard, made mistakes and let him through.

That year, in unofficial practice in Italy, he refused to lift as his kart went up on two wheels in a fast corner, and went into the fence at 110–⁠130 km/⁠h (70–⁠80 mph). Fullerton jumped the fence and talked him into breathing again. On Brazilian television in 1986 Senna told a story very like it, and what it had shown him:

E, graças a Deus, não aconteceu nada de grave, mas eu me quebrei por dentro todinho. Aquilo foi uma prova para mim mesmo de que eu estava ali envolvido com o ímpeto de ir mais rápido e não estava pensando, não estava raciocinando.

Thank God nothing serious happened, but I was completely broken up inside. That was proof to myself that I was caught up in the urge to go faster and wasn’t thinking, wasn’t reasoning.

So nearly: Estoril and Nivelles

The World Championship of 1979, at Estoril, was the first of two he lost by a hair. He led the first final until an engine problem dropped him to 5th, was 2nd to his DAP team-mate Peter Koene in the second, and won the third. By the Brazilian account he and Koene were then level on points, and the stewards separated them on an earlier round, a semi-final in which Senna had been running 2nd until the leader’s kart failed in front of him and both of them spun; he had understood that a tie would go to the winner of the last final. A Dutch newspaper had Koene 2 points clear. Either way, Koene was champion. Ernesto Rodrigues saw in it a rehearsal for Suzuka in 1989: victory on the track, disappointment when the official result came.

In 1980 the friendship with Fullerton ended. Before the Champions Cup at Jesolo that spring, Fullerton stopped letting him read his notes, and Senna threw the notebook over his head. The two of them were far ahead on points, and the cup came down to the last final. Senna led until the last lap; Fullerton went down the inside into the hairpin, they touched, Senna’s kart went up on two wheels, and Fullerton won by eight yards or more. In an Italian paper Senna called himself the moral winner. Fullerton has a photograph of him 10 minutes later, sitting on a tyre, completely drained. The next morning, at the hotel pool, Senna waited until Fullerton was lined up, then launched himself out of his chair, pushed him in fully clothed and walked away laughing. After that they barely spoke.

Then came Nivelles, in Belgium, that September, where Fullerton had won his world title seven years before. There were three finals, and the best two counted. In the first, the Swiss driver Marcel Gysin hit Senna and spun him, and he finished 13th; he won the second; in the third he needed 2nd place and finished 3rd, behind the Dutchman Peter de Bruijn and Gysin. De Bruijn was world champion, Senna 2nd again, Fullerton 3rd. In the crowd was an 11-year-old German, Michael Schumacher, who remembered asking someone the name of the driver with the precise line.

Never the world champion

By 1981 he was racing cars in England, and the money now ran the other way: DAP paid him to develop its karts. He came back for the World Championship at Parma, the first for the new 135cc Formula K, and finished 4th, in a new chassis built to his liking, with the only DAP engine among the leaders. At Kalmar, in Sweden, in 1982, he was 14th. It was his last attempt.

The reasons he never won are plain enough: a tie-break in 1979, a collision in 1980, new engines and a soured deal with DAP in 1981, and by then a career in cars. What it meant to him is harder to know. Tchê later said that Senna had told him several times that, had he won it, he would have stopped racing and gone into the family business; it is an old friend’s claim, and it cannot be tested. In October 1993 a Dutch karting official told a reporter that Senna still found it terrible never to have been world champion in karts. The record of those years, karting and cars together, is set out at the end of the next chapter.

Back to the kart

He kept coming back. In November 1982 he won the Pan-American title at Tarumã, and in December, at Interlagos, in a twin-engined Superkart he had never driven before, he took pole with a track record, won by 15 seconds and handed the trophy to the runner-up, Carol Figueiredo, saying he had only come as a guest. In January 1984, on the eve of his first Formula One season, several of his karts were still in the family garage.

O kart é antes de tudo uma escola. E às vezes é bom voltar às aulas.

Karting is above all a school. And sometimes it’s good to go back to class.

In December 1991, in the year of his third world title, he opened a kart track on his farm at Tatuí with a party for about 900 guests. His nephew Bruno, who was eight, won the first race. In the race for grown-ups Senna started last on a reversed grid and finished 3rd, behind the young Tony Kanaan and Mário Sérgio de Carvalho, to whom he had not spoken since 1981. Karting, he told his old rival, was what he really liked.

In December 1993 he raced Alain Prost in karts on a temporary indoor track at the Paris-Bercy arena until his kart broke as he was closing on the leader; Prost won. His last known laps in a kart were on his own track at Tatuí, on 19 March 1994.