Legacy The Instituto, the memory, the influence

On 1 May 1995 about 500 people gathered behind the wall at Tamburello for a Mass at half past two. It was said by Father Amedeo Zuffo, who had given Senna the last rites, and he told them he had come not of his own wish, but because a group of admirers wanted to pay a simple tribute; he reminded them, too, that another man had died at Imola that weekend a year before, Roland Ratzenberger. No Formula One driver or official came. The day before, the San Marino Grand Prix had been run with Tamburello turned into a chicane, and some of the drivers, Michael Schumacher among them, had stood for a minute’s silence before the start. There was no official ceremony. Formula One, Folha de S.Paulo wrote, had disdained the tribute.

In São Paulo that morning an open-air Mass was said at the Cemitério do Morumby, 50 metres from where he lies, and no one from the family came. Over the three days around the anniversary, by the cemetery staff’s count, about 100,000 people visited. Luciano Alves Júnior, a history teacher of 23 from Porto Alegre, kept a vigil there of 31 hours, reading the psalms he said Senna had loved. Yoshio Tokuyoshi, a Japanese farmer who advised on the crops at the family’s farm at Tatuí, laid three plants of corn on the grave, each with three ears, one for each title. From the tree above it hung a banner that asked the Lord, if a boy driving a blue car had arrived up there, to give him the chequered flag, because, although he did not know it, he had won.

The Instituto Ayrton Senna

By then his sister was at work on the thing he had asked her for. Viviane Senna, a psychologist, has told the story of his request more than once, and dated it both to two months and to two or three weeks before Imola.

He told me he wanted to help in a more systematic way, … not simply one person here, and another person there, it had to be more organised. So he asked me to plan something, some system, that would help children and adolescents to have a better future. This was two months before the race at Imola. So I began to work on a structure. We had no opportunity to talk again, but we had his wish in our hands, and the family has worked to fulfil that dream.

The first money was raised in London, where a foundation in his name was collecting funds by the July after his death. In São Paulo the Instituto Ayrton Senna was set up that November, with Viviane at its head, and its doors opened formally on 21 March 1995, when he would have turned 35. It lived from the start on his image: every contract that used it, Viviane said in April 1995, went to the Instituto, and by then licences for the Senna and Senninha names had brought in US$4 million. The first plans were modest, soup for 26,000 poor children a day and sports coaching at the University of São Paulo, and in Europe some of the press accused her of trading on her brother’s image.

It grew into something else: an organisation that works with the state and municipal schools of Brazil. Educação pelo Esporte, education through sport, began in 1995. Acelera Brasil, from 1997, which helps children who have fallen behind their age group to catch up, was the first of its programmes to become public policy, and the same year it began working with the town of Sobral, in Ceará. Se Liga, from 2001, teaches reading to pupils who could not keep up with Acelera Brasil, and SuperAção Jovem became policy in the state of São Paulo in 2003. The Instituto says it was the first NGO to hold a UNESCO chair, in 2004, and the first Brazilian member of the OECD’s Network of Foundations Working for Development, in 2012. Prince Harry visited in 2014, and Prince Albert II of Monaco in 2025.

By its own count, which records every service given to a child in a year rather than every child, it had reached 40 million by 2025, in 3,300 municipalities in every state, and had given 830,000 more to teachers. Its income in 2025 was about R$45.9 million, and R$24.1 million of it, 52 per cent, came from royalties on his name and image. Since 2019 his brands have been managed by Senna Brands, whose chief executive is Viviane’s daughter Bianca, and part of its revenue goes to the Instituto. The family, Bianca says, has given up more than US$500 million in licensing and image rights to fund its work.

Senninha

Senninha went on without him. How the character began is told with his other businesses in Away from the circuit. Senna had meant, Viviane said in 2008, to give a share of Senninha’s proceeds to the project; after the accident the family decided to give all of the royalties. Tec Toy made the toys. In 2004 a short film, Senninha em dia de mudança, won the prize for the best Brazilian animation at the Anima Mundi festival, and in 2015 Discovery Kids showed 13 one-minute cartoons, Zupt! com o Senninha, made with the Instituto.

From 2018 a series of 26 episodes of 11 minutes for children of three to six, Senninha na Pista Maluca, ran on Gloobinho and later on Netflix. On YouTube, one episode of Gameventura com o Senninha (2021) has been watched more than a million times, and the comics can be read on the Social Comics platform. At Interlagos each year a children’s Senninha Racing Day runs beside the Ayrton Senna Racing Day.

Honours, halls of fame and polls

The International Motorsports Hall of Fame at Talladega inducted him in 2000. On 4 December 2017 he was one of the 33 world champions in the first class of the FIA Hall of Fame, in Paris, where his nephew Bruno Senna represented him, and in 2025 the Automotive Hall of Fame took him in, at a ceremony in Detroit on 25 September at which Bianca spoke. Karting’s governing body, the CIK-FIA, has him on its Wall of Fame.

On 10 May 2024, 30 years to the day after the Senate first honoured him, the Brazilian Senate held a special session for the anniversary. It ended with Senator Astronauta Marcos Pontes, Senna’s brother, Leonardo, and the Instituto’s vice-president, Ewerton Fulini, signing, as a symbol, a bill to write his name in the Livro dos Heróis e Heroínas da Pátria, the book of the heroes and heroines of the fatherland. The bill passed through both houses of Congress, and on 30 June 2026 President Lula signed it into law as Law 15.447. The book is kept in the Panteão da Pátria e da Liberdade Tancredo Neves in Brasília.

The polls agree. In December 2009 Autosport asked 217 Formula One drivers to name the greatest of all, and they chose him, ahead of Schumacher and Juan Manuel Fangio. The BBC’s Formula One team put him first in 2012; FiveThirtyEight’s rating model did the same in 2018, on his five best years, 1988 to 1992; and in 2020 a model built by Formula One and Amazon Web Services, measuring drivers against their team-mates in qualifying since 1983, found him the fastest, 0.114 seconds ahead of Schumacher.

In 2014 Datafolha asked 798 people in the city of São Paulo to name their greatest sporting idol: 47 per cent said Senna, and 23 per cent Pelé. Datafolha’s Mauro Paulino explained it partly by the way he died, still racing, during a live broadcast, on 1 May.

The drivers who followed

Schumacher won at Imola in 1994. At Monza in September 2000, when he equalled Senna’s 41 wins, he broke down in front of the press, and explained afterwards that he had been thinking of Ayrton, a driver he really admired, and of Imola. Rubens Barrichello, who walked beside the coffin, has called him a big brother, and a hero as well. Fernando Alonso had pictures of Senna in his schoolbooks and a poster on his bedroom wall, and his first karts were painted in the colours of Senna’s McLaren; in 2015 he drove one of Senna’s MP4/4s at Barcelona.

Lewis Hamilton was nine when Senna died. He equalled Senna’s 41 wins at Suzuka in 2015, where Senna had won all three of his titles, and his 65 pole positions in Montreal in 2017.

As a kid I’d come home and I’d say if I’m really lucky and I get to Formula 1, I want to emulate Ayrton. The fact that I have now reached him in that area, I just can’t believe it. I honestly can’t believe it.

After he won the São Paulo Grand Prix of 2021 and carried a Brazilian flag on his slowing-down lap, the Chamber of Deputies made him an honorary citizen of Brazil. On 3 November 2024, before the race there, he drove McLaren’s own MP4/5B round Interlagos in the drizzle, took a Brazilian flag from a marshal and ran more laps than he was meant to.

A younger generation has never seen him race. Charles Leclerc’s father first told him to watch Senna’s laps of Monaco, and when Leclerc won there in 2024 he called Senna his idol; a year later, at Monaco, Isack Hadjar said that there was one king of Monte Carlo, and it was Ayrton. Kimi Antonelli calls him his idol too, and Gabriel Bortoleto the greatest driver of all time.

Pierre Gasly, born two years after Imola, has worn Senna’s colours on his helmet there, and has described the reach of it: his grandfather followed Senna, his parents followed him, he followed him, and now he sees children inspired by the stories.

Every 1 May

At Imola the fence beside Tamburello, on the edge of the Parco delle Acque Minerali, is hung all year with flags, photographs and messages. Every 1 May people gather there, and at 14:17, the time kept for the crash, there is a ceremony and a minute’s silence; then they walk on to the Villeneuve corner, where Ratzenberger died. In São Paulo people go to the grave, and at Interlagos a relay race and festival, the Ayrton Senna Racing Day, reached its 20th edition in 2025, with 11,000 taking part. In 2022 the statue of Christ the Redeemer above Rio was lit in the colours of his helmet.

In 2004, the 10th year, Brazil’s World Cup winners of 1994 played a team of Formula One drivers, Schumacher and Barrichello among them, at Forlì, near Imola, and drew 5–⁠5, with the takings going to the Instituto. Before the San Marino Grand Prix Gerhard Berger drove three laps in Senna’s black Lotus of 1986, which was then given to Viviane for the Instituto; and at the statue by Tamburello, Folha’s reporter found four vases of dead flowers. In 2014, for the 20th, thousands walked the track to Tamburello for the silence at 14:17, Berger, Alonso and Kimi Räikkönen among them.

The 30th, in 2024, was the largest. At the Grand Prix at Imola that May, Sebastian Vettel led the drivers of Formula One, Formula 2 and Formula 3 on foot from the pit straight to Tamburello, in yellow shirts, carrying the flags of Brazil and Austria, and on the Saturday and the Sunday he drove his own McLaren MP4/8 round the circuit, waving both.

one of the most beautiful moments I had behind the wheel, to be honest.

… I had the flags with me and the moment I got those flags out, the people were just going mad. It was such a great moment. I was shouting their names in the helmet. Also to get the Austrian flag out, which is the job that Ayrton wanted to do and really belongs to him because he had the Austrian flag in the car on that Sunday, was very, very special.

That Saturday Max Verstappen equalled Senna’s record of eight pole positions in a row. At the end of November Netflix released its drama series about him.

Statues, memorials and named places

At Imola the memorial is Stefano Pierotti’s: a bronze, two metres high, of Senna seated in his overalls, his eyes lowered towards the Tamburello wall. It went up in the Parco delle Acque Minerali on the weekend of the San Marino Grand Prix in April 1997, and Folha reported it as the first official tribute at Imola in almost three years. The same year fans paid for a memorial at Donington Park to him and Juan Manuel Fangio, bronze figures with plaques from Tom Wheatcroft and from the presidents of Brazil and Argentina. At Monaco, on 24 May 2017, 30 years after the first of his wins there, Prince Albert II and Bianca Senna unveiled a statue of him at the Fairmont hairpin.

São Paulo has the most. Velocidade, Alma e Emoção, a bronze by Melinda Garcia five metres long, shaped on his racing car, was put up above the new tunnel under Ibirapuera that bears his name in October 1995, and the city’s critics attacked it at once. In 2017 it was restored and given a square of its own beside the park, the Praça Ayrton Senna do Brasil, built in 27 days with private money beside the ground where the city’s radio-controlled models are raced. A four-metre statue followed in the Parque Ecológico do Tietê in 2019, and at Interlagos in 2022 Nosso Senna, a faceted aluminium bust by his niece Lalalli Senna, made because his mother asked for it.

Rio has had Mario Pitanguy’s bronze on the Copacabana promenade since December 2019. Wałbrzych, in Poland, unveiled a statue of him in 2021, and in 2019 Paul Oz cast three copies of his bronze of Senna through Eau Rouge, one for the McLaren Technology Centre and one for the Instituto. At Adelaide his handprints are set in concrete beside the old circuit, and beside the main grandstand at Estoril a large stone sculpture stands over a small memorial.

His name is on the map. On 27 December 1994 the state of São Paulo renamed the Rodovia dos Trabalhadores, the Workers’ Highway, which links the city to the Presidente Dutra highway, the Rodovia Ayrton Senna da Silva. The tunnel under Ibirapuera, the kart track at Interlagos and a municipal infant school in the south of the city carry it too, as do circuits at Goiânia, Londrina and Caruaru, and corners at Adelaide, Montreal and the old Hockenheim. And at Interlagos the bends at the end of the pit straight are the S do Senna.

McLaren and Williams

For 27 years, from 1995 to 2021, every Williams carried a small S for Senna on its nose, and in 2014 the badge read Ayrton Senna Sempre, 20 anos. The team dropped it for 2022, under new owners, and promised him a place in its museum instead; the family, it said, had not been consulted.

McLaren went the other way. In December 2017 it revealed the McLaren Senna, a road car of about 789 bhp from a twin-turbo V8 of 4.0 litres, developed with Bruno Senna’s help. All 500 were sold before it was shown, and a payment goes to the Senna foundation for every one. From the Monaco Grand Prix of 2022 McLaren’s Formula One cars have carried the S on the halo, with the family’s support, and in May 2024 they raced at Monaco in a one-off livery taken from his helmet.

The continuing fascination

Films and books keep finding him: Asif Kapadia’s documentary Senna won the BAFTA for Best Documentary in 2012, and Netflix’s drama followed in 2024. They have a chapter of their own, Books and films.

The murals are Eduardo Kobra’s above all: the one that looks down on the corner of the Avenida Paulista in São Paulo is 41 metres high, and there are others at Imola, at Interlagos and in Miami. Watches, motorcycles, toys and games carry his name, and part of what they earn goes to the children the Instituto works for.

In Brazil’s census of 2010, 316 people born in the 1980s were called Ayrton. Of those born in the 1990s, the decade of his last two titles and of his death, 1,166 were. In 2025 alone, by its own count, the Instituto reached 1.1 million children and young people in 5,000 schools.