The machines Toleman to Williams

Rory Byrne, Toleman’s chief designer, drew it with John Gentry as his number two. It had a carbon-fibre monocoque, with the engine carrying part of the load, twin rear wings and radiators set in the front wing. The engine was the Hart 415T, a 1.5-litre four-cylinder with a single Holset turbocharger; the tyres were Pirelli’s, and the number was 19. In the week before the first race the title sponsor, Candy, withdrew, and the bodywork was repainted for the new main sponsor, Segafredo, at a spray shop in Rio that Senna knew.

He started three races in it. At Kyalami, with steering that was brutally heavy from the warm-up lap, he finished 6th and was so exhausted that the team had to lift him out of the car. At Zolder he was 7th on the road, and became 6th when Tyrrell’s results for the year were struck out. At Imola a dispute with Pirelli kept the cars in the garage on the Friday, a fuel-system problem struck on the Saturday, and he failed to qualify, the only time in his career. Toleman broke with Pirelli that weekend, and at the next race it had Michelin tyres and a new car.

Byrne kept the monocoque and suspension of the TG183 and changed most of the rest. The front venturi went, because it made the car too sensitive to pitch; the oil and water radiators moved into the right-hand sidepod and the intercooler into the left; and in the Ministry of Defence wind tunnel at Shrivenham he found about 25 per cent more downforce. The one visual link with the year before, Motor Sport noted, was the twin-plane rear wing, a Byrne innovation. The car was late because Byrne had designed it around Michelin’s tyres, which Toleman could not have until 20 May, when the French Grand Prix was run at Dijon-Prenois, and even then, by Motor Sport’s account, they were always a step behind McLaren’s.

There was no data recording in 1984, and Byrne relied on what his driver told him. Senna, he said 20 years later, was very concise, came up with good ideas of his own and had taught himself engineering; the TG184 was good from the start, and Senna loved it. In chassis TG184-02, his car from France to Britain, he was 2nd at Monaco in the rain, from 13th on the grid, with the fastest lap. He was 3rd at Brands Hatch, and 3rd again at Estoril in his last race for the team. Driving TG184-02 for Motor Sport in 2004, Dieter Serowy found the Hart’s turbo lag long enough to count to two.

For 1985 he moved to John Player Special Team Lotus, and to a black-and-gold car numbered 12, on Goodyear tyres. The technical director was Gérard Ducarouge, the chief designer Martin Ogilvie. Their 97T carried a Renault V6 with Garrett turbochargers, good by Lotus’s own figures for 780 to 850 bhp, depending on the set-up, and a stronger gearbox of the Indy type. It had small winglets on its sidepods and vertical vanes set between the tub and the front wheels, to cut drag and clean the airflow; it was the first Lotus with carbon brakes as standard, and it had a nose box built to crumple under the new crash rules.

In chassis 97T/2 he took his first pole and his first win, at Estoril in heavy rain, and he won again at Spa-Francorchamps. His seven poles were more than anyone’s that year, and he led more laps than anyone. But it did not always finish: at Imola he led 56 laps and ran dry on the 57th, and engines failed under him at Monaco, Paul Ricard, Kyalami and Adelaide. The 97T won three races in all, and the third went to his team-mate, Elio de Angelis, at Imola, the race in which Senna’s own car had run dry.

In 1986 every car on the grid was a 1.5-litre turbo, and the fuel allowed for a race fell from 220 litres to 195. The 98T carried Renault’s EF15B V6, in its standard form and as the DP, with pneumatic valve springs, and from the French Grand Prix he had the newer EF15C. In race trim, by the figures published for its sale in 2026, it gave a reliable 900 bhp at up to 12,500 rpm, and well over 1,000 in qualifying. It was the last Formula One car in John Player Special’s black and gold.

He put it on pole eight times, in half the races, and won twice: at Jerez, where he held off Nigel Mansell’s Williams by 0.014 seconds at the line, and at Detroit. Both wins came in chassis 98T/3, his race car for the first eight rounds, and they were the last two for Renault’s turbo engine. But the Renault was thirsty. At Hockenheim his fuel ran out just beyond the finishing line, and in Portugal on the last lap.

In December, on Brazilian television, he was asked what he had felt on finishing 2nd to Nelson Piquet in the first race of the season. Nothing, he said: he had wanted to win, and he would try again.

In 1987 almost everything changed. Camel’s yellow, lettered in blue, replaced the black and gold, and Honda’s V6 twin-turbo replaced the Renault, held like every turbo that year to 4 bar of boost; Honda rated it at 1,000 PS or more at 12,000 rpm.¹ A new six-speed gearbox, designed by Lotus with Hewland, took the power. Above all, the 99T raced on computer-controlled active suspension, developed by Lotus Engineering: a central hydraulic pump fed an actuator at each corner, whose valves were adjusted without pause to hold the car’s ride height. It did away with pitch and roll, kept the tyres’ contact with the road constant, and let the car run with less wing.

At Imola he took pole, the first for an actively suspended car and, as it proved, the last for Team Lotus. At Monaco he won, the first Grand Prix won on active suspension, and three weeks later at Detroit he won again without changing tyres: Team Lotus’s last victory. Through the summer, though, the Williams FW11B, whose Honda engine was the same, was usually a second a lap quicker, and at Hockenheim he finished 3rd with the active suspension collapsed on to its support springs. He was 3rd in the championship, and left for McLaren.

The rules of 1988, the last year of the turbos, cut boost to 2.5 bar and the fuel for a race to 150 litres. Honda answered with the RA168E, an 80-degree V6 of 1,494 cc that it rated at 685 hp, and lowered its crankshaft by 28 mm; McLaren answered with a three-shaft gearbox that brought the car’s centre of gravity sharply down. In the cockpit the gear lever was on the right and the anti-roll-bar adjuster on the left, with a red button for extra boost to overtake and a blue one for the radio. Honda credits Steve Nichols with the design; Gordon Murray, McLaren’s technical director, has disputed it.²

The car won 15 of the 16 races and took 15 poles, 13 of them his. His eight wins were a record for a season, and the eighth, at Suzuka, made him champion. In qualifying he beat his team-mate, Alain Prost, by 14 to 2, and at Monaco, in the same car, he took pole from him by 1.427 seconds.

With turbos banned for 1989, Neil Oatley’s MP4/5 was built around Honda’s first V10, the RA109E: 72 degrees, 3.5 litres and, by Honda’s figure, 685 PS at 13,000 rpm. The airbox rose behind the driver’s head, the steering wheel carried a single button, for the radio, and from the British Grand Prix in July a new transverse six-speed gearbox took the drive. Without turbos, the minimum weight fell to 500 kg. He carried the champion’s number 1.

He started every race from the front row, 13 of them from pole, and won six, each time from pole. But the car did not always last: an electrical failure at Phoenix, an engine three laps from the end in Montreal, the new gearbox baulking and spinning him out of the lead at Silverstone, another engine while he led at Monza. The MP4/5 won 10 of the 16 races, and Prost took the title after their collision at Suzuka.

For 1990 Prost moved to Ferrari and took the number 1 with him, so McLaren took Ferrari’s 27, the only time a McLaren has carried it. The MP4/5B was Oatley’s evolution of the 1989 car, and Oatley was also Senna’s race engineer. Honda’s RA100E V10, with butterfly throttles in place of slides, went through six versions in the year, and Honda’s engineers set its throttle by hand to suit his footwork. The car began the season with a diffuser of five semicircular tunnels, nicknamed Batman, which was dropped from the Hungarian Grand Prix, and for Spain its tail grew by 30 cm.

All six of its wins were his, among them Monaco, where he led every lap, and Monza, where he and Ron Dennis had a wager on whether McLaren could win at Ferrari’s home race. He won, and the car became his: chassis 6, the one he preferred, which by Jo Ramírez’s account won in Canada, Germany, Belgium and Italy. It was delivered to him with a new Honda engine; today it is kept in São Paulo, by the Instituto Ayrton Senna. The MP4/5B made him champion for the second time, at Suzuka, where he and Prost collided at the first corner.

The MP4/6 of 1991 was McLaren’s first car with a V12, Honda’s RA121E, and the first MP4 with push-rod front suspension. At its first test, at Estoril shortly before the season began, Senna said publicly that the V12 felt hardly stronger than the V10 of 1990. He won the first four races anyway, each from pole, which no driver had done before, and still he asked for more power: whenever he saw a Japanese television camera that year, Honda remembers, he pleaded for it.

Then the Williams FW14-⁠Renault came good, and through the summer McLaren and Honda fought back with lighter chassis and engines, a third specification of the V12, intake trumpets of variable length and new fuels from Shell. At Silverstone and at Hockenheim he ran out of fuel on the last lap. He raced the car only with its manual gearbox. After the German Grand Prix he tested McLaren’s first semi-automatic cars, and Honda has him saying that they made driving incredibly easy and that he could not go back to a manual; but when the team tried one in practice in Hungary he spun after a few laps, and it was put away. He won in Hungary and at Spa, and took his third title at Suzuka.

McLaren began 1992 with a stop-gap, the MP4/6 updated to take Honda’s new RA122E V12, and he raced it twice. At Kyalami he was 3rd. In Mexico City he crashed heavily in the Esses in Friday qualifying, badly bruising his left leg; on his 32nd birthday, the next day, he qualified 6th, and in the race the transmission failed.

The season belonged to the Williams FW14B-⁠Renault, with its active suspension, semi-automatic gearbox and traction control, and McLaren brought its new car forward to race from the third round, at Interlagos.

The MP4/7A brought McLaren’s first semi-automatic gearbox, a transverse six-speed that could run through a programmed sequence of downshifts at a single push of a button, which Honda says no other car could do. The throttle was worked electronically, the nose was high for the first time on a McLaren, and the rev counter was a liquid-crystal display. Honda’s RA122E/B, a 75-degree V12 that sat 20 mm lower than the one before, gave 774 hp at 14,400 rpm by its own figure.³

It was rushed into its first race, at Interlagos, where the engine kept cutting out, and it was never a match for the Williams. He won with it three times: at Monaco, where he held off Mansell’s much faster car for the last laps to win by 0.215 seconds; in Hungary; and at Monza, on the weekend Honda announced that it was leaving Formula One. That Friday McLaren had tried a fully active suspension developed with Honda, and Senna found it a little too active; it was dropped. His only pole of the year, in Montreal, was the only one not taken by a Williams.

With Honda gone, McLaren began 1993 with Ford’s HB V8 as a customer; Benetton had Ford’s newer specification, and McLaren drew level with it only in the summer. By one estimate the customer Ford gave 680 to 700 bhp, against 750 to 780 for the Renault in the Williams. The car made up what it could in electronics, developed with TAG: active suspension, traction control, a semi-automatic six-speed gearbox and two-way telemetry, with power brakes later in the year. It was red and white, entered by Marlboro McLaren, and numbered 8.

He was not sure he would race at all. In the first week of March he tried the MP4/8 at Silverstone, where his times were the fastest of the winter, and he then raced it on terms agreed race by race until July. All five of its wins were his: Interlagos; Donington Park, in the rain, where he led from the end of the first lap; Monaco, his record sixth there, in chassis MP4/8-6; Suzuka; and Adelaide, where he took the car’s only pole and the last of his 41 wins.

For 1994 the electronic aids were banned, and Adrian Newey, under Patrick Head, drew the FW16 as a passive evolution of the active FW15C, narrower and lower at the back, with fairings shaped like wings over the rear wishbones, which rival teams questioned before the first race. Behind him was Renault’s RS6 V10; the car was blue and white in the colours of Rothmans, with fine lines of red and gold, and numbered 2. After his first laps for the team, at Estoril in January in a converted 1993 car, he warned that without active suspension the car jumped more, was completely unstable, and was harder to drive and slower too; its aerodynamics had been developed for active suspension, and with passive suspension, he said, it turned into an animal. He had a piece of the chassis removed to keep his hand from striking the side of the cockpit, and the team joked that Williams had done that for nobody before.

It was fast and nervous: it worked only in a narrow window of ride height, and on bumpy tracks it bottomed out, bounced, and its rear lost grip. He put it on pole at all three of his races for Williams and finished none. At Interlagos he spun while chasing Michael Schumacher; at Aida he was hit at the first corner; at Imola, in chassis FW16/2, he crashed at Tamburello while leading. The car’s steering column had been modified at his request, to give him more room, and that modification became the focus of the Italian trial that followed.