1984 The arrival

Days before Ayrton Senna’s first Grand Prix, Toleman lost its title sponsor. Candy pulled out, Segafredo was moved up in its place, and the cars had to be repainted before practice began in Rio. Senna knew a spray shop in the favelas. Chris Witty, who ran the team’s commercial side, masked the bodywork, and three of them drove it into the city on a VW flatbed, a kid at the wheel, Senna in the middle and Witty on the outside, with Lionel Richie on the radio. The panels were ready by the Thursday.

He had signed a three-year contract with Toleman Group Motorsport, a British team that had scored its first points only the season before. His engineer was Pat Symonds, the designer Rory Byrne, the managing director Alex Hawkridge, and his team-mate Johnny Cecotto. The car he began with was the Toleman TG183B-⁠Hart, number 19, with a four-cylinder 1.5-litre Hart turbo, on Pirelli tyres. Around him on the grid were three world champions, Niki Lauda, Nelson Piquet and Keke Rosberg, and Alain Prost, who was not one yet.

At Jacarepaguá, on a hot, sunny 25 March, he started 16th, the best of the Pirelli runners, and gained places on the opening lap. On the ninth lap he came into the pits with the turbo boost gone. He had lasted eight laps, and his was the first retirement of the season. Alan Henry of Motor Sport admitted that his first impression of the newcomer had been of cockiness, and that watching him wrestle the Toleman round Rio had won him over.

The first point

The South African Grand Prix, at Kyalami on Saturday 7 April, was his first long race in a Formula One car. He had completed only eight racing laps, and his longest races had been Formula 3 sprints of 30 or 40 minutes; this one would last about an hour and a half, at altitude, in the heat. While the other drivers went on a photographic safari he stayed with his mechanics to work through set-ups, and he qualified 13th, 1.3 seconds faster than Cecotto.

On the warm-up lap, on a full tank, the steering was so heavy that he stopped and told his engineer the car was impossible to drive. On the third lap, glancing at his boost gauge, he hit debris beyond the crest of the main straight and lost the nose cone that joined the front wings. He drove round the problem, turned the engine down to save it, climbed through the retirements and stopped once, on lap 57, for fresh tyres. On lap 71 Michele Alboreto’s Ferrari coasted to a halt, and Senna was 6th, three laps behind Lauda. He finished so spent that he had to be lifted out of the car, and he was taken to the circuit’s medical centre. He had been told at first that he was 7th, and brightened when he learned he had scored.

At Zolder three weeks later he started 19th, the worst grid position of his career, was 24th after the first lap and finished 7th on the road. Later in the year the whole of Tyrrell’s 1984 season was struck out, which made him 6th, and gave him a second point.

Imola, and a new car

Imola was the one race of his career he failed to qualify for. Toleman had fallen out with Pirelli over the tyres and, by two accounts, over money, and on the Friday morning a telex from the Toleman Group’s headquarters in Brentwood, Essex, told the team not to run the cars. Friday began wet and dried fast; everyone else set grid times while the two Tolemans stood in the garage. On Saturday he was 20th in the wet morning session. The afternoon hour was dry and fast, and early in it a fault in the fuel system stopped him. His 1:41.585 left him 28th of the 28 entries, more than 13 seconds off Piquet’s pole. Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport, noting black armbands on sale for grieving Ferrari fans, suggested that Toleman’s followers could have used them too. That evening, with Bernie Ecclestone mediating, Ted Toleman signed with Michelin.

Six days later he beat a field of champions. On 12 May the new Nürburgring was opened with a 12-lap race for identical Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.3-16 saloons, driven by past and present Grand Prix drivers. There were nine world champions in the field of 20, and Prost, not yet one, took pole. In light rain Senna won in car number 11, with Lauda 2nd and Carlos Reutemann 3rd. By Prost’s own account, it was the weekend they first met: he gave the young Brazilian a lift from the airport, and in the race, he says, Senna pushed him off the road after half a lap.

The Toleman TG184-⁠Hart made its debut at the French Grand Prix at Dijon-Prenois on 20 May. Byrne had designed it around Michelin tyres, which is why it could not race until the Michelin deal was done; it kept the old car’s monocoque and gained, by his reckoning, about a quarter more downforce. Senna had tried it in April and wanted to race it at Zolder. The tyres were not quite what McLaren had. All season McLaren held a veto that kept Toleman on the previous year’s Michelin specification, except in the wet, when there was only one.

Thirteenth on the grid

He had qualified 13th at Monaco on 1:25.009, in the dry, well down on power, among 27 entries for 20 places. By the account on the official Senna site, he sat on the pit wall reading the grid, looked at the 13, and said that one day the number would bring him luck. It had rained all morning. Everyone started on grooved wet tyres, and the dry tunnel was hosed down so that no one would meet a sudden change of grip at its exit. For once Toleman had the same tyres as McLaren; by Hawkridge’s account, McLaren had tried to stop Michelin supplying its current wets to Toleman, until Michelin faced Ron Dennis down in the pit lane.

I think we are watching the arrival of Ayrton Senna as a truly outstanding talent in Grand Prix racing.

At Sainte-Dévote, on the first lap, Derek Warwick’s Renault hit the barrier and Patrick Tambay ran into him; Tambay broke a leg. Senna was 9th at the end of the lap. He passed Jacques Laffite and Manfred Winkelhock, and was 6th when Alboreto spun on lap 9. Early in the race he hit the kerb at the harbour chicane very hard and launched the car; the team found a crack in a front rocker afterwards. Nigel Mansell’s Lotus took the lead from Prost. Senna passed Rosberg and then René Arnoux to be 4th on lap 14, and 3rd when Mansell lost his Lotus on the painted lines going up Beau Rivage and hit the barrier. On lap 19 he passed Lauda for 2nd. Prost was about 34 seconds up the road.

On lap 24 he set the fastest lap of the race, 1:54.334. Stefan Bellof, in the only car without a turbo, came through to 3rd and was soon the fastest man on the circuit. Prost, whose carbon brakes were troubling him, had begun signalling to the pits that the race should be stopped. The gap came down at three or four seconds a lap: about 11 seconds on lap 30, 7.446 seconds at the line on lap 31. On lap 32, just before ten to five, the clerk of the course, Jacky Ickx, had the red flags shown. Prost pulled over and stopped at the line as the Toleman swept past, and Senna did another lap waving to the crowd, believing he had won. Under the rules the result was taken from the last full lap. Prost had won, Senna was 2nd, Bellof 3rd, and because less than three-quarters of the distance had been run, half points were given.

I had a great chance to win. But unless you cross the finishing line in first place, it is impossible to know.

He was furious with race control. The Brazilian federation publicly questioned Ickx, who drove works Porsches in sports cars when Porsche built McLaren’s engines. Whether Senna would have won is still argued over. Symonds suspects the cracked rocker would have held; Bellof was catching both leaders; Alan Henry thought Senna lucky, or skilled, to finish. Afterwards, the official site records, he said the 13 had brought Prost luck and still owed him some.

The stoppage cost Prost more than it cost Senna. Half points gave him 4.5 for the win. Had the race run far enough for full points, even 2nd place would have given him 6, and in October he lost the championship to Lauda by half a point.

The wall moved

The heat of the summer races told on him. Before the Canadian Grand Prix he flew early to Montreal, where doctors at a McGill University sports-medicine conference tested him and praised his condition and the programme of his trainer, Nuno Cobra. He finished 7th at Montreal, two laps down, and was treated for dehydration. In Detroit, with under eight minutes of qualifying left, he was 24th; he had the rear wing changed for more downforce and went 7th. A wheel from Piquet’s Brabham, flying off in the first-start pile-up, wrecked his front suspension, and in the spare car he crashed at the first corner after 21 laps.

The first Grand Prix at Dallas, on 8 July, was run on a track that broke up from the start of practice, in temperatures above 40°C (105°F). The start was brought forward to 11 a.m., and Laffite came to the early warm-up in his pyjamas in protest. Senna qualified 6th and was 4th early on. On lap 2 he touched a wall, spun with a slow puncture and rejoined 23rd; he worked back to 13th, then clipped a wall again and retired after 47 laps with the driveshaft damaged.

With Ayrton, it was the first time I saw that there was something different in a real elite sportsman. Obviously he had ability by the bucketful but it was more than that. It was the first time I’d met a driver that didn’t need to use his entire brain to drive the car and had plenty of capacity left to think about what was going on. This was enormously valuable in an era before data recording. He could tell you what the water temperature was, what the revs were in each corner.

Back in the pits he told Symonds he was certain the wall had moved. Symonds had heard every excuse a driver could make, but not that one, and Senna talked him into walking out to the spot after the race. The tyre marks showed that another car had struck the far end of a concrete block and swivelled it, so that its leading edge stood a few millimetres proud. The episode, Symonds said, raised his respect for the young man a good deal.

A week later, at the Nürburgring 1000 km, he drove the New-Man Joest Porsche 956 with Henri Pescarolo and Stefan Johansson to 8th, in his only World Endurance Championship race. Then came Brands Hatch. Four minutes into Friday morning’s session Cecotto crashed head-on at Westfield in a new TG184; he was trapped in the car and flown to hospital with serious leg and ankle injuries that ended his Formula One career. In that same session Senna was fastest, ahead of Prost and Lauda, the first time he had topped a Formula One session. The race was stopped after 11 laps when Jonathan Palmer crashed, and restarted. Senna sat in the turbulence of Elio de Angelis’s Lotus lap after lap, went inside him into Paddock Hill Bend about six laps from the end, and passed Piquet, slowed by a failing turbo, for 3rd. The crowd gave him an ovation to match Warwick’s. Symonds, who knew they were still a tyre specification behind, found it more satisfying than Monaco.

At Hockenheim his rear wing collapsed at about 280 km/⁠h (175 mph) on the fifth lap, and he was unhurt. Toleman now ran only one car. At the Österreichring he was 3rd for three laps before the engine lost its oil pressure.

A secret, badly kept

Lotus had been courting him through the summer. Peter Warr and Gérard Ducarouge dined with him near the Österreichring without troubling to hide it, and in August, in England, he signed with Lotus for 1985, with TV Globo’s Reginaldo Leme the only journalist present, under an embargo. His Toleman contract ran to the end of 1986, but he had spent most of its negotiation on the release clause. By Hawkridge’s account he was to state his dissatisfaction and pay £100,000 before he negotiated with anyone else.¹

Lotus announced the signing on the day of the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, on 26 August, without telling Toleman first. Its press release added that Senna would, of course, continue to drive for Toleman for the rest of the season, and Toleman replied in print that it did not appreciate the release. Senna, caught out by the timing, later called it a tactical mistake. In the race his engine failed after 19 laps.

A few days before the Italian Grand Prix Toleman said he had broken his contract, took him off the pre-race test at Monza and withdrew him from the race. Stefan Johansson drove number 19 there and finished 4th. It was the only race he ever missed through suspension. Symonds thought it a case of cutting off the nose to spite the face; Hawkridge judged it the only punishment that meant anything to him.

I did it. … because it was important to teach him that for every negative action you perform in life there is a penalty.

He reached an understanding with Hawkridge and came back for the last two races. By Hawkridge’s account he paid what he owed after the event, apologised, and said that he knew he had got it wrong but that Lotus were more to blame, because they should not have let the secret out. Many years later, Symonds says, Senna told him he had learned a lesson from it.

He was living near Reading that year, and in August he told the Brazilian monthly Quatro Rodas that he dreamed of living in Monaco.

Lá se come bem, tem praia e clima quente. Que mais você quer? … Enquanto estou na pista, envolvido com meu trabalho, está tudo bem. Na hora em que chego no meu quarto e fico sozinho, aí sim é duro.

You eat well there, there’s a beach and warm weather. What more do you want? … While I’m at the track, wrapped up in my work, everything’s fine. When I get back to my room and I’m alone, that’s when it’s hard.

Estoril

At the European Grand Prix, on the new Nürburgring, he rode over Rosberg’s Williams at the first corner and was out on the spot. The last race was the Portuguese Grand Prix at Estoril on 21 October, Michelin’s last race in Formula One, and Michelin told Toleman they would have the same tyres as everyone else. Senna was fastest in the Saturday-morning session and qualified 3rd, his best grid of the year, 0.233 seconds off pole.

Lauda needed 2nd place for the championship and was climbing from 11th on the grid. Senna passed Rosberg for 3rd on lap 19; on lap 33 Lauda tried him twice and finally went by in the slipstream across the line. When Mansell’s brakes failed on lap 52, Senna was 3rd again. Alboreto’s Ferrari had spun on lap 44 trying to get past him, and in the last laps it closed up once more. Senna held on by 0.275 seconds. On the podium stood Prost, the winner, Lauda, champion by half a point, and Senna. Between them the three would win 10 world championships.

He finished the season 9th, level on 13 points with Mansell. His mechanics, by the official site’s account, made him a farewell banner. Toleman became Benetton in 1986, and of all the points the team ever scored in its own name, half were his.