1986 In the slipstream

The row began before a wheel had turned. With Elio de Angelis gone to Brabham, Lotus and its sponsor, John Player Special, wanted Derek Warwick in the second car, and in December Motor Sport believed he was filling the seat. Senna, whose contract made him the team’s number one, would not accept him, or any other experienced driver. The reason reported at the time was that he did not believe Lotus could prepare two front-running cars at once; he had lost races the year before to failures of the car and the engine. Denis Jenkinson noted that in three months of argument in the weekly papers everyone had had his say except Senna himself, and he dismissed the theory that Senna feared being beaten as rubbish.

Warwick’s own account, given decades later, is that he had signed and was called to Lotus expecting the team to sign too, and that instead they tore the contract up in front of him: the sponsor, they said, had been under pressure from Senna. He raced Jaguar sports cars instead. The seat went to Johnny Dumfries, a Scottish aristocrat who had been British Formula 3 champion in 1984. Senna out-qualified him at all 16 races.

Ayrton dominated his team-mates, intimidated them, and he knew Warwick was strong, and he didn’t like it.

The car was the Lotus 98T-⁠Renault, black and gold again, number 12. Every car on the grid now had a 1.5-litre turbo engine, and each was allowed 195 litres of fuel for a race, 25 fewer than the year before. Races became economy runs decided by the read-outs in the cockpit, and the thirsty Renault V6 would leave him short again and again. In qualifying, when fuel did not count, it could be run to 12,500 rpm, and he took pole at half the races.

Fourteen thousandths

His 26th birthday fell on the first day of qualifying for the Brazilian Grand Prix at Jacarepaguá, where Rio’s billboards divided the fans between him and Nelson Piquet. On the Saturday he took his first pole at home. At the start he led, and Nigel Mansell drew alongside on the long straight and tried the inside of the fast left-hander; Senna held his line, and Mansell went over the kerb into the barrier. It was the second race running in which they had touched on the first lap. Mansell blamed him, and wrote years later that Senna’s tactic was to intimidate and that he refused to be intimidated; Senna joked on television in December that in both their encounters it had been Mansell who left the track, by chance, of course. Piquet passed him on lap 3 and won. At the foot of the podium the two Brazilians waved a flag together.

The Spanish Grand Prix returned, for the first time since 1981, on a new circuit at Jerez, near Seville. On the Friday an oil-filter seal failed in the morning, the spare car had its engine changed, and when he finally went out he was about 1.4 seconds faster than anyone. His pole was the 100th for a Lotus. It left him so drained that he called in Willy Dungl, Niki Lauda’s masseur.

He led the first 39 laps with Piquet, Keke Rosberg, Mansell and Alain Prost in a line behind him, pacing himself by his fuel read-out rather than his rev counter. On lap 40 Mansell went round the outside of him past the pits and into the lead. But a rear tyre on the Williams had been cut by debris, and on lap 63, with nine laps left, Mansell stopped for four new ones. He rejoined about 20 seconds behind and took some four seconds a lap out of the Lotus. Senna’s left rear tyre was finished; he nearly spun twice. Mansell passed Prost at the end of lap 69 and was 1.5 seconds behind with a lap to go. They came out of the last hairpin wheel to wheel. Mansell pulled out of the slipstream and drew alongside, and the Lotus crossed the line first by 0.014 seconds, by Jenkinson’s eye barely the diameter of a wheel. Mansell was ahead a few feet after the line, and set off on his lap of honour believing he had won. Senna had about a litre and a half of fuel left. At the time only one finish in the championship’s history had been closer, at Monza in 1971.

Seconds between them at the line

0.014

Jenkinson gave the day to both of them: Senna had won, he wrote, but Mansell was the hero. Senna led the World Championship.

Spring

At Imola he took pole, his fourth in a row, and retired after 11 laps with a failed rear wheel bearing; the bearings had been renewed the night before, and Dumfries’s failed too. At Monaco he was 3rd behind the two McLarens, his brakes locking and the engine short of power out of the slow corners.

Three days after Monaco, on 14 May, de Angelis crashed his Brabham in a private test at Paul Ricard, and he died in hospital in Marseille the next day. In December Senna said that his former team-mate had had the misfortune to crash at a circuit where the safety was not what it should have been. At Spa, the first race since, the podium was subdued. Senna was 2nd to Mansell there, running so close to the limits that the Lotus weighed 542 kg against a minimum of 540, with barely any fuel left to drain. At the start he had dived between Piquet and Gerhard Berger into La Source, nudging Berger’s Benetton sideways into Prost, whose McLaren was launched over René Arnoux’s rear wheel. Senna blamed Berger. Three into two, Jenkinson wrote, will not go, and when one of the three is Senna somebody else comes off worse. In Montreal he took a provisional pole on a wet Friday and finished 5th, a lap down, his Renault drinking too much fuel.

Detroit, and the flag

In Detroit, with Mansell on provisional pole in Saturday qualifying, Senna sat in the shade of the Lotus motorhome with his race engineer, Steve Hallam, then walked to the pits in no hurry, did one warm-up lap and one flying lap, 1:38.301, and came back in. Jenkinson thought it almost arrogant. Mansell’s reply was stopped by a red flag. As Senna came slowly down the pit lane, by his own account, one of his mechanics held up a board: “Brasil 1, França 0”. It was the World Cup quarter-final, in Guadalajara. Instead of going to the pole-sitter’s press conference he went straight to his hotel room to watch it, and the press laid into him for it. Brazil lost on penalties. He stayed away from the garage all evening, because his designer and the Renault mechanics were French and he knew they would tease him.

Race day was very hot and humid. He led the first lap, missed a gear on the second and let Mansell through, then passed him again on lap 8. On lap 14 a slow puncture put him in the pits and down to 8th, and he came back through the field, the fastest man on the track. Piquet took over the lead, and the two Brazilians fought through the traffic until Piquet’s stop dragged on for 18 seconds and Senna’s took eight. Piquet set the fastest lap in reply, and on lap 42 put his Williams into the wall. Senna won by 31 seconds from Jacques Laffite and Prost.

On the slowing-down lap, exhausted, he saw a Brazilian behind the fence with a small flag. It was instinct, he said: he stopped and signalled to the man on the other side of the fence, the marshal eventually understood, took the flag off the fence and brought it to him, and he drove the lap with it. It was the first of his flag laps. At home TV Globo was showing Argentina against England, the match in which Maradona scored twice, and Brazil saw only a summary of the race. It was Renault’s 20th win as an engine maker, and its last until 1989. It also put Senna back at the top of the championship, for the last time that year.

Twenty-five minutes, and the pass

At Paul Ricard he took pole and slid off on oil from Andrea de Cesaris’s blown Minardi on the fourth lap; at Brands Hatch the gearbox failed. At Hockenheim, 10 minutes before Saturday’s qualifying hour, the engine in the spare car spluttered: its fuel pump had failed. At ten past one the engine and gearbox were being unbolted from the monocoque, and Senna was signing two small boys’ programmes at the back of the garage. With 25 minutes of the session left the team manager came in from the pit wall to find the car in pieces. At a quarter to two he went out in his race car; at five to two he leapt into the rebuilt one, and at one minute to two he began his flying lap, finishing it under the chequered flag: 3rd on the grid, three tenths off pole. He apologised to the mechanics for not getting pole. That weekend Honda announced that it would supply Lotus as well as Williams in 1987, with its test driver Satoru Nakajima in the second car. In the race Senna was 2nd, and ran out of fuel just after the line.

The Hungarian Grand Prix of 10 August was the first World Championship race behind the Iron Curtain, and people came to the Hungaroring from Hungary, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany: more than 120,000 of them, by Motor Sport’s count at the time. Senna gambled on two sets of the softest qualifying tyres, took pole on the first run and spun on the second and third.

Piquet had quietly found an ideal differential setting, and had not told his team-mate Mansell. He took the lead on the straight early on, but Senna had looked after his tyres, and after the stops he led again by about eight seconds. Piquet closed. On lap 55 he dived inside at the first corner, arrived too fast and slid wide into the dust, and Senna cut back underneath him. Two laps later Piquet feinted right past the pits, went round the outside into the first corner, locked his right rear wheel and held the Williams in an opposite-lock slide across the Lotus’s nose. Senna braked hard and bumped over the inside kerb, and Piquet came out in front, shaking his fist. He won by 17.7 seconds. Senna thought the Lotus as quick as the Williams in the corners, and Piquet much faster on the straights.

Out of fuel

At the Österreichring the engine misfired and failed. At Monza the clutch gave out within about 90 metres (100 yards) of the start, and he sat with his arm raised as the field streamed past on both sides. On a Saturday in September, without telling Lotus, he spent a day in the Welsh forests near Carno trying five rally cars for his friend Russell Bulgin, editor of Cars and Car Conversions. He drove himself there from Slough, was first out of his car to help shift a tree across the road, and said afterwards that, racing apart, it was probably the best day he had had in the country.

At Estoril he took pole by 0.816 seconds. Mansell beat him to the first corner and led every lap, and Senna spent the second half of the race holding off Piquet, using the traffic, Jenkinson thought, with fine track-craft. On the last lap, pushed by Prost, he lapped in 1:21. His read-out said he had fuel for another 1.4 laps; halfway round the 70th the Renault spluttered and died. Prost and Piquet went by, he coasted over the line, and he was classified 4th, a lap down. His chance of the title had gone. The next day Renault announced that it would leave Formula One.

In Mexico, at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, he took his 15th pole in the last minutes of qualifying, sliding over a bump at the exit of the Peraltada, and finished 3rd on blistered tyres while Berger ran without a stop on Pirellis and won. At Adelaide the engine, misfiring for an hour, gave out after 43 laps. Prost was champion, by 2 points from Mansell. Senna was 4th again, with 55 points and eight poles, more than anyone, and only two wins.

The black and gold went with the year. John Player Special left Lotus, Camel came in, and for 1987 the car would be yellow, with a Honda engine and computer-controlled suspension.

On 15 December he sat in the ring of interviewers on TV Cultura’s Roda Viva in São Paulo for an hour. They played him the pictures from Detroit, set to The Cure’s Boys Don’t Cry, and his eyes filled; men don’t cry, he protested. Asked where he stood behind Prost, Piquet and Lauda, he answered with an image from the straights.

Estou chegando lá, eu estou no vácuo.

… Estou no vácuo de todos eles. No ano que vem a gente vai tentar passar.

I’m getting there, I’m in the slipstream.

… I’m in the slipstream of all of them. Next year we’ll try to get past.