1987 The first Monaco win

On 29 January 1987 he signed a letter to Team Lotus agreeing that, as far as the public was concerned, he had a two-year contract. The agreements concluded in London the next morning made him the team’s number one, with priority in the equipment, and paid him US$1.5 million from Team Lotus, US$4,000 a point, and US$2.5 million more from R.J. Reynolds, whose Camel brand now sponsored the team. And they held a clause that he was bound not to mention in public: either could end the deal after one year, by written notice received no later than 8 August 1987.

The same papers banned him from motorcycling, skiing and hang-gliding, told him to keep himself fit at all times, and made him swap the Banco Nacional cap he had worn in 1986 for a team cap, and button his overalls on the podium so that the Camel logo showed. That spring he left England to live in Monaco.

Almost everything about the team had changed. The Lotus 99T-⁠Honda was yellow, with a Honda V6 turbo limited to 4 bar of boost, and it raced all year on computer-controlled suspension: hydraulic actuators at each wheel, developed and paid for by Lotus Engineering, that held the car’s ride height and attitude constant. Senna, John Davis of Lotus Engineering recalled, did all the development work on it. His team-mate was Satoru Nakajima, Honda’s test driver and Japan’s first full-time Formula One driver, whose seat had been a condition of the engine deal.

At Jacarepaguá he ran 2nd from the start, and led five laps when both Williamses stopped with paper blocking their radiators; after three tyre stops he was running 4th when the engine failed. At Imola, where Count Gughi Zanon gave him a silver plate engraved with the name of Elio de Angelis, winner there for Lotus two years before, he took pole in the last minutes of qualifying. It was the first pole for a car with active suspension and the last for Lotus: the 107th of the marque’s history, the works team’s 102nd. Peter Warr wore a badge that read Magic, which the team’s press release explained was its nickname for Senna. Nigel Mansell passed him on the second lap and won; Senna fought Alboreto all afternoon for 2nd.

Spa, and the garage

At Spa, with a cold, he qualified 3rd, in showers and, on the Saturday, hail. The race was stopped after Philippe Streiff’s Tyrrell broke in two at the top of the Raidillon. At the restart Senna dived between the two Williamses to lead into La Source. Mansell took a tow out of Pouhon and tried to go round the outside of the Lotus in the fast bends that followed. There was not room. The cars touched, and both spun into the gravel; Senna was out, and Mansell, who got going again, retired later with the underside of his car damaged. Jenkinson, in Motor Sport, thought Mansell foolish to have tried it.

Afterwards Mansell went down to the Lotus garage and grabbed Senna, and Lotus mechanics pulled them apart. By Mansell’s own later account he pushed Senna against the wall and pulled the zip of his overalls up to his nose; he also says Senna hit him while others held him back. At Monaco, an hour before the start, the FISA president, Jean-Marie Balestre, called both of them in and made them shake hands.

Monaco, 31 May

That year Monaco let 26 cars start for the first time. In practice Michele Alboreto’s Ferrari was launched over Christian Danner’s Zakspeed on the climb from Sainte-Dévote, and Senna, following Alboreto on a flying lap, had seen the danger and backed off. Mansell took pole, 0.672 seconds faster; Senna was 2nd, and fastest in the race-morning warm-up. Before the race, by the official site’s account, he told Brazilian journalists that Mansell had said Spa was in the past, and that the two of them had talked it over in the race director’s office.

Every circuit we went to was new to me, so he advised me on what to look out for, during team meetings and even in private conversations. Not only that, when we were in Brazil, he advised me on which water I could and couldn’t drink in daily life, and how to drive on the Brazilian roads. In Monaco, he even taped up my hands so I wouldn’t injure my fingers.

Mansell led for 29 laps, pulling away. Senna sat 2nd with no intention of mixing it, saving his tyres and brakes. On lap 30 the Williams lost its boost, with a broken exhaust, and Senna went by. He led the remaining 49 laps. The Lotus mechanics changed his tyres at the end of lap 42 in about nine seconds, a stop Jenkinson called faultless. Near the end, at the swimming pool, he could not get second gear, found the car sideways and caught it. On lap 72 he set the fastest lap of the race, for the joy of it, Jenkinson thought, and he won by 33.212 seconds from Nelson Piquet: the first Brazilian to win at Monaco, in the first Grand Prix won by a car with active suspension. Over the radio he thanked his mechanics one by one, and Peter Wright, the Lotus Engineering man who ran his suspension, remembers him shouting with delight on the slowing-down lap.

The drive had been more comfortable and less tiring, he said, with less wear on his hands from the wheel and the gear lever. On the podium he took a magnum of Moët and soaked everyone within reach, the princely family included, and Prince Rainier laughed. That evening he was the star of the Grimaldis’ gala, where Jacky Ickx, who had stopped the race in 1984, said he knew Senna had held it against him; then he went on to the Tip Top bar with his mechanics and a bemused Nakajima. It was his fifth win, in his 50th Grand Prix, and the first of his six at Monaco.

Detroit, without a stop

Three weeks later, in Detroit, Mansell took pole by 1.3 seconds and led away after a wet morning had dried to a humid, overcast afternoon. Early in the race Senna’s brake pedal went soft. It had put him into the wall there in 1985, so this time he eased off until the brakes came back, and saved his tyres as he did so. When Mansell’s stop was slowed by a sticking wheel nut, Senna led, from lap 34. On TV Globo Galvão Bueno said that now was the moment for him to stop and still come out in front. Instead he went faster, set the fastest lap on lap 39, and, finding his tyres and brakes in good shape as the fuel load came down, decided to go to the end on the same set. Ducarouge said afterwards that the team had fixed no lap for his stop; it was for Senna to call. Every other points-scorer stopped for tyres.

Mansell got cramp in his right leg, fell to 5th and was lapped by the Lotus. Senna won by 33.819 seconds from Piquet, and a marshal handed him a Brazilian flag for his lap of honour, as in 1986; he thought it came from the same fan, because he picked it up in the same place. He looked, Motor Sport said, perfectly fresh, and when Ducarouge and Goodyear’s Lee Gaug looked over his four tyres they found them in good condition. He was the first man to win the Detroit Grand Prix twice, and he led the World Championship. It was Lotus’s 79th and last World Championship win as a constructor, the works Team Lotus’s 74th.

The release clause

Through the summer the Williams FW11B, with the same Honda engine, was usually about a second a lap faster. Mansell lapped him at Paul Ricard, and at Silverstone both Williamses lapped him as Honda engines filled the first four places, Nakajima 4th. At Hockenheim he switched to the spare car on the dummy grid and led the first lap. Late in the race a hydraulic union cracked and the active car sank on to the small springs that held it up when the system was off; his lap times went from 1:49 to 2:05, and he still finished 3rd. Piquet took the championship lead from him that day.

He blamed the car’s aerodynamics, and the effort that had gone into the suspension. After the French Grand Prix he and Peter Warr had very hard words, and after a tyre burst and a heavy crash in a private test at Hockenheim, by one account, the two spoke only through Ducarouge. At the end of July his lawyers wrote to Warr that he would use the release clause and leave at the end of the year. At the Hungaroring, on the weekend of the 8 August deadline, Lotus announced Piquet as his replacement for 1988. Senna finished 2nd there, his back badly bruised by the vibration of his tyres.

At the Österreichring, where the race took three starts, he stalled at the third, fought up from the back to 3rd, lost his nose against Alboreto’s Ferrari, and passed Alain Prost for 5th at the finish.

When I first come to Formula One in ’84, I was starting, so I had so much to learn and to achieve that anything... Any good result was a progress, was a motivation. Then I changed to a bigger team, to Lotus, and I still went up and up and up. And I’m still doing it. So even when I have some problems, I look always to the next race. Because maybe one race I have no chance, but next one or the next five will be good against one bad one. So, you got to try to make the numbers bigger and bigger.

McLaren

On Friday 4 September, at Monza, Honda confirmed that it would supply McLaren as well as Lotus in 1988, McLaren named Senna as its second driver, and Ron Dennis drove Prost and Senna to a restaurant in the park in a grey Mercedes convertible, the two of them in plain clothes. Senna had wanted to bring Ducarouge with him; Ducarouge said no.

Senna must be out of his mind if he thinks he can take on Prost in what amounts to Prost’s team, … and, remember, I know all about that, first hand.

In the race he gambled on running without a tyre stop, and led from lap 24. On lap 43, coming up to lap Piercarlo Ghinzani’s Ligier for the second time, he went for the inside at the Parabolica, found it was not on, and ran wide across the sand of the run-off, made firm by rain the night before. It cost him about 13 seconds, and Piquet went through. With his car full of stones and sand he closed from about seven seconds to under three, set the fastest lap on the penultimate lap, and lost by 1.806 seconds. It was, Jenkinson wrote, one of his rare mistakes, and he took full responsibility for it. The race director forgot to show the chequered flag, and Senna, out of fuel just past the line, rode back on Nakajima’s car.

At Estoril a throttle sensor had to be changed, and he finished 7th. At Jerez he ran without a tyre stop again, held up a train of cars, and faded to 5th as his tyres wore through. At the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez he spun off with clutch trouble; his car stalled as it was being pushed, and he struck a marshal, and FISA fined him US$15,000. He said he would not appeal.

The Japanese Grand Prix, the first in Japan for 10 years, was run at Honda’s own circuit at Suzuka, and the title had already been settled: Mansell crashed heavily in practice and could not race, and Piquet was champion. Senna started 7th, in the spare car with Honda’s latest engine. At the start he went round Piquet on the right, over a white line beside the pit wall that Balestre had told the drivers not to cross, and passed Piquet, Teo Fabi and Alboreto before the first corner. He held Piquet off for most of the race, and on the last lap caught Stefan Johansson’s McLaren, short of fuel, and passed it for 2nd.

His last race for Lotus, at Adelaide on 15 November, was very hot and hard on brakes. He chased Gerhard Berger’s Ferrari to within about seven seconds, eased off as his tyres wore out, and finished 2nd on the road. Then Benetton protested, with, Marriott wrote, some support behind the scenes from Ferrari, and the stewards found that the extra ducts added to cool his brakes took the Lotus beyond the limits on its bodywork. He was disqualified, and Lotus did not appeal. He finished the year 3rd, with 57 points, behind Piquet and Mansell. Keeping the 6 points would not have changed that: only his best 11 results would have counted, leaving him level with Mansell, who had more wins.

In three seasons with Lotus he had won six races and taken 16 poles. Andrew Marriott, who wrote that last race up for Motor Sport, thought the partnership had never quite gelled as it should have. In 1988 Senna would drive for McLaren, beside Prost, in what Keke Rosberg had called Prost’s team.