Was Ayrton Senna the greatest Formula 1 driver of all time? How do you define greatness? 30 years after Ayrton’s tragic death, Pat Symonds, his first race engineer in F1, recalls how the genius quickly made itself obvious…
WORDS PAT SYMONDS PICTURES
2 November 1983 was a fairly typical winter’s day at Silverstone. The temperature was around 12 degrees in the morning – not warm enough to dry off a track surface wet with overnight drizzle. The light south-east wind was doing little to help, it merely added to the misery of a winter test. And yet in other ways the day was far from typical for this was the day that Ayrton Senna first drove a Toleman, the car he was to race the following season with me as his race engineer.
This wasn’t Ayrton’s first taste of Formula 1. In July he had driven Keke Rosberg’s Williams FW08C at Donington Park and, in the autumn, McLaren had given him a run in the MP4/1C – but this was his first experience of a turbocharged Formula 1 engine. The enormous throttle lag associated with those early engines did nothing to help him master what was a rather difficult chassis. It was also his first experience of Pirelli tyres – the Williams had been on Goodyears and the McLaren on Michelins. Then, as now, the Pirellis took some mastering.
I wasn’t actually running the car that day. That was left to Rory Byrne but, in a way, as an observer, I was better able to examine how this rookie driver was progressing. It was nothing short of impressive. His run in the McLaren had given him some indication of what to expect of an F1 car at Silverstone but his early mastery of the turbo engine’s throttle lag and his precise feedback were really quite exceptional.
Then there were the lap times. In qualifying for the British Grand Prix in July, Derek Warwick had been the faster of our team cars, setting a time of 1m12.5s for 10th on the grid – and this on ultra-soft qualifying tyres. By the end of the morning Ayrton had lapped at 1m12.0s and, in the afternoon, he shaved this down to 1m11.5s – a time that would have put him eighth on the grid. Of course, the high tyre energy at Silverstone and the somewhat fickle thermal nature of the Pirelli tyres in those days may have played a part, but no one was in any doubt that here was someone who was going to shake up the establishment. This was a fact not lost on another Brazilian, Nelson Piquet; at a later test at Paul Ricard in the Brabham, it’s widely believed Piquet instructed the chief mechanic, Charlie Whiting, to alter the setup of the car after
