GRR

Senna’s inspired first F1 win, 40 years on

03rd February 2025
Damien Smith

They say you never forget the first time. That was certainly true for Ayrton Senna, especially as his maiden Formula 1 win was among the best of his eventual 41.

It didn’t take him long, of course, to make the breakthrough: just two races in to his second season, and in his second start for his new team, Lotus. It’s nearly 40 years ago now: 21st April 1985, at a drenched Estoril for the Portuguese Grand Prix. Already established as the next big thing, the great man appeared to walk on water that day.

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Senna stamps his mark at Toleman

The Brazilian was hot stuff long before he even stepped into an F1 car, thanks to his striking record on the UK single-seater nursery slopes. By 1983, as he saw off a surge from Martin Brundle to claim the British Formula 3 title, Senna tested for three of the top F1 teams with an eye on an immediate graduation in 1984. Williams, Brabham and McLaren all ran him and were impressed, but none had a race seat available.

Which is why Senna found himself in the cockpit of a Toleman in the autumn for a test run at Silverstone. The team’s designer, Rory Byrne, was on hand to run Senna – and both driver and engineer immediately relished working together. Without many alternatives but encouraged by the promise of working with Byrne, Senna thus joined the small but improving Toleman team for his F1 debut season, all too aware of its minnow status. He’d just have to make the best of it.

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That much was clear from the start. Turbo failure on his Hart engine curtailed Senna’s F1 debut in Rio, but he scored a World Championship point with a sixth-place finish in his second Grand Prix start at Kyalami – despite losing bodywork from his Toleman TG183B’s nose and suffering from severe dehydration at the finish. Later renowned for his fitness, Senna had to be lifted from the car in South Africa, such was his state of exhaustion.

Thereafter, his season was pockmarked by brilliance. Following his only failure to qualify at Imola and another blown turbo at Dijon in the new TG184, Senna subbed for countryman Emerson Fittipaldi in a one-make Mercedes 190E race to launch the new Nürburgring – and won, beating an all-star cast that included Alain Prost.

Then, at the sopping Monaco Grand Prix, he famously came oh so close to doing it again. Suffering with a brake problem, McLaren’s Prost found himself stalked by the Toleman, only to be saved by red flags as the rain intensified. Senna was classified second, on a landmark day.

Another podium followed at Brands Hatch for the British Grand Prix. But by August tensions were running high at Toleman. Rumour had it Senna was about to seal a deal to join Lotus for 1985.

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Banned! Senna creates a storm

Toleman boss Alex Hawkridge responded furiously to the speculation, claiming an unbreakable three-year deal was in place. He was then apoplectic at the Dutch Grand Prix when Lotus, under the leadership of Peter Warr, announced its deal with Senna.

These had been hard years for Lotus. The last win had come way back in 1982, when Elio de Angelis held off Keke Rosberg’s Williams by half a car’s length in Austria. Then less than four months later, devastation: Lotus founder and its charismatic leader Colin Chapman died of a heart attack aged just 54.

Warr carried the broken team, but Lotus was in dire need of a lift. Nigel Mansell, whom Warr held in barely concealed contempt, dropped his 95T on a wet white line at Massenet while leading the early stages of the 1984 Monaco Grand Prix in which Senna later starred. Now the chief had convinced JPS to drop its insistence of always having a British driver and went after Senna, whose worth had shot up through the summer. The signing would provide the lift Lotus so dearly needed.

Meanwhile, sensation! Hawkridge, in a fury, banned Senna from Toleman for the Italian Grand Prix. Remarkably, the relationship was repaired for Ayrton to then return to finish the season, and he signed off with another podium at Estoril, which in 1984 hosted the final round. The Brazilian stood on the podium with race winner Prost and Niki Lauda, whose second place was enough for him to clinch a third World Championship – by just half a point over his team-mate. Just six months later Senna would return to the Estoril podium for what turned out to be the race of his life.

 

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The lighter side of Senna

Senna would race at Lotus for three seasons, from 1985 to ’87, inspiring the team to revival and its brightest post-Chapman period. In Gérard Ducarouge’s Renault turbo-powered 97T, Ayrton found himself armed with the potency he needed to fully express himself. An evolution of the previous 95T, the 1985 model was a classic of its era: a monocoque featuring aluminium foil between composite layers, pull-rod suspension, and aerodynamic appendages such as small wings at the back of the sidepods and vertical planes behind the front wheels to enhance downforce and airflow. 

Senna scored the first eight of his eventual 65 pole positions in the car, but only twice converted them to race victories. Mechanical failures let him down too many times and restricted him from making a sustained title challenge to champion Prost.

Famously intense, Warr didn’t have an easy time managing Senna. But others within the team saw a different side to the great man in his formative F1 years. An ebullient American, Kenny Szymanski looked after the team’s tyres and helped out on pitstops. He struck up a firm friendship with Senna and experienced his playful sense of humour.

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“Ayrton was 100 per cent serious, he gave you 100 per cent effort,” says Szymanski. “But he’d walk in in the morning, come over, smack you with a fist on the shoulder and say ‘how’s my f***ing American friend today?’ You’d raise your fist and he’d say, ‘uh, uh – don’t touch the driver!’”

Senna was one of a number of famous names who paid a visit to what Szymanski calls “the 85th Street Museum” – his apartment in New York, which is filled with memorabilia collected from his years in F1. “It was in 1986 after the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal,” Szymanski recalls. “The first thing he did was look at the right-front tyre from Portugal 1985, which I have in my flat signed by him. He looked at the [wet-tread] blocks, which of course were worn because they’d done a GP, they were rounded off a little bit. But they were almost pristine.” Just like everything from that day at Estoril.

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A wet-weather masterclass

At the first round of 1985 in Rio, Senna again found himself out of luck at his home Grand Prix. An electronic fault ended his Lotus debut, while team-mate de Angelis – who had outqualified him on the first of only three occasions that year – scored a podium. Senna’s disappointment would soon be forgotten.

Estoril was only Senna’s 16th Grand Prix, where he claimed the first of his record-setting 65 pole positions (since beaten by Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton). From the start, the black Lotus stretched into the lead in the treacherous conditions, and that’s the way it stayed as the race ran to the maximum two-hour duration. Only nine cars were classified, with just Michele Alboreto’s Ferrari finishing on the same lap – more than a minute down.

Later, Senna would reflect on perhaps his most complete race performance. A gearbox problem before the start had caused a major flutter, then he struggled to keep the Lotus on track during the extra ten minutes of warm-up allowed in the conditions. Even during the race Senna lobbied from the cockpit for it to be stopped early, just as it had been at Monaco the previous year. His calls fell on deaf ears. Instead, he’d earn every one of his full allocation of nine points.

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After the chequered flag, watched by his delighted parents and a paltry Portuguese crowd, Senna pulled into parc ferme. The moment is captured by one of the great F1 photographs, taken by Steven Tee. Captured in moody black and white from behind, the 97T is rolling to a standstill in a drenched collecting area as bedraggled onlookers peer through a wire fence. The driver has already thrown off his belts, his left hand cupped in glory as Warr, in thick-framed Peter Sellars specs and flat cap, welcomes him with arms spread as wide as his ecstatic smile. The first Lotus win for nearly three years.

And there, just above Senna’s left-front wheel, is Szymanski – in a Goodyear cap, joy spread all over his face, caught mid-pogo about six inches off the ground with arms straight by his sides. “Well, I still haven’t come down,” says Szymanski, “I’m still up in the air. A wonderful day. And I’m so glad that was Ayrton’s first win, not Monaco in 1984 with the Tolemaniacs…”  

So many more would follow. But were any of them any better or sweeter than this? Perhaps Brazil 1991, when he finally broke his home-race duck. But Estoril 1985 was surely Ayrton’s day of days. We remember the first time, too.

 

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images.

  • formula 1

  • f1

  • Aryton Senna

  • Portuguese Grand Prix

  • Estoril

  • Lotus

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