The season that launched Senna to stardom

Ayrton Senna looked like sweeping all before him in his 1983 F3 season, but it became a ferocious battle with Martin Brundle. The Brazilian’s team boss Dick Bennetts looks back

Dick Bennetts casts his mind back to mid-1982: “Dennis Rushen said, ‘You need to meet this young lad’, because he was with him in Ford 2000. Dennis introduced me to him, and I knew ‘EJ’ was after him. Then Dennis came back and said, ‘Ayrton would like to do a test’. So we arranged it and it went very well, and he said he wanted to do the non-championship race in the Mansilla car. He just blitzed everyone. I thought, ‘This bloke’s not too bad’.”

At the time, Bennetts was the fresh-faced engineer who had left Ron Dennis’s employment and struck out on his own when Dennis’s Project 4 team became the nucleus of the new-look McLaren in Formula 1. Rushen was the free-spirited maverick running the works Van Diemen team in Formula Ford 2000, and for whom a certain highly touted Brazilian was cleaning up in the European and British championships.

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Author Marcus Simmons

Marcus Simmons is the Deputy Editor of Autosport magazine. As a child he was a regular on the chalk banks of Thruxton – hence his unhealthy obsession with 1970s Formula 2 and F3 – before he became an MSA timekeeper at the age of 17. At 19, his reporting debut for Motoring News arguably overshadowed Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ goal as the sporting moment of June 1986, and he joined the staff in 1990 after graduating from his degree course in Plymouth. A parallel Formula First career – which was as incident-packed as his childhood exploits in show-jumping and hunter trials – finished when he wrote off his car and put himself in hospital in 1991.

Marcus moved to Autosport in the summer of 1996. Since then he has had two stints as a freelancer and a brief spell as editor of Motor Sport magazine, during which the revered green cover was revived, before he rejoined Autosport in 2008. He lives in Teddington with his wife (who, gratifyingly, grew up within earshot of Castle Combe), daughter, stepson, dog, cat and guitars, and additionally has an adult daughter and stepson.