The season that launched Senna to stardom

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.

‘EJ’ was, of course, Eddie Jordan, whose own Eddie Jordan Racing team was rivalling Bennetts’s new West Surrey Racing operation. Enrique Mansilla was the Argentinian who had partnered the Brazilian at Van Diemen in FF1600 in 1981, and whom Bennetts was fielding to runner-up in the 1982 British F3 Championship. And Ayrton… He was the future racing god, who at the time went by the name of Ayrton da Silva.

You can see the evidence on Bennetts’s timing sheet from his first F3 test at Thruxton. It was 28 October 1982. West Surrey Racing had initially been formed as West Surrey Engineering for 1981 by Mike Cox, the sponsor of Jonathan Palmer – Rushen’s ex-FF1600 driver who stepped up to F3 with Bennetts and won that season’s British title. No wonder Rushen sought Bennetts out that day in mid-1982.

And look at the times. A first run of a few laps, getting down to a 1m14.22s. Into the pits; a few tweaks. Back out. Another run: three quick laps, the quickest of which is a 1m13.33s. Just to put this into context, from the three British F3 rounds held at Thruxton that year, the fastest time recorded had been Martin Brundle’s pole time for the championship finale held the previous Sunday. That was a 1m13.77s…

Another test day at Thruxton, one at Snetterton, and then the competitive debut in the non-championship race at the Hampshire circuit on 13 November. ‘Da Silva’ earned pole by 0.75 seconds, then beat seasoned F3 campaigner Bengt Tragardh by 13 seconds in the race. That particular Ralt RT3 was then sold to Helmut Marko for Gerhard Berger to use in the 1983 European championship. Senna – the name under which he would become worshipped – got a new RT3 to race in the British series with WSR.

Senna made an immediate impression at the end of 1982 when he won a non-championship F3 race at Thruxton

Photo by: Sutton Images

“He got a cheap deal I realise now, considering the accident damage,” laughs Bennetts. “Two chassis in one season [were destroyed] – one at Cadwell, one at Oulton in a test.”

The one at Oulton wasn’t Senna’s fault though: “The left-rear stub axles weren’t good, and it failed – big shunt. I then rented Richard Trott’s [the 1980 FF2000 champion who had struggled for budget] F3 car, and did an all-nighter to get it ready.

“[Senna was a] very sharp businessman as well. He had friends in Brazil who were helping him. We had a battle over sponsorship space on the car. The front of the cockpit, he wanted Pool Jeans. I’d just done a deal with Toshiba and wanted it there, because it was quite a prominent spot on the old F3 car. He won.”

"A very intelligent guy, but he just had this thing where he wanted to win, and almost felt like he should win"
Dick Bennetts

The year had started so well. From the first nine of 20 rounds, Senna had won all of them. In eight, second place had gone to Brundle, who had been picked up by Jordan when he was left in the lurch by the withdrawal of BP backing. The gap was 34 points – equivalent to almost four wins. And then came the big mid-season wobble.

“We knew the bubble had to burst one day, and it burst at the European race at Silverstone,” says Bennetts. This was an event that counted for both the European and British championships, but you could only score British points if you ran the Goodyear control tyre.

“We had such a lead we thought we’d go for an outright win, thinking Martin would still go for a British win to gain points on us,” continues Bennetts. “But then he switched to Yokohama tyres when he heard we were. Eddie, of course, had run Yokohamas through 1982 in Europe, so he knew the tyres, we didn’t. Then of course Martin got pole, with Ayrton second.

“We got seven laps in before he had the accident through the wire catch fencing at Woodcote. He reckoned he’d picked up a puncture down at Club Corner, and that caused him to go off. The car was damaged that bad we couldn’t see…”

Senna began 1983 in sparking form, but mistakes crept in - this is his qualifying shunt at Cadwell

Photo by: Keith Sutton

The following weekend, it was trashed in qualifying at Cadwell Park.

“Comfortably on pole,” mutters Bennetts. “‘I can go a lot quicker’. Didn’t happen. I was back in the pub in Shepperton for lunch at two o’clock. Someone standing halfway round the lap had been timing and said it was blindingly quick, and I said, ‘Yeah, but he didn’t finish it…’

“He dropped the right-rear off the track [at the bottom of the Mountain S-bend], and he kept his foot buried on the throttle, and if the right-rear’s off the track, there’s no load on your left-front. Straight on. His girlfriend at the time said, ‘Can you not fix it?’ Obviously she didn’t understand that when an aluminium chassis hits a concrete wall…

“He didn’t like finishing second. I had to sit him down and say, ‘Right, you get six points for second, one for fastest lap if you manage to get that, so you’re only losing two points. If you finish second to him [Brundle] every race to the end of the year, you’ll still win the championship.’ ‘But I want to win.’

“That was the only sort of weakness I could see in him, but now knowing about his F1 career… to him, second was a loser. A very intelligent guy, but he just had this thing where he wanted to win, and almost felt like he should win, and unless you’ve got the equipment to do it, as he found in F1 when he switched to the Williams that fateful year…”

There was also the infamous Oulton Park shunt, when Senna landed on top of Brundle, putting them both out of the race. But not all the retirements were his fault.

“One of Ayrton’s big strengths to me was he could tell you everything about the car,” admires Bennetts. “We used to play with the ignition in qualifying – up and down one degree, one and a half degrees on the ignition. We’d done it on the dyno at Nicholson McLaren – a pencil width on the base plate of the distributor was one and a half degrees ignition.

“So I used to mark it, and he’d go a tenth and a half quicker – that was our final tuning at a race meeting. Except it caught us out at Thruxton, because while it worked around Snetterton, I didn’t realise the effect of the extra loading on the engine around the fast right-handers at Thruxton, and we blew a head gasket. I learned the hard way.”

Rivalry between Senna and Brundle was one of the big talking points of the 1983 season

Photo by: Ercole Colombo

Engines were key to Senna finally clinching the title when it went down to the wire at the Thruxton finale. And perhaps Bennetts’s lecture was bearing fruit. The Brazilian had placed second to Brundle in the penultimate round at Silverstone – one of just two finishes in 1983 that weren’t wins – and had been leapfrogged by the East Anglian in the points.

Both WSR and EJR had been using Toyota engines supplied by Italian F3 powerplant titan Novamotor all season, with the former team’s tended by Nicholson McLaren. Bennetts takes up the story: “In mid 1983 we noticed that Martin had stepped up, and we couldn’t work it out. We knew he had nothing new from Ralt. Then I got told he’d had a rebuilt engine direct from Novamotor.

“The best way to fix that was we sent Ayrton to Italy with the engine after the penultimate round. It made a difference, definitely. It was an upgrade, not just a rebuild.

Bennetts reckons “the biggest and most impressive thing was Macau” regarding Senna’s season

“He spent the week there while they rebuilt it, because he could speak Italian. We went to test at Snetterton and straight away we knew – it sounded crisper, it sounded sharper, and if we’d had that for the second half of the year we wouldn’t have had so many dramas. But at least we proved that it was the engine – although Eddie still disagrees to this day!

“In the morning at Snetterton we were at pitlane exit, Eddie and Martin were down at pitlane entry, both with our stopwatches timing each other every lap. We were quicker than Martin straight away, and Ayrton just said, ‘The car feels great, the engine’s mega’.

“We also had a 1984 upgrade sidepod from Ralt. We put the sidepods on about a quarter of an hour before lunch. Ayrton didn’t go any quicker. But he came back, we went across to the cafe, and he said, ‘You wait until after lunch, those sidepods are good’. He went even quicker.”

They also devised a cunning plan regarding the engine: “The Toyota took a while to get the oil temperature up, so the engine was a bit sluggish. It didn’t have a proper oil cooler – it had a slot in the sidepod, and you used to control the oil temp by putting tape across it. The slot was about 30mm wide by a foot long.

Senna ultimately came out on top in his battle with Brundle, while Davy Jones (left) finished second in the Thruxton finale

Photo by: Keith Sutton

“I thought, ‘Right, to be clever, for the start of the race I’ll tape it right up, and then we’ll get the oil temp up quick, but then Ayrton, you’ll have to pull the tape off after two laps or whatever’. ‘Oh yeah, I can do that.’ So we tried it for two laps around Snett and he could. But when he pulled the tape off, he slowed down to do it. He could loosen the belts, lean out the side of the cockpit.

“Early into the race at Thruxton, he loosened his belts but he still had to drive quick, and it almost cost us an engine. He managed to get it off coming into the chicane, and he got a bit out of shape. A couple of people said to me, ‘What happened to him then?’ I said, ‘I’m not quite sure…’

“I’d put a bit of a return tab on the tape, but of course high-speed Thruxton had pushed it down flat and he couldn’t reach it. It could have cost us the championship.”

Senna was on his way to F1. And so, it transpired, was Brundle. But first, there was the Macau Grand Prix – the first time the Far East street race had been run for F3 cars.

Bennetts reckons “the biggest and most impressive thing was Macau” regarding Senna’s season. It’s well-documented that his Brabham F1 test at Paul Ricard meant he didn’t arrive in the city until the middle of the night before qualifying began: “He’d never walked around the circuit, he had to hop in the car Thursday, and he goes and sticks it on pole.”

Bennetts’s timing sheets, bearing the logos of the Theodore Racing name under which Senna and EJR pair Brundle and Roberto Guerrero raced that weekend, reveal that in Friday’s decisive qualifying session, the Sao Paulo man only needed three laps. Even the slowest of these would have put him fifth on the grid.

Senna easily won both parts of the aggregate race on the Sunday, even though he wasn’t feeling up to scratch.

“He went out Friday night, and something happened on Saturday. We were supposed to meet up at the Theodore garage at the top of the hill. The guys finished the cars about four o’clock, and I said, ‘You go back to the hotel’. I waited there until six and he turned up. He said, ‘Are we going to talk about the car?’, and I said, ‘Too late, cover’s on the car, we’re ready’. ‘I don’t feel that well’, and that’s all I got out of him.

Senna was under the weather in Macau, but took a famous victory

Photo by: Sutton Images

“And then I heard rumours that he was out drinking or someone had spiked his drink. I honestly do not know to this day, but when we sat for a debrief at the end of race one, we sat on the edge of the circuit in the gutter, and he said, ‘The car’s good, just leave it. More important, I’ve got to go for a sleep.’ So he walked back to the hotel and he slept for a couple of hours, came back and ‘boom’.”

The post-race celebrations continued on the journey home from Hong Kong.

“It was a BA flight,” recalls Bennetts. “We knew the first officer – he was a local at our pub in Shepperton. He arranged some champagne. Ayrton gave us the trophy because it was his last F3 race, but on the way home it kept getting filled with champagne and got passed around the whole bloody jumbo.”

"You can be quick through talent, but he had the intelligence and the memory retention"
Dick Bennetts

While Senna went on to become a legend, WSR won further British F3 crowns with the Brazilian’s friend and protege Mauricio Gugelmin (1985), Mika Hakkinen (1990) and Rubens Barrichello (1991), and could have won the 1984 crown had the budget been raised to run Roberto Moreno: “Two weeks before race one, Roberto and I sat down and he said, ‘I’m nervous’, I said, ‘I’m nervous’, so we both shook hands and said, ‘Best we don’t do this – too risk’. He was very quick in testing – we would have won again.”

Since the mid-1990s, the team has been a mainstay of the British Touring Car Championship, with four titles won with Colin Turkington and BMW, and Jake Hill currently second in the 2024 standings. What would Senna make of what WSR is doing now?

“Hard to say, to be honest,” answers Bennetts. “He was very supportive. Away from racing he was a really good guy, a good friend. Some people didn’t like him but he was very determined, very focused. His feedback was incredible.

“He could ring me two or three days after a test or race and go back through what the car was doing. You get some drivers, 10 minutes after a race they can’t tell you what the car was doing because they have to focus 110% on the driving to be quick. You can be quick through talent, but he had the intelligence and the memory retention.”

The young Brazilian bloke, indeed, really wasn’t too bad.

Bennetts thought highly of Senna, who was killed at Imola in 1994

Photo by: Keith Sutton