The rushed McLaren F1 car that elevated a reluctant Senna's legacy

McLaren had lost its supply of Honda V12 engines in the summer. A replacement wasn’t found until November, and then only a deal for customer-spec Ford Cosworth V8s. It didn’t start on the development of the active-ride system essential to keep pace with Williams until the autumn. And to cap it all, the team’s talisman driver, Ayrton Senna, was telling the world that it was far from certain that he would return the following year. The odds looked stacked against McLaren at the end of 1992.

McLaren’s 1993 Ford-powered contender, the MP4/8, wouldn’t run until a month before the start of the season at Kyalami in South Africa. Two weeks into its belated and truncated test schedule, Senna climbed aboard for the first time on 3 March at Silverstone. The Brazilian liked what he found, smashed the winter testing record and quickly did a deal to race the MP4/8, an agreement involving famously unconventional terms. And so began a season that while slightly surreal in the context of McLaren’s history is central to Senna’s legend.

If you believe the generally held contention at the start of the year that McLaren was some kind of underdog, then it punched above its weight over the first half of its 1993 campaign. Senna won three of the first six races and led the championship from pre-season favourite Alain Prost at the end of that run. Yet by the season’s end, McLaren had a car that was probably a match for the Williams-Renault FW15C in which Prost had wrapped up the title after 14 of the 16 races. No wonder former McLaren boss Ron Dennis has called the MP4/8 “one of the best cars we ever made”. “Mindblowing” is another superlative he has attached to it.

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That such words can be used to describe the 1993 McLaren is all the more remarkable because chief designer Neil Oatley and his team set to work on what would become the MP4/8 not knowing the identity of the engine in the back. Or how many cylinders it would have!

Dennis was trying to convince Honda to reverse its decision to quit at the same time as striving to get the same Renault engines as Williams, a deal that would have involved the purchase of Ligier for its supply of the French V10s. All the while the fallback position was paying for Ford Cosworth HB V8s, not the latest pneumatic-valve version to be used by Benetton, the factory team, but customer units of the same spec as those to be supplied to Lotus and Minardi.

“We started work on that car really not knowing if it would have a V12, a V10 or a V8,” recalls Oatley. “We were pressing ahead with the aero package, but the big question marks were the engine and fuel tank lengths. We just had to accept that the wheelbase would have to be tuned once we knew what engine it was going to have. We were able to adapt fairly easily when the Ford came. It was easier doing it that way around rather than designing it for a V8 and going to a V12.”

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Customer Ford engines powered McLaren in 1993, a point which didn't fill Senna with confidence

It helped that Cosworth provided McLaren with some help via the back door prior to the inking of a deal that cost the team a reputed $6 million. “Cosworth was fairly friendly and gave us some basic information, so we could do some work as if it was all going ahead,” continues Oatley. “It was a bit unofficial. If we hadn’t have those details until November it would have been almost impossible to do it on time.”

There was a further complication in the conception and gestation of the MP4/8. It wasn’t the change in tyre rules — narrower all around - and tweaked aero regs for 1993, which Oatley reckons had a negligible effect on the design process. Rather it was the decision to produce an active car to challenge Williams head-on. McLaren’s big British rival had moved the F1 goalposts with the introduction of the active B-spec FW14 in 1992, a year that Nigel Mansell swept to the title with a then-season high of nine victories.

“Ron wanted an active-suspension system; he wanted a car full of technology,” recalls Giorgio Ascanelli, Senna’s race engineer in 1992 and ’93 and the project leader on the active programme. “So that’s what we did.”

"The whole thing was conceived, designed and tested in the period from October up to the first run of the car at Silverstone" Neil Oatley

McLaren had already been testing active technology for a couple of years. Honda was leading the development of the system that built on its experience with Lotus and the active 99T of 1987, a two-time race winner in Senna’s hands. It ran on a pair of different test cars over that period. But that avenue of development was removed with Honda’s departure, which meant that McLaren and its TAG Electronics Systems sister company had to start from scratch.

“Honda based its system on something akin to Lotus’s, which was fairly complex, and progress was painfully slow,” says Oatley. “What we’d learned there was really no benefit for what we had to do for 1993. The whole thing was conceived, designed and tested in the period from October up to the first run of the car at Silverstone.”

McLaren sketched out its active strategy after another test with an MP4/7-based mule using the Honda system at Monza early in September. Ascanelli was asked by Dennis to head up co-ordination of the programme right at the end of the month. “I remember the date because there’s an Italian song called 29 Settembre,” he says.

A key lieutenant of Ascanelli’s on the active development was a young Pat Fry. He’d joined McLaren earlier in 1992 as a test and development engineer but shifted over to the active programme at Ascanelli’s request. They’d worked together at Benetton and, as Oatley says, the future Ferrari, McLaren and Renault big shot and now Williams chief technical officer was “very well suited” to his new role. An electronics engineer by qualification, he’d started his career working on navigation systems for missiles.

Photo by: Ercole Colombo

Ascanelli (left with Ron Dennis) led the active suspension programme on the 1993 McLaren

“Pat was a clever kid and a fundamental element in the programme,” says Ascanelli. “Him joining was one of the conditions of me taking responsibility to head up the active programme.”

The tight timescale involved at least partially explains why Ascanelli and Oatley opted for what the former calls “a more simple approach” to the furrow ploughed by Honda.

“We accepted a lower effectiveness in terms of damping,” he explains. “We wanted to provide a stable platform for the aerodynamics, which at that time were very sensitive.

“We found ourselves with a very short time to define the system and the code to give us the performance. But Ron was fantastic, always so good at giving us the tools we needed. TAG was a fantastic partner. They sometimes claim paternity of the software, but it was generated completely inside McLaren, myself writing the principle code and three good kids putting it into something the ECU could eat.”

TAG, which had been set up at the start of the 1990s, was responsible for the ECU. It produced a fully integrated system for the engine and chassis controls, two-way telemetry and its own traction control for the Cosworth V8.

The first driver to sample the MP4/8 was CART Indycar star Michael Andretti, who was following the path across the Pond trodden by his father, Mario, nearly 25 years before. He and Mika Hakkinen, who’d been brought in as test driver and reserve after a protracted legal battle with previous employer Lotus, put in the initial test work, all of it undertaken at Silverstone. Oatley had known from the beginnings of the development programme that the car would never be ready for a normal schedule of testing in the warmer climes of continental Europe in the early months of the year.

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Initial testing wasn’t straightforward. There were interruptions in the programme, recalls Oatley, resulting from Cosworth’s conservatism. Even after the smallest of over-revs, McLaren was asked to pull the engine out of the car.

“There was problem with the engine on the gearshift,” he explains. “Inevitably when you do a gearshift you get a wind-up in the driveshafts.” That was affecting the torque delivery and resulting in the over-rev. “Cosworth had a very strict policy,” continues Oatley. “Even if you went 13rpm over the limit you had to take the engine out. We got nothing done in the first couple of days at Silverstone.”

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Andretti and tester Hakkinen did the initial donkey work as Senna stayed away; the Finn would later replace Andretti

Of three-time F1 world champion Senna, there was no sign. The Brazilian disappearing for the winter and leaving the testing donkey work to others was nothing new. But he’d gone into the off-season proclaiming that he’d made no decisions on his future. He wasn’t happy after McLaren’s loss of Honda, a manufacturer with which he’d enjoyed a close relationship, nor enamoured with the prospect of racing a car with the same engine as Minardi. “He was worried that with the Ford engine, we were going to struggle,” says Oatley.

It might or might not be true that he offered to drive for Williams for free. But it was never going to be possible contractually. Prost, it is said, had a clause in his Williams deal stating that if the team signed his bitter rival he could walk away. Oatley insists that Senna had a contract that meant if he was racing in F1 in 1993 it would be for McLaren: “He couldn’t go anywhere else.”

But Senna could have taken a sabbatical a la Prost or headed Stateside like Mansell. He would test a CART Indycar for Penske at the Firebird Raceway in Arizona just before Christmas ’92 and proclaimed that he liked what he found. A season in CART with Penske was probably unrealistic, too: the team already had its drivers by the time of his test. But Senna was going to make no decision about racing McLaren’s 1993 F1 offering until he’d tested it.

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Longtime McLaren man and then chief mechanic Dave Ryan remembers picking Senna up ahead of his maiden run in the MP4/8, and he didn’t get a good vibe.

"With the Honda V12, lifting off the throttle was like stamping on the brakes because there was so much friction. He could ‘drive’ the V8-powered car so much more because the engine wasn’t influencing the chassis behaviour so much" Neil Oatley

“Ayrton was sitting on the fence, and this was a time when he wasn’t getting on with Ron,” says the New Zealander. “I got the feeling that he might not be driving for us that year; he really wanted to see what the car was like before committing.”

The MP4/8 had already shown promise in the small amount of testing it had done so far. Hakkinen had got within half a second of Michael Schumacher’s best in the new Benetton-Ford B193 on the Silverstone south circuit. But McLaren didn’t know where it was in the pecking order. As Oatley says, the Finn was “an unknown benchmark”.

Benetton and Williams had been among the teams testing at Silverstone prior to Senna’s arrival. Prost and new Williams signing Damon Hill were a good couple of seconds quicker than McLaren’s best from Hakkinen. When Senna turned up, he didn’t just beat their times in the MP4/8, he obliterated them.

Photo by: Rainer W. Schlegelmilch / Motorsport Images

Senna kept McLaren guessing until he tested the car - but even then was only willing to commit to a race-by-race deal

His first run was just to feel the car. “We put in 100 litres of fuel and he drove for maybe 20 minutes: the times were coming down, the progression was good,” says Ascanelli. “Then he came into the pits, no call on the radio. He didn’t say a word, just indicated that we should go into the office in the truck.”

What Ascanelli recalls as a two-hour debrief followed. Then it was back on track for a proper run. The times tumbled and his engineer believes Senna set the fastest time for a V8-powered car around Silverstone that winter. The following day he put in a series of hot lap as lunchtime approached. He got down to a 1m20.3s, which compared with the 1m21.0s set by Hill the day before that stood as the previous best of the winter.

“I was driven back home and had a bite to eat and a chat with my wife, then I crashed in bed,” recounts Ascanelli. “Then 10 or 10:30 my wife woke me up, and said, ‘It’s Ayrton for you’. His words were, ‘The car is good, you will have to put up with me or another year’.”

Senna most definitely liked the MP4/8. He felt he could do something with it.

“Ayrton was surprised, he was surprised at the driveability of the car,” says Oatley. “The Ford didn’t have the top-end power of the Honda, but it was a much more free-flowing engine. With the Honda V12, lifting off the throttle was like stamping on the brakes because there was so much friction. He could ‘drive’ the V8-powered car so much more because the engine wasn’t influencing the chassis behaviour so much.”

There was still the little matter of a deal to be done; Senna had told Ascanelli to keep his decision a secret because he “had a few things to sort out with Ron”. It is recounted in Maurice Hamilton’s book Ayrton Senna that a contract had already been faxed from McLaren HQ in Woking to Silverstone.

The deal Senna signed was of a suck-it-and-see nature, a race-by-race arrangement for a reputed $1 million a pop. It wouldn’t be until the French GP in July that he put pen to paper to contest the remainder of the season.

It has been suggested that the idea of a million-a-race deal was put about by McLaren in an attempt to screw more money out of its sponsors. It had lost its supply of free engines and was not only paying for the Fords but spending money developing them. Then there were Senna’s salary demands…

Photo by: Rainer W. Schlegelmilch / Motorsport Images

Senna was a regular thorn in Williams' side in 1993 as the car proved more drivable with a V8 engine

Hamilton, however, makes it clear in his 2014 work that Senna really was driving race by race through the first half of the season. He quotes McLaren’s lawyer, Tim Murnane, recalling late nights in the office with Dennis as Senna played a game of brinkmanship to leverage his position. And it is true that McLaren’s number 1 flew in overnight from Brazil to Italy for the San Marino GP at Imola in April. Whether he turned up five minutes after opening free practice had started or 10 minutes before — stories vary and Oatley thinks they’ve all been embellished — is irrelevant.

Record testing pace or not around Silverstone, McLaren still felt it was heading into the unknown as the team boarded the plane to Johannesburg.

“With the car only just finished and only testing at Silverstone, and mostly by ourselves, we really didn’t have a benchmark,” explains Oatley. “Silverstone is a circuit that can vary a lot from day to day depending on the atmospheric conditions and the wind.”

Ascanelli reckons Senna could have won in Hungary but for the potentiometer failure that put him out after 18 laps and would still have won at Suzuka had the race been dry

Senna qualified less than a tenth behind Prost for the South African GP, led the race for the first 23 laps and finished second to his great rival, albeit more than a minute behind. A sensor in the active system had failed, leaving the right rear suspension at full droop from halfway through the race. But Kyalami undoubtedly showed that McLaren’s new F1 design was very much in the mix.

“We faded a bit, but we still had a favourable result,” says Oatley. “We qualified well and had been right with Williams and Benetton in the race.”

No one could have predicted what was to come, however. There were five wins, three of them in the wet and that first lap at Donington Park in the European GP in April. Senna excelled in his ultra-driveable mount on a slippery surface. But by the end of the season the MP4/8, now with the latest spec Cosworths, power braking and improved active incorporating roll control, was a match for the all-conquering Williams FW15C.

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Ascanelli reckons Senna could have won in Hungary but for the potentiometer failure that put him out after 18 laps and would still have won at Suzuka had the race been dry. Then at Adelaide came the first non-Williams pole of the year and a second dry victory of the season that owed nothing to good fortune a la Monaco.

The pole was set, of course, by Ayrton Senna in the McLaren-Ford MP4/8, the car he’d been so reluctant to drive. An imperious drive then gave him victory number 35 with the British team. It was a fitting way to round out a career with McLaren that had yielded three world titles.

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Senna got on well with the MP4/8 and at Donington produced one of his most famous victories in mixed conditions

How McLaren evolved to become a Williams challenger

McLaren endured a mid-season dip in form and results in 1993. Over the six races between Senna’s fortuitous Monaco victory and team-mate Michael Andretti’s sole podium in the last race of his truncated F1 career at Monza, the MP4/8 was outgunned by the Benetton B193 in qualifying five times. But the order turned around over the final races of the campaign, and then some. There were multiple reasons why McLaren finished the season as the quicker car and perhaps ahead of even Williams by its very end.

McLaren’s deal with Cosworth allowed it to upgrade to the latest Series VIII HBs incorporating pneumatic valves from mid-season. It resulted in a considerable power upgrade, remembers Oatley.

“The power curve on that Cosworth kept going up and up: it didn’t plateau before the redline,” he explains. “So the more revs you could use, and the air valves allowed gave more revs, meant pure extra power. There was a significant improvement from that point onwards.”

Exactly what constituted mid-season became a matter of fierce debate between McLaren and Benetton. The latter’s team boss, Tom Walkinshaw, famously proclaimed that its rival would get the Series VIIIs over his dead body. Twice the engines went into the McLarens over a race weekend, only to quickly to come out again. Senna even qualified with the latest-spec engine Hungary while the arguments went on in the background.

“We actually flew Walkinshaw back to the UK for a meeting with the Ford and Cosworth on the Saturday afternoon to try to establish if we could race the later engine the next day,” remembers Oatley. “We had to take them out again, but the plane that took Tom went technical before he could return.” Oatley isn’t sure if the Benetton boss made it back to Hungary, though there is photographic evidence to suggest that he did.

Continuing developments with the active system also played a part in McLaren’s upturn in form.

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Ford outfits McLaren and Benetton with star drivers Senna and Schumacher enjoyed a healthy rivalry in 1993

“It was relatively crude and simple at race one and incredibly complicated in the way we operated it at race 16,” explains Oatley. “We changed a lot of the hydraulic lines and fittings so it had a quicker response. What we were able to do was fine-tune the system to optimise the aero performance all the way through every corner. It was almost an all-nighter to programme the car.”

Ryan still marvels at the debriefs involving Senna and Ascanelli.

“I’d sit there, and they would be saying we’ll drop it a mill here and raise it two there,” he says. “The detail they went into was amazing, particularly for the time. Giorgio and Ayrton were so good together at maximising every aspect of the car. They really clicked.”

"Mika’s arrival was healthy for Ayrton. He was comfortably quicker than Michael and didn’t have to push that hard" Dave Ryan

There’s one final factor, one that involves the identity of the driver in the second MP4/8. Andretti was dropped after Monza to be replaced for Estoril by Hakkinen, who promptly went and outqualified his superstar team-mate.

“I remember Gerhard Berger coming across Mika, who was laughing at the end of qualifying,” recalls Ascanelli, who had been lured to McLaren by the Austrian, only to be poached by Senna to become his engineer in ’92. “Gerhard told him to remember this was going to be the first and last time he outqualified his new team-mate.”

“Mika’s arrival was healthy for Ayrton,” reckons Ryan. “He was comfortably quicker than Michael and didn’t have to push that hard. When Mika came along, it made Ayrton focus that little bit more.”

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Ryan credits Hakkinen's promotion to a race seat with lifting Senna's levels in the closing rounds of 1993