The underdog F1 squad that thrust Senna into the limelight
The Toleman TG184 was the car that could, according to legend, have given Ayrton Senna his first F1 win but for Alain Prost and Jacky Ickx at Monaco in 1984. That could be stretching the boundaries of the truth a little, but as STUART CODLING explains, the team's greatest legacy was in giving the Brazilian prodigy passed over by bigger outfits an opportunity
“Start small, think big,” runs a quote popularly attributed to technology entrepreneur Steve Jobs. In January 1984 Jobs, whose company had begun operating from a suburban garage in Los Altos, California, unveiled the first Mac computer in a revolutionary blaze of hype, setting Apple Computer Inc on the path to becoming one of the biggest companies in the world. Four months later and thousands of miles away, a group of unproven individuals destined for greatness in Formula 1 narrowly missed out on achieving one of the greatest upsets in the history of motor racing.
Monaco 1984 is F1’s great shoulda-woulda-coulda moment, an event still hotly debated. The narrative is stuffed with Hollywood tropes: a struggling, underdog team; a new car created by a who-are-you-anyway designer; a driver talented enough to have caught the eyes of top teams, but not so much that they wanted to employ him straight away; a surreal race flagged before the finish and the win awarded to a driver who had already been overtaken; and the long-tail intrigue of whether the car which crossed the line first, only to be denied a sensational victory, would have made it to the chequered flag if the race hadn’t been stopped early. And most of it is true.
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