‘Pure genius’ - Senna, Donington and the best opening lap in F1 history

If you are reading this column on the day on which it was posted, April 11, 2023, you are doing so exactly 30 years after one of the greatest racers in history drove one of his most brilliant laps.

The morning broke damp at Donington, the Easter eggs brittle with cold, and, although Williams was to start the afternoon’s European Grand Prix with the benefit of a front-row lock-out, its drivers Alain Prost and Damon Hill the only two to have posted sub-71sec qualifying times, a few shrewdies reckoned that the wet-weather wizards on the second row, Michael Schumacher (Benetton) in P3 and Ayrton Senna (McLaren) in P4, might be advantaged by the drizzle.

What transpired surprised everyone. At the start, Senna dropped a place, overtaken by Sauber’s Karl Wendlinger, who had jumped Schumacher, too. Senna passed Schumacher almost immediately, at Redgate, then took a bold, wide line around the outside of Wendlinger on the second of the two Craner Curves. He now had only Hill, in second, and Prost, leading, ahead of him, but by the exit of the Old Hairpin he was on Hill’s tail. He outbraked him on the inside-line approach to McLean’s, closed on Prost through Coppice and the Esses, then nailed his old foe at the Melbourne hairpin, his McLaren skittish yet biddable on the wetter side of the braking zone. He had stormed from fifth to first in just 75 seconds. By the end of that first lap he was half a dozen car lengths ahead of the field, and he kicked off lap two with a jaunty dab of oppo as he powered out of Redgate. He was on his way. He won by almost a minute and a half.

In a very good but not outstanding car, the McLaren-Ford MP4/8, Senna had humbled not only Hill but also Prost, already a multiple world champion, and Prost and Hill had been driving the most technologically advanced racing car theretofore made, the Williams-Renault FW15C, their efforts assisted by not only its tractable 780bhp Renault V10 engine but also by anti-lock brakes, traction control, hydropneumatic active suspension front and rear, and a six-speed sequential semi-automatic gearbox. Senna’s McLaren had some of those bells and whistles, albeit less sophisticated versions of them, but its Ford V8 was giving away at least 80bhp to the Williams’ Renault V10.

Was it the best opening lap in Formula 1 history? I believe it was, but I will defer to two great South American drivers from the era previous, who watched it on television, and whom I was privileged to quiz about it years later. First, Carlos Reutemann, who in the 1970s and early 1980s won 12 grands prix and two non-championship Formula 1 races with nervy, dexterous precision, spoke about the race in December 2006 over lunch at Zia Teresa (now closed), near the Capital Hotel, Knightsbridge, where he had stayed during the weekend of the 1978 British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, which he had won for Ferrari.

“Senna, si, the best driver I see since I arrive in Formula 1,” he said, then gingerly speared some rigatoni.