Ayrton Senna

Biography

Ayrton Senna da Silva was born in Santana, São Paulo, on 21 March 1960, and his father built him his first go-kart. He entered his first kart race at 13, won the South American championship in 1977 and was runner-up in the Karting World Championship in 1979 and 1980. In 1981 he moved to England and won two Formula Ford championships. Two years later he took the British Formula Three title and, that November, the Macau Grand Prix.

His Formula One debut came with Toleman at the 1984 Brazilian Grand Prix. At a rain-soaked Monaco that year he was closing on the leader, Alain Prost, when the race was stopped on lap 31. For Lotus he took his first pole and first win at the 1985 Portuguese Grand Prix, and he won the 1986 Spanish Grand Prix by 0.014 seconds. In 1988 he joined Prost at McLaren: their Honda-powered MP4/4 won 15 of the 16 races, eight of them for Senna, and he took the title. Collisions between the two at Suzuka settled the championship in 1989, for Prost, and in 1990, for Senna. A third title followed in 1991, and in 1993 he won at Monaco for a record sixth time.

Senna signed for Williams in October 1993 and started from pole in each of the first three races of 1994, then again at the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola. On 1 May 1994 he crashed at the Tamburello corner on lap 7 and was pronounced dead that evening at Maggiore Hospital in Bologna. An estimated three million people attended his funeral in São Paulo on 5 May. In 161 starts he had won 41 races and taken 65 pole positions. McLaren later named its 2018 road car, the Senna, after him.