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Brazilian Ayrton Senna was the king of Monte Carlo: the Brazilian won the racing classic six times, but only once drove as qualified for the 1988 Monaco GP.
In the crown crisis, countless events around the world were canceled, including, particularly painful for fans of Formula 1, the Monaco Grand Prix, the classic racing in the Mediterranean, the most prestigious of all races in the World Championship always in late May.
Monaco fascinates me over and over again. It gives me goose bumps when I stand against a wall and I know: here Tazio Nuvolari drifted or Silver Arrow shooters Bernd Rosemeyer and Rudi Caracciola. I admire the laid-back driving style of the seemingly effortless superiority of Juan Manuel Fangio and Jim Clark. Unfortunately, I only know all this from the movies. When Graham Hill and Jackie Stewart won in Monaco, I was a humble man who dreamed of Formula One. Monaco was as far as the moon for me.
For this, I will always be grateful to be able to say: I was allowed to admire Ayrton Senna’s driving skills. I was there for his first GP win (in the pouring rain of Estoril 1985), his biggest win (in the Donington Park deluge in 1993), and perhaps the most fabulous training round a Grand Prix driver has shown, in Monte Carlo 1988.
It’s part of the Monaco myth that Senna did something here that had nothing to do with normal Formula 1 driving. If you can even talk about normality when you tame a GP racer in the Monte Carlo railing channel.
The unforgettable Brazilian described the qualification at Monte Carlo in 1988 as “my most intense experience in Formula 1”, “a feeling that I have never been able to experience again”.
The final training sessions with senna were almost always a pleasure. If the Brazilian arrived on the track with new tires shortly before qualifying, everyone knew it: something magical is about to happen. Feverish tension spread.
How Ayrton passed through the opponents was a pleasure. Other drivers often complain after final training that they have been pulled over, “I had traffic,” as the excuse book for racing drivers says. Former Formula 1 promoter Bernie Ecclestone used to say, “A good driver doesn’t have traffic.”
I hardly ever heard Senna complain. When the opponents saw the bright yellow dot on his helmet appear in the rearview mirror, they automatically stepped aside.
Even today, Formula 1 fans are passionately arguing over what was probably Ayrton Senna’s most fabulous lap: perhaps Donington’s opening lap in the rain in 1993? Not for the great Brazilian himself. Senna described Monaco as her best time in 1988.
Senna described a state where she was practically driving, everything worked automatically, the mind was disconnected from the body. “I was already on pole for half a second, but I was driving faster and faster, a second ahead of my opponents, then almost a second and a half. I just drove instinctively, I was in another dimension, like in a tunnel, beyond conscious understanding.
“I went out and said to my kids, ‘This is the best, there is no way I can drive even faster.’
In the end, Senna was 1,427 seconds ahead of Alain Prost, exactly the same McLaren from 1988.
Senna in her own words can be found in this YouTube video with excerpts from SENNA’s documentation:
