Remembering Ayrton Senna: Five great stories

Three-time World Champion Ayrton Senna will be forever remembered as one of the all-time greats in Formula 1.

Here are five stories that give you a glimpse, a reminder, of what made him such an iconic driver. He will never be forgotten.

We all know that Senna was a master of his craft, a driver who spent his Formula 1 career on the absolute limit. One great example of that came at the 1984 Dallas Grand Prix.

Driving for Toleman, Senna retired on Lap 47 from P4 after hitting the wall. He had been nailing that corner to precision, a matter of millimetres, and was convinced that the wall had in fact moved.

Impossible right? Well, it turned out that it had.

Recalling the incident, Senna’s race engineer Pat Symonds said: “In Dallas he touched a wall and broke a wheel.

“During the debrief he said ‘I can’t make out how I hit that wall. The wall must have moved’.

“With any other driver you would say ‘don’t be bloody ridiculous’. But he was so troubled by it that we went and looked at the wall.

“Tyre marks showed that somebody had crashed into one end of one of the huge concrete blocks and pivoted it a little bit.

“He’d been placing his car a few millimetres from that wall, and when the edge had moved a fraction he hit it.

“I thought then that this guy was beyond anything I’d ever experienced before.”

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Nigel Mansell gives Ayrton Senna a lift back to the pits at the 1991 British Grand Prix. pic.twitter.com/ALiACfoRM7

— PlanetF1 (@Planet_F1) April 29, 2020

One of Formula 1’s most iconic moments – a legend of the sport giving a lift to a fellow great.

It was at the 1991 British Grand Prix where this event occurred – a podium was all but guaranteed for Senna with Nigel Mansell taking the chequered flag at his home race.