The Lap

He started fourth. One lap later he was leading. Four overtakes. In the rain.

DoningtonSennawet raceopening lapMcLarenlegend1990s

Barry Blake

I've been watching Formula One since 1976. I have seen Lauda, Senna, Schumacher, Hamilton, Verstappen. I have seen wet races and dry races and everything in between. Lap one of the 1993 European Grand Prix is the single greatest thing I have witnessed in any sport at any time in my life. Start fourth. End first. One lap. Four overtakes. In the rain.

He got Wendlinger into the Craner Curves — fair enough, Wendlinger wasn't the problem. Then Hill into the chicane. Then Schumacher down the straight, almost nonchalantly. Then Prost, who was in the fastest car, who was about to become world champion, who was done before he understood what had happened. Four passes. One lap. I was standing in the living room by the end of it.

Gary Finch

I've run the sector time analysis on this repeatedly. In sector 1 of that lap, Senna was 0.8 seconds off his own dry-weather benchmark — in wet conditions, in a car with passive suspension, remember, active was banned for 1993. He gained 6.2 seconds on Schumacher in one lap in conditions where no model I've built would predict that as physically possible.

The fastest lap of the whole race was set on lap 1 by Senna. Not his fastest sector — his fastest complete lap of the race, in treacherous conditions, while passing four cars. The lap time he set in those conditions would have put him P4 in the dry. If I showed that data to someone without context they'd say the timing equipment was broken.

Kat Moreno

The McLaren MP4/8 that year had a Ford HB V8 — not the most powerful engine on the grid. Without active suspension, it relied on the driver to manage its mechanical balance more consciously than any Williams driver had to that year. What Senna was doing through Craner Curves wasn't just brave — it was biomechanically extraordinary. His steering inputs were compensating for a car that wanted to understeer and he was making it rotate on his own throttle.

A Ford engineer who was at Donington that day told me the telemetry from lap one looked like a calibration error when they first saw it. The throttle maps were being used in a way that the engineers hadn't written into the strategy. Senna was reprogramming the car through his inputs in real time. He wasn't using the setup they'd agreed. He was using the setup he'd decided existed.

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