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Motor Sport Great Read

Motor Sport Great Read

Written by: Motor Sport Magazine
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 Great Read brings Motor Sport’s remarkable archive to life, with unforgettable stories of legendary drivers, great rivalries and extraordinary racing cars, told by those who were there and the writers who chronicled them.

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Episodes
  • Lap of the Gods: Ayrton Senna's stunning start at Donington '93

    Lap of the Gods: Ayrton Senna's stunning start at Donington '93
    Apr 8 2025
    The image is clear in my mind's eye: a ball of first-lap spray containing two Williams-Renaults, Karl Wendlinger's Sauber, Michael Schumacher's Benetton and Ayrton Senna's trim McLaren MP4/8 tagging on at the back. When the cars reappeared about 90 seconds later, the Brazilian led by several lengths and only Wendlinger had gone missing — harpooned by Senna's team-mate Michael Andretti, although by then the Brazilian had been well clear of both. There were few giant trackside screens in those days, so you had to use your imagination to fathom out what had just happened. And bear in mind that a McLaren-Cosworth wasn't really what you needed in 1993. "I'm not sure," says McLaren's Martin Whitmarsh (now team principal, then operations director), "that I ever saw a Renault power curve in period, but we felt we were about 50bhp in arrears."
    Senna had won the previous race in Brazil, which was also fairly wet, but lagged during Saturday's dry qualifying session at Donington, when the Williams FW15Cs of Alain Prost and Damon Hill were more than a second clear of anything else, with Schumacher third ahead of Senna. "The whole tone of the weekend became Ayrton v Alain Prost," says Whitmarsh, "and that was quite personal, given their fraught, well-documented history. Alain was a great, great driver, but had a Renault-powered Williams while we were running a Cosworth with wire springs rather than pneumatic valves. It was a plain customer V8 and not the latest specification Benetton was using.
    "Thanks to Sega sponsorship, Williams had Sonic the Hedgehog logos on its car, so after Brazil we put a squashed hedgehog decal on the side of ours as a bit of an in-joke."

    It was swiftly apparent that a second might soon be needed.
    Senna dealt quickly with Schumacher and Wendlinger, passing them before and through the Craner Curves, then outbraked Hill into McLeans and went tearing after Prost. The Williams wasn't particularly user-friendly in the conditions, both drivers reporting that their cars were locking the rears during automated downchanges, but that hardly explained the ease with which Senna dispatched his nemesis at the Melbourne hairpin. By the lap's end he was six tenths clear.
    Then as now one of the lynchpins of McLaren's design team, Neil Oatley was watching from the pit garage. "We could hear fragments of commentary," he says, "including the words Wendlinger' and 'Andretti', so I assumed they'd gone off. I remember being quite staggered at the size of Ayrton's lead. He'd only passed Prost a couple of corners before the finishing line, but such was his advantage that I initially thought Alain must have spun. Ayrton looked really comfortable from that point on."
    I was watching from the inside of Redgate, with fellow journalists Paul Fearnley, Mark Skewis and David Phillips, the latter over from America to write a piece on Andretti. As the clamour subsided in the wake of the cars' second passage, David's voice — "Um, did anyone see Michael?" — provided a melancholic contrast to the excited chatter.


    Great Read
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    "Honestly, it's very difficult for me to talk about Ayrton, and not only because he's not here any more. He was so different, you know, so completely different from any other racing…
    October 1998 Issue
    By Nigel Roebuck
    "There was a great deal of fuss about Ayrton leading," Phillips says, "and I assumed I hadn't noticed Andretti in all the excitement. Next time around, though, he clearly wasn't running so I trudged away to find him. I wanted to stay and watch, but had a job to do. I didn't have the right pass to get into the pits, but eventually talked my way into the McLaren garage and found Michael. He was very hooked up in the race, though, because the team wanted him to observe what was happening and it wasn't easy for him to talk. We eventually agreed it would be simpler if I went to see him in the States! And anyway, I was keen to get back outside to watch the action.
    "That's when I was grabbed by Michael's then w...

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    15 mins
  • Working for Eddie Jordan: 'He shut the door in my face. I've worked there ever since'

    Working for Eddie Jordan: 'He shut the door in my face. I've worked there ever since'
    Mar 29 2025
    The death of Eddie Jordan has prompted some impressive tributes from former drivers and paddock contemporaries. But what was it like to work for the colourful Irishman – and how good a leader was he?
    Few knew EJ better than Andy Stevenson, who joined him as an F3 mechanic towards the end of 1987. Some 38 years later Stevenson is still at what is in effect the same team as sporting director of Aston Martin, one of several employees who has remained on board what was originally Jordan GP.
    In 1987 Stevenson was working for the Magnum F3 outfit when team manager Bosco Quinn left to rejoin Eddie Jordan Racing, winners of that year's British title with Johnny Herbert. Quinn was keen for Stevenson to follow him to Jordan.
    "He called me up and said do you want a full-time job working for the British F3 champions?," Stevenson recalls. "I jumped at the chance and went to Silverstone one evening to have an interview with Bosco.
    "He said, 'I know what you're like, I know your skillset and your attitude.' And towards the end of the interview he said, 'You've got a job. This is how much we're going to pay you.'
    "Then Eddie came in. I'd never met him before. He said, 'Bosco, who's this c***?' Bosco said, 'It's Andy, I've just offered him a job.' He said, 'Don't hire him, I don't like him, I don't like the look of him. He doesn't belong here.'
    "To be honest at the time I was a bit star struck, because Eddie was a big name in motor sport already by then, he was manager of some successful F1 drivers, and he had been around a while. We all knew who he was.


    "I turned up for work for my first day on the job, and the office was still locked because I got there nice and early. Eddie was the first guy who turned up. I introduced myself to him, and he literally turned around and said, 'What the f**k are you doing here? I told Bosco not to hire you.'
    "I thought he must be joking, but he wasn't. I went to follow him in, and he said, 'No, f**k off,' and shut the door in my face. So I sat in my car, and 10 minutes later, Bosco arrived. I told him, 'Eddie said I haven't got a job', and he just said, 'Ignore him, come in with me'. So that was my introduction to Eddie. And I've been working there ever since…"

    Obituaries
    Eddie Jordan, who has died aged 76, was one of the biggest characters in Formula 1: a charismatic team boss to whom wheeling and dealing with sponsors came naturally; an incisive and unbridled TV pundit; and a man who remained a mover and shaker in the paddock until the very end
    20th March 2025
    By Damien Smith
    Stevenson soon found out how Jordan tried to get the best out of his employees.
    "I was only a young kid, and I always felt like Eddie was picking on me," he recalls. "He'd ask me what I was doing every single day, he'd ask me what my plan was every single day. 'What are you going to do that's better? How are you going to make the cars go faster?' And I found it quite tough.
    "As you grow up you learn to understand these things. What Eddie was actually doing and what he did with everybody, he was finding the best way to motivate me. And with Eddie, he knew if he motivated you, he got the most out of you, so he got the most value.
    "It also meant the team was as strong as possible. And the people that always hung around the team, stayed with the team and worked with Eddie, were those that could react and could dig deeper and improve themselves.
    "Some would say because he didn't want to pay the big bucks, he'd hire people, and he'd mould them."
    "He had this ability to spot potential, and not only in drivers, but in staff as well. Mechanics, designers, commercial staff, press, he would spot potential in them, and he would extract that potential. Some would say because he didn't want to pay the big bucks, he'd hire people, and he'd mould them.
    "He would make you feel more confident in yourself and a stronger person. And to this day I still get up every day trying to do a better job than I did the day before."
    Anyone who spent any time ar...

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    17 mins
  • Emerson Fittipaldi: Young gun, old master

    Emerson Fittipaldi: Young gun, old master
    Dec 12 2024
    Emerson Fittipaldi's language dates him, reminding you of a time in motor-racing more violent and dangerous, yet also gentler, less hard-nosed. 'Dice', for example, is a favourite word of his, yet it has fallen into disuse in contemporary Formula One. These days the drivers tend to refer to 'a fight' or 'a battle', which is ironic, really, when one considers that the potential consequences are so much less than in the days of the simple 'dice'.
    "People ask me about my career," says Fittipaldi, "but, really, I had two completely separate careers. When I retired from F1, at the end of 1980, I thought I was retiring from driving for good. By 1984, though, there I was, on the grid at Indy."
    His rise in motor-racing was swift. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1946, he made a name for himself in local karting and touring car events, and by 1969 had moved to England, where he so impressed in Formula Ford, and then F3, that by mid-1970 he had been invited by Colin Chapman to join the Lotus F1 team. In the German Grand Prix, only his second race, he finished a remarkable fourth in a Lotus 49.
    This car was obsolete by now, and for the Italian GP, at Monza, Emerson was entered in a 72, Chapman's latest masterpiece, and the car with which team leader Jochen Rindt was on course for the world championship.
    It was my first year in F1, and I quickly began to realise how fragile life was
    "On the first day of qualifying, I crashed – and it was a huge accident. I just looked in the mirrors, because Jack Brabham was coming up behind me, and I missed my braking point – when I looked back, there was Ignazio Giunti's Ferrari in front of me. I went over the back of it, landed on the sand, went over the bank, and into the trees. The toughest thing, though, was to walk back to the pits and tell Colin what had happened.
    "That car was going to be Jochen's for the following day, the Saturday. It was brand-new, and Colin had wanted me just to bed everything in, but now it was destroyed. He asked me what had happened, and I told him: I was 100 yards deeper into the comer than I should have been. We were running without wings, looking for better straight-line speed, and… I just locked up, and hit Giunti. I had to be honest, and say that I just screwed up. Then, in the afternoon Jochen had his accident."
    In the final qualifying session, approaching Parabolica, the corner at which Fittipaldi had crashed the day before, Rindt's Lotus suffered a mechanical failure (almost certainly a broken front brake shaft), plunged off the road, and hit a guard-rail post at more than 150mph.
    En route to hospital, he died.
    For Emerson, not yet 24, and on the cusp of his F1 career, this was a massive blow. Rindt, as well as being his team-mate, was a man he had idolised.
    "Emotionally, it was devastating," he says. "Very tough. I had breakfast with Jochen that morning in the Hotel de la Ville in Monza, and he invited me to drive for his F2 team the following year – he and Bernie Ecclestone were going to have this team between them. I said, 'Sure, I'd love to drive for you', and he said, 'OK, well, we'll do the contracts later' – and a few hours after that he was dead. It was my first year in F1, and I quickly began to realise how fragile life was – the odds on getting killed were so high back then. I'm so happy to have survived."
    Naturally, the remaining Lotus cars were withdrawn from the race at Monza, and Chapman did not take his team to the next grand prix, in Canada, either. On the horizon loomed Watkins Glen.

    "After Monza, there was a month with a lot of pressure," says Fittipaldi. "First, Colin didn't know if we were going to the States or not. Finally he called me, and said, 'Emerson, I'd like you to go to Watkins Glen as number one driver', and for me that was a big surprise."
    What happened when they got to the Glen, he was expecting even less. First, he qualified a superb third, behind only Jackie Stewart's Tyrrell and Jacky Ickx's Ferrari. And then he won the race, on...

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    14 mins
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