Pit Debrief had a chance to talk with longtime Formula 1 race engineer Steve Hallam, whose tenure included three years as Ayrton Senna’s race engineer at Lotus. From Hallam’s first glimpse, at a tyre test in 1982, it was clear that Senna was going to make a name for himself.
Hallam watches Senna from afar
“I remember looking at him, looking at the [Formula Ford] car, and he was winning everything at that time[…] just wondering where he’s gonna go. The following year, which was 1983, he blitzed Formula 3, not without a bit of a fight with Martin Brundle, and then appeared on the Formula 1 scene as a very precocious, apparently precocious individual[…] in Brazil in 1984.”
It would be another test session that would start the process of getting Senna from Toleman in 1984 to Lotus in 1985.
“In those days, if your car was quick at Brands Hatch, on the Grand Prix circuit, it was pretty well known that you could win anywhere.[…] He was flying, and that was when Peter [Warr, team principal] and Gerard [Ducarouge, technical director] really started to work on Ayrton to come and join us at Team Lotus for 1985.”
Under Hallam’s watch, Senna is immediately competitive in the Lotus
At Lotus, Senna would be directly in Hallam’s care as race engineer.
“Ayrton[…] was to a degree reserved, but at the same time, he was open, he wanted to have success[….] He wasn’t greedy and demanding, and he understood that he still had a lot to learn, and he leant on me a lot, and it was flattering that he did so.”
Senna made his mark quickly, dominating a wet Estoril circuit in just his second race at Lotus, taking his first win. The 40th anniversary of it comes next month.
“The issue for us at Team Lotus, all of a sudden became, how are we going to support a driver at this level, because if he’s running at the end of the race, he’s going to be on the podium, and this guy is going to go somewhere, and [so] we poured a lot of resource into reliability.”
“He’d just hang out all day… when we were at the shop”
His personality, as well, cemented his place in the team as much as his speed.
“When Ayrton joined us at Lotus in 1985, he was living in Norwich and he used to come to work every day. And we even gave him a desk in the engineer’s office[…] and he’d just hang out all day during the week with us when we were at the shop. He’d go running with the boys at lunchtime. On the days that he didn’t, he’d come to the pub with us for lunch. He just embedded himself. And there were, what, at that time, 60, 65 people at Team Lotus. He knew them all. But more importantly, they knew him.”
Some success, but not enough
Firmly the team’s #1 driver for 1986, Senna, Hallam, and the rest of Lotus made their push for a championship. With their reliability improved—and with a revolutionary active suspension system via a partnership with General Motors, who at this point owned Lotus’ road car business—Senna won twice in 1986 and 1987, and finished 4th and 3rd in points in those seasons. But Lotus could not match the resources of teams like Williams and McLaren that had increased the scale of their operations.
“It’s a resource game. It’s warfare. The countries that win wars have the most of everything. That’s how it is.[…] We didn’t have the resources of McLaren, even though we tried, and it was a matter of time before he looked further about the Formula 1 tree to find what he needed, which—he found what he wanted, which was a World Championship, which he got in 1988.”
