What Was Senna’s Bizarre F1 Technique About? 

What's your take on this technique?

Senna was a keyboard user at heart)

So basically the man had anti lag, abs and traction control all in his right foot.

Senna's car dancing in the rain is something out of this world.

A constant battle for grip, always at the limit. Forever remembered as the number one. The most spectacular racing driver ever.

In summary, Senna was faster than the car itself.

That reminds of a Nigel Roebuck quote: "If you see Prost driving a Formula 1 car, you'd think you could do it yourself. If you see Senna driving the same car, you'd abosolutely knew you couldn't".

This sounds almost like ABS in reverse. Rather than rapidly tapping the brakes to decrease stopping distance, he was tapping to get constant feedback from the car/tires and be on the very knife edge of traction at all times. This is why he was such a wizard in the wet, he was able to find the absolute limit of traction and keep the car right at that limit longer than most if not any driver ever.

Jonathan Palmer - when he said ‘I raced against Ayrton for 6 years’ He meant ‘I followed in dust for 6 years’

“The normal technique on corner entry is to keep as smooth as possible,” explains Takeo Kiuchi, Senna ‘s Honda race engineer of 1990-92. “But Ayrton would use the throttle to put more torque through the tyre and change the yaw, a little bit each time. This way he could get a better trajectory before the apex without as much steering. When we did our simulations, usually the actual time a driver set was slightly slower than the simulation; with Ayrton, he was nearly always slightly quicker. That was because we couldn’t model what he was doing with the throttle and how it affected the car.” -motorsport mag 2004

Senna traction control system. Pushing his car to the limit.

Senna and Jim Clark where just grandmaster in F1. No one could touch them. Taken from us too soon Rest In Peace you master 🙏🏽

As someone who done a similar technique my entire racing career, it's because the blips are short enough, that it enables you to feel out the limit of traction. For me this started as a karting technique for finding grip on slick racing surfaces, in the wet, and works just as well in the dry. It's not really something I have ever thought about until now, but if you do lose traction, because of the pedaling, you don't generally lose it for long, and it generally doesn't wildly affect the car other than to give you more rotation. The less responsive the motor, the longer the chops can be. Because if you look at the comparison of his data vs the test drivers, you can just see how much sooner he is able to find where the limit of grip is and is able to use the throttle. Just my two cents as someone who just naturally started doing this.

Inventor : Let me introduce you to traction control Senna : Here's my foot

25 years after his death, Senna is still a reference in terms of piloting technique

Died before i was born and still makes me proud of my country. What a legend :'^)

I just came here to express my deep love and respect to Ayrton Senna. He was one of the truly illuminated ppl in this world. He will be forever missed.

The iconic loafers and white socks - the secret to Senna's speed!

He's controlling rotation with throttle and brake, he's almost creating his own stability and traction control.

His speed was entirely down to his loafers.

Sennas magic was that he could take the car over its grip limit, causing wheels to slip, something that other drivers will lose a lot of time on. Senna however could dance the car through the curve with little to no time lost. His brain started forming these neuron bridges at age 7, creating a unique brain that by chance was controlling a naturally fast and agile, but also top trained, body. Unique man, he had no conscious technique, the perfect driver created by many biological coincidences. We will not see his like in our lifetime, the greatest driver and a great human being.

Hello Driver61, here's what Honda's Takeo Kiuchi said about the Senna throttle blipping technique: "He had a way of jabbing the throttle that people thought was all about keeping up the boost pressure of the turbo engines. Maybe it started that way but he was still using it even with the normally aspirated engines..He would use the throttle to put more torque through the tyre and change the yaw, a little it each time before the tyre stalled and slid. This way he could get a better trajectory before the apex without as much steering. He was the only driver I ever saw doing this."

I love reading all the comments paying respect to this unique man. Miss him so much.

Absolutely amazing. I have always been fascinated with Senna’s driving. His technique is different, and unorthodox. But, man did he make it work! When you watch him in qualifying mode, it’s like he was truly a part of the car and a man almost possessed. He could have easily won two or three more championships. For me, F1 has never been the same after we lost him. I still miss him😢

So basically, he was using traction control before TC became a thing

Senna feels the traction all the time, he knows the full car behavior, the tires, the engine, and himself as one piece, all together. We miss him as a hero. Regards from Brazil

Man, I miss waking early in Brazil every Sunday to watch this man race as a kid he was my hero. Far out I don't think we will ever have someone on our sports like this man again. I hope his legacy is kept alive forever.

I really wanted to be Ayrton Senna when I was a kid. He was so cool.

Would Senna have been faster if he drove like everyone else? Michael Johnson was asked a similar question about his unconventional sprinting technique. His response? "If I ran like everyone else, I'd be back there with them".

Now imagine doing this during a rainy day in Monaco. Every genius is crazy and he was.

Instinct, talent and genius. All 3 beyond close analysis.

My theory is he was accelerating earlier and with more force but whereas a consistent application of throttle would put the car into a slide if it was too early or too forceful, a blip would only slide the car a little, giving feedback as to where the limit is but also, as a by product, helping rotation on an oversteery car which he definitely preferred.

A craftsman that mastered every aspect of his instrument.

Here is what I think he did. When you are feathering the throttle to not lose traction, you are most of the time under the threshold of spinning the tire. And in case you spin the tire you lose a lot of time regaining traction. The tires will grip more with a little speed higher compared to the tarmac. I think this way, you can be more consistent if you have a fast foot as Senna did. You don't overspin the tire a lot and hence can be faster than smoothing into the accelerator. I have never raced an F1 car and is just my theory from SIM racing so this could be as reliable as my Timmy Hilfiger watch...

I saw Senna drive in person several times. He was the greatest driver...ever! He would adjust very quickly to the kiddie cars in F1 they have these days and be at the top. It's misguided to say or infer otherwise. In the turbo age the fuel injectors would go to high pulsewidth to dump some fuel between shifts (200-300ms) to keep the turbocharger spinning at peak rpm. This is the backfire one sees in the old films. It was by design.

Non-car guys: Nooo, I don't want to go to Brazil! Cultured people:

Now I understand why the modern F1 divers when asked after watching a replay of senna's car dancing around the track all say "I can't do that"

Imagine being able to HEAR someones driving style.

Imagine how dominant he would be if he was driving the Williams for 1993, with those active suspensions, abs, TC and things

Senna was, without doubt, a uniquely gifted driver. If I recall correctly, Alan Jones the Australian former F1 World Champion used a similar technique when cornering or through chicanes. He referred to his throttle technique as “feathering” and it obviously brought him F1 success 🏎

Senna was pure talent and my all time favourite F1 driver !

I raced karts for about 10 years as a child into early adulthood, and I always (naturally) used the same exact technique. Nobody ever taught it to me as a kid, I just found that it worked and I was able to find traction where others weren't. Where they slid all around the track (especially on wet days) I managed to somehow make the kart stick better while quickly tapping/vibrating the throttle, and to this day I do the same thing in road cars. I've never been in a crash so I don't think it's dangerous, but I'm not really sure why it works either, I just know it does... It's a feeling, an instinct, and it's actually saved me before while aquaplaning. I'm sure Senna felt a similar way about it.

6:23 mans driving in loafers

Having watched Senna so much as a child, and hearing those blips, I thought that was normal and I do it in the simulator to this day, not quite as aggressively but I definitely blip it.

I've been looking at this (and listening to it) for years and I'm always amazed at how many things are missed in these analysis. What I see is that 1- He releases the brake long before the apex (and switches his right foot to the throttle, he actually reaches the apex ON the throttle. Clearly seen on the NSX video) 2- Most of the blipping happens BEFORE the apex (between the brake release and the apex) 3- On fast corners, by the time he reaches the apex he applies full throttle (most times even before the steering wheel is straight) 4- On short corners he is already full throttle on corner exit (as opposed to the 2nd Spoon at Suzuka, for example) 5- He doesn't always do the blipping at the same rate/speed. He instinctively adjusts it to the amount of grip at that given moment. 6- Seems to me he blips at a more rapid rate on fast corners, but during a shorter amount of time and he doesn't lift completely. The blip happens between 60-100% throttle. 7- On slow corners (Check Monaco or Montreal hairpins, or La Source at Spa) he blips between 0-40% throttle and usually continues blipping well into the corner's exit depending on how tight the exit is.

If he’s already “pulsing” the throttle through the corner, I think he’s better prepared to let off when he’s losing traction as he feels it happening. He’s already clearly in a different league than even other F1 drivers in terms of his reflexes, so I think he’s feeling the edge of traction and that dictates what he’s doing with the throttle pulses. Given his unbelievable ability in the wet in F1 cars with no traction control, I don’t think he’s upsetting the car in any way with his technique. The lack of grip in the rain would expose that flaw if it were true.

I use his footwork technique in my go kart racing for around 5 years and it's actually effective. Got alot of respect for his talent love from uk🇬🇧 😁

God made him capable. Senna was a genius. May his soul rest in paradise.

Omg that McLaren sound was so majesctic!!

He was simply the greatest F1 driver ever, had a sence of grip and way of handling that has never been seen before of since!

He is basically acting as a PWM controller for the throttle, on average his throttle is open more than others, trouble is it's difficult to control and do consistently. I think you are right, the suspension dampening won't allow the springs to react to fast enough to the blip. But I also think sometime he did it to induce oversteer/understeer to put the car where he wanted. I highly doubt a driver as strong as senna wouldn't kick a habit that was holding him back.

A small flaw in the descriptive in the video: most of the weight transfer is NOT the result of the car pitching or squatting from suspension movements. The majority of the weight transfer is the result of balancing forces on the free body of the car with acceleration forces acting on the center of gravity. Even with with completely stiff suspension, there is still weight transfer to the rear when accelerating.

Senna: "How much air can the turbo pull in?" Mechanic: "Air? Ton." Senna: "Yes?"

Senna was the social outsider in the F1 circle. The drivers were secretly in awe of a talent they did not understand.

Senna: I was no longer driving that car consciously...........

Seems a bit like a human traction control system

Fantastic

Frequency response is the key. You can put loads of incredible magnitude through systems and see almost no physical reaction as mass and damping effects prevent the system from responding to these impulses. You can guarantee that Senna was working with his engine and suspension development team to isolate out any negative effects of his technique on the vehicle. By fluttering on and off the throttle Senna was able to know where the grip limit was at all times without causing the vehicle to become unstable by exceeding the limit for any appreciable period of time. By the time traction was breaking he was already off the power, but knew that he had exceeded it at that point in the corner. It was like a primitive Stability Control where his foot, hands, and ass were the sensors detecting where the break point was. Think Stability Control, not Traction Control. Senna was that good.

Senna don't react to the car, the car has to react to senna

"That reminds of a Nigel Roebuck quote: "If you see Prost driving a Formula 1 car, you'd think you could do it yourself. If you see Senna driving the same car, you'd abosolutely knew you " couldn't". POR DAVI MOURÃO

Imagine the engineer asking senna "so, do you want oversteer or understeer?" "YES"

I use the throttle like that sometimes when i play simulator.

IMO: The reason he did it as a kid was because the karts were two stroke - keeping the RPM up was same as keeping RPM up in turbo.

He is actually the best driver in history of f1.

"he was almost mystic" - o melhor de todos.

Dear Driver61, you are looking for the horse while riding on it... The blip throttle technique in a corner allows to INcrease the AVERAGE speed midcorner WITHOUT running the risk to go over the limit with the rears for TOO LONG. The latter will end in an oversteer situation that will cost cornerspeed/laptime and could even end up in an oversteer that cannot be corrected anymore (crash). It is much harder to be ON the limit with increasing the throttle smoothly all the time throughout every corner again and again, because in XY% of the cases you will go over that fine line and face more or less oversteer. Senna's technique allowed the rears to regain full grip just in time a few times during the corner when there was no driving power on the rears at all. The same can be said of the frontwheels. When giving throttle intermittently, at the moment you give much throttle the rears (that do not steer and are always standing straight) want to power the car straigh ahead which pushes a car more into an understeer situation. However, when dropping off the throttle, this understeerfactor is completely gone at once, causing the frontwheels to "fully bite" again in the tarmac, causing the car to steer around with much more ease and 100% 'pure rolling' efficiency again. These two effects added up made Senna faster in a corner while sparing the tires because the tires were NOT driven on the limit all the time taking a corner. In the intermittent times he was off throttle he spared tyres, both front and rear. There was even a third factor. What Senna did can also be seen as "intermittently lifting" IN a corner instead of only lifting (and coasting) before a corner (which, as you know, saves fuel). When you are using less fuel on average than your competitors during a race, then you can start with less ofc, making you lighter and thus faster during the WHOLE race... To sum it all up: Senna was able to maintain a higher (or the same) corner speed as his opponents while running less risk to break out with his rears, at the same time sparing his tyres AND saving fuel. In his youth he found out that "it worked"... and never changed his driving style, no matter in what car/engine he was driving because the above mentioned factors work with EVERY car and EVERY engine (but when driving a turbo engine with a turbo lag, there is even that 4th advantage indeed). So now you've got the whole secret explained for free. What do you think it's worth? Kind regards, Barend PS if you want to know more, send me a private message

5:15 Karts have weight transfer just like normal cars. Weight transfer causes suspension displacement, not the other way around.

I would say, it's more of a test of the grip, every time he stomped on the throttle, he would get a feel of, if the car was having enough grip for him to floor it.

Something I found from trying to modulate the throttle like senna did is that it induces oversteer, he's revving the engine to pretty high RPMs and likely inducing just the right amount of wheelspin in the back wheels to push the front tires around. It's extremely difficult to do but there were a couple corners I managed to get it just right and it is definitely faster.

Ayrton was a friend. I am technical and not a driver (although I wish and had much time on carts with big front porches, being 6'6"). I was not part of racing or the network of racing, but I will say this: AS was a student of the moment. He thought about every aspect of every car and track put beneath him. I do NOT think he would EVER have carried prior-tech (meaning cars, tires and track layouts and conditions) applications of his technique (his body movements, from head to toe) into any new scenario. He would not have ever let "habit" be a part of his day. You know, one of the things I get emotional about in telling folks about A is HIS STUDY ETHIC. If you told him that a soccer ball had camel leather all of a sudden, he'd study kicking it differently and new shoe possibilities. He did not carry prior technique into new paradigms of engine and tracks. He thought-out everything. Don't take my word for it. Ask Mika. If you want to know why he did this, put it in this paradigm: A genius doing something that you can't fathom. He would have eliminated it if it hadn't served him.

I love that decade of F1. It was all about perfection, pure driving skills, sheer power and SOUND. Today its so boring to watch..

Senna, Fangio, Clark, Ascari, Shumi, Surtees, Moss, Hawthorn and others... these guys could drive anything very fast and would all be at the top in today's cars.

I’ve noticed myself doing this while driving in simulators, more-so on rally sim’s, not an influence of Senna, as I did this before I knew about Senna’s technique.

throttle blips work to give you more feel on the steering of the front and rear wheels so you know how much grip is there. Seeing that he was accustom to doing it from early, he knew exactly what feel he was looking for and knew the limit of the car cornering on every lap and how much grip he had left, so basically he was using the grip of the wheels to its limit.

Senna had a built-in human abs/traction control system!

I saw Senna many times doing telegraphy with the engine and also notice his attention to get and modify ratio transmission from throttle pedal to the butterfly valves - was nice to see and hear. I remember when he asked after a lot of telemetry analysis modification in one Monza GP. than Saturday made and incredible and best lap time with circuit still in old configuration with 2 Lesmo bends done from 6 to 7th gear. Thanks to remember this peculiarity of this grate driver for me the best one with the best F1 cars of all time up to now.

Well done video, very well explained. You have a new subscriber. MustangMedic likes.

This is fascinating,I knew senna would literally throw his car around circuits whereas his fiercest rival alain prost would glide it around,hence his nickname the professor,but I had no idea just how violent senna was with his F1 car,astonishing really considering just how hard and technical they are to drive

Sennas do a tcs with his feet. Gain traction with this shortly blips

Senna wasnt just a very fast driver, he's the fastest driver ever for me.

According to Takeo Kiuchi (Senna's Honda engineer), Senna did this to manipulate the yaw and trajectory of the car in the corner. "The normal technique on corner entry is to keep as smooth as possible. But Ayrton would use the throttle to put more torque through the tyre and change the yaw, a little bit each time. This way he could get a better trajectory before the apex without as much steering. When we did our simulations, usually the actual time a driver set was slightly slower than the simulation; with Ayrton, he was nearly always slightly quicker. That was because we couldn’t model what he was doing with the throttle and how it affected the car."

great video and insight. Thank you and have subscribed

I have been knowing this driving style as "the telegraph". Switching between understeer to oversteer as my father taught me.

Physics instructor and former very amateur SCCA racer many years ago. After reading all of the comments/analysis and thinking about it for a while here are my thoughts. 1) There are two ways to turn a car, steering input and throttle steer 2) Both of these methods will have a delay from input to desired effect that is variable depending on the corner speed and corner radius. 3) In high speed corners the slightest steering input will have a very rapid change in set/weight transfer and rapid response time vs a throttle input will have very slow response time because the motor has no "additional" push available because it is already wound up near max output. Mashing the throttle will only change the balance of the car slightly and slowly. If you want the car to respond, use the steering wheel 4) In low speed corners using throttle steer leads to too large a variation in arc curvature meaning very poor repeatability. You can get the car to rotate perfectly once but most of the time you either induce rear wheel spin/severe oversteer or push too wide or not enough and dont get the power down early to get out on the exit cleanly. The cyclical timing is also not likely to allow you to line up the perfect mash to match the exit max throttle point. You are effectively out of the corner before you have time to modulate multiple times to get the desired result. Steer with the steering wheel. 5) Medium speed corners. Steering inputs take time for the car to transfer the input to weight transfer and the car is covering significant ground during the input to response time. Stabbing at the throttle gives a more rapid transfer and allows more input/weight transfer cycles in a shorter period of time/shorter distance traveled vs steering inputs. With steering input you have to enter the given input, wait for the car to respond/weight transfer, feel the new response, enter another steering input, feel/wait for the response again, but are moving at relatively higher speeds and are out of the corner with few input-adjust-feel-input-adjust-feel cycles available before exiting the corner. With the throttle stab you can get more input-feel-adjust cycles in with less drama for the arc of the car. You also develop a much better anticipatory feel for what each stab will produce in response because you are holding a very consistent track line with less variability in the surface because inputing steering adjustments moves you in/out of the ideal line with less rubber on the road or marble regions etc. Looking at the traces imagine trying to put in the same number of steering input cycles he gets in with throttle cycles. The car would be unsettled and running a very unclean line. The car is also going fast enough that the throttle stabs will not be sufficient to lead to complete rear end wheel spin/severe oversteer. In summary, he found a way to get the maximum number of steering input adjustments in a given curve that would allow him to keep the car on the edge while still steering a clean line. It is an optimization problem using the technique that allows the most corrections in a given corner with the least drama in line. I could be completely wrong but this is what makes sense to me both from the physics and driver perspective. Its an optimization problem.

I’ve noticed lots of top Mx riders do this on 4 strokes as well and I’m sure it’s because the blip reduces engine braking thus keeping corner speed up

I love your channel, it feels like a coup to find. So much quality content I really appreciate this one.

Controle de tração natural meu amigo. Era talento puro. Eu tive o prazer de ver isso de perto. Natural traction control my friend. It was pure talent. I was pleased to see it up close.

I don't race full sized cars, but I race high down force model cars and I've been doing this for years on corner exit, it's my way of finding the limit of the chassis, I rarely correct the car with the steering, I tend to pick a line and find the limit with the throttle pedal, the stabs at the throttle are so fast it's like ABS and once you know the chassis will hook up you just plant it, it's like a constant search and feel for the moment when traction can be fully planted, rather than smoothly applying the throttle, the car is gradually and smoothly transferring weight to the rear despite the erratic pedal inputs, because the chassis just can't react fast enough to such short transients, it's like how digital audio works, if you increase the sample rate enough it's indistinguishable from an analogue signal and it just flows. Hard to explain but I think anyone who is in the habbit of doing this understands how to extract performance from it, but probably can't explain why it works.

I’m glad to see you said that it’s an understatement to call Senna a *very* fast driver.

I was unaware that Senna did this! My dad always drove fast like this! And I guess I picked it up from him too. For me it always seemed to allow me to go through corners at a higher speed as long as you use really short bursts. I also feel it allows me to make better and faster corrections while I'm turning.

Really interesting. It was like what my dad taught me in reverse, so to speak. He'd been a rally driver, and while I had a driving instructor to get me through my test, he and Dad arranged that Dad would teach me how to actually _drive._ Aaand he decided that taking me on roads he rallied on was a 'good thing'. (It was terrifying. In a Datsun Laurel, 2 lt, no power steering, I was a 17 yr old girl, couldn't see over the steering wheel... It weighed 1.75 tons IIRC. Lots, anyway.) Because a number of those roads didn't have good traction, or any, slamming the brakes on was not recommended. So he taught me how to blip the brakes rapidly if I needed to slow in a hurry, whilst smoothly but quickly getting down the gears - he taught me to actually slow using the gears out of preference to the brakes, which is a top idea in rain and ice! I still blip the brakes rapidly if necessary - sadly I'm relegated to driving autos now. I hate them - and rarely have I ever had the back slide out (once on ice, in an auto, and once when aquaplaning at 70mph on the motorway when I was 17 - those sorts of moments you don't forget!). In fact I didn't notice that my ABS lightbulb broke between the last two MOTs because I'd seen it come on once (the ice 'moment' - it was fine, just had an interesting corner on a country road lol) in about 8-9 years. Not bad in over 35 years of driving ;-) As for Senna - well, he could do anything and make it work. Though my inclination is to say smoother is faster (Prost was as smooth as anything and let's be honest, he wasn't exactly snail-like, was he?), my experience with control in braking makes me think he might have been onto something with the engines of that time. They were more mechanical than electronic like they are now. Keeping the level of fuel burning high might well have kept the engine working at its peak? That's well past my knowledge, so that's only the slightest guess. More likely it was just a habit... Or... did he do it to see if others would copy him? Knowing he _could_ make it work because of all of those years doing it, and also knowing it would _take_ years of practise to get it right? He wasn't beyond playing head games! Great vid - thanks!

He was actually trying to get the most of the grip. Every driver is doing this naturally but maybe not in such way

A terrific, well-explained overview of something I didn't know about Senna. The picture of the dogs at 9:03 is simply too funny ... ''ABS for Dummies'' ... LOL. Well done.

Flat out or nothing. What a legend he was ❤

Thank you for remember Senna legacy. He was a genius and made our Sundays mornings awesome!

On snow and Icy roads this works great too. Works in petrol cars and EV' s, with and without tc / stability control. Kept me out of trouble for > 20 years.

Hi Jonathan, I am 15 and have been building my own sports car for the past 2 years. I am so happy to learn from you. It's so much fun to discover something new. Thank you.

I really like your channel, specially this line of pilot technique analysis. I would love to see one made for Gilles Villeneuve

A técnica de Senna em fazer o punta-taco suave, mantendo as altas rotações, deixando sempre o motor “cheio”, era incrível! Imagine essa técnica na chuva, onde ele era o “rei”!!!

i also blip around the corner. it helps maintain revs for more aggressive exits. and more importantly it is to counter understeer and maintain better grip. blipping helps to drive the head into the direction you're turning, bit by bit you can feel it, and maintaining optimal rpm for the exit with the right timing. micro slide grip slide grip slide grip actually balances the car better around corners. i saw many japanese racers have this technique too. but f1 is a different beast.