How Fittipaldi helped guide Senna on his path to F1 glory

Fittipaldi says he “loved and admired Ayrton in equal measure” – which was in stark contrast with Senna’s relationship with the other Brazilian F1 great Nelson Piquet, as he and Ayrton shared a mutual loathing.

Emerson first met Senna as a teenaged karter, and invited him into the Copersucar-Fittipaldi garage at a test at Interlagos in the mid-1970s: “The kart track at Interlagos was right next to the race track,” he recalls. “His father brought him next to the garage, and then I called him, ‘Ayrton, come inside here!’

“He was extremely shy, very polite but very quiet.”

Before following Fittipaldi’s trailblazing path from Sao Paulo to the United Kingdom for his junior career, it was Emerson who first called Van Diemen’s Ralph Firman: “I said ‘Ralph, I have a guy who’s going to win the championship for you’ and he laughed and said, ‘Oh aye, Emerson!’”

Senna’s father Milton, whom Fittipaldi already knew from his business interests around the city of Sao Paulo, then agreed a contract with Firman, and Ayrton announced himself to the wider racing world from 1981.

A year later, as Formula Ford 2000 supported the Austrian Grand Prix, a then-retired Fittipaldi – who was still onboard at the family’s F1 team in an advisory role – decided it was time to take up-and-comer Senna for a trip along the F1 pitlane in Zeltweg to meet as many team bosses as possible.

“He really didn’t want to, but I said he had to come with me,” says Fittipaldi. “He had won the race, so after the Saturday qualifying for F1, I wanted him to meet teams who might have seats available.

“Using my best English expression, I introduced him as the Formula Ford champion and told them all that he was ‘world championship material’. They all laughed at that, but sometimes people don’t see what is there right in front of them.”

Because their F1 racing careers never overlapped, with Fittipaldi retiring in 1980 and Senna joining the grid with Toleman in 1984, they never shared a race track together as true rivals. Apart, that is, from one pre-season F1 test, at Rio de Janeiro’s Jacarepagua track, when Emerson made an abortive comeback in ’84 with Spirit, which had recently been dumped by Honda and was using Hart engines.

The test went terribly, with Fittipaldi finding the car to be horrendously…