When F1 Drivers Raced the SAME CARS (And SENNA Won)

what if all F1 drivers raced in the same car it's a question we fantasize about all the time finally we'd have some understanding of who was the best and Incredibly this has already happened back in 1984 there was a race where all of the drivers were in the same car and most of those drivers were past or present F1 drivers with nine world champions and two future world champions and one of those future world champions was Aon Senna who just started started his Formula 1 career a few months earlier Senna was just a month away

from one of his breakthrough drives that one that was in the west at Monaco has come up through the field he starting in 13th Place and he's now seven this was a race that he probably should have won if it wasn't for it being red flagged anyway when all of these F1 drivers got together and raced the same cars Senna blew them away so I wanted to dig a bit deeper to see what actually happened during this race I wanted to understand Sen's driving technique at this early stage in his career and understand how this

very young driver destroyed a very experienced field the race was called The Race of Champions a name you might be familiar with already but it wasn't the same thing as it is now it was held in 1984 and was organized to celebrate and gain some publicity for the new nurburg Grand Prix circuit F1 had stopped running on the Nord slier after louder's fiery accident in 1976 by by the way that isn't louder's car it's this one just here and so a new safer circuit was built to bring F1 back to the nurburg ring which would

return later in 1984 as the European Grand Prix so the organizers had an amazing idea they had a brand new circuit but before we get into sena's incredible driving and how he won this race I must first introduce you to The Identical cars that they used the mighty Mercedes 190e 190 and fuel engine Ed 190e now Mercedes who were a partner on this project wasn't going to let F1 drivers compete in a bog standard 190e so they needed to make a few modifications and look what they came up with I don't know about you but

I personally think these things are very very cool for safety these 190 e were fitted with a roll cage and safety harnesses but they also made some changes to make these road cars a bit more racy this included lowering the chassis lowering the gear ratios and replacing the exhaust system to be louder and more race ready the cars were fitted with pelli racing tires but aside from that they had no other performance parts and because all the cars were the same they painted half of them in silver and half in this black blue color although

they also added the dri's names all over the car so you could tell who was driving and I thought these cars were so cool that I looked to see how much they cost to buy one now but most of them were actually fitted back to factory spec and sold as regular cars however Nikki louder's car was left in race condition and was sold in 2023 for 308,000 Swiss Franks that's 270,000 next the organizers needed to sign up the drivers and for me this is the most surprising part of this whole event Formula 1 drivers by

Nature are pretty competitive so convincing them to all race in the same cars where their pure skill would be on show and where they couldn't hide behind being in different F1 cars was quite an achievement Mercedes started by inviting all of the living F1 Champions at the time there were 14 banio Phil Hill ctis Hume braam Stewart faly louder hunt andreti sha Jones PK and rosberg and a grid like that would have been incredible but not all of them were available Andrey and fit py were busy at the Indie 500 Stuart and PK weren't cleared

by their contracts and fanjo Tapped Out for health reasons as he was 72 at the time still nine F1 champions in the same race is amazing and to fill the remaining slots other F1 race winners such as reuteran lefiti Prost d'angeles and Sterling Moss came in then some local drivers were also invited to fill the gaps but there was still one place left to make it 20 so the organizers were searching for the right driver when Emerson faldi recommended a young Brazilian who is only four races into his F1 career and impr proven in F1

at least and his name was Aon Senna hello my name Ison sna Senna was 24 years old at the time and it only finished two of the first four races of the 1984 season and now he was going up against nine F1 world champions and many race winners but Senna saw it as an opportunity to prove himself so what happened in the race well the grid was settled by a short qualifying session that wasn't as close as you might have expected considering all the drivers were in the same car in fact the top 10 were

covered by 1.6 seconds but CR was on poll reyman was second and Senna qualified third and louder only qualified 14th but he hadn't competed in the practice sessions as he had TV commitments now the TV coverage missed the first two laps of the race but it said that Senna had made his way from third to first by only lap three and there was a move Center on Prost that was said to be very very aggressive which could have started their fierce rivalry and Senna was treating the race like he would any other but some of

the drivers at the back weren't taking it all that seriously cutting corners and pushing each other off the circuit but towards the front they were all fighting for a win especially louder who delivered a masterclass to climb from 14th to second but no one wanted to win more than Senna and after 12 laps he took the checkered flag for a pretty easy win so how did Senna manage to win against all of these F1 Champions well to do do that let's take a look at his driving but first let me tell you about this beautiful

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sounds like you you can start your free trial today at shopify.com driver61 that's shopify.com driver61 and to secure for your chance of owning this limited edition piece register your interest through the link in the description so back to s's driving the cool thing about this race was that it was done in only slightly modified road cars and in road cars compared to F1 cars it's much easier to see how the driver is attacking the circuit when I ran my driver training program for racing drivers I used Mazda mx-5s because they were relatively soft and any

small mistake in technique that the driver makes is very obvious with soft softer suspension if you turn into a corner too hard or Trail break too much it compresses a softer spring more than it would do a harder spring therefore it changes the car's balance more as well and that's why I was so excited when I came across this footage and we seen examples of Sen's technique on this channel before like when he used the throttle like [Music] this and when he gave us a masterclass in healing toe in his slipons but the first thing

that stood out to me was how smooth Senna was driving the car just take a look at this footage it's a complex part of the circuit coming out of a left-hander breaking and moving into a right hand corner and when you watch it in slow motion it's even more impressive first just look at how the car is leaning over to the right compressing the outside Springs then you see Senna open up the steering wheel and then blend in the brakes but it's how smoothly and progressively he's doing all of this all with Incredible precision and

timing and finally he releases the brakes very progressively while turning into the right hander again all of these inputs turning braking and turning again are Blended beautifully and when a driver is able to blend all of their inputs so well it means they're using all of the tires grip available to them they're driving to the ultimate limit and of course when you're using the optimal amount of grip you can go through the corner that little bit quicker on the other hand many of the other drivers were allowing their cars to go beyond the limit for

example just take a look at this footage the driver in question has not controlled the slide very well they've let the car rotate too much the car's too sideways and it's costing them time and then the car has gripped up before the exit of the corner the driver's gone beyond the limit of grip with the rear tires at least and then come back under it this driver isn't as refined as sener and not utilizing the grip anywhere near as well and therefore he's slower and being smooth isn't necessarily only about smooth inputs on the steering

wheel we may see very delicate steering inputs in F1 nowadays but these are basically road cars with much much softer suspension so the car and its body language on the track should look smooth and flowing but the steering inputs don't necessarily need to be as smooth just take a look at the steering correction that Senna makes here however the car remains fluid and the momentum is kept and you can get away with corrections like these to a certain point but if the correction is too large typically with opposite lock then it will cost the driver

time the next thing that stood out to me was Center's absolute Precision again take a look at this footage Center's out in the lead and the car looks like it effortlessly slides to the outside of the circuit without using any of the curb whereas the car in second runs into the curb and has a bit of a wobble and the car in third has a big over steer moment that would have dropped his exit speed and cost him time all the way down the following straight even in this footage you can see that Senna perfectly

kisses the Apex louder misses it by a few inches third and fourth miss it slightly and then the rest are all over the place and I watched this footage over and over again Center is so precise everywhere on the circuit he's using all of the track but not too much and he manages to keep the Mercedes flowing perfectly balanced throughout each and every lap and Sen's absolute Precision is something that would come up again just a few months after this race at the 1984 Dallas Grand Prix Dallas was a street course and Senna hit the

wall in the race however he said to his race engineer after the race that the wall itself had moved I went with him we went to the exit of this particular corner and damy it had moved someone had hit the sort of trailing edge of one of these blocks brushed it with a t tire and and it had pivoted slightly and Aon was driving with such Precision that you know he was probably missing that that that block by about 2 millim or 3 millim or something like that lap after lap so when it suddenly moved

5 millimet because it swung round slightly he hit it so s was right and that goes to show that it has that Precision built in another reason I think Senna did so well in this race is because he was very good at adapting to different cars and different conditions something we continue to see throughout his career obviously these Mercedes were very different to the F1 cars of the time therefore they require different braking different racing lines and a different feel for how to be fast that's one of the reasons why I love this race so

much it was so different for the drivers so not only were the cars identical but the playing field was level in terms of previous experience it was a race of skill how much speed can you extract from this car and When jumping into a car that none of these drivers were used to how do you figure out how to be fast and remember this was a time before data logging and Telemetry analysis the drivers needed to do everything by feel and while many of the other drivers were running off the circuit or using too much

curb Senna seemed to make no mistakes senna's driving technique sets him up so well to make fewer mistakes because he's so smooth so precise and just gently leaning into the limit the car is more predictable for him because he has the fundamentals of driving perfected the car feels easier to drive he's just more refined with his driving technique this was an absolute masterclass from Senna and one that helped put him on the radar of the larger F1 teams I made a video about senna's weird blipping technique and why he did it which you can check

out just up here thank you very much for watching and I'll see you next time