Ayrton Senna’s first win was a borderline cinematic effort on a rainy Sunday afternoon at the 1985 Portuguese Grand Prix, he was driving the Lotus 97T and the win would be Lotus’s first since the untimely death of Colin Chapman in 1982.
Senna’s long list of wins began with the car you see pictured here, this is chassis #2 and it’s owned by Classic Team Lotus – a company run by Colin Chapman’s son Clive. The car now makes regular appearances at motorsport events around Britain and was recently displayed at The Goodwood Festival of Speed and the Renault World Series, driven by Martin Donnelly.
I’ve added the start of the 1985 Portuguese Grand Prix below for those who haven’t seen it (or those who’d like to see it again). If you click through to YouTube you can actually watch the entire race – it’s divided into 13 parts.
Ben Branch has had his work featured on CNN, Popular Mechanics, the official Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with millions of readers around the world and hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
The Woodill Wildfire is considered by many to be the first production fibreglass sports car in the world, it was very nearly mass-produced by Willys as the “Willys Wildfire” and mass-produced as a contemporary of the first Chevrolet Corvette. If it hadn’t been for Kaiser Motors buying Willys in 1953 the history of the company…
The fact that Cannonball! is a true story is almost impossible to fathom looking back on it from 40+ years since it was last run. The Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash The actual race was named the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash with the first running of the event taking place in 1971, though…
To say that the Greeves Challenger, and all Greeves motorcycles, were ahead of their time is to significantly understate the remarkable foresight of Bert Greeves and his lightweight two-stroke off-road racing motorcycles. Bert developed the first examples of his scrambles and trials machines in 1952, almost 20 years before lightweight two-stroke motorcycles would rise to…
Armed Forces Rally in Land Rovers is a short film by the team at Patina that covers the Armed Forces Rally Team (AFRT), a racing outfit made up of serving British military personnel competing in lightly modified examples of the UK MOD-specification Land Rover Wolf. The Land Rover Wolf is essentially a Land Rover Defender…
This article was written by Rahul Sinroja, the owner and founder of Sinroja Motorcycles. When possible we like to bring you an article written by the person who built it, to cut out the middle man and give you direct insight into their methods and thought process. The idea was to keep the build simple…
The legendary NCR workshop played a significant role in the early competition life of Ducati, perhaps most famously they built the special 900cc race bike that Mike Hailwood piloted to his seemingly impossible comeback win at the the 1978 Formula One TT at the Isle of Man. NCR was founded in 1967 as a small motorcycle…
