Senna has given us back the passion for a Formula 1 that no longer exists. And its sound is key to understanding its success

March 1, 1981. Brands Hatch, United Kingdom.

He had fought for two karting world championships but was still a complete unknown to the general public. Not even in England, where the passion for motorsport is several steps ahead of other European countries, were they aware of what they were seeing.

Brazilian with curly hair. The face of a child on the body of a 21-year-old boy. The arrogant look of someone who knows he is superior. And it is superior. That day was fifth at the controls of his Van Diemen. Two weeks were enough for me to get his first victory.

With the circuit flooded, Ayrton Senna da Silva asked his team to put as much pressure as possible in their tires. They say that no one on the team believed in that decision but as a pilot who paid to have a guaranteed seat, the mechanics followed orders.

The rest is history.

The Brazilian driver began to string victories. Six races held that year in the Formula Ford 1600 with four victories. 12 victories out of 19 rounds in which he took the exit.

At the end of that same year, Ayrton Senna fulfilled his family commitment and promise to Lilian de Vasconcelos Souza, then girlfriend and then briefly wife of the man considered the most talented Formula 1 driver in history. Senna returned to his country to run the family business. But he had already experienced what it was like to win. He had already experienced what it was like to be the best.

And he came back to win it all.

They exist, they are somewhere

More than 40 years after that Brands Hatch race, Netflix released Senna. “While we were still searching, we recorded a Formula Ford in Sweden, an FF 1600,” The speaker is Gabriel Gutiérrezsound designer of the six-episode series in which the pilot’s life is recreated working with, among other tools, Dolby Atmos.

Senna talks about the human side of the driver, his private life and his path to becoming a triple world champion. But if something attracts an amateur, it is the montage of the images, the recreations aboard legendary single-seaters. Recreations that would be nothing without their sound.

“I received a call from a post-production supervisor from Brazil, Gabriel Queiroz, who told me about a new project by Vicente Amorim, with whom I had already worked on Holy. From the beginning, we started looking for cars worldwide and how to get models from that era to go out and record them,” explains Gutiérrez about how Senna was built.

“The filming was going to be done with replicas of the cars that were custom-built models, fantastic, with enormous precision, but their engines were not Formula 1 racing ones,” Gutiérrez clarifies.

And there begins the challenge: to be able to record the most iconic models driven and against which Ayrton Senna competed throughout the decade of the 80s and early 90s. “Many people told us that we were crazy, that we were never going to achieve it, that those cars were dismantled and that they do not exist.”

But boy do they exist.

Whoever has ever gone to see a Formula 1 race, there is something that they do not forget: the sound. The current V6 hybrids have nothing to do with the brutal howl of the V10s of the late 90s and early 2000s that Senna himself would not see.

What he did have in his hands were cars from a time that will not return. Between his debut in Formula 1 in 1984 and the fateful May 1, 1994 when he lost his life in the Tamburello curve of the Imola circuit (San Marino), the turbo V8 and the naturally aspirated V10 and V12 paraded through Formula 1, the latter with a brutal sound, hoarser than the return of the V10 from 1995 onwards.

Pure sounds, without a trace of electrification, that danced inside the cabin to the metallic tapping of the gearbox lever. From stomping on the clutch to downshift, playing with the accelerator to synchronize the revolutions of an engine that was going above 10,000, 11,000, 12,000 rpm. The engine backfired before taking the first chicane at Monza where the Ferraris of Berger and Alboreto watched in shock as Ayrton Senna abandoned the car after Jean-Louis Schlesser crashed and got the only victory they would scratch to the McLarens throughout 1988. The hit of the accelerator at the start and the howl with each gear change before reaching the Parabolica and heading down the finish line. The no less powerful cry of the typhosi in the stands when they saw that they were returning to the top of the podium in Monza when just three laps before they had seen it impossible.

They were years of pure driving, of senses. By sight, smell, touch… and hearing.

For the protagonists and those who admired them. For those who saw a Brazilian debutant swims between the rails in Monaco in 1984jeopardizing the victory of an already renowned Alain Prost who managed to stop the race before its end, distributing half of the points in a decision that would end up costing him the World Championship at the end of the year in favor of Niki Lauda.

“We were able to record Ayrton Senna’s original Toleman from 1984 and the original Lotus, the 97T model at the Lotus Classic Track in Oxford, which was a fantastic recording. The Toleman was positioned as the new leading car for us, the favorite,” explains Gutiérrez. By then, they had already obtained a good handful of the cars that marked an era. As? Moving through the mist.

Senna’s sound designer explains that his first idea was to talk to Frank Cruz, who held that same position in Rush by Ron Howard, a film about the duel between Niki Lauda and James Hunt in the 1976 World Championship. The film had dazzled fans for the emotions transmitted by the cars, by the sensation of speed experienced, by their sound.

He explains that Cruz put him in contact with Max Lachmann, a sound expert responsible for the recordings of the cars. Rush and whose company Pole Position already gives an idea of ​​his love for the world of racing. Then, the hunt began. The cars had to be found, then convinced the owners and, finally, recorded at full capacity.

Gutiérrez explains that time was passing without much news until someone gave them a tip: a “secret event” in Donington Park. There were going to take to the track a few classic cars. They had gotten the key to the first door. They had in their hands the go-ahead to record the V8 Cosworth with which Nelson Piquet won his first World Championship aboard the Brabham BT49C, the V8 from the very brief stint of the Leyton House Racing team and one of the unicorns: the McLaren MP4/6 with a V12 engine with which Senna won his third title.

That first step was key. Then the rest of the models would arrive, says Gutiérrez. It was then that that key car, although less remembered in Sweden, appeared, the 1981 Formula Ford 1600 single-seater that was key to recreating history. But, above all, they seemed like three other units. In Chicago, a collector kept like gold a unit of the McLaren MP4/4, the MP4/5 and the MP4/6 that marked the history of Senna in the English team.

And you have to record them

The Senna sound system, the series that can be seen on Netflix, had the cars. It had, at least, all the engines that were used in those years. But the most complicated thing remained: recording.

And having the cars available was only the first step. had to convince the owners to put your jewels to full performance to achieve the original sound of the engines. Delicate cars with more than 30 years behind them that had to be taken out onto the circuit to put their mechanics and all their integrity at risk.

For this, Gutiérrez explains, it was essential to have good harmony with the pilot. Max Lachmann was the final sound engineer of the series, in charge of collecting the sound of the engines and cars. He explains that they placed microphones everywhere they could.…but those places were extremely small.

The biggest headache was offered by the engraver himself. While the microphones could be distributed throughout the body, on the rear wing next to the engine or inside the cabin, a recorder takes up too much space. The only way found was to place it between the pilot’s legs. Complicated considering that the recorders suffer from the force experienced by the cars and that they had to go out on the track to ride in stints of 15 or 20 minutes, at least, a good pace.

The situation, therefore, is delicate. When these engines were designed more than three decades ago, they were made with maximum performance in mind, playing on the edge to obtain maximum power while compromising reliability to a minimum. After 30 years, it is clear that the risk of breaking up is much higher.

This is what happened, in fact, with the McLaren MP4/6 recorded in Donington Park before finding the Chicago units whose gearbox passed away. He also broke the Lotus 97T loaned by the team for the recordings. The sound team knew that they had to maximize resources and that is why they placed ambient microphones on all the straights and curves of the circuits where the cars were recorded.

The next step is pure craftsmanship.

Gutiérrez explains that once all the sound samples have been collected, an assembly exercise begins in which you have to be extremely careful.

“When you record engines, the only thing you hear is the engine, because it is a sound with a lot of sound pressure, it steals any detail from any other element. Then we start to build the rest of the elements, which would be the physicality of each car. That is, what the possible rattling of the body would be depending on how the circuit is, if you are stepping on the piano, and how the spoilers or the mechanics of the car can vibrate, the detail of the wheels when they are rubbing against the asphalt. If it is in dry, if it is wet, how it was prepared in assembly, the creation of what the gear changes and mechanics would be, that is, what the mechanics, rhythm and metrics of the gear change are like.”

This is really what creates the work. And the sound of the engine is key but to get us into the series, to feel the pressure that falls on Senna at home, in Interlagos, when he wins his third and last Formula 1 World Champion title. But also to recreate with maximum precision the touch with Alain Prost in the 1989 Japanese Grand Prix. And the repetition of the scene in 1990.

Stories from other Formula 1.

Of a story that seems like one can smell and touch.

But that, of course, you can hear.

Photo | Ayrton Senna Institute and Jerry Lewis-Evans

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