McLaren had lost its supply of Honda V12 engines in the summer. A replacement wasn’t found until November, and then only a supply of customer-spec Ford Cosworth V8s. It didn’t start on the development of the active-ride system essential to keep pace with Williams until the autumn. And to cap it all, the team’s talisman driver, Ayrton Senna, was telling the world that it was far from certain that he would return the following year. The odds looked stacked against McLaren at the end of 1992.
McLaren’s 1993 Ford-powered contender, the MP4/8, wouldn’t run until a month before the start of the season at Kyalami in South Africa. Two weeks into its belated and truncated testing schedule, Senna climbed aboard for the first time on 3 March at Silverstone. The Brazilian liked what he found, smashed the winter testing record and quickly did a deal to race the MP4/8, an agreement involving famously unconventional terms. And so began a season that, while slightly surreal in the context of McLaren’s history, is central to the Senna legend.
If you believe the generally held contention at the start of the year that McLaren was some kind of underdog, then it punched above its weight over the first half of its 1993 campaign. Senna won three of the first six races and led the championship from pre-season favourite Alain Prost at the end of that run. Yet by the season’s end McLaren had a car that was probably a match for the Williams-Renault FW15C in which Prost had wrapped up the title after 14 of
