If you’re anything more than the most casual of F1 (or Honda) fans, you’ve probably heard of Ayrton Senna. To many, he’s the GOAT—a repeat F1 world champion who was taken from us far too early. And like most greats, he had his eccentricities. Even now, many fans know him best not for his competitive exploits but for the many clips of him driving an NSX in anger while wearing casual white socks and a pair of loafers.
I don’t know about you, but my appreciation for motorsports doesn’t typically lead to watching videos of people’s feet all day, but like me, Senna fans are probably confusing the algorithm, and not because we’re shoe aficionados. We’re simply trying to decipher exactly what the champ was doing with his right foot.
Anybody who’s spent time racing, tracking, auto-crossing, or discussing any of the above at length has heard the phrase “smooth is fast.” Most high-performance drivers are taught from the very beginning that sharp, rapid inputs are bad—at best, they merely destabilize the car and at worst, they cause you to lose time or even control of the car.
But if that’s a universal maxim, why did one of the fastest drivers in the world so often stab wildly (and seemingly randomly) at the throttle mid-corner?
If you ask the internet, you’ll get several equally plausible explanations. Some say he was doing it to maintain boost in F1 cars that used turbochargers at the time; others say he’s simply testing the car’s mid-corner grip, looking for additional opportunities to gain speed. Yet others believe he was effectively acting as a human traction control system, eking every last bit of throttle he could out of his race cars.
Unfortunately, we can’t go back in time to simply ask him, so we turned to our captive racecar pilot and high-performance driving coach, Nik Romano, and set him up with the same car Senna drove in one of his most famous videos—and the car he personally helped Honda develop: a 1991 NSX.
Romano tackles the question from a technical perspective, and walks us through each of his tests on track at California’s Chuckwalla Valley Raceway (which, incidentally, was recently put up for sale). And while he makes no claim to being anywhere near as talented as Senna, his ultimate conclusion is that his rapid throttle-fluttering technique is not only viable, but fairly straightforward to replicate.
But what Romano’s testing can’t reveal is precisely why Senna developed the technique in the first place—something that will likely forever remain a mystery.
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