An independent tribute
Pedro Diniz
São Paulo Monaco Spa-Francorchamps Itirapina
Six seasons of Formula One with four teams, a year as a partner in a fifth, and then the land: the organic farm he made of his family’s estate at Itirapina, told in pictures, results and his own words.
BeginCover: Martin Lee · CC BY-SA 2.0
Epigraph
Tenho mostrado que posso andar na frente.
I’ve shown I can run at the front.
Introduction
Two lives
In May 2012 Pedro Paulo Diniz, Pedro Diniz to Formula One, gave the magazine Trip a long interview, his first for about 10 years. He was 41, he had been living for two and a half years on a farm up-country in São Paulo state, and he told the magazine that he could go to a shopping centre now and nobody would recognise him. He counted it a success.
It had not always been so. He was born on 22 May 1970 in São Paulo, the last of the four children of Abílio Diniz and his first wife. His father ran the Pão de Açúcar supermarket group, which had grown from a cake shop that Pedro’s grandfather opened in 1948. He began racing karts at 17, late by his own reckoning, and learned his trade in the junior formulae, from Brazilian Formula Ford to Formula 3000 in Europe, without ever winning a race in a car.
Money came with him into Formula One, largely from companies that sold through his family’s supermarkets: Parmalat above all, whose name went with him to each of his four teams. Estimates of the time, none of them confirmed, put it at US$10 million to US$17 million a year.1 To much of the press, grandprix.com among it, he was a pay driver from his first season to his last, and the money was real.
So were the results. Driving for Forti, then Ligier, Arrows and Sauber, he started 98 Grands Prix and scored 10 points, in an era when points went only to the first six. In 1997 he qualified ahead of his team-mate Damon Hill, then world champion, three times, and at Spa he started 8th, the highest he ever started a Grand Prix. In 1998 he scored as many points as Mika Salo, and in 1999 more than Jean Alesi. He finished 5th twice, at the Nürburgring in 1997 and at Spa, in the rain, in 1998. He never led a lap.
He came out of a burning Ligier at Buenos Aires in 1996 and an upturned Sauber at the Nürburgring in 1999 with nothing worse than blisters and bruises, and both times he started the next Grand Prix. Late in 2000, aged 30, he left the cockpit to help run a team rather than drive for one. Then came the land. In 2006, when his first child was born, he resolved to go into sustainable business, and in 2008 he began to make the Fazenda da Toca, the family’s farm at Itirapina, an organic one.
This book tells the two halves together. It sets the label beside the record and leaves the reader to weigh them, and it gives his own words as he said them, most of them in Portuguese. It begins in São Paulo, with a boy and his first kart, and it ends where this introduction began, on the land.
The numbers
The numbers
- Grands Prix started
- 98
- 1995–2000 · four teams
Six seasons
- Entries
- 99
- The one he did not start: Brazil 2000, when Sauber withdrew both cars
- Championship points
- 10
- From eight points finishes, in four of the six seasons
- Top-ten finishes
- 26
- Best result, twice
- 5
- Nürburgring 1997, Spa 1998
The book
Contents
Part One · The racing life
Four teams
- 1995
- Forti FG01-Ford
- 1996
- Ligier JS43-Mugen-Honda
- 1997
- Arrows A18-Yamaha
- 1998
- Arrows A19
- 1999
- Sauber C18-Petronas
- 2000
- Sauber C19-Petronas
Forti, a Formula 3000 team from Alessandria, moved up with him and largely on his backing; its car was usually 7 to 9 seconds slower than pole. He started all 17 races of 1995 and was classified in nine, the best of them 7th at Adelaide, in the last race of the year, a place short of the points.
At Ligier in 1996 his team-mate was Olivier Panis, who won at Monaco that May. Diniz came through the fire in Argentina and took the first points of his career: 6th in the rain at Barcelona in June, and 6th again at Monza in September.
Arrows was Tom Walkinshaw’s team. In two seasons there Diniz raced beside Hill and then Salo, scored at the Nürburgring, Monaco and Spa, and left under a performance clause in his contract, which Arrows contested before three tribunals and lost before all of them.
At Sauber he had, by his own later reckoning, the best car of his career. He was 6th three times in four races in the summer of 1999, the year of the roll at the Nürburgring, and in 2000, beside Salo again, he scored nothing. At the end of that season he stopped racing.
The results of every race he enteredFire and a roll
Two escapes
Buenos Aires: after his pit stop a refuelling valve stuck open, fuel sprayed onto the brakes and the Ligier caught fire; he was out of it almost at once, his hands blistered.
The Nürburgring: at the first corner Alexander Wurz’s Benetton, swerving round a slowing Jordan, hit the Sauber, which rolled and slid upside down, its roll hoop broken off; afterwards the teams agreed to double the sideways load in the roll-structure test.
VII · The shareholder
The Diniz family took a stake reported as 40 per cent in Prost Grand Prix, and Pedro gave up driving to help manage the team, turning down the seat Alain Prost offered him. The partnership did not survive 2001; by the end of January 2002 the team was in liquidation, and back in Brazil he spent the next five years running Formula Renault.
VIII · The farm
Part Two · The land
A farm at Itirapina
The land had been the family’s since the year he was born: about 2,300 hectares that he had known since boyhood. He came to live there with his wife, Tatiane Floresti, and their son in about 2009. The orange groves went organic; agroforestry followed, crops grown among trees, taken further with the Swiss-born farmer Ernst Götsch; then eggs, until by 2022 the business press called the Toca Latin America’s biggest producer of organic ones.
In 2018 he set up Rizoma Agro with two partners, to grow grain by regenerative organic methods at scale. Speaking to IstoÉ Dinheiro in November 2020, he put his idea of business in one sentence: “When we compete we create scarcity; when we collaborate we create abundance.” Both companies were built with Península, Abílio Diniz’s family office. In December 2022 Granja Mantiqueira agreed to buy the egg business and Rizoma’s grain operation; the land itself was leased rather than sold.
The farm, from the first organic groves to the saleWhat others said
Two views of 1999
A humorist in São Paulo and Diniz’s team boss, Peter Sauber, four months apart
E o Pedro Paulo Diniz devia dirigir carrinho de supermercado. Aliás, sabe por que o carro do Pedro Paulo não tem espelho retrovisor? Porque nunca tem ninguém atrás dele.
And Pedro Paulo Diniz ought to drive a supermarket trolley. By the way, do you know why Pedro Paulo’s car has no rear-view mirror? Because there’s never anybody behind him.
Pedro Diniz showed in his 5th season of F1 that he is a driver with a consistently good performance and is able to run within the top ten regularly. Also his constructive co-operation during the development of the car and his positive style of working with the whole team convinced us that Pedro Diniz will still be our man for the year 2000.
Reference
Explore
The men and women around him, from his father to Ernst Götsch on the land, have portraits of their own in The people. The pages listed here keep the record: every race, the dates of his life, and the words, each with its source.
Notes
Estimates reported by grandprix.com at the time, none of them confirmed: about US$10 million for the Ligier seat (December 1995); as much as US$13 million for Arrows, US$3 million of it from Parmalat (October 1996); about US$17 million more in Arrows’ budget for 1998 (September 1997); about US$15 million a year (September 1998); about US$10 million for Sauber (October 1998); and at least US$25 million in all to the teams Tom Walkinshaw ran (February 1999). ↑
Sources
formula1.com, results archive: race results, starting grids, qualifying and drivers’ standings, 1995–2000. formula1.com
statsf1, “Pedro DINIZ”, his driver page and list of entries, read through the Internet Archive. statsf1.com
chicanef1, “Pedro Diniz”, profile and race data. chicanef1.com
grandprix.com (Inside F1): race reports from the 1995 Brazilian Grand Prix to the 2000 Malaysian Grand Prix; “Ligier out of luck in America”, 11 December 1995; “Tom takes Bridgestone, Yamaha and Diniz”, 14 October 1996; “Alesi at Sauber, Salo at Arrows”, 22 September 1997; “Zonta or Diniz for BAR?”, 14 September 1998; “Diniz signs for Sauber”, 12 October 1998; “Tom loses to Diniz”, 22 February 1999; Peter Wright, “Formula 1 technical regulations for 2000”, 5 January 2000; “The Diniz Family buys into Prost”, 30 November 2000; “Diniz launches Formula Renault in Brazil”, 21 November 2001; and the Grand Prix Encyclopedia, “Pedro Diniz”. grandprix.com
Atlas F1: “Diniz is Fine”, 27 September 1999; “F1 Teams Divided by Roll-Bar Dispute”, 17 February 2000. atlasf1.com
BBC: “Herbert races to shock GP triumph”, 27 September 1999; “Arrows lose Diniz appeal”, 5 February 2002. bbc.co.uk
motorsport.com, “Pedro Diniz confirms split with Prost”, 3 November 2001, read through the Internet Archive. motorsport.com
La Libre Belgique, “Prost Grand Prix, c’est fini”, 28 January 2002. lalibre.be
Agência Estado, “Brasil terá F-Renault por cinco anos”, 20 November 2001. estadao.com.br
Folha de S.Paulo: Mauro Tagliaferri, “Diniz admite ter pouca experiência para a F-1”, 16 September 1994; “DINIZ – A carreira sem vitórias”, 26 March 1995; “Fogo no carro apavora Diniz”, 8 April 1996; José Simão, “Fórmula 1! Diniz dirige carrinho de supermercado!”, 10 April 1999; “Diniz sofre acidente na 2ª largada”, 27 September 1999; Fábio Seixas, “Diniz deixa as pistas e vira sócio de Prost”, 1 December 2000; “Conheça três fazendas de orgânicos que vendem produtos para a capital”, 27 September 2015; Eliane Trindade, “Ex-piloto de F-1 faz de fazenda da família uma incubadora de sustentabilidade”, 13 November 2018; “Eles deixaram uma carreira no mercado de grãos para investir em ovos orgânicos”, 3 June 2023. folha.uol.com.br
Paulo Lima, “Pedro Paulo Diniz” (Páginas Negras), Trip 210, May 2012. revistatrip.uol.com.br
Agência O Globo, “Abilio Diniz: saiba quem são os seis filhos do empresário morto em São Paulo”, Folha de Pernambuco, 19 February 2024. folhape.com.br
Pedro Diniz’s official website, Sauber’s statement on renewing his contract, August 1999, read through the Internet Archive. His own publicity. pedrodiniz.com
Swissinfo, “Sintonia com o planeta: suíço resgata terras degradadas no Brasil”, 3 March 2016. swissinfo.ch
FoodNavigator-LATAM, “Large-scale regenerative agriculture is possible – and profitable, says Rizoma”, 8 April 2019. foodnavigator-latam.com
Pedro Souza, “‘Quando a gente compete, gera escassez…’, diz Pedro Paulo Diniz”, IstoÉ Dinheiro, 23 November 2020. istoedinheiro.com.br
“Mantiqueira dobra a aposta nos ovos orgânicos”, Brazil Journal, 6 December 2022. braziljournal.com
“Mantiqueira cut deals to expand organic egg production”, Valor International, 6 December 2022. vlex.com.br