About this site How the book was made

The car at the head of this page is an Arrows A18, the car Pedro Diniz raced in 1997, but it is not his. It wears the colours of his team-mate that year, Damon Hill, and it was photographed at Brands Hatch in 2018, 21 years after their season together. It stands for the way this book was made. Few freely licensed photographs of him exist, so his team-mates’ cars, the circuits where he raced and the people around him stand in for him, and every caption says so.

An independent tribute

This is an independent, non-commercial tribute. It is not affiliated with Pedro Diniz, his family, his companies or any racing team; it sells nothing and carries no advertising. It was written from published sources only: the newspapers and race reports of the time, his own interviews and the results archives.

Sources and checking

Every fact on these pages goes back to a named source, and every page ends with its list. A fact confirmed by two independent, reliable sources is stated plainly; one that rests on a single reliable source may be used; anything unconfirmed or disputed is left out, or the doubt is written into the sentence, with reportedly, by his own account or accounts differ. Wikipedia served only as a pointer to other sources. When this book was made, its English article said he began karting at 18; the interview it cites has him in his first kart at 15.

The race results come from formula1.com’s archive and statsf1, with the Ergast data (through Jolpica), chicanef1 and the contemporary race reports of grandprix.com as checks; where they disagree, the results page says which way this book has gone, and why. The sums said to have followed him from team to team were never confirmed, and they are printed as the estimates they were. Before any page was written, the research behind it was checked again against the sources, and each finished page was checked once more, fact by fact.

Quotations are worded exactly as they were published. When he spoke Portuguese, a quotation set on its own gives the Portuguese first and the English after, in a translation made for this site; one quoted within a sentence is given in English. A quotation reported by reputable sources whose original record has not been found is marked attributed; one that does not stand up appears only at the end of In his words, and theirs, with the reason.

The photographs

The photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and Flickr, each used under the licence it carries: a Creative Commons licence that allows reuse with credit, or the public domain. Photographs licensed only for non-commercial use, or with all rights reserved, are not used, even where they show him. Every picture is captioned with its photographer or source and its licence, and the picture credits link each one to its source. The site prints them in black and white and crops some of them; colour is kept for the few where it is the point, the yellow of his first Formula One car and the land at Itirapina.

Corrections

The record of a racing driver of the 1990s is scattered across old newspapers and databases that do not always agree, and this book will sometimes be wrong. When an error comes to light, or a better source does, the page is corrected and its list of sources brought up to date.

A companion book

This is the smaller companion of ayrton-senna.com, a tribute made in the same way to the driver Diniz named as his idol in a newspaper profile published on the day of his first Grand Prix.