São Paulo 1970–1990

On 22 November 1970, when his son Pedro Paulo was six months old, Abílio Diniz won the Mil Milhas Brasileiras, the Brazilian Thousand Miles, at Interlagos. He shared an Alfa Romeo GTAm, number 25, with his brother Alcides, and when the 12 hours and 50 minutes were done, in intermittent rain, they were 3 laps clear.

The brothers had imported the car for the race, and it was entered by the Jolly-Gancia team, which belonged to Piero Gancia. More than 50 cars started. The Alfa was 21st at the end of the first lap, and it beat the favourite, Gianpiero Moretti’s Ferrari 512S, which led for much of the race before losing almost 3 hours in the pits. The next year Abílio and Alcides took the 12 Horas de Interlagos too, and Abílio was runner-up in the Brazilian championship. Soon afterwards he stopped racing cars: the business needed him. On the water he was three times Brazilian powerboat champion as well.

It was all before his son’s time. Asked about his father’s racing in 2012, Pedro said that it had been short and that he had not lived it, and that his own urge to prove himself had not really been about outdoing his father. But the Alfa left a thread that would run through his career. Two decades later Piero Gancia’s son, Carlo Gancia, became Pedro’s manager, and in time led him into Formula One with Forti.

A cake shop and a supermarket

The family’s fortune began with cakes. Pedro’s grandfather, Valentim dos Santos Diniz, came from Pomares do Jarmelo, near Guarda in Portugal, where he was born in 1913, and landed at Santos in November 1929, aged 16. On the voyage, he said later, the sight of the Sugarloaf at Rio, the Pão de Açúcar, stayed with him. He was a baker. His own shop, the Doceira Pão de Açúcar, a cake shop on Avenida Brigadeiro Luís Antônio in São Paulo, opened its doors on 7 September 1948, and next door, on 14 April 1959, came the first supermarket to carry the name.

Valentim had married Floripes Pires in 1936, and their eldest son, Abílio, the first of six children, arrived on 28 December that year, in São Paulo. Abílio studied business administration at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas and built the business into one of Brazil’s biggest retailers; by 1995, Folha de S.Paulo reported, the group had 216 stores. He would run it until he lost control of it in 2013. In the 1960s he married Maria Auriluce Falleiros, and they had four children: Ana Maria, João Paulo, Adriana and, the youngest, Pedro Paulo, born in São Paulo on 22 May 1970.

Ana Maria, about 10 years older than Pedro, is the sister he has called his second mother; she would later join the group and become one of its vice-presidents. João Paulo, a serious sportsman, a triathlete who would compete in Ironman races, was much the stronger at sport, and Pedro felt that his brother saw the racing as play, and was uneasy about it. Adriana has kept out of public life.

Avenida Cidade Jardim

His first memory is of moving house. He was about three when the family moved into a very large house on Avenida Cidade Jardim, and he did not want to go. There were drivers and security men in the household, but Abílio was strict, and wanted a more ordinary upbringing for his children. Pedro remembers a dominating father whose affection was formal, and he is grateful to him all the same for the values he taught. As the youngest, he said, he caught a very bad phase of his parents’ marriage and got less attention. When he was about 15 his parents parted, and only then did things between father and son improve.

He was a quiet, withdrawn boy who did not fit at school. He went through several schools and had learning difficulties; he was good at mathematics and bored by Portuguese, and he took apart blenders and vacuum cleaners and built little carts. At about 13 he spent a whole summer holiday shut in his room, revising for resits. A school that let him learn by making things, he thought later, might have held him. He finished secondary school at the Objetivo, and he never went to university.

Beyond the city there was the family’s farm, the Fazenda da Toca at Itirapina, some 200 km from São Paulo, which the family had owned since 1970. From about the age of 10 he rode a little enduro motorbike round its fields and to its cave. Nearly 30 years later he went back there to live, and to farm it.

In the city he was driving before he was old enough for a licence. From about 13 he took a Volkswagen Gol round the streets of São Paulo, which, Folha wrote in 1995, was exactly why his father wanted him on a race track.

The first kart

When he was 15 a friend invited him for a go in a kart at Interlagos, home of the Autódromo José Carlos Pace, where his father had won the Mil Milhas, and he found at once that he was good at it. His father’s verdict, as Pedro tells it, was that it was better to race on a track than on the Marginal, the riverside expressway through the city. Abílio encouraged him, and gave him a kart. The withdrawn schoolboy had found something he could do. Looking back, Pedro put what it did for him in a few words: “It did me a lot of good; it raised my self-esteem.”

He was a late starter, as he told Folha in 1994: “I made my karting debut at 17. The others start much earlier, at 8 or 9.”¹ He took up training so as to be fit enough to race.

Aprendi que lugar de correr é na pista.

I learned that the place to go fast is on the track.

He won races, among them, by the account of his own later website, two-hour races in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and he took many pole positions. He never won a championship. In 2012 he was plain about the reason: “I took pole after pole, but I was a complete wild man and crashed in the races.”

The driver he looked up to was Ayrton Senna. In March 1995, on the day of his own first Grand Prix, the first in Brazil since Senna’s death, he called Senna his idol, and Michael Schumacher the best.

Into cars, and to England

In 1989 he raced cars for the first time, in Brazilian Formula Ford, at the start of the years told in the junior formulae. On Monday 11 December, with that first season just over, his father was kidnapped in São Paulo on his way to work. The police freed him six days later, on 17 December, and no ransom was paid.

A year later, at 20, Pedro left alone for England and British Formula 3, where the next chapter takes up the story.

In February 1995, weeks before his first Grand Prix, Folha put the question of his father’s help to him directly. He answered:

Quando o campeonato mundial começar, vou poder provar a todos que estou na F-⁠1 por causa do meu talento e não por ser filho de Abílio Diniz.

When the world championship starts, I’ll be able to prove to everyone that I’m in F1 because of my talent and not because I’m Abílio Diniz’s son.