The junior formulae 1989–1994

He arrived in England on his own in the winter of 1990–91, to try his luck in British Formula 3, against his father’s wishes. Abílio gave him little money at first, and within months, by his own account, Pedro was living in a tiny flat, a long way from his mother’s house and its staff, learning English and learning to look after himself. He found a team without anyone’s help. In 1996, answering those who called him a daddy’s boy, he put those first months into one sentence: “On the contrary, I went to live on my own in England and spent about six months eating pasta without so much as seeing a pretty woman.”

He came with two seasons in cars behind him. The first, in 1989, was in Brazilian Formula Ford, and it was then, he says, that he began finding his own sponsors; his father, as he tells it, handed him nothing on a plate: “Of course he opened a lot of doors for me, but when I moved up to Formula Ford I went out, made presentations to companies, got sponsorship.” He finished that season 6th. In the same series was Rubens Barrichello, two years younger and also from São Paulo, and for three years running the two of them would race in the same championships.

In 1990 he moved up to South American Formula 3. His best result was 3rd, at Interlagos, and with 4 points he was 15th equal; Christian Fittipaldi won the title, and Barrichello was 8th. Neither season brought a win, and no season in cars ever would.

British Formula 3, 1991–1992

His team for 1991 was Dick Bennetts’s West Surrey Racing, which had taken the British Formula 3 championship in 1990. It ran three Ralts with Mugen-Honda engines, for Barrichello, for Jordi Gené and for Diniz. First time out, at Silverstone in March, he finished 6th. It was the only point of his season. Barrichello won the championship with 74 points and Gené was 4th; Diniz, with his single point, was 11th equal.¹

grandprix.com’s later verdict was that he struggled at first, and was quicker in 1992. The points bear it out, 1 against 8, though his first year had put him in the champion team, beside the champion.

That first year also brought a heavy crash. At Silverstone, by his account, in a strong wind the car spun in a fast corner, flew over the kerb and hit the wall backwards. His seat was pushed into the fuel tank and his head thrown forward: “I broke the fifth vertebra; I could have been paralysed.” He spent four months out of the car. There is no contemporary report of the crash, and its date is unknown. He described a neck injury from a Silverstone crash to Folha de S.Paulo in 1995, and the broken vertebra in 2012 and again in 2018. In 1995 he linked the crash, and Senna’s death, with a calmer way of driving: “I calmed down.”

For 1992 he moved to Edenbridge Racing, which had made the Reynard a race-winner with Gil de Ferran the year before. He began in a Reynard 923; in mid-season, with most of the field now in Reynards, Edenbridge bought Ralt RT36s, and he finished the year in one. Both cars had Mugen-Honda engines. His team-mate was Warren Hughes. Diniz finished 3rd twice, and his 8 points left him 12th equal with Jason Plato. De Ferran, now with Paul Stewart Racing, was champion, and Hughes, 7th, won the race that supported the British Grand Prix.

He also raced once at Zandvoort, in the Masters of Formula 3, and once in the British Formula 3000 championship, at Donington in October, where from 10th on the grid he finished 8th.

In 2012 he looked back at those seasons without dressing them up: “I saw I didn’t have the natural talent I had imagined.” His results in Formula 3 and Formula 3000, he said, had been middling.

Formula 3000, 1993–1994

The next step came through a connection between two racing families. Carlo Gancia was the son of Piero Gancia, for whose Jolly-Gancia team Abílio Diniz had raced in 1970 (chapter I, São Paulo). Carlo, who had worked in banking and since 1990 had run an asset-management business in Monaco, had become Pedro’s manager, and in 1992, while hunting for a Formula 3000 drive for his client, he met Guido Forti.

Forti had set up his team, Forti Corse, at Alessandria in the late 1970s with Paolo Guerci. It had won the Italian Formula 3 championship four times and had raced in Formula 3000 since 1987. Forti agreed to run Diniz from 1993, and Gancia bought Guerci’s shares.

In 1993 Diniz drove a Reynard 93D with a Ford Cosworth engine, beside Olivier Beretta. At the first round, at Donington in May, Beretta won from pole and Diniz spun off on the first lap. Beretta out-qualified him at every round and finished the year 6th. Diniz failed to qualify once, at Pau, took his best result, 7th, at Enna-Pergusa in July, and scored no points.

He had a coach by now. René Arnoux, who had won seven Grands Prix, worked with him in Formula 3000 and later in Formula One, because, Arnoux said, Pedro asked him to; once Diniz stopped racing, he did no more full-time coaching.

He stayed with Forti for 1994, with Hideki Noda as his team-mate and a Reynard 94D. The sponsors named in January were Arisco, Sadia, Unibanco and Mobil; the Pão de Açúcar group, Folha reported, stayed out.

In qualifying he was quick now: 6th at Silverstone, 5th at Enna, 4th at Spa, and a provisional pole at Barcelona, where he started 7th. He and Noda were level in qualifying, four rounds each. Motor Sport noticed in July that both of Forti’s drivers were showing a speed not seen from them before; what they needed now, it said, was to learn to finish races.

Finishing was the difficulty. At Silverstone, the first round, he was running right behind Noda when a wheel nut put him out. He finished three of his eight races, and of his five retirements four were recorded as accidents or accident damage and one as a wheel nut. His own account, in September, put the car first: “In the races I’ve been having problems with the car. I’ve had gearbox failures, a wheel that came off, some accidents and bad luck.”

Then, on 24 September at Estoril, he started 10th and finished 4th. It gave him 3 points, his only points in Formula 3000, and a result that, Folha wrote, all but secured his FIA superlicence, the licence a Formula One driver needs. At Magny-Cours eight days later he crashed out after 28 laps, and he finished the championship 12th equal.² Jean-Christophe Boullion was champion.

His karting and junior seasons are set out year by year in the results table of the junior years.

The way into Formula One

Guido Forti had long wanted to take his team into Formula One. By September 1994 Gancia owned half of it, and he was in São Paulo raising about US$17 million for the step, 70 per cent of it planned to come from Brazilian companies; the beer maker Kaiser and Arisco had already agreed. That month Diniz told Folha that he had talked to Arrows and Jordan, and that his chance of Formula One depended on Forti’s plan.

Gancia, recalling it in 2024, put the decision at the end of 1994, later than the record of that September, and gave it to himself and Abílio. In 2012 Pedro told it more simply: the owner of his Formula 3000 team had dreamed of Formula One, they had put a team together bit by bit, Pão de Açúcar had helped, and he himself had brought in Parmalat as sponsor.

In Britain, looking at the same record, Motor Sport’s preview of the 1995 season was not persuaded:

Diniz, who has sourced most of the financial support, will struggle. He never truly got to grips with F3000, and has shown no sign that he is ready for this.

He received his superlicence on 24 January 1995. A week later, on 31 January, Parmalat Forti Corse was launched in São Paulo and in Milan on the same day, with a new car, the FG01, and a Ford Cosworth V8. The team, Gancia told the launch, would be a kind of springboard for young drivers.

On 20 February, at Varano in Italy, he drove a Formula One car for the first time. His first lap was also his only one that day: a part of the gearbox came loose, and he drove back to the pits stuck in third gear. He told Folha: “These are problems a new car always has. I wasn’t frustrated. I was even pleased the car ran.” Five weeks later he started his first Grand Prix, for Forti, at Interlagos.