Why Ayrton Senna's Monaco lap is still the greatest onboard F1 footage ever recorded

Replay: It's the Monaco Grand Prix this weekend. And to mark the occasion you should find time to spend 100 seconds with the great Ayrton Senna on the streets of Monaco in 1990.

Ayrton Senna was known as the King of Monaco. He won the Grand Prix held on the Principality's tight, twisting streets a record six times, a statistic that is all the more remarkable because those victories came from only 10 starts. Of the current drivers, Lewis Hamilton leads with three wins, while Max Verstappen and Fernando Alonso have two each. Charles Leclerc ended years of heartbreak to finally win his home race in 2024, and Lando Norris converted pole to victory in 2025 — but with the new names on the trophy, you still can't see Senna's record coming under threat any time soon.

In a hugely storied career, the Brazilian driver's exploits at Monaco deserve their own chapter. In 1984 he guided a ridiculously underpowered Toleman to a remarkable second place in the wet; in 1988 he produced a pole lap that was an astonishing 1.4 seconds faster than the great Alain Prost, who was his teammate at the time and driving the same car; in 1992 he managed to keep a hard-charging Nigel Mansell on much fresher tyres behind him for what seemed like an impossible forever.

And in 1990, an onboard camera captured this, a hot lap of his around the Monaco circuit, which I maintain is possibly still the most thrilling onboard footage of an F1 driver at work — despite the cars being around 10 seconds a lap slower than they are now.

(F1 rights don't let us show that lap directly, so here's another lap from the same year which is 99% as good.)

Camera overload

Partly it's so good because of the way the technology struggles with the storm and fury of a 1990s F1 car (unlike the cameras used in F1: The Movie); the camera is vastly overloaded and the image and audio are all over the place. But mainly it's the very obvious skill of the driver.

Unlike modern F1 cars with their semi-automatic gearboxes controlled by paddles on the back of the steering wheel, Senna's McLaren MP4/5B had a 6-speed manual transmission with an H-pattern gate. That means he had to physically change gear around 3600 times during a race. And when you see him accelerating out of Sainte-Dévote and up Beau Rivage one-handed, mere inches from the barriers at over 258 km/h (160 mph), you can understand why, even over 30 years after his tragic death, Senna remains the King of Monaco.