Karun Chandhok reflects on driving McLaren's forgotten Lamborghini-powered MP4/8B

I’ve just come off the most intense but brilliant quadruple header of the season, with Austria, Silverstone, Goodwood and Spa filling my weeks ahead of the summer holidays. As a self-proclaimed historian of the sport all three of these grands prix are special because of the significance of them to our sport over the years, while at the Festival of Speed we, of course, celebrate the past, present and future of this wonderful world of motor racing.

The British Grand Prix this year was an extraordinary event. With Glastonbury having a fallow year, this was unquestionably the biggest festival in the UK with 564,000 people flocking to the circuit across the four days. This was a record number in the 76-year history of Formula 1 and underlined the importance of Silverstone to the F1 calendar, despite the shiny new venues like Madrid, Vegas and Qatar popping up. I opted to have time away from Sky F1 duties as it’s the only weekend of the season where my children come to the race and I loved sitting in the grandstands and watching the action as a pure fan for every one of the sessions we had on track.

The roar that came out when Lewis secured pole for the sprint race was something special and reminded me of standing in the paddock in 2007 on the inside of Copse Corner when he took pole position in his debut season. On his 20th visit as a grand prix driver, he still remains the darling of the crowd although the Landoland fans in their fluorescent yellow kit made quite the impression too. I cycled down to that area on the outside of Stowe to soak up the atmosphere and it’s clear that Lando has done a brilliant job of engaging with a young and fresh demographic.

“What if Senna stayed at McLaren with a Lambo engine for 1994?”

Speaking of which, I got to spend a day with Ollie Bearman where we both drove the very car in which Ayrton Senna took his first grand prix win back in 1985 at Estoril. Ayrton’s former mechanic Chris Dinnage and Clive Chapman at Classic Team Lotus had done a brilliant job preparing the car – and if you haven’t seen the feature we made yet, you should (it’s on YouTube now!). Watching Ollie’s emotions as he drove the car was amazing – it’s rare to see a driver of his generation who has never raced a manual gearbox single-seater appreciate just how special these older cars are.

He’s a lovely kid and I was so pleased to see that he appreciated the purity of driving these cars where every input isn’t filtered by a computer. The fact that the Lotus 97T still had Senna’s seat and steering wheel from the 1985 Portuguese Grand Prix made it pretty magical to drive.

At the Festival of Speed, I got behind the wheel of another Senna car, albeit one that never raced. In 1993, McLaren were in the midst of going through four different engine suppliers in four years but they also built a test car for a fifth, with a V12 Lamborghini engine in the back of the MP4/8B. This was seen as a way to entice Ayrton into staying at the team and not moving to Williams, and for the first time in 33 years this car ran in public with Bruno Senna and I having the first opportunities to deafen the crowd.