Team · 1981–1985 · United Kingdom
Toleman Motorsport
Toleman belonged to Ted Toleman’s car transport company. The team came up from Formula 2, where its drivers finished first and second in 1980, and in 1981 it entered Formula 1 with a turbocharged Hart engine, but for almost all of its first season it failed to qualify: its car started a race for the first time only in September, at Monza.
In 1984 Ayrton Senna made his debut with Toleman. At a wet Monaco he started thirteenth and was second when the race was stopped, and he reached the podium twice more, in Britain and Portugal. Teo Fabi gave the team its only pole, at the Nürburgring in 1985. In 1986 Toleman became Benetton — the start of the lineage that leads to today’s Alpine.