Inside David Coulthard’s ‘Hollywood’ F1 win: From replacing Senna to Portugal glory
David Coulthard has looked back fondly at his first F1 race win, at the 1995 Portuguese Grand Prix.
30 years on from his first F1 victory, David Coulthard has remembered his time stepping into Ayrton Senna’s Williams and overcoming his lack of experience to become a Grand Prix winner.
The Scottish driver went on to win 13 Grands Prix during a successful F1 career as a consistent frontrunner, scoring his first victory at the 1995 Portuguese Grand Prix.
David Coulthard gets call-up to Williams following Ayrton Senna’s accident
Coulthard had been a test driver for Williams on an ad-hoc basis through 1992, stepping up into a more defined role in 1993, before getting the call-up to race for the Grove-based squad following the tragic death of team leader Ayrton Senna at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix.
To put it mildly, it was a baptism of fire for the young Scot, who stepped forward from relative anonymity into the spotlight as the direct replacement for the sport’s most talismanic driver.
September 2025 marked 30 years since Coulthard became a race winner for the first time, coming home seven seconds ahead of that season’s stand-out performer, Michael Schumacher, in Portugal as the then-Benetton driver romped to a second consecutive title.
It hadn’t been a particularly easy arrival in F1 for Coulthard, who paired up with Damon Hill; a situation he now explains helped to reduce the spotlight on him as the British driver was more viewed as the team leader. Despite Hill’s greater experience, Coulthard proved a “thorn in his side” during the eight races they did in 1994, with 1992 F1 World Champion Nigel Mansell getting the nod for the remaining races of the year.
Looking back on this time period, Coulthard is fully aware his career could have gone in a very different direction had tragedy not struck at Imola in mid-1994.
“I’ve no idea if I would have had an opportunity to race with Williams otherwise,” he told PlanetF1.com in an exclusive interview.
“Probably not. I could say, maybe just a bit later. I was stuck personally, struggling for budget in Formula 3000. I had enough money to do two races at the beginning of ’94.
“I did the first race. Ron Meadow’s team, Paul Stewart Racing, won, and we finished second to Franck Lagorce, but we didn’t have the money to do the full season, so there was no guarantee I would have done the full season in ’94.”
With the first race of the International F3000 series taking place at Silverstone on the day after Senna’s death, Frank Williams called upon Coulthard following his podium in order to slot into the Brazilian’s car after a single-car entry with Hill at Monaco.
“Teams didn’t really bring reserve drivers, test drivers, to the tracks in those days,” he said.
“Maybe I would have ended up in touring cars. Whoever would have imagined that Ayrton Senna would be killed, and then whoever would have imagined they would put an unknown young driver in the car. It’s a kind of Hollywood movie.”
But despite the rapidity of Coulthard’s sudden change of circumstances, the Scot was nonplussed by his ascendancy into the big leagues, having spent so much time as a test driver across the previous two years.
“I tested for Nigel [Mansell] for a year [in 1992] and tested for Alain [Prost in 1993], and at the beginning of the year with Ayrton, so I was very integrated into the team,” Coulthard said.
“I walked in and felt comfortable. I knew these guys and would fly with Frank. I was very used to his disability and the nurses and things like that.”
Astonishingly, Coulthard denied feeling pressure despite the circumstances of his abrupt promotion.
“There was no pressure. It was just an opportunity,” he said.
“Pressure comes through expectation. There was no expectation from either me or them. I had tested an F1 car, but I didn’t really know where I would stack up. I qualified ninth for the first race, with Damon in second, so a little bit off.”
Just how good was the 1994 car?
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“It was a quick car, but tricky in the beginning,” he said.
“It became less tricky as the year went on. I can’t remember how many races Damon won in the car; Ayrton had pole in the first three, and Nigel won in Australia at the last race.
“I led at Monza, and I was asked to roll over. So I finished up his [Damon’s] chuff (or would have, had Coulthard’s car not run out of fuel at the Parabolica on the final lap) and, at Estoril, I finished up his chuff.
“It was good enough for me to get podiums, right there, so it was a pretty good car.”
Coulthard’s breakthrough win didn’t come during his eight races in 1994, and it would be another full year from his maiden podium before his moment of glory arrived, and that came behind the wheel of Williams’ FW17B.
The first specification FW17 had proven fast but fragile across the first 12 races of the season, not helped by both Hill and Coulthard making some high-profile mistakes, such as Coulthard spinning off from pole position on the formation lap at Monza.
“I had a lack of experience and, even in ’95, I made some really silly mistakes. Spinning on the way to the grid at the Nurburgring when I was on pole…
“At Monza, they red-flagged the race because someone else had an issue. So then I took the T-car, led the Grand Prix, and, on Lap 13, the front upright seized. So yeah, it was an element of being unlucky in some of them, and silly mistakes in others.”
Coulthard, now a prominent member of the F1 media through his post-racing career as a TV commentator and pundit, said he’s fully aware that, in a very different sport nowadays, he likely wouldn’t have been given such a lenient start to his career, even though it was becoming clear he had the speed to succeed at the front.
“I got into a run where I had five pole positions (sic) in a row,” he said. “The ’95 car was a great car, I loved that car.
“I think my first one was Argentina, in torrential rain. I was clicking with the car in terms of speed, but the results just weren’t quite coming.
“The benefit of youth is that you don’t know what you don’t know. I wasn’t asked too much about it back then. It was a different media than the one that you work in today. Everything’s better, the whole sport is elevated, you’re all much more informed and knowledgeable.
“Back then, the old tabloid media guys would all get together, some of them wouldn’t even go to the track, and they would share the stories, file the stories, and be in the newspaper on the Monday. So it was a bit more of a cushy number.
“If it was the me of 30 years ago, then I would just be in and out. But, if it were me as a racer, 30 years younger, doing it now in this generation, I’d be just better because of more knowledge, more experience.
“You could be a naive village boy in Formula 1 back then. You cannot be that way today.
“I was always a focused professional, but when we talked about strategy, it was like, ‘Well, what lap do we want to put fuel? Do you want to do a long stint, or do you want to be a bit lighter at the beginning?’ That then dictated what your lap was, because you don’t have fuel to get to that one.
“So, if it was a long run to the first corner, you might want to be a bit lighter not to lose the place. If it was Monza, it was definitely one stop, and you wanted to go as long and heavy as you could. You just kept getting quicker. So you would, as a team, pick the last moment you could based on how much fuel you could get in the car. So the strategy was a lot simpler!”
Everything would change for Coulthard at Estoril, as Williams brought along its revised FW17B to the Portuguese Grand Prix. Technical director Patrick Head and chief designer Adrian Newey had made some modifications to the car aimed at making it more predictable and drivable, and it had an immediate impact. Or, at least, it did in qualifying…
“Adrian came up with the top wishbone… maybe it was the bottom, I can’t remember!” Coulthard said.
“But it was also shrouding the drive shaft, so it became an aerodynamic shape, and it was load-bearing. It was Adrian exploiting the aero efficiencies of the car a lot and all that sort of stuff. It was really great to work with Adrian through that period.
“The shroud was just introduced for qualifying. We hadn’t done any long runs on it, so we didn’t race it. So they put that gearbox on to qualifying, put it on pole, and then took it off, and put the standard wishbones on for the race.”
In terms of strategy, Williams plumped for an all-out assault on the lead, utilising the speed of its young charger behind the wheel. This resulted in Coulthard, weirdly, setting the fastest lap of the race on Lap 2, his very first full-speed lap.
“I was told, ‘This is a three-stopper, treat it like qualifying, you’ve got to go!'” Coulthard laughed.
“I got the jump at the start, Michael was behind me, and I got to Lap 8 or 9, and I was exhausted!”
Mimicking gasping behind the wheel, he said, “I was pushing, looking in the mirrors, and Michael was still there! But, a lap or two before the first pitstop, he started to drop off.”
Coulthard went on to take the chequered flag in first place, taking his maiden victory in what, by today’s standards, would have been his first season.
“It was my 21st race,” he said.
“I remember the Autosport magazine, which was quite popular at that time, the headline was, ‘At last!’ After 21 races!
“But I had pole position, the win, and fastest lap.”
Having taken pole at Monza and Estoril, Coulthard followed it up with another two pole positions at the Nurburgring, where he spun off on the formation lap, and another pole position at Aida. His confidence had been massively boosted by the victory, prompting him to believe young drivers today can spiral if such breakthroughs don’t come.
“It made a huge difference. Because you don’t know how easy it is to win until you win,” he said.
“Then, when you win, it just lines everything up. It just changes your confidence. I’d obviously won in other formulas, in every formula, but it’s not until you do it that you know it.
“I think sometimes, when drivers go through their career never getting a winning car, they get frustrated, and then it becomes a spiral like that. So it was totally important.
“I’ve been incredibly lucky with the opportunities I had and the teams I raced for, and I don’t have any lack of appreciation for that.
“I loved it, no regrets, even the silly mistakes and everything, all the blow-ups when I was leading. Because why put that negativity into what’s otherwise been an amazing journey?”
Coulthard’s tenure with Williams ended at the conclusion of the 1995 season, moving to McLaren as he made way for Jacques Villeneuve at the Grove squad.
Before Coulthard’s time at Williams came to an end, however, the Scot was infamously involved in a bizarre incident in Adelaide, a race-ending crash that would cost him over £2.5 million… stay tuned for the second part of PlanetF1.com’s interview with David Coulthard!
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