Terry Fullerton

Adelaide, 1993. Ayrton Senna, three-time Formula 1 world champion, is asked which rival gave him the most satisfaction to race. The room expects Prost. Senna says Terry Fullerton — a karter who never started a single car race. Fast, consistent, complete: Senna's exact words. For karting people, it merely confirmed what they had known for twenty years.

The karting years

Fullerton, born in 1953, became Britain's first karting world champion in 1973, taking the 100cc title at Nivelles in Belgium on a Birel with Komet power — the combination Riccardo Patrese would ride to the same crown a year later. A European Championship followed in 1977 with Zip Kart, part of a career haul of four European titles and eight British championships spread across two decades of the 100cc golden age.

From 1978 to 1980 he was the lead driver at the Italian DAP factory team, where his new team-mate was a Brazilian teenager named Ayrton Senna. The pair delivered repeated one-two results for DAP and pushed each other ruthlessly. At the 1980 World Championship at Nivelles, Fullerton won the opening final before an engine failure in the second dropped him to third overall — Senna finished second that year and never did win the karting world title he craved. Weeks earlier at Jesolo, Fullerton had beaten Senna on the last lap to take the prestigious Champions Cup. That was the dynamic: the established master and the prodigy, neither giving a centimetre.

What made him different

Completeness — the very quality Senna named. Fullerton combined raw one-lap pace with racecraft, tyre management and a hard, clean edge in wheel-to-wheel combat, and he sustained it against every generation thrown at him, from the Goldstein era through to the rise of Mike Wilson. He was also a pure karting professional at a time when that career barely existed. While his rivals used karting as a stepping stone, Fullerton treated it as the destination, racing as a paid factory driver for the best teams in Italy for two decades. He walked away from driving in 1984 with nothing left to win.

Legacy

Fullerton's second act may have shaped as many careers as his first. As a driver coach and manager he guided Dan Wheldon, twice an Indianapolis 500 winner; Allan McNish, twice a Le Mans winner; Formula 1 racers Paul di Resta and Anthony Davidson; and Jake Dennis, junior karting world champion in 2010 and later a Formula E world champion. The Fullerton method — built on the fundamentals of the 100cc era, translated for the modern OK and OKJ generations — became the template for professional driver coaching in karting. And the Senna quote gave the whole sport its best argument: the greatest driver of his age looked back past every grand prix and named a karter as his truest rival. Karting has been quoting it ever since.