When Ayrton Senna decided to tell a journalist what he felt while driving a racing car, and what it meant, it was Gerald Donaldson who provided his audience of one. Senna chose wisely. The Canadian writer and broadcaster, who has died aged 87, was a sympathetic listener who could be relied on to ask the sort of questions that encouraged interesting answers.
During Donaldson’s career as an observer of Formula One racing, reporting for daily newspapers and national TV and radio stations, Senna had provided him with his outstanding memory. It was that of the 1993 European Grand Prix at Donington Park, Derby, where the Brazilian, on a wet and treacherous track, overtook five rivals on the opening lap to seize a lead he would never relinquish.
Donaldson described Senna as “a complex man – intense, introspective, sensitive, private – and very intelligent”. In turn, Senna recognised the journalist as someone who could be trusted not to distort or sensationalise his thoughts when he spoke of the out-of-body experience of driving a perfect lap in qualifying on the street circuit at Monaco in 1988, two seconds faster than any of his rivals. “I suddenly realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously,” Senna said during the course of their remarkable conversation, revealing the shock of waking up from that trance: “It frightened me because I realised I was well beyond my conscious understanding.”
A full and varied life even before he made a late entry into journalism had equipped Donaldson to appreciate the human qualities of the racers he observed, as well as their technical skills. His biographies of his ill-fated compatriot Gilles Villeneuve (1989), the hell-raising James Hunt (1994) and the five-times champion Juan Manuel Fangio (2003), whom he considered the greatest of them all, became classics of the genre, blending admiration with shrewd observation, deep but lightly worn research and, where appropriate, compassion.
In a press room full of interesting characters during the three decades in which he was a regular attender at grand prix races around the world, Donaldson was a quiet presence, unassertive in manner but naturally congenial, universally respected and admired for his broad-ranging intellect. He was always willing to share his knowledge, to test his opinions (often expressed with a laconic humour) against those of others, and to give encouragement to newcomers entering a sometimes daunting environment.
He was born in Almonte, Ontario, the elder son of David Donaldson, a dairy superintendent, and his wife Mary (nee Purdon). At 16 Gerald dropped out of Almonte high school to pursue a life of adventure, hitch-hiking across Canada, taking jobs as a farm hand and ditch-digger, drinking and gambling until he decided to put an end to the wild years and enrol at Ontario College of Art in Toronto as a mature student.
Subsidising his studies with work as a male model, in 1967 he married Betty Stewart, the daughter of his mother’s best friend. With an urge to write a novel, he drove a VW van to Mexico to live in an artists’ colony for a year. The same impulse drew him to the south of France, where he spent a further year in Antibes, renting a house that had belonged to Edith Piaf.
On his return he moved into advertising, founding his own agency, while continuing to write. When the Canadian publisher Anna Porter advised him that his gifts might be better deployed in the field of nonfiction, he began to submit stories to magazines such as Style and Encore.
In the early 1980s he cut his ties with advertising and became a full-time journalist, covering the success of Canada’s Alpine skiing team, known as the Crazy Canucks, and, in 1987, ghostwriting the autobiography of Steve Podborski, the World Cup downhill champion.
Donaldson’s interest in motor racing had been sparked by a visit in 1961 to Mosport Park, in Clarington, Ontario, where he saw Stirling Moss win the Player’s 200 in his Lotus. A quarter of a century later he found his way into Formula One, writing newspaper columns for the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, and broadcasting for CBC, CTV and TSN.
In 1990 he published a book titled Grand Prix People, consisting of interviews with more than 100 of the characters, of many nationalities, to be found within the paddock: not just drivers and team owners but engineers, writers, photographers, race officials, press officers, sponsors and team caterers. A compelling mosaic of an extraordinary world, it provided a useful primer for newcomers and an inspiration to those trying to find their way in.
Away from the track, he pursued his love of nature by building, in collaboration with his brother, Gordon, a cabin in the Pakenham mountains in eastern Ontario, accessible only by hiking through the boreal forest. There he would retreat alone to the snowbound landscape, with the company of bears, wolves, coyotes, deer, beavers and mice, and visited only by Gordon.
A lover of literature and art, after Betty’s death in 2008, he married Diane Fine, a Toronto artist whom he had met at a fitness club while they were each training to run a marathon. Each summer they took a house in Chipping Campden, in the Cotswolds, where he could indulge his abiding Anglophilia. Diane provided beautifully wrought pencil portraits of drivers for his blog on motor racing.
He is survived by Diane and Gordon.
• Gerald David Craig Donaldson, writer and broadcaster, born 18 July 1938; died 14 December 2025
