Born: 5 March 1975, Sâo
Paulo, Brazil
Marital Status: Single
Lives: Sâo Paulo and Cambridge
Height: 1.75m
Weight: 68kg
The prodigious speed of this 25-year-old Brazilian has brought him to Jaguar Racing as the official race driver after one season as test driver for the team.
Like his great idol Ayrton Senna, Burti is a native of Sao Paolo. Quite what they put in the city's water supply nobody knows but the effects are plain to see: speed is something which comes as second nature to 'Paolistas'.
Burti, as Senna before him, began competing in karts and won the 1994 South American Kart Championship title before moving to England to begin his racing career in earnest. Racing in Formula Vauxhall Junior with the team run by former Lotus F1 star Martin Donnelly, Burti's four wins and third place in the championship were fine reward for his debut season, but more significant still was his move to Paul Stewart Racing.
The graduation to Formula Vauxhall with PSR saw Burti dominate both the 1996 Winter series and 1997 British Championship, and British Formula 3 duly followed, where Burti has been honing his skills on the Stewart 'staircase of talent' both on- and off-track for the past two seasons, where his ever more polished style has reaped seven wins and saw him take the runner-up spot in 1999.
In 2000 he joined Jaguar Racing as test driver and competed in the Austrian Grand Prix when Eddie Irvine fell ill. For 2001 he will make the step up to fully fledged race driver alongside team-mate Irvine.
Not a lot of people know that:
You will only ever see Luciano hop into a race car from the right… he's superstitious,
you know.