Ghost stories are not a big thing in Formula 1 history, but in the summer of 1988 you did have to wonder. At the time, McLaren-Honda was dominating with its amazing MP4-4. To give you an idea just how dominant it was, at Imola the two McLarens both qualified in the 1m27s, Senna being 0.7s ahead of Prost (imagine that gap today), but the third fastest driver was the World Champion Nelson Piquet in his Lotus-Honda. This matched the McLarens through the speed traps but was more than three seconds a lap off pole position. That is a huge car advantage and with Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna as drivers, the team delivered 11 straight wins. The rest of the field was never really involved. The best was Gerhard Berger in his Ferrari, but the rest were nowhere. It was Ron Dennis’s dream to win all 16 of the races. To achieve the perfect clean sweep and you would have been mad to bet against that. We think of it now as having been a golden age, but the truth is that the races were rather dull, much more so than they are today, when everyone is much closer, even if Mercedes has had an advantage.
Nothing seemed to work. In the first week of June Pope John Paul II visited Maranello and was taken for a spin around the Fiorano test track by Piero Ferrari. The Pope blessed the F1 cars and Italians hoped this would make a difference, but they both retired with mechanical failure a week later in Canada. The Pope’s visit to Maranello did highlight the fact that Enzo Ferrari was not very well. He was then 90 years old and had been ailing for some months. The fact that he did not make it to the factory to see the Pope highlighted that things were very serious. In the course of July, the reports got worse. And then on Sunday, August 14 it was announced that Il Commendatore had “serenely ended his earthly life”. He was interred in the family tomb in the San Cataldo Cimitero in Modena.
Two weeks later, it was a sombre F1 circus which gathered in Spa. It was the same old story. McLaren dominated. Both Ferraris retired. A fortnight later they reconvened at Monza. It was the same story again. The McLarens qualified side by side on the front row. The Ferraris were third and fourth. The order did not change at the start and remained a McLaren 1-2 until lap 35 when Prost retired with an engine failure. Senna stayed ahead, working his way through the midfield, lapping them one by one. At the start of the 50th lap (in a 51 lap race), Senna came up behind the Williams of Jean-Louis Schlesser, who was standing in for Nigel Mansell, who was out of action because of chicken pox. It was Schlesser’s first F1 World Championship race and he was running a very decent 11th, three places behind his team-mate Riccardo Patrese. He saw Senna coming and tried to get out of the way. Senna went for the gap, but he had left Schlesser with nowhere to go and the two cars collided. Senna spun. The crowd at Monza went berserk, not only was the McLaren out, but suddenly there was a Ferrari 1-2, on the team’s home turf. There were memorable scenes of wild celebration and as F1 cowered inside the paddock walls as the fans beseiged the compound, more than a few folk wondered if Enzo Ferrari, sitting on a cloud somewhere, might have been responsible…
It was the only non-McLaren victory of the year.
joeblogsf1 
Magic cars, magic drivers . I bet McLaren would like to have even a fraction of that success this year.
I remember that race well and the excitement of the tifosi. Michele Alboreto was desperate to win and chased Berger hard. As a Ferrari fan myself I thoroughly enjoyed watching it!
Domination the same as the level of the Williams cars in 1992. Makes me chuckled when people moan today’s races are boring, with the top four around 20 to 30 seconds apart. I remember the days when only three or so cars finished on the lead lap as well, Joe.
Hmmm not the best year for competition but was the start of the Senna-Prost feud.
Schlesser did do the ’83 Race of Champions in a RAM Joe. He was a very versatile and quick guy and a string anchorman for TWR’s ETCC effort between ’84-’86.
Was he driving for Sauber-Merc in Group C at the time of his Williams appearance?
Jean Louis, who I have known since The French Touring Car Championship in 1984, is a remarkable talent and deserved a much better F1 career than he had. He often tested for Williams, because FW liked him.
Thanks Joe, yes J-LS was very quick and and also a very nice bloke from my distant recollections of him when I was a boy chasing autographs around the paddocks.
I never thought of him as an F1 driver at the time even though he was a frontrunner in Group C nor did I realise he was a Williams tester!
Schlesser was driving for Sauber-Mercedes, together with Mauro Baldi. He still owns the unofficial speed record at the pre-chicane-Hunaudiéres with 407 km/h.
With all my consideration, may I add two details. First, Jean-Louis Schlesser is a smart and warm man, with direct sentences, and about the Mulsanne straight, he always had the same opinion, being clearly against, up to avoid compete in Le Mans in 1990, as the straight was still fully used. In Le Mans, he had 7 starts, 4 DNF, best finish 2nd for its first time. Its last LM apearance was in 1991, when the two new chicanes were breaking the straight…
Second point, the official top speed record of 405 (some sources says 407) km/h during the race was marked by Roger Dorchy in a WM P 88 in the 88’s 24 Hours.
Yes I remember it being Dorchy with the WM
He said (literally) it wouldn’t be the most stupid thing to drive 400 +, but to step on it for twenty seconds for sure would be.
I was working for Williams at the time and after the race I bumped into Ron Dennis in the paddock. Considering what had just transpired, I had fully expected Ron to be apoplectic with rage, but he was remarkably sanguine.
“What on earth was your boy thinking?”, he said calmly. “I think you will find”, I said, “that it was entirely self inflicted”.
The tifosi naturally were ecstatic and Jean Louis was awarded honorary Italian status by a steady flow of visitors to the Williams motor home.
I am sure it wasn’t the way that Jean Louis would have wanted to finish the weekend, but there were many who congratulated him on his race and it did put a smile on Frank’s face!!
I was in Monaco a couple years ago with Jean Louis and Ron came up and, with a big smile, said to his girlfriend: “This is the man who ruined my life”. And Jean-Louis replied, with a bigger smile: “No,” he said. “I kept you hungry.”
That’s a brilliant quote Joe!
Ron still got the closest there’s ever been to a perfect season though, and as an 11 year old the ’88 battle between Senna and Prost is what got me hooked on the sport.
I, too, recall that race well and I felt at the time – still do – that Senna’s trademark hubris cost him that race. Yes, the Ferraris were both healthy but they were a decent distance behind and this was lap 50 of 51 for crying out loud. Sorry to say that his attitude of “I’m Senna, get out of the way.” was not something I consider his most endearing feature.
Senna saw a gap and went for it; no hesitation or loss of momentum, it just didn’t work out. If you want hubris, look further along the grid…
And this during an era without safety cars, so if they were to catch him it would have had to happened on pace alone…which they didn’t have on the Maccas
Thanks again Joe for another interesting story. The 1988 season was before my time, was the performance gap that McLaren had due to the engine, chassis or a combination of both? I know that Lotus had an Honda engine too so I would assume more to do with the chassis
It was all chassis
That’s a statement we need to hear again, and often even.
Whether I’m misguided or not, my imagination that there is no equal customer engine, to works spec, lingers like heavy fog over my enjoyment.
Not directly verified, there are a lot of folks who know the details far better than me, but:
Part of the advantage was the engine installation/gearbox layout on the Mp4/4.
McLaren had a gearbox (Weissmann, I think) with additional shaft which allowed a lower crankshaft height. The Lotus had to tilt the back of the Honda upwards to fit their gearbox. This raised the centre of gravity.of the engine. It may also have increased oil system “drag” but I’m not sure if that was measurable.
The ’88 was that end result what had begun ’86 with the flat Brabham BT55. Gordon Murray finished at McLaren what he started 2 years ago. It was not Steve Nichols, it was Murray who gave this input for that dominating car.
It was both
Subject for a study, maybe a nice post grad term project, or even aiming at publication, I.e. ,rope in department for the objective:
Can chassis’ relative contributions to performance be adduced from public data?
I’d suggest there’s a lot more data that can be obtained from sources such as race footage: Lines through corners are often more revealing of relative fuel load, but that’s a steady factor, on a downward trend so one can handle that as linear, whereas chassis design and setup have more interesting dynamic factors, off top of my head, pitch / yaw on braking end of a straightaway, the straightaway being something to normalize against, would be there a point to measure from, likely to be reliably on broadcast feeds. Photogrammetry is totally a on demand service with video. Okay, program required but Azure’s services include baseline image/video processing that has high level interfaces to the program you want to do the work of interest.
I am shooting from the hip, as always I suppose, but I can see some niche supply of commentary aides in the future… I forgot the name just now, but was pointed to a video card maker the other week, name new to me, lead because of open hardware designs (relatively speaking) and the maker is big in football video analysis, seem to have that market cornered. Video hardware for broadcast sees few new entrants, I was very happy to see a new one, and assume open hardware specs – valuable and chargeable to users, other suppliers in software, control .. this is giving up a good revenue stream… – is strategic. Strategic to move up in the information value chain. Their databases and play analysis apps look like they might only need a recognizable face to parrot to the screen…
I’ll have to check out that company again..
Isn’t it time F1 got moving on all the tech leads out there?
The best and sometimes only way to engage is start doing business in the area. I mean business you can talk about, not the CFD madness where I last read the rules gave teams a limit less than a hobbyist would start…
Truly high tech can be unseen Chinese walls everywhere, for the uninitiated.
A circuit board design software house put their complete main product on the web. For free. Only for users to revolt against any idea of risking data of designs. (being forced into “the cloud” rightfuly scares people with vast investment in toolchains) . But I’m advocating the need to give tools away as policy to save the world. My view I’m not going to start on now here, but it’s a deeply held view, long considered.
That’s just a example. Privately i joke to friends that my ranting here about Larry Ellison got Microsoft onto a car…
Yeah, i know…
But my last comment on the hacker news forum (run by YCombinator / Paul Graham, angel investors not Hollywood ideas of hacking..) was to correct the assertion Michael Bloomberg worked for Merril Lynch. I held off a time… Because a good handful in the discussion already have past or present programming for investment banks. Yet nobody noted what is a important point, discussing why the Bloomberg terminal matters, how it came to prominence. I realised after a good scratch of my head, that it was not age so much, nor exposure, but the fact that institutional memories were I printed on my mind by my mentors. This anecdotally concurs with the embarrassment of trying to chat up a attractive lady whose badge said (bulge bracket bank) with a line clawing for terrible humor dependant on knowing what was written about the head of her department not long before.
My point is I believe companies have sanitized their cultures.
Like the result of some toilet bleach advert, human resources shall never include cultural aspects not proscribed by the compliance committee.
Remember the effort to collect race by race data to answer eight questions? Remember it’s yesterday in my mind, when and how that community effort ended up behind a pay wall?
When The Hack and DT weigh in here, i get a real tingling down my spine.
Not only is this what the web is for, in every way..
But also few even know how trail are the threads that keep a page like this open.
Classically, would be publishers are the kind desirous to pass on the good word, fight the reborn-every-time-MSM/Adland-is-nervous fake words. But the cost of taking the often so tempting sales, is long term fixed costs. It’s that which buries the good word almost in mass graves. Cut almost. Traders look and say, “selling short, borrowing long, guaranteed doom” and that’s a banker not out of the training programme, reporting on hiring a sales team.
But what if I, in my jest, am right, that some comments here, might shift sponsorship there? I speak hypothetically. This ain’t claim but making a point:
If that is possible, even in theory, then what value could a comment bring that makes any difference?
My example is a silly one, but deliberate to provoke a thought, if you are past choking on my hubris – the thought is nobody is valuing the cultural / institutional memories for certain in some areas i see frequently.
Therefore, in my theory, finding source of those memories is the actual deal catalyst.
Not a highly paid crack team of sales people who you need to put through thirteen steps to , even if necessary, fire for cause last I heard…
And, apart from being walked away from my phones, one day still seventeen, thinking i was being canned, and instead hearing the first almost clandestine advice from my much later mentor, himself worried (presciently) he was being canned not me, alongside his idea of vital memory… Apart from that, what did I have for a angle? I dived into out of print and often rare company histories. I got more business just phoning who i imagined seemed a approachable fellow on the non executive board, asking about details which struck me, than I did using anything else. ( that wasn’t pitching, mind you, but it’s not for here or now to say more, only genuine interest is often reciprocated.)
All you need is curiosity.
And the essential business style as given.
But this all was just spurred now by The Hack commenting… Why?
Because teams sure have stories to trade. And there’s recent institutional, cultural memory to relate. And that interests the often quieter thinkers in even highly aggressive companies.
F1 is going right now through what might in future be looked at as end of scene one. Why the worry and not joy at the way the world can open? I may be a mean sceptic but Carey can’t say he’s listening, and not..
Worried men fret details.
The bankrupt demand when they get paid.
Dear Unknown, Dear Invisible Sponsor Teams Of F1, can you not please grab The Hack and DT and lots of understanding taboos are well broken between enemies as equally friends, if in peace, and set to some unabashed imaginary exploration what ever it may be that might fascinate or even annoy every character in tech (or accountancy,if there’s enough characters) and phone them maybe after one too many, but to find out what makes them talk, not what stops them buying right now this minute, before my bonus calculation is due?
As always, my apologies for the length, i attempt laconicism in prise as earnestly as i write poetry, the one is short and awful, the other long, marginally better sometimes. But the care is there. Too many massive shark fins with no logos. Too many people who only see writing like GP+’s, places like here only once they are hooked. That has the be inverted. In the same effort as getting not sponsor deals now but getting a pool of potential sponsor companies. And bring them in with other reasons than the rote pitch that clearly ain’t working. That’s why this business is hyper cyclical. Too much identical pitches and benefits being sold. The Bernie era worked those to death. Use whoever wasn’t nuked / sterilized in the process to start the brew again. It’s not maturity, of import, around history, if it hadn’t worked for me at seventeen I’d have had no job… It worked better because i was that young, people bothered with me. Tell people F1 is also young. Doesn’t realise it just yet, but it will. And find something cool that makes heads turn before they switch off if they switch off to F1. Open the video to the Machine Learning crowd, with support from the tech supplier e.g. Azure. Give designers a license to “skin” or even do more, and re-present for their own edification, pleasure and portfolios. Seed more data and tools, or even selected efforts using the raw feed, as they grow, to online fan discussion groups. (Doesn’t Skype , i mean Office Teams splutter.. Have a slight problem with that Slack app thing… Don’t mention Semephor… Doesn’t this amount to F1 branding inside possibly millions of people’s Outlook mail?.. Co-promo? Sell SPE resellers hooking up local data to custom the channel? If they don’t listen, look at Crunchbase, and just think how much if not all money raised by some types of start up, especially in high value low entry markets representative around those just noted… Whole finance rounds are for marketing only! The secondary bid on this space is a appetizing prospect. And yes, open to resell slots beyond anchors, build a market … Vendor nota bene insist on a market not a closed end deal, opening up is a reciprocal thing and you moved first…)
Okay i better get my hat…
Blast, i thought it was burnout did me in but was obscure health meant i lost time necessary to be doing more than talk about such ideas. But I’m cool, this is out of love. Only by all means come ask me what i mean if you are who can or just know you can do. I could go on ten thousand words before I barely expanded on angles that aren’t above even by hint, and i care to grow markets, not hog deals, if it’s any good i hear back from my prattling..
P.s. Joe, why not invite someone from adland, a rotation maybe, to pen a column. Positive thinking only. Especially history like around Martini. GP+ sent out enthusiastially around adland by proud contributor, might be a nice source of conversation.
Well Its definitely you JoJ and apparently you still have your hat. If only that brain and inside ad knowledge could be put to serious money making use again.
Where are you now John? Time a lot of people knew what was done to you!
I remember Peter Warr stating after the divorce with Honda that it also was because of the japanese shock absorbers which Williams and McLaren did have, but Lotus didn’t.
I remember this race and as a Senna fan I was massively disappointed.
A few years ago I read a story that Prost’s engine was misfiring since the first lap and he was aware he would not finish the race. As such he pushed harder so that Senna would have fuel issues at the end of the race. I don’t recall Prost ever being on Senna’s gearbox before he retired, but have a vague recollection Senna was being caught by the Ferraris in the final laps? (And therefore was under pressure to not lose time behind Schlesser)
I am not really sure about this so any accurate perspectives are welcome !
I don’t remember there being any question of them catching him. That was just how Ayrton did it.
I image in the modern era, Senna would be told to back off by the team, and Schlesser would have had blue flags waving at him the lap before. But that was how he [AS] rolled, and sometimes that’s how races were decided back then.
He didn’t roll.
Ayrtons gift was his ability to slice and cut through traffic, Prost revealed as much, it requires timing, rhythm and a little luck…
The 89 season was even more intense and a sad end to the season in Japan.
As I recall, Senna was in dire straits with fuel in the closing laps of that race at Monza, entirely his own fault because he had engaged in a mutual game of ‘get stuffed’ with Prost at the beginning of the race. The proof of that is that the two of them were merrily swapping fastest laps.
When Prost’s wilting engine forced him into the pits after 35 laps, Senna was left with a 26 second lead over Berger. The consequence, as reported in Autocourse by Alan Henry, was that ‘Senna was faced with the prospect of getting his fuel situation back under control and, at the same time, fending off the increasingly positive Ferrari challenge. ‘On lap 44 — seven to go — the gap was down to 15.19 seconds. Then, on successive laps, it went 11.3s, 8.9s, 6.1s and 5.04s … it was clear that [Senna] wasn’t in a position to waste any time as he sailed into the penultimate tour.’
A.H. goes on: ‘Whether the Brazilian should have read the [Schlesser] situation or whether, instead, he was so strapped for fuel that he needed every inch of clear air between his McLaren and Berger’s Ferrari going into the last lap was something destined to sustain paddock gossip for weeks to follow.’
And here we are, nearly 29 years later, still mulling over it thanks to Joe’s Fascinating Facts …
My opinion at the time on that 1988 season, for what it’s worth, is that McLaren did the sport a huge favour by putting the world’s two best drivers into the two best cars of the era, equally well prepared, and then trusting them to duke it out without any interference from the pits. In the absence of any serious opposition, this amounted to a very generous gesture to race-goers who would otherwise have had nothing to interest them.
You could argue that Mercedes-AMG has been doing something similar over the past few years, but that, I think, would be wrong, if only because Nico Rosberg has confessed more than once that he wasn’t on the same level as Lewis Hamilton.
Funny how memories leave things out over time…
If I recall rightly, in Gerhard’s biography by Chris Hilton, he was in danger of being excluded but I can’t remember why now. Do you remember this, Joe?
There were some questions but that never happened in those days in Italy!
What was Gerard’s danger of exclusion?
Gerard?
Observation applicable to my life, certainly what’s been around me:
Confident societies ask fewer questions.
Provided there’s no obvious common fear, people who understand what’s going down around them, can usher it by. Everyone who could see the points a belaboured explanation might offer, already knows.
Confident society comes to consensus almost subconsciously.
Sometimes newcomers extrapolate conspiracy from such collective behaviour. But when it’s benign, this is social efficiency. More vitally, again proviso nothing overarching and untoward, behaviour of this kind cements social cohesion.
This us a notable failing of the Bernie management style. His ham acting nudge nudge wink wink disconnected from the sport which hsd been shocked and shackled to naive major business who had no time to learn any of the way things were signalled. What people suddenly wanted to signal, no longer came automatically. Amazing it lasted so long. I’m disinclined to credit BCE with any ability in the hanging on, as a result, despite my on record respect for the man.
Wasn’t the old joke that Ferrari ran pump petrol at Monza. The pump in question was at Linate Airport?
Berger’s fuel tank was initially measured to be more than 150 litres in capacity. It was subsequently remeasured and found to be slightly below 150 litres. (150.5 initially and 149.5 when remeasured if memory serves me correctly)
@PNJ I asked what it was and can tell you if you like: After the race, the volume of the fuel tank of numero 28 was measured. It was the year with the 150 litres fuel limit. There was a big outcry as the first measurement showed slightly more than 150 litres. But the floor was uneven. Second time, it was only 149,5. And that was it. Berger could keep his victory.
If I recall correctly, it took the scroots three attempts to return an official capacity of under 150 litres on Gerhard’s car. Rather curiously, the officials at Imola in 1985 didn’t even consider doing a similar favour for McLaren when they checked Alain Prost’s car, which was about one bag of sugar short of the regulation weight on the scales. The win was duly conferred on Elio de Angelis, a citizen of Rome.
Good Lord, Michael George, you sound like a Little Englander…
Thank you for this! Finally someone admits the “Golden Age” was a snore-fest on the track.
There’s another “Fascinating ‘F1’ Fact” about Monza ’88: after the race, while waiting at the airport, Dennis, Murray and Mansour Ojjeh first thought of creating the McLaren F1 road car. Or, at least, that’s what the legend says…
I’d never put 2 and 2 together, knowing it was linate 88 but forgetting it was the only race they didn’t win.
so what> utter domination by one team happens in f1 all the time since it exist. hopefully 2017 will be different and 3 or more gangs will fight out victories and champagneships until the last turn of last lap of the season.
The crowd did indeed go berserk, I’ve never heard a cheer like it before of since. I was down at the Rettifilo after Mr Piquet ended up in the gravel with yet another clutch issue with our Lotus T100. Yes it had the same engine as the MP4/4 with the aforementioned gearbag & driveshaft angle shortcomings but aero & mechanical grip were on another level entirely.
MP4/4 and Senna and Prost was the perfect storm and whilst the 0.7 gap between the drivers was significant, the competition was nowhere.
That season Senna out qualified Prost at Monaco by close to 1.5 seconds, the incredible lap of transcendence as Senna told Gerald Donaldson but most people don’t remember the gap was a similar amount around Detroit, iirc.
Staggering driver.
I think that it would be worth adding that Jean-Louis Schlesser is the nephew (I think) of Jo Schlesser, who lost his life in a Honda at the French GP in 1968. An air-cooled Honda, to boot; the only F1 car in living memory with such an engine.
It was in his memory that all Ligiers were designated “JS”.
True
Schlesser has had a really interesting and diverse career. It takes some talent to get to F1 and also be world class in prototypes, touring cars and rally raids.
Also just wanted to say how much I’ve enjoyed these facts throughout the winter.
JLS is just a lovely bloke…
Mclaren were very lucky that Williams spent four years developing the engine and then Honda did the dirty and left Williams with Judd engines for 88, I’m sure 88 would have been a really exciting Battle if Team Willy had the Honda engine in the back as well but it was a bit of a bore fest.
It also would have been interesting to see what Benetton could have achieved if they had kept the GBA for another season, because it was conceived for efficiency rather than for sheer power like other manufacturers. Thierry Boutsen was remarkebly competitive in the last races of 87.