1989 The break with Prost

Rio greeted the world champion with tens of thousands of posters, banners and T-shirts. It was 41°C (106°F). On the warm-up lap the crowd at Jacarepaguá cheered him to the echo, and when he failed to appear at the end of the first lap there was near silence. From pole he had been squeezed between Riccardo Patrese’s Williams and Gerhard Berger’s Ferrari into the first corner and lost his nose. After two stops for repairs and two for tyres he finished 11th, two laps down, and for the second year running his home race had gone wrong at the start. He said he had been trapped, with nowhere to go; Berger said Senna had been trying to intimidate him, and that he would never lift in that situation. Nigel Mansell won, on the first outing of Ferrari’s semi-automatic gearbox. Ron Dennis made light of it.

Senna carried the number 1 that year, on the McLaren MP4/5-⁠Honda, designed by a team under Neil Oatley around Honda’s first V10. Turbos were gone, and every engine was now a normally aspirated 3.5 litres. Alain Prost, his team-mate for a second season, carried number 2. Senna took pole at 13 of the 16 races and started every one of them from the front row. He won six. But the car broke under him again and again, and the year ended in a disqualification, a fine, a suspended ban and a winter in which he nearly stopped racing altogether.

Imola

Before the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola the two McLaren drivers made an agreement, at Senna’s suggestion by the accounts of both Motor Sport and Prost: whichever of them reached the first corner, Tosa, first on the opening lap would not be attacked there by the other. Senna led cleanly from pole. At the start of the fourth lap Berger’s Ferrari failed to turn into Tamburello, hit the concrete wall at about 270 km/⁠h (170 mph), and burst into flames. The fire crews reached it within seconds. Berger came out of it with a broken rib, burns to his chest and hands and a cracked shoulder blade and breastbone, and raced again in Mexico five weeks later.

The race was restarted, and this time Prost made the better start. Senna took his tow through Tamburello and the Villeneuve kink and went by on the left under braking for Tosa. He won by 40.225 seconds on aggregate. On the podium Prost pointedly did not spray his champagne, and afterwards he told Dennis that Senna had broken their pact. Senna’s view, as Motor Sport reported it, was that a red flag and a restart cancelled the agreement.

At a test at Pembrey, in Wales, the following week, Dennis made Senna apologise. At Monaco Prost told L’Équipe that Senna had not been honest and that he had even cried. Dennis later said that he had reduced both of them to tears. From then on the two barely spoke, and, McLaren says, passed what they had to say through the engineers Neil Oatley and Steve Nichols and the team coordinator Jo Ramírez.

Monaco, Mexico, Phoenix, Montreal

At Monaco he took pole by 1.148 seconds, with 1:22.308. He led every lap. First gear began jumping out, and then second went too, stripped by the hairpins; he changed the way he drove so that Prost, behind him, would not guess, and won by 52.529 seconds. It was the first of five Monaco wins in a row. On the podium he uncorked his magnum over the Grimaldi family, and Jean-Marie Balestre, the president of FISA, was not amused.

At the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez his 33rd pole equalled Jim Clark’s record, and he led every lap after a restart; on the same Sunday Emerson Fittipaldi won the Indianapolis 500. Prost, 5th after a tyre gamble, said publicly that he believed Senna was being given better engines. Dennis answered that the engines were allocated by drawing numbers from a hat. At Phoenix Senna’s 34th pole broke Clark’s record. He led the first 33 laps, the easiest race he had ever led, he told Tyler Alexander, until a misfire set in; the battery, the electronic control unit and the plugs were changed, and he retired after 44 laps. Prost won.

At Montreal hail fell before the start and the race was wet, then drying, then wet again. Prost retired after one lap with a front wishbone mounting torn out. Senna stopped for slicks on lap 4, went back to wets on lap 21, and in heavy rain and spray was the fastest man on the circuit. On lap 39 he took the lead from Derek Warwick’s Arrows at the chicane, and he was more than 20 seconds clear of the two Williamses when his engine blew with three laps left. Boutsen won his first Grand Prix. Motor Sport ranked it among the finest drives of recent years.

Prost leaves

On Friday 7 July, on the morning of first qualifying for the French Grand Prix at Paul Ricard, Prost announced that he would leave McLaren at the end of the season, and gave his relationship with Senna as the reason. In the race Senna’s differential broke as he changed into second gear at the restart. At Silverstone he beat Prost into Copse and led for 11 laps, until the new transverse gearbox baulked on a change down into third and he spun into the gravel at Becketts. Prost now led by 20 points.

At Hockenheim he and Prost traded lap records. A mechanic who doubted he had tightened a wheel nut lifted Senna’s car again, and the stop took 23 seconds; Prost led, until three laps from home his sixth gear broke and Senna went by to win, with pole and the fastest lap. After the race Viviane, his sister, told him the news that had been kept from him since the night before. Armando Botelho Teixeira, his friend and manager, whom Viviane called a second father, had died of cancer in São Paulo. Senna went to the motorhome with Viviane to pray.

At the Hungaroring he was 2nd behind Patrese on the grid, took the lead on lap 53, and five laps later, when Stefan Johansson’s slow Onyx jumped out of gear in front of him, Mansell swept past both of them to win. At Spa, with his parents in the paddock, it rained so hard that the start was put back half an hour. He led every lap, eased off in the closing laps, and won by 1.304 seconds from Prost and Mansell.

Monza, Estoril, Jerez

By Monza Ferrari had confirmed Prost for 1990, and the tifosi cheered him and whistled at Senna. Prost said his engines were inferior and threatened to miss the last two races. Senna took pole by more than a second, led for 44 laps, his oil pressure fading over the last few, and on lap 45 the engine blew as he entered the Parabolica and he spun in his own oil. Prost won, and on the podium handed his trophy down to the crowd; Dennis, who kept McLaren’s trophies at the factory, was furious.

At Estoril Mansell overshot his pit at the end of lap 39 and reversed his Ferrari back to his crew, which was against the rules. From lap 46 he was shown the black flag. He did not come in. McLaren did not tell Senna, an oversight Dennis later called a fundamental mistake. On lap 49, down the pit straight into the sun, Mansell pulled out of Senna’s slipstream and drew fully alongside into the first corner; Senna turned in from the outside of the track, and both cars went into the gravel. Motor Sport called it Senna’s mistake, while putting the chain of errors that led to it down to Mansell and Ferrari. Mansell was fined US$50,000 and banned from the next race. Prost, 2nd, now led by 24 points.

At Jerez, in Friday practice, Senna drove flat out through the black flags shown after Gregor Foitek’s crash, eight of them by FISA’s count. He was fined US$20,000, less than half Mansell’s fine for missing three, and had his earlier times struck out, and the charge that there was one rule for Senna and another for everyone else followed him. He took pole all the same and won with the fastest lap, leading every lap, in pain from his ribs and his sciatic nerve. Asked at the press conference, by the official site’s account, whether he had expected to win so easily, he said that even getting up the stairs to the press room had been hard.

Suzuka, 22 October

Prost had 76 counted points and Senna 60. Senna had to win at Suzuka and in Australia; anything less and Prost was champion. Before the race Prost told Dennis, and the press, that if Senna tried to pass him he would not open the door any more. By then, Prost said later, McLaren worked as two teams that happened to share one pit. Senna took pole by 1.730 seconds, his 41st. Prost ran less wing, so that he was quicker on the straights and Senna through the corners, and he made the better start.

To be very honest I was absolutely sure I was going to win, or it was going to end in an accident. I knew that Ayrton wanted to win absolutely and, you know, the problem with him is that he cannot accept that he cannot win, and he cannot accept that somebody might resist one of his overtaking moves.

Prost led by nearly five seconds after 10 laps. After the stops the gap was about four and a half seconds; Senna cut it to under two, Prost pulled away again, and then Senna set a run of fastest laps and was 0.42 seconds behind on lap 40. On lap 47, at the chicane, he braked later than he ever had and dived for the inside. Prost turned in. The cars touched, and slid to a stop at the mouth of the escape road with their wheels locked together.

Prost climbed out at once. Senna stayed in his car and waved for help. The marshals pushed the McLaren back to free it, then forward down the escape road; the engine fired and he rejoined beyond the chicane. On the next lap his damaged front wing fell off, and he stopped for a new nose. Alessandro Nannini’s Benetton now led, and Benetton had not told Nannini what had happened. Senna closed on him at up to five seconds a lap, dived inside him at the same chicane on lap 51, and crossed the line first two laps later. He was then disqualified for rejoining the track illegally, through the escape road, after missing the chicane. Nannini was invited to the top step, for the only Grand Prix win of his career, and Prost was champion.

Tearful, he could not bring himself to name his team-mate: “Somebody who was there closed the door. I was the moral winner.” Dennis announced an appeal that night, against the championship of his own other driver. David Tremayne, reporting for Motor Sport, thought the stewards had got their reasoning wrong and the result right: the push-start was the real breach, and in Japan, he wrote, Senna had broken the rules. On 31 October, in Paris, the FISA Court of Appeal upheld the disqualification, fined Senna US$100,000 and gave him a six-month suspended ban, citing his driving in earlier races. McLaren protested that the ruling was unfair, and spoke of taking it to the French civil courts.

Adelaide

At Adelaide he gave an impassioned press conference on the Thursday about the way he had been treated. That year Prost also said, on camera and to the press, that Senna’s faith made him think he could not be killed; the charge and Senna’s answer are in Mind and faith.

Senna took pole by 0.738 seconds. On the Sunday morning the weather turned from heat to cold, torrential rain, and a group of drivers, Boutsen, Patrese, Nelson Piquet, Berger and Prost among them, went from car to car trying to have the race put off. Senna sat in his car with his visor up, apparently praying, and would not join them. The first start was stopped after a lap, and Prost, as he had planned, stayed in the pits. At the restart Senna, alone on the front row, was eight seconds clear after a lap. Early in the race he spun, two and a half times, and kept the engine running. On lap 14, on the Brabham Straight, he came up behind Martin Brundle’s Brabham, invisible in its own spray, and ran into the back of it, tearing off his left front wheel. He drove back to the pits on three wheels. “When I retired, they should have stopped it. Nothing more could have happened that could have affected the championship, so there was no further point in risking people’s lives. … I will go back to Brazil now to think over everything that has happened. One option is that I may not come back.”

Berger said the race had been a hundred times more dangerous than what Senna had done in Japan, and that the disqualification had been political. Boutsen won, in a race stopped at two hours. Senna was 2nd in the championship, with 60 points to Prost’s 76.

The winter

At a press conference in São Paulo on 10 November he went further: “It was clear that political and economic pressure groups manipulated behind the scenes to make Prost world champion.” In December he was summoned to Paris, to see Balestre and then the FISA World Council, which ruled that his super-licence for 1990 would be refused unless he withdrew the allegation. He telephoned Dennis, as Dennis remembers it, to say he would not race again; the sport, he said, was unjust, unfair and amoral. Dennis worked on him through Viviane and his father, and told him that if he stopped, they had won. When McLaren’s 1990 entries came back from FISA, because the US$100,000 fine was unpaid, McLaren paid it.

At the licence deadline in mid-February 1990, FISA’s entry list named Jonathan Palmer beside Berger at McLaren. Within the hour it issued another, with Senna’s name, and a statement from him.

During the meeting of the FISA World Council which took place on December 7, 1989, I listened to statements and testimonies from various people, and from these statements one must conclude that they provide proof that no pressure group or the President of FISA influenced the decisions regarding the results of the 1989 FIA Formula 1 World Championship.

Seven years later, Folha de S.Paulo reported that Balestre had said he did put his hand into the decision of the 1989 championship, to favour his compatriot Prost. By then Senna had been dead for two years. In 1990 he went back to Suzuka.