F1
Origins
The Early Years
The
British Era
Wings,
Shunts & Ground Effects
The
Turbo Era
The
Active Cars
It
was in 1987, the sole Williams exception to the
string of seven straight McLaren drivers championships
from 1984-91 (and the season that witnessed Piquet's
3rd World Championship when Mansell broke
his back in a qualifying crash at Suzuka),
that the seeds for the fifth major technical revolution
in Formula One were laid. Although their struggle
to remain competitive
would be doomed, in the '87 season Team Lotus
unveiled the first F1 car with a computer-controlled
"active suspension" system. Active
suspension later joined by the semi-automatic
gearbox, traction control, "black box"
controlled starting programs and anti-lock brakes
would produce fabulously complex and fast
cars, but would also give lie to Niki Lauda's
prediction, after ground effects were banned in
1983, that the new rules "create a purer
sense of racing for the driver."
At
the start of the post-turbo era, McLaren remained
supremely dominant, but it's two stars
Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost
would begin a personal battle that never came
to an end. Given their cars' technical superiority,
both drivers agreed in 1988 that it made little
sense (particularly since they usually qualified
1-2) to fight over the first corner of a race.
Yet
that gentlemen's agreement was broken at the 1989
San Marino GP, where Senna overtook Prost
during the restart (after a flaming accident at
Tamburello when Gerhard Berger hit
the wall, a shunt that would have killed the driver
a decade before) by taking the racing line from
behind. Prost was furious, finding Senna's adversarial
approach to racing impossible to deal with, commenting
that "I no longer wish to have any business
with him. I appreciate honesty and he is not honest."
(Senna, for his part, complained that fighting
for the racing line before the braking
zone was legitimate.)
With
the 1989 title on the line at Suzuka, the
feud came to a head. Prost led by 1.7 seconds
at the start, but Senna slowly reeled him in,
moving alongside at the chicane, putting
two wheels on the grass to go for the inside line.
As Prost turned in, he held firm he had
given way previously, but not now. Both cars collided
and went off. Prost got out of the cockpit in
disgust, but Senna insisted on a push start
from the track marshals, stopped for a new nose
in the pits, and passed Alessandro Nannini
to cross the line first. Yet FISA declared
Nannini the winner, disqualified Senna (revoking
his superlicense as well) and effectively awarded
the championship to Prost. Senna remarked, "What
we see today is the true manipulation of the World
Championship."
The
two would do the same thing again in 1990
different corner, same result except that
Prost by now had moved on to Ferrari, no
longer content to take a back seat to Senna, and
complaining that McLaren was giving preferential
treatment in car set-up to the Brazilian. But
in 1990, Senna was leading the World Championship
when the shunt occurred, and many observers feel,
to this day, that Senna deliberately drove Prost
off the road as a measure of revenge for the prior
year. (Senna admitted as much in 1991, without
remorse.)
Some
will say, perhaps, that the 1991 World Championship
was settled by the events at Montréal or
Spa or Estoril, where apparently certain victories
gave Nigel Mansell the slip. It was not. In reality,
the World Championship was won and lost
in the first four races, all won by Ayrton
Sennna. Won, moreover, by a car which should not
have been winning.
Autosport
Grand Prix Review '91 - Nigel Roebuck
It
was in 1991 that the active era in Formula One
truly began, as Team Williams introduced
the FW14, designed by Patrick Head. As
the first F1 car combining a semi-automatic gearbox
(originally debuted by
Ferrari in 1989) with traction control, the FW14
was revolutionary, but broke the old dictum that
"To finish first, first you have to finish."
Thus Senna, driving a plainly inferior
McLaren-Honda MP4/6, after four races had recorded
four pole positions and four wins. No one had
ever started a Formula One World Championship
campaign with four straight victories, and for
the rest it was more than demoralizing. With an
increase in the points for a win from 9 to 10
(and all races counting for the championship for
the first time in F1) Senna had 40 points, his
nearest challenger 11, and Nigel Mansell
of Williams just six.
The
Williams began to improve at Monaco, where Mansell
took second to Senna, and at the Canadian GP
on 2 June it looked like Williams were finally
ready to make their move. Mansell qualified second,
took the lead in the first corner, and ended the
penultimate lap with a commanding lead of more
than a minute. Waving to the crowd, Mansell turned
into the final hairpin, and the engine cut dead,
the car coasting to a slow stop, a victim of electronic
gremlins. Nelson Piquet pushed forward
to take the checkered flag for Benetton
for what would be his last F1 win. The
balance of the 1991 season would see a fruitless
quest by Mansell and Williams to catch Senna,
including a disqualification while leading at
Estoril after a wheel fell off in the middle
of pit road. Mansell
won three in a row in France, England
and Germany, and came into Suzuka
needing two more victories (and no more than a
4th from Senna) to take the title. But Mansell
went off into the sand chasing the Brazilian on
lap 10, and Aryton Senna had clinched his
3rd Formula One championship in four years.
But
Williams got the bugs worked out of their gearbox
and, adding traction control and a host of other
computer-controlled wonders, ran off a tremendous
streak over the 1992-93 seasons. In 1992, Nigel
Mansell finally rode the Williams wave to
the World Championship, winning the first five
races and a total of nine overall breaking
Senna's 1988 record to cruise to the F1
crown. Mansell retired from Williams after
Mansell
enjoyed enormously the best car and had reached
the point in his career when he had could exploit
it enormously. He seized the 1992 season and held
it tight. In the end, the simplicity was all beguiling.
After 13 years, after the nightmare of Adelaide
in 1986, the pain of Suzuka in 1987 and 1991,
Mansell would achieve the World Championship with
five races to spare. That simple.
Grand
Prix Showdown - Christopher Hilton
team owner
Frank Williams announced that he had hired
Alain Prost (who took the '92 season off) for
1993, but headed "over the pond" to
IndyCar, where he won the 1993 PPG Cup
championship, teaming with Mario Andretti
(and ironically
with victories mainly on the ovals). The prodigal
Prost returned to claim his seat promoting
test driver Damon Hill, son of Graham and
driving number "0," to the second spot at Williams
and in 1993 in turn won his 4th and last
World Championship, putting him 2nd on the all-tome
Formula One list only to Juan Manuel Fangio.
Yet
in some respects, 1993 was the end of another
era in fact, of two eras in Formula
One. Again fretting over the perceived absence
of driver skill as a delimiter of success, and
concerned about the impact a long series of "runaway"
seasons on worldwide viewership and sponsor money,
FIA declared an end to "driver's
aids," banning active suspension, traction
control and other automatic car adjustment mechanisms.
While the reaction was typical (recall 1981 and
1983), it was slightly overdone, as Aryton
Senna had put on a spectacular show, once
again in an outmatched McLaren MP 4/8, to
win five GPs. The most impressive of these, and
perhaps the finest victory of his career, was
at the European GP at Donnington Park,
where Senna won after picking up five places in
the rain on the first lap, cementing his place
in history as the rainmeister. (1993 was
also the season in which American Michael Andretti
tried to master a difficult McLaren without
testing and while commuting on the Concorde, crashed
in his first four outings, and was sent limping
home after a single podium finish.) And so, with
a final victory at Adelaide in the last
race of the 1993 season, Ayrton Senna prepared
to move on to Team Williams, at long last striking
a $20 million per-year deal with the team, and
owner, who had given him his first test ride in
an F1 car more than a decade before.
After
Tamburello
Grooves
& The New Legends
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