Cheever masters weather

Eddie Cheever kept it together in the gloom and rain to win the Silverstone GPM race

Even the weather was as it so often used to be, Silverstone awakening on race day to grey skies, a chill wind and rain. The Masters huddled in their garages, reluctant to put 650bhp down onto the wet asphalt in close company with their colleagues. But race they did, and the result was not in the script.

The crowd had come to see Nigel Mansell swashbuckle his way to another victory, followed by Derek Warwick who described the race as the other British GP. It was not to be.

After a troublesome practice our Nige, running with his trademark Red 5, was bogged down at the back of the grid and Stefan Johansson led away from poleman Christian Danner. The rest, headed by Eric van de Poele, Warwick and Eddie Cheever, slid around in the spray and waited for the leaders to fall off the road. And it didn’t take long, with Danner and Warwick colliding while Johansson and van de Poele spun down the field leaving Cheever to lead.

Mansell, meanwhile, had spun on the way to the grid and repeated the feat on the opening lap. A broken differential was to blame and, although he did another lap for the crowd, his race was run. Running in the middle of the pack was Emerson Fittipaldi, finding little grip between the puddles. Out front it was Cheever’s day, the American driving faultlessly in difficult conditions and fending off a racy van de Poele and a recovering Danner to win.