Forty years on: Gerhard Berger’s Benetton-BMW B186 wins the 1986 Mexican Grand Prix
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In the post-Singapore Grand Prix hullabaloo of the early part of last week, not many Formula 1 fans might have noticed a remarkable anniversary: 40 years had elapsed since not only Gerhard Berger’s but also the Benetton team’s first Formula 1 grand prix victory, which was achieved on October 12, 1986, in a Mexican Grand Prix that was as unexpected in its outcome as it was intrepid in its execution. To be precise, it was a race that offered a splendid rebuke to the developing orthodoxies of the first turbo era, and a reminder that strategic ingenuity could still trump outright pace, that patience might occasionally thereby pay dividends, and that the finest way to confound one’s rivals was and sometimes still is to do something that they had decided could not possibly work.
Mexico City had been absent from the F1 calendar since 1970, when the old circuit and its then unruly spectators had last played host to the F1 world championship. Its return in 1986 brought the F1 circus back to the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, although the circuit had been modified slightly, making the once wide, fast, and terrifying 180-degree Peraltada right-hander just a little less fearsome, and converting the scary old Turn 1 right-left switchback into a slower three-element esses. Nonetheless the circuit remained tricky and bumpy; the air was still thinned by the 2300-metre altitude, which made breathing uncomfortable for both drivers and engines; and the F1 drivers’ world championship was approaching a tumultuous conclusion, since Nigel Mansell (Williams, on 70 points), Nelson Piquet (Williams, on 60 points), and Alain Prost (McLaren, on 59 points) were all in with a shout of winning the title. Ayrton Senna (Lotus, on 51 points, and therefore just out of title contention since a race win was worth nine points in 1986 and only the Mexican and Australian Grands Prix remained) was, at 26, the youngest yet already the fastest of the season’s top four drivers, for throughout the year he had not only won two grands prix but had also delivered a series of peerlessly and almost supernaturally rapid qualifying laps.
While Lotus, McLaren and Williams stopped for new tyres, Benetton gambled on one set of harder Pirellis lasting all 68 laps
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On Friday, Berger set the Mexico City pace, but Saturday belonged to Senna, who put his Lotus-Renault 98T on the pole with a stunningly impressive lap of 1min 16.990sec – the only driver to breach the 77-second barrier. Piquet and Mansell secured the next two grid slots in their Williams-Honda FW11s, Berger (Benetton-BMW B186) was fourth, and Prost (McLaren-TAG MP4/2C) delivered a typically conservative quali lap that was nonetheless good enough to bag him a grid slot just behind Berger’s.
Race day dawned sunny and hot, and at the start Piquet made it immediately clear that he had no intention of allowing Senna to convert his pole position into a comfortable cruise to victory, hurling his Williams past his compatriot’s Lotus to seize the lead as they scythed through the first corner of the first lap. The two Brazilians then settled into a lively battle at the front, their rivalry lending the opening laps the intensity that their considerable talents and contrasting temperaments would soon so often go on to produce. By the end of lap one Prost had eased his way up to fourth, while Mansell had contrived to make a dreadful start, struggling to engage first gear as the lights went out and tumbling down the order, eventually finding himself in 18th place.
And Berger? Ah, I am glad you asked. Almost no-one expected him to mount a challenge for the win, because he had never won an F1 grand prix before, neither had his Benetton team, and his best qualifying lap had been slower than Senna’s pole time by the reasonably hefty margin of 0.619sec. However, he was third at the end of lap one and, more significant, he was about to benefit from a strategy call that would transform the race. Unlike the grandest and most competitive teams – including Lotus, Williams, and McLaren, which were all contracted to Goodyear – the Benettons were on Pirellis, which tended to be harder in terms of compound and therefore less grippy in terms of adhesion than the Goodyears. On the plus side, the harder Pirellis offered a greater capacity to weather the Mexico City circuit’s high track temperature and abrasive asphalt surface. The Goodyear runners had all decided that tackling the entire race distance on a single set of tyres was out of the question – but Berger, Benetton, and Pirelli decided to try it.
BMW’s fearsome M12/13 turbo claimed its final Formula 1 grand prix victory in Mexico
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Over the next 93 minutes, under a sweltering sun, Piquet and Mansell made three tyre stops each, Senna two, and Prost one. Meanwhile Berger stayed out, lap after lap, and managed to nurse his Pirellis to the finish without stopping at all. In so doing, he won the race. Prost finished second, Senna third, Piquet fourth, and Mansell fifth, both Williams men a lap behind the winner. The tortoise had beaten not one but four hares.
Having said that, ‘tortoise’ is a grossly unfair word to use about either Berger or the Benetton-BMW B186. First, let’s look at the car. It was a handsome and muscular machine designed by Rory Byrne, whose later career would make his name synonymous with F1 success, and its vivid colours – green and white flecked with flashes of red, blue, yellow, pink, and purple – lent it a visual exuberance that suited the rebranded team’s character, for it was the first F1 car produced by the Enstone F1 team under its new Benetton identity, following the Italian fashion company’s purchase of Toleman at the end of 1985.
The victory also marked the final F1 grand prix triumph of BMW’s magnificent M12/13 engine, a turbocharged 1.5-litre four-pot whose formidable reputation had been forged in an era of escalating boost pressures and ever-increasing grunt. By 1986, qualifying-spec versions of the M12/13 were commonly credited with staggering outputs approaching 1400bhp. As a result, the M12/13 was a ferocious piece of engineering whose prodigious power transformed every throttle application into an edgy and exhilarating negotiation between man and machine. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, its final F1 grand prix victory was not the result of brute force but was instead delivered by the measured deployment of power over 68 laps, in a car whose one set of tyres went the distance when those of its more illustrious rivals did not. There is an agreeable asymmetry in that ending: the most extravagantly potent engine in F1 history secured its last grand prix win via the virtues of durability and restraint.
Senna started from pole but Berger’s patient, strategy-led drive from fourth on the grid won him the race
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And the driver? Berger, then 27, handsome, tall, and lissome, and graced with a coltish physicality, was already much cleverer than his impish charm might lead his rivals to suppose. He was talented and brave too, a born racer who felt comfortable manhandling an F1 car in the old-school manner, pugnacious and often messy in his driving style, thick black rubber marks frequently offering tell-tale evidence of ebulliently wrought tail slides that one felt he had provoked as much for his own enjoyment as in an effort to shave precious tenths off his lap times. But he was fast nonetheless.
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He would go on to win nine more F1 grands prix, for Ferrari, McLaren, and Benetton again; Benetton would eventually develop into a formidable F1 world championship-winning powerhouse, while Byrne’s design genius would find expression in cars of still greater consequence, Ferraris driven with supreme confidence by Michael Schumacher; BMW’s mighty turbo straight-four would retain its place in the mythology of an era in which ambitious technicians were determined to extract from their engines as much power as could be generated before the laws of physics, or the con rods, objected; and Pirelli is now F1’s sole tyre supplier. However, none of the above should be allowed to obscure the joie de vivre of that scorching afternoon in Mexico City 40 years ago, when a happy and popular young driver, an excitingly upgraded team, a luridly multicoloured car, a daringly managed set of tyres, and a plucky readiness to resist conventional wisdom combined to defeat rivals that, on paper, ought to have been beyond their reach.
Anniversaries matter because our sport is an unusually forgetful one, for ever hurrying towards its next grand prix, its next world championship showdown, its next controversy, and its next multi-million-dollar deal. So a race such as the 1986 Mexican Grand Prix deserves more than just a passing glance at its finishing order, because it contains, in microcosm, so much of what makes or perhaps I should say made F1 so endlessly fascinating: technical audacity, strategic ingenuity, and of course human courage and skill. The next grand prix – the future – will in and of its very nature always arrive soon. The past, if we are careless with it, may be forgotten. Let’s not let it be.
