The sports car star who torpedoed McLaren's record '88 F1 win streak

There are pictures of Mansell from that season’s Hungarian Grand Prix where he looks truly ill; very pale-faced and sweating profusely. The chicken pox was already raging and he later said it was a mistake doing that race in which he qualified his Williams on the front row and ran an early second to Senna before retiring through illness. He stood himself down for the next two races, requiring Williams to find a short-notice replacement for Spa. Martin Brundle was the obvious number one candidate, the only proper F1 driver without a drive as he had tired of Zakspeed at the end of ’87 and opted to race sports prototypes for Tom Walkinshaw’s TWR Jaguar team instead.

There was no clash for the Belgian Grand Prix and Brundle was duly installed in the Williams-Judd at Spa alongside Riccardo Patrese. First qualifying was wet and impressively Brundle went fastest, a great shop window performance as he bid to return to F1 full time for ‘89. He finished the race ninth across the line (later seventh after the Benettons were disqualified for non-compliant fuel). Senna and Prost delivered McLaren a 1-2, which sealed the team the constructors’ championship with five races still to go.

Monza was next and Mansell informed Williams he still had not made a full recovery. Frank Williams offered Brundle the drive again. There was no clashing sports car race but Brundle reluctantly turned down the offer. “Tom [Walkinshaw] wouldn’t release me for a second race,” he recalls. “He wanted me to stay focused on the world sports car championship, which I won of course. He also wanted to keep me at Jag for ’89 I suspect, and he convinced me that the Williams-Judd at Monza would not be a competitive car. I regret not doing that race for many reasons. As do McLaren, I suspect…”

Williams turned instead to another world sports car front-runner, Mercedes’ Jean-Louis Schlesser. He was almost 40 years old and had done only one previous F1 race (the non-championship Race of Champions at Brands Hatch 1983 in a RAM). He had tested quite regularly for Williams, though. He qualified 22nd, 2sec slower than team-mate Patrese and was running 11th towards the end of the race as Senna’s race-leading McLaren grew bigger in his mirrors…

Although McLaren had already sealed the constructors’ championship, the fight for the world title between its two drivers was still raging intensely. Prost had out-accelerated the pole-setting Senna off the line to take the lead but as he up-changed into third he felt a loss of power – enabling Senna to surge by even before they arrived at the braking zone for the chicane. The slight misfire Prost had felt was the first symptom of an injector problem, making one cylinder run too lean. This would subsequently damage the spark plug and later in the race lead to the failure of the engine. But in the meantime Prost continued to chase Senna while trying to figure out what the problem might be with his engine. He found that by enriching the mixture he could reduce the severity of the misfire. He quickly understood this would mean he had no way of making his 150 litres of fuel last the distance, knew from early in the race that he would not be finishing.

A non-score in combination with a likely Senna victory would be a potentially disastrous points swing in Prost’s battle with Senna for the championship. So he formulated a plan. There are times when the interests of a driver and those of the team for which he drives diverge and this was one of them. He turned up his turbo boost to a level which would ordinarily ensure he would run out of fuel before the end. But knowing that was his fate anyway, because of the misfire, he tried to force a pace on Senna which he hoped might later lead him to also run dry before the end.

The pair set a scorching pace as Senna responded to Prost’s challenge. Prost’s engine finally let go with a failed piston after 34 of the race’s 51 laps. At this time Senna’s lead over Berger was around 26sec, but he was now way off schedule on his fuel, just as Prost had hoped. Senna reduced his boost, leaned-out the mixture and tried to derive his lap time from carrying as much speed into the corners as possible. But Berger was closing fast regardless. Senna later said he had the fuel situation under control into the closing stages but he couldn’t afford to let Berger get to within lunging range and with two laps to go the Ferrari was just 4sec behind. Up ahead of him as he approached the first chicane was Schlesser…

Anyone else but Schlesser and they would likely not have been on that piece of track at that moment; they’d have been somewhere else. He tried to get out of the way as Senna committed to lapping him on the inside approach to the chicane (which in those days was a left-right rather than the current right-left). But there came a moment when he had to either run straight-on over the grass or turn in. He clambered over the kerb just as Senna was going by – and this threw the Williams into Senna’s right-rear tyre, damaging the McLaren’s suspension and spinning Senna out of the race. The tifosi roared its approval for the Ferraris were now running 1-2, Michele Alboreto a few seconds behind Berger. They crossed the line like that in the very first race after the death of founder Enzo Ferrari and the scenes can be imagined. Schlesser walked to the McLaren pits to apologise. No-one seriously blamed him, not even Senna.

Like that, McLaren’s clean sweep of the season came to an end. It won the subsequent five races and Senna of course prevailed in the drivers’ championship at Suzuka for the final round. But just a random confluence of circumstances had been all it took to inflict a fatal flaw in a team’s otherwise perfect season.