Prost’s final fling

With Nigel Mansell gone and new team-mate Damon Hill finding his feet, the path was clear for Alain Prost to make the most of the opportunity to drive the best car on the grid.

“Alain was very good to work with, very precise,” recalls Adrian Newey. “But also frustrating at times. Pre-season in ’93, we were at Estoril or Barcelona, and our lap times weren’t looking good. And we all started to get a bit twitchy – have we actually been overtaken here? And Damon of course was still getting himself up to speed.

“Basically, Alain had been playing around. He was doing the old thing of doing a few corners, but never worrying about stringing a lap together. So then finally, he said, ‘OK I’m going to put a lap together,’ and he went a second quicker or something!

“It was quite confusing to start with. When Nigel was in the car you pretty much knew what it was capable of.”

Paddy Lowe agrees: “Alain would put the lap together in his head, and not really deliver it all at once. He saved all his delivery for actual qualifying. So you couldn’t say whether something was good from the stopwatch. Nigel was diametrically opposite – Nigel didn’t know the meaning of going slowly.”

Prost soon formed a good relationship with race engineer David Brown.

“I really liked working with him,” Brown recalls. “He was meticulous and hard-working. He was quite different; his McLaren upbringing brought a lot of fresh ideas. And he liked numbers attached to things, and so do I. He was really into looking at data. Most of that in those days came via Renault. And he would spend a lot of time with the Renault people.”

Prost won the season opener in South Africa, but that was followed by an off in Brazil on a damp track after a miscommunication with Brown over tyres, and then a tortuous path to third at a soaking Donington on a day when Ayrton Senna dominated. It took him time to come to terms with the complex FW15C and get the most out of its many systems.

“Alain struggled a lot with understanding how to get the car to his liking,” says Patrick Head. “He would spend hours going through the set-up with David Brown, biting his nails until they bled. I wouldn’t say we ever got to know him. Early in the season he seemed to be incredibly nervous; he was always stalling the car.

“But then he really got his act together and won six races from seven. It was as if he thought, ‘Oh s**t, this isn’t going the way I wanted,’ and he put his head down and just bang, pulled away enormously.”

In total, Prost won seven of the opening 10 races and although he wouldn’t win again towards the year’s tail end, that streak was enough to set him on the way to the fourth title he craved.