To say that McLaren were dominant in 1988 is to make quite an understatement. Pole positions and race wins were picked up even more easily than those of the Mercedes team of today and last season. The 1988 San Marino grand prix at Imola was the second race of that F1 season, and would end up being Ayrton Senna’s first win at new team McLaren.
Senna’s debut race for his new team was nothing short of a disaster. At his home race in Brazil, he was forced to start from the pits in a reserve car after his gear selector mechanism broke on the parade lap. He made quite a recovery and by lap 20 was up to second behind his team-mate and title rival, Alain Prost. However, on lap 27 he pitted and stalled his engine. He changed cars and re-entered the race in sixth, but was disqualified as changing cars after the start of the race proper was illegal. Going into San Marino, then, Senna had ground to make up.
In qualifying, the McLarens tore the rest of the field to pieces. Senna took pole, with Prost second, eight tenths of a second behind. Amazingly, the closest anyone got to Prost, let alone Senna, was Nelson Piquet, whose Lotus was 3.3 seconds slower. As well as being the reigning world champion, what shows how staggering the gap between Piquet and the McLarens was was that he was using an identical engine to them. This was the third time in McLaren’s history that both drivers were on the front grid.
As for the rest, Nigel Mansell finished a mere 11th — the first time he’d missed out on the front row in nearly two years. Alessandro Nannini and Gerhard Berger made up the rest of the top five, and American Eddie Cheever, not known for being a great qualifier, caused a shock by finishing eighth in his Arrows-Megatron.
Despite their considerable defeat, Lotus were still in good spirits going into the race. They felt that they had the aerodynamic advantage over McLaren which, on a fuel-guzzling track, gave them an advantage. Team boss Peter Warr even went so far as to say that were McLaren to try to maintain their three second advantage during the race, they would not be able to finish due to the 150 litre fuel limit.
On race day, Alain Prost’s car stalled just as he was taking his place on the grid. He managed to get it going with a bump start, but dropped down to seventh at the start of the race. Certainly, according to Warr’s prediction, at least, this would make it very hard to regain the ground needed to get back to second and challenge Senna whilst keeping his fuel consumption at a good rate.
However, Warr’s prediction turned out to be wholly inaccurate. The McLarens dominated the field just as they had done in qualifying. Prost had zipped up back to second by lap eight, but by then Senna had built up enough of a lead to keep his team-mate at bay and he began to control the race. Whilst Prost stayed about six to ten seconds behind the Brazilian, the rest of the field slipped away at quite a rate of knots. The McLarens began to lap faster than all the other teams had qualified, and by the end of the race the two had lapped the entire field.
Late on in the race, Prost began to eat into Senna’s lead, cutting it down to nearly two seconds. However, this wasn’t because the leader was deteriorating so much as he was trying to use as little of the car’s power that was needed to win him the race. Therefore Senna was never really under any pressure, and he cruised home to win his first race for McLaren and the seventh of his career.
Behind the front two, Nelson Piquet completed the podium. He was lucky to finish the race — Senna’s lapping him meant that he had to complete one lap fewer, and it is likely that his fuel would have run out otherwise. Nannini and Berger finished fourth and fifth respectively, and Nigel Mansell’s team-mate, Riccardo Patrese, got the final point with his sixth-placed finish.
This was just the beginning for Senna. That season he won seven more races as the McLaren drivers won all but one race between them that season. The battle for the drivers’ championship was a two-horse race between team-mates, but Senna came out on top to win the first of his three world championships.
Exactly six years after his first win for McLaren, Senna would tragically die at the same circuit.
