FIFTEEN FROM SIXTEEN

Some seasons are contested. The 1988 Formula One World Championship was annexed. By the time the year was over, the McLaren MP4/4 had won fifteen of the sixteen races, scored 199 constructors’ points — three times Ferrari’s total — and led 97.3 percent of every racing lap run all season: 1,003 of a possible 1,031.[124] Read that figure again. Not most of the laps. Almost all of them. For thirty-odd seconds out of every thousand, the rest of the grid was permitted to lead; the rest of the time the World Championship happened somewhere in front of them, in silver, just out of reach.

The car itself looked like an idea pushed to its conclusion. It sat so low to the road that it laid its drivers down almost flat — a nearly horizontal, reclined seating position that set it apart from the upright posture of every rival on the grid.[124] Where other cars sat their drivers up to face the circuit, the MP4/4 had them lying back into it, eyes barely above the bodywork, as if the machine had been drawn around the smallest possible hole in the air and the human being asked to fit whatever space was left.

Numbers like these do not recur lightly. McLaren’s 199 points would stand as a championship record until 2002 — fourteen seasons would pass before any team built a campaign capable of beating it.[193] But the real drama of 1988 was never going to be whether McLaren won. That was settled almost before the cars left the factory. The only open question was which of the two men inside the same garage would walk away with the title — and what it would cost them to find out.

The MP4/4 was the work of obsessives. Gordon Murray served as its Technical Director and Steve Nichols as its Chief Designer, and behind their chassis sat the engine that made the whole project feel preordained: the Honda RA168E, a turbocharged V6.[124] It was a marriage of the finest design thinking in the pit lane to the finest power unit on the entry list, and the rest of the field spent the year racing the consequences.

That engine was a thing of throttled violence. In qualifying trim it produced roughly 685 horsepower at 12,300 rpm; for the races, boost was reined back to 2.5 bar under the 1988 regulations.[34] This was the turbo era in its final season, an age of forced induction being legislated slowly to death — and Honda’s answer was to build something so complete that even clamped and restricted it left nothing on the table. The car was fast not because the rules let it be, but in spite of how hard they tried to slow it down.

Wrapped around all that was a car weighing just 540 kilograms — a shade under 1,190 pounds, feather-light for the forces it was asked to contain.[124] Over the season it claimed fifteen pole positions to match its fifteen race wins, qualifying supremacy and race supremacy moving in perfect lockstep.[124] A car that started at the front and finished there, weekend after weekend, until the pattern stopped looking like sport and started looking like inevitability.

There is a bitter irony folded into the story of how the second seat was filled. It was Alain Prost who had suggested bringing Ayrton Senna to McLaren for 1988 — and Prost who would come to regret the recommendation, as the man he helped recruit outscored him under the era’s points system and took the championship that had looked, on paper, like the Frenchman’s to keep.[129] Two of the greatest drivers alive, handed the most dominant car yet built, and pointed squarely at one another. The team had no real rival. So the drivers became each other’s.

The first sign that the same wiring carried both genius and fragility came on the streets of Monaco. Senna had built a lead of roughly fifty seconds over Prost — an ocean of time on a circuit where a clean overtake is closer to a rumour than a plan. And then, on lap 67, he lost concentration, glanced the barrier at Portier, and damaged the front suspension.[14] The race he had owned from the lights, the one win that had seemed least in doubt all weekend, was simply gone — surrendered not to a rival’s pass but to a single empty second inside his own head.

What followed the crash was stranger than the crash itself. Senna did not return to the pit wall. He did not radio his engineers. He did not seek out his team at all. Instead he walked back to his apartment in the principality without informing McLaren, and made no contact with them until he finally appeared in the pit garage — by which point the mechanics were already packing up.[128] The most watched athlete in the most public sport on earth had, for a few hours, simply vanished into the city to sit with what he had thrown away. Monaco 1988 is remembered as much for that silence as for the gulf he opened: a portrait of a man whose brilliance and whose need to grieve a mistake alone were cut from the same cloth.

There was exactly one crack in the season, and it ran straight through Monza. On 14 August 1988, Enzo Ferrari died — roughly four weeks before the Italian Grand Prix was due to be run at the autodromo that carried the spirit of everything he had built.[126] The race that followed would become one of the most emotionally charged afternoons in the sport’s history for Italian supporters, a home crowd grieving its founder with the season’s outcome already decided everywhere except in their hearts.

The mechanism of what happened next was, for McLaren, pure heartbreak. On lap 49, at the Rettifilo, Senna collided with the Williams of Jean-Louis Schlesser; the rear suspension broke, and Senna’s race was over.[126] The door that had stayed bolted shut for fifteen consecutive races swung suddenly open — and Ferrari, of all teams, on this of all weekends, walked through it. Gerhard Berger led Michele Alboreto home by 0.502 seconds in a Ferrari one-two: the team’s only victory of the entire year, and the sole non-McLaren win of the 1988 season.[126] Weeks after burying the old man who founded them, on the ground that bears his sport’s deepest loyalties, the tifosi were handed the one fairy tale that the numbers said could never come.

The myth-making began before the cars had cooled. The journalist Nigel Roebuck later reported that a spectator approached Schlesser after the race and told him, “Thank you, from Italy” — an acknowledgement that the Frenchman’s collision with Senna had handed Ferrari its day.[126] The accident that broke a McLaren had made a grieving nation’s afternoon, and a crash at the chicane became, in the telling, an act of providence. It also did something colder and more consequential: it tightened the only contest that still had life in it. After Monza, Senna led Prost by just three points, 75 to 72, with four races remaining.[126] The championship, supposedly a formality, had become a knife-fight again.

The title travelled to Japan, and Senna almost lost it before the race had even begun. On the grid at Suzuka, he stalled the McLaren — precisely the kind of mistake that ends championships in the time it takes a clutch to bite. But the Suzuka grid slopes, and as the car began to roll Senna bump-started it back to life, dropping to fourteenth and then setting out on one of the great recovery drives of the decade: from the back of the order, all the way to the front, to win the race and clinch his first World Championship.[192] A stall, a sloping road, and a man who answered a near-catastrophe with a coronation.

He crossed the line thirteen seconds clear of Prost.[192] The win was his eighth of the season — and that eighth victory broke the record of seven wins in a single year, a mark held jointly by Jim Clark and, with a symmetry almost too neat to script, by Alain Prost himself.[192] On the day he beat his teammate to the crown, Senna also lifted that teammate’s name out of the record book and put his own in its place. The defeat was total and it was personal, and both men knew it.

What made 1988 combustible was that the two men were opposites in method as much as in temperament. Prost was The Professor, a nickname earned by a methodical, intellectual approach to the craft; his philosophy was to win as slowly as possible — conserving brakes and tyres through the opening laps before mounting his challenge late, when others had used themselves up.[129] Senna’s instinct ran the other way entirely: to seize the corner, the lap, the advantage, now, and to defend it with everything he had. Two contradictory theories of speed, bolted into one identical car, could never stay civil for a whole season.

The fault line, by reported account, broke open at the Portuguese Grand Prix. As Prost tried to come past, Senna swerved to block him, forcing his own teammate down toward the pit wall at something close to 290 km/h — about 180 miles an hour.[128] It was a warning written in millimetres at the edge of two hundred miles an hour, and whatever the partnership had been before that moment, it was something harder and colder afterwards. Mutual respect does not survive being shown the pit wall at full speed.

The arithmetic of the title was nearly as close as the racing that produced it. Senna ended the year with eight wins and 90 points; Prost took seven wins and 87 — yet under the best-eleven-results scoring of the day, the championship fell to Senna by three points.[193] One car, one trophy, three points, and two of the finest who ever drove a racing car separated by the thickness of a regulation about which results were allowed to count.

And it is here, inside the most dominant season any team had ever assembled, that the foundation was laid for one of the fiercest rivalries the sport would ever know — a competition that would go on to culminate in a string of dramatic race incidents between Senna and Prost over the following five years.[128] The MP4/4 did not merely erase a championship. It built a war between the two men strapped inside it, then handed each of them the weapons — and left the rest of Formula One to watch the fallout from a lap down.