THE COMPUTER THAT DROVE

By 1993 the fastest racing car in the world had very little left to ask of the human strapped inside it. The Williams FW15C arrived carrying active suspension, power steering, anti-lock brakes, fly-by-wire and traction control — a full cabinet of electronics layered over a Grand Prix chassis.[204] Each of those systems took a judgement a driver used to make by feel and made it faster, more often, and without nerves. The suspension held the ride height. The traction control metered the slip. The brakes decided where to stop locking. What remained for the man in the cockpit was the one thing no circuit board could yet supply: the will to go faster than was sensible.

For a few extraordinary seasons the machine drew ahead of the human — and the sport had to decide whether it could live with that. This is the story of those seasons, and of the reckoning that ended them.

None of it began at Williams. The idea of a car that holds its own shape through a corner — one that refuses to lean, dive or squat — reached back to Colin Chapman, the restless mind behind Lotus, who had pioneered a computer-managed hydraulic suspension and fitted an early version to a Lotus Excel in 1985, long before Williams turned the concept into a weapon.[205] What Chapman sketched, others made ruthless. At Williams the engineer Frank Dernie built an active system around hydraulic servos at each wheel, the servos working without pause to cancel the body movements — the lean, the dive, the squat — that bleed grip out of a car at the limit.[205] The effect was uncanny. The chassis did not so much respond to the road as decline to be disturbed by it, sitting flat and composed where rival machines pitched and rolled and scrabbled for traction. The road moved; the car did not.

The cleverness did not come cheaply. The Williams FW14, the active car’s immediate ancestor, introduced a new sequential semi-automatic gearbox — and across 1991 that gearbox kept betraying Nigel Mansell, pitching him out of races he was leading as the transmission failed under him and winning positions simply evaporated.[133] It was the whole era written in miniature: every fresh piece of intelligence bolted to the car was at once a new way to be brilliant and a new way to break. Reliability had to be conquered before genius could be banked. By the time the electronics could be trusted to last a full Grand Prix distance, they had stopped being a marginal gain and become something larger and stranger — a car doing a meaningful share of its own driving, and a driver learning to trust software with the decisions that used to keep him alive.

When the machine finally held together, the floodgates opened. Nigel Mansell began 1992 with five consecutive victories — a run without precedent in his long career — and never once looked back, clinching the World Championship at thirty-nine years old at the Hungarian Grand Prix.[132] He was the first British driver to take the title since James Hunt in 1976, and he sealed it in what would prove to be his final full season in Formula One.[131] The records bent around him as he went. At Silverstone, on home tarmac and in front of a home crowd, his victory broke Jackie Stewart’s long-standing record for the most Grand Prix wins by a British driver — one knighted hero’s mark passing to the man about to become champion.[132]

Behind the runaway Williams, the rest of the grid raced for what was left, and now and then for the future. Ayrton Senna, wringing everything out of a McLaren that could not live with the active car, still prised three victories from the year — at Monaco, Hungary and Italy — and finished the championship fourth, beaten less by a rival driver than by a rival engineering department.[128] Gerhard Berger added two more wins for McLaren-Honda.[131] And in Belgium, in the chaos of a wet Spa, Michael Schumacher scored the first Grand Prix victory of his career — a single line in the results that would, in time, grow into the longest entry in the sport’s record books.[131] The cameras stayed trained on the blue car at the front. The next thirty years were being quietly written at the back of the field.

It made for a peculiar kind of spectacle. A season that should have been a coronation was, for long stretches, a demonstration — proof of concept for an idea about racing in which the engineers had quietly become the protagonists. The crowds still cheered a driver; the stopwatch increasingly answered to a circuit board. And the better the cars grew at doing the driving, the louder a question rose that the sport could not indefinitely ignore: in a contest decided by software, what exactly was the man for?

A car like the FW15C is a signature; it tells you exactly who built it. Its shape was the work of Adrian Newey, drawn away from the Leyton House team, whose partnership with the engineer Patrick Head propelled Williams to a stranglehold on the constructors’ championships of the early 1990s.[206] Head’s instinct for what would survive a season and Newey’s obsession with what the air was doing were the two halves of a single idea: a car both violently fast and, at last, dependable enough to carry that speed to the flag.

The drivers around that drawing board lived the era’s odd arithmetic. Riccardo Patrese, runner-up to Mansell across 1992, would eventually leave Formula One holding the record for the most Grand Prix starts of anyone — 256 races from 257 entries, a monument less to flash than to sheer, stubborn endurance.[207] Mansell, for his part, did the one thing reigning champions are not supposed to do: he walked away. He crossed the Atlantic to race for Newman/Haas alongside Mario Andretti and won the 1993 CART title at the first time of asking — for a window of months holding the Formula One and American open-wheel crowns at the same time, a double no other driver has managed before or since.[132]

His empty seat drew in the most garlanded driver of the age. Alain Prost, returned from a season on the sidelines, took the 1993 championship — the fourth and final title of his career — and made it mathematically safe at the Portuguese Grand Prix, finishing the year thirty-four points clear of Senna.[129][204] Prost’s career haul of victories would stand as the sport’s benchmark for fourteen years, until Schumacher at last surpassed it.[129] In the other Williams a newcomer was being schooled at the highest level in real time: Damon Hill won the first Grand Prix of his life in Hungary, gathered three victories across the campaign, and finished third in the championship in his first full season.[204] The departing master and the arriving apprentice had, for one strange year, shared a garage.

Total dominance breeds a folklore that never fully settles, and the active era left a thick one. The most consequential rumour attached itself to the ban. Accounts of the technology hold that when the FIA outlawed active suspension, the motive was not purely sporting — that the rule was aimed, at least in part, at closing the advantage Williams had opened over the rest of the grid.[205] Whether the governing body moved to make the racing safer, fairer, or merely less blue depends entirely on who is telling the story; the cars were legislated out of existence all the same. The fastest idea in the sport had been ruled not a triumph but a problem to be solved.

The period’s other ghosts belonged to its drivers, and to the rivalry that defined it. Ayrton Senna would later be the source of a remarkable admission: that his 1990 collision with Alain Prost at Suzuka had been no racing accident at all, but a deliberate act of retaliation for their clash the season before, in 1989.[128] Reported as Senna’s own confession, it recast one of the sport’s most notorious moments from a misjudgement into an intent. And the habit of settling titles by contact did not die with the electronics. The 1994 championship would itself be decided in Australia by a much-disputed collision between Schumacher and Hill that put both cars out on the spot — exactly the kind of incident the sport has never stopped arguing about.[134] Three championships in a row, it could seem, were resolved as much in the stewards’ room and the press conference as out on the circuit.

And then the era ran clean out of grace. The reckoning arrived at San Marino, at Imola, across the first weekend of May 1994 — the weekend that forged the modern sport’s conscience in the worst way imaginable.

It began on the Saturday. In qualifying, a wing failure pitched Roland Ratzenberger’s Simtek off the road and into the wall at the Villeneuve kink, and the driver was killed.[134] A paddock that had grown comfortable, that had half-forgotten the oldest debt the sport has ever owed, was shaken to its foundations. Then came the Sunday. On 1 May 1994, Ayrton Senna left the track at Tamburello and struck an unprotected concrete wall, and the most luminous driver of his generation did not get up.[134] The man who, only two seasons earlier, had prised three wins out of an outgunned car was gone — in the first full season after the machines had been switched off, in a car the regulations had deliberately made simpler and more human to drive.

The Formula One that walked out of Imola was a changed thing. The 1994 regulations had already swept away the electronic driver aids — active suspension, traction control, the whole cabinet — and handed control of the car back to the driver; the same rules brought in-race refuelling back for the first time since 1983, restoring strategy, jeopardy and open flame to a championship newly stripped of its computers.[134] And out of that traumatic, blood-marked season rose a new name at the head of the order: Michael Schumacher took the title with Benetton-Ford — the first of the seven championships that would eventually make him the yardstick against which everyone who came after was measured.[134]

The computer had driven for three remarkable seasons, and for three seasons it had won almost everything worth winning. Then the sport chose, deliberately, to have a contest of drivers rather than a contest of code — and discovered, almost at once, the full and terrible price of remembering what such a contest has always cost.

For all the genius poured into those cars — the servos and the sensors, the code that thought a thousand times a second — the era’s last lesson was its oldest one. Speed has a price. Sooner or later, someone is asked to pay it.