1987 Monaco F1 Grand Prix Race Report & Results
Event: Monaco Grand Prix
Track: Monaco Circuit
Weather: warm, sunny, dry
Ayrton Senna won his 5th F1 World Championship race at the 1987 Monaco F1 GP. The Lotus driver started from second and won on the Monaco circuit for the first time. It was also his 1st win of the season and the 78th win for the Lotus F1 team.
Monte Carlo and active suspension
Lotus had committed in 1987 to running active hydraulic suspension on the 99T, software-controlled struts of the kind the team had been developing for two years and that no rival had yet been brave enough to race. The system was a nightmare to set up: Gerard Ducarouge's engineers had to re-tune the control software for every circuit, and the workload was eating into every other development project. Ayrton Senna had reservations of his own, the system stole some of the kinaesthetic feedback he relied on, but in two places the active suspension was unanswerable. One was Imola's Tamburello, where the Lotus had taken pole. The other was Monte Carlo, where the bumps that broke other cars were simply absorbed.
It would also be Senna's fiftieth grand prix start, in the city in which he had just bought an apartment, on the circuit that had haunted him since the wet 1984 race that was stopped before he could win it. Jean-Marie Balestre, briefed about the bad blood with Mansell after Spa, summoned both drivers separately an hour before the start and ordered them to shake hands. Senna, who had refused Mansell's outstretched hand in the paddock earlier in the week, complied.
Mansell's pole, Mansell's lead, Mansell's wastegate
Mansell took the twentieth pole position in Williams's history with a lap seven tenths quicker than Senna's, exiting the tunnel at a clocked 282 km/h while Prost's McLaren registered 254. Piquet, still suffering from headaches and three-hours-a-night insomnia after the Tamburello shunt, neither of which he had shared with the press, qualified third, a second and a half off his team-mate. Alboreto, who had survived an enormous Friday crash at Mirabeau after Christian Danner had drifted across his nose at the top of Beau Rivage, qualified fifth (Danner was excluded from the race, the first ever such sanction for dangerous driving).
The race itself opened the way the qualifying had implied. Mansell led from Senna by three seconds inside the first three laps, by ten seconds by lap fifteen, by sixteen by lap twenty-five. Piquet held third comfortably ahead of an Alboreto whose Ferrari was being shadowed by Prost. The McLaren had picked up a misfire after a loose wire detached over the bumps; Prost spent the first half of the race on five-and-a-half cylinders, content to wait. On lap thirty Mansell's race ended in the cruellest possible way: a welded joint on his wastegate piping let go, the Williams lost all boost in an instant, and Senna swept past after the chicane to take the lead. Mansell crawled back to the pits and retired what had been the clear winning car.
Senna pulls away
Senna led for the next forty-eight laps. Piquet, with his head full of after-Tamburello fog and his back complaining, made no attempt to challenge, he later admitted he had no interest in catching his rival. Behind them Cheever spent the first half of the race holding off Prost in third on a single-stop strategy, an Arrows-BMW driver outdragging a McLaren around the harbour. Prost only got past after the McLaren's tyre stop on lap thirty-five, then watched his TAG-Porsche's water-temperature gauge climb until the engine finally let go on lap seventy-six. The two McLarens both retired with mechanical failures; Cheever's Arrows broke a cylinder-head gasket on lap sixty.
Senna pulled the cushion to thirty, forty, then forty-five seconds. He set the fastest lap of the race on lap seventy-two at 1m 27.685s, partly to keep himself concentrated. On lap sixty-five he almost lost the Lotus exiting the Piscine when second gear refused to engage; he caught the slide with what one journalist described as "deconcerting ease." Then, with twelve laps left, he started thanking his mechanics one by one over the team radio.
A first that built a dynasty
Senna crossed the line for his fifth career grand prix victory, his first ever at Monaco, the first of what would, by his death, become six wins around the Principality, and Lotus's first Monte Carlo win since Ronnie Peterson in 1974. On the podium, still new to protocol, he emptied an entire magnum of Moet over the royal box; Prince Rainier chose to laugh. Piquet brought the second Williams home a comfortable second; Alboreto held off Berger for third, a brave drive on a Ferrari for the home crowd given that he had been pulled out of his Friday crash. Jonathan Palmer took fifth and his first ever championship points in the Tyrrell-Cosworth, winning the atmospheric class on the day. Ivan Capelli took sixth for March-Ford and the team's first F1 point.
"Extra car, extra engine, extra suspension," Senna said. "At the start I kept a near-quiet pace and let Mansell go rather than risk killing my tyres and brakes. After I took the lead I did three or four laps flat out just to see if everything was working perfectly and to keep my concentration intact. Then I relaxed again because nothing could worry me. Short of a freak incident, I couldn't lose this race." The ease with which Mansell had pulled away from him for the first thirty laps did not augur well for the rest of his title fight, he conceded. Prost still led the championship on 18 points, with Senna at 15, Johansson 13, Piquet 12, Mansell 10. The night ended with Senna at the Grimaldi gala, kissing Jeane Manson's hand, then at the Tip Top bar with his mechanics and a bemused Satoru Nakajima. He gave himself an hour. By the next morning he was at the Lotus garage going through every lap of the race with Ducarouge. Monaco had been won; the season was eleven races from over.
Classification 1987 Monaco F1 GP
Fastest lap: 1:27.685 min by Ayrton Senna (Team Lotus 99T) in lap 72
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