1986 Austrian F1 Grand Prix Race Report & Results
Event: Austrian Grand Prix
Track: Österreichring
Weather: hot, sunny, dry
Alain Prost won his 24th F1 World Championship race at the 1986 Austrian F1 GP. The McLaren driver started from fifth and won on the Österreichring circuit for the first time. It was also his 3rd win of the season and the 51st win for the McLaren F1 team.
Brawl in the airport lounge
Nelson Piquet and Ayrton Senna found themselves at Budapest's Ferihegy airport on the Monday after their Hungarian quarrel, waiting to fly out to Austria. The conversation was, by both men's later account, civil but cold. "We don't have the right to take that kind of risk on a track to overtake you," Piquet told Senna. The Brazilian who had spent fifty-six laps refusing to surrender a metre offered no apology. They shook hands; the body language said nothing of the sort. The 1986 paddock had now produced two genuine feuds in the space of a fortnight, Mansell-Piquet at Williams, and Piquet-Senna across team lines, and the Austrian Grand Prix was the third stop on a five-race championship sprint that the season's title contenders were openly trying to win individually rather than collectively.
Off-track, McLaren and Renault were still trying to write a 1987 deal that would not quite arrive, the obstacle being the fuel contracts, with Shell at Woking and Elf at Boulogne-Billancourt unwilling to give ground. John Barnard had agreed to leave for Ferrari at season's end; the McLaren design office would have to be rebuilt around someone new. Didier Pironi had tested the new AGS JH21C at Paul Ricard the previous week, four years after Hockenheim, and was thinking seriously about a 1987 comeback. Berger was being courted hard by Ferrari to replace Stefan Johansson.
Benetton on pole, BMW altitude advantage
The Österreichring sat over 700 metres above sea level and the BMW four-cylinders revelled in the thin air, where the bigger turbos compensated for the weaker oxygen feed. Teo Fabi took pole position on Saturday, the first ever for Benetton as a constructor, edging Gerhard Berger by two tenths to put two Benetton-BMWs on the front row in front of an Austrian crowd not entirely convinced by the man Lauda's old fans were now expected to follow. Rosberg, the Friday pacesetter, was third on Saturday; Patrese fourth in the Brabham; Prost fifth. The Williams pair were stranded on the third row with reliability issues; Senna was eighth in a fractious Lotus he could not get to balance. Derek Warwick had one of the year's biggest crashes on Friday, the Brabham launching off the rise out of the pit lane after a Pirelli failure, somersaulting through the air and slamming inverted into the Armco. He walked away. Pirelli withdrew the offending narrow tyre from circulation.
Sunday came in with thirty-degree heat. Patrese discovered on the dummy grid that his gearbox would not shift cleanly; Bernie Ecclestone ordered Warwick out of the surviving Brabham and into the pit lane so that Patrese could drive it instead. Berger led away cleanly past Fabi; the two Benettons pulled four seconds clear by lap five, when Fabi's sixth gear jumped out and his BMW spat its bearings. The Italian limped on with his fingers crossed.
The Benetton lead, and then the Benetton fade
Berger ran out front for the next twenty laps, an Austrian winning his home race in front of an Austrian crowd, except the home crowd was, on Lauda's account, dispersed and only half-full. Behind him Prost held off Mansell and Piquet through the opening fuel-conservation stint; the Williams pair started reeling Prost in around lap fifteen as their FW11s' superior consumption kicked in. Then everything turned at once. Fabi's BMW finally died on lap seventeen and his lead lap turned into a retirement. Senna's Lotus consumed three sets of spark plugs and an electronic management unit and was sat in the garage by lap sixteen. Andrea Nannini's promising Minardi run ended on lap fourteen with a collapsed rear suspension. Berger pitted on lap twenty-six with a comfortable cushion, and could not restart his Benetton, the battery flat. Three minutes parked, ten places lost, that was that.
The lead fell to Mansell, who ran his own clean stint until lap twenty-nine, when he pitted for tyres. The right rear refused to come off cleanly and the Williams was stationary for eleven seconds. He emerged still in contention, only for Piquet's Honda water-temperature gauge to start climbing into the red on lap thirty and for the Brazilian to pull off into retirement two laps later, his first non-finish since Detroit. Then on lap thirty-three Mansell's left-side driveshaft, the same component that had failed at the start of the British Grand Prix, surrendered again. For the first time all year both Williams cars were out. Renault, with six engines on the grid, had only one running and that one in trouble, Arnoux, who would finish ninth after multiple pit stops and ignition-box changes.
Prost equals Fangio
From the moment Mansell parked, Prost ran on his own. Rosberg held second briefly before suffering the same electronic illness that had cost his team-mate so much fuel earlier in the year; the Finn pulled off in retirement on lap forty-nine after a short-circuit. That left Prost with thirty-plus seconds in hand over a Ferrari 1-2 that surprised everybody including the Ferrari pit. Michele Alboreto, on a single-stop strategy with one of the season's quickest stops at seven seconds flat, came home second a lap down; Stefan Johansson, having driven a Ferrari front-wing strut off his crash helmet on lap twenty-seven and pitted for a new nose, was third. Alan Jones and Patrick Tambay scored Haas-Lola's first points of the season in fourth and fifth; Christian Danner picked up Arrows-BMW's first point of the year with sixth.
"Since Germany I haven't been very lucky," Prost said. "I had a few good circumstances today, but it was a close call. Over the last five laps the engine started cutting out, as has often happened this year. I thought I wouldn't finish." His twenty-fourth grand prix win equalled the career total of Juan Manuel Fangio, a figure once thought beyond mortal reach. Jacques Laffite raised a champagne flute from a hospital bed in Paris in his honour. The world championship had also been bullied back into shape: Mansell led by two points from Prost, with Senna and Piquet at 48 and 47 respectively. With four rounds left, all four men were still mathematically in it, but Mansell and Prost had pulled away into a private contest, and Williams's mid-season untouchability had been replaced overnight by a McLaren that had remembered how to finish first.
Classification 1986 Austrian F1 GP
Fastest lap: 1:29.444 min by Gerhard Berger (Benetton B186) in lap 49
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