1988 Mexican F1 Grand Prix Race Report & Results
Event: Mexican Grand Prix
Track: Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez
Weather: hot, humid, hazy
Alain Prost won his 31st F1 World Championship race at the 1988 Mexican F1 GP. The McLaren driver started from second and won on the Mexico City circuit for the first time. It was also his 3rd win of the season and the 59th win for the McLaren F1 team.
Alliot's airborne weekend
Saturday afternoon at the Hermanos Rodriguez delivered one of the more terrifying accidents of the season. Philippe Alliot, having just bolted on fresh tyres on the Larrousse-Lola, came out of the Parabolica at 250 km/h on lap thirteen when the rear stepped out and the car speared into the pit-straight wall hard enough to launch itself into the air. It tumbled end over end across the verge, landed inverted, and slid to rest in the grass with most of its bodywork scattered. The cockpit had held. Alliot unbuckled himself and crawled out without a scratch. The Larrousse mechanics worked overnight to rebuild the chassis well enough for him to take the start; he managed one slow lap on Sunday and parked it after the formation lap to collect his appearance fee.
Off-track the Ligier team had been quietly granted French government tax breaks to move its operation from Abrest to Magny-Cours, François Mitterrand's old constituency was being turned into a circuit on the back of Ligier's presence. The Williams pair was now running a hybrid active-passive suspension system that nobody at the team had quite finished testing, and that did not work at altitude. Both FW12s qualified outside the top 14; both retired with broken Judd V8s. McLaren-Honda was preparing the move from turbo to V10 atmospheric for 1989; Emanuele Pirro was running test mileage on the new engine at Silverstone. Honda's Osamu Goto had confirmed in Monaco that Lotus would not get the V10 because the team could not afford to develop a chassis for it.
Senna's pole, Prost's launch
Senna took his fourth pole position from four races, his twentieth career, by six tenths from Prost on a circuit Honda had assured the team would suit the McLaren even better than the previous rounds. Berger qualified third for Ferrari, the closest a non-McLaren had been all year (652 thousandths), buoyed by Maranello's electronic-management work that had at last begun to unlock the V6 turbo. Piquet was fourth, Alboreto fifth, Nakajima sixth.
Sunday's race was decided in the opening 400 metres. Senna's pop-off valve opened spuriously as he engaged second gear off the line; the McLaren bogged briefly; Prost out-launched him along the run to the first corner and held the lead through the first turn complex. From that point Prost ran the kind of race he had been running on Imola and Monaco, but this time at the front. He pulled two seconds on the opening lap, three by lap three, six by lap ten. Senna sat behind him, lap after lap, looking for the moment when Prost would back off. The moment never came.
McLaren versus McLaren, the rest a lap behind
Berger held third in a Ferrari that for once felt like it belonged in the same race. By lap thirty he was on the cusp of being lapped; by lap fifty he was 51 seconds adrift and his on-board fuel computer was telling him to back off (the on-board fuel computer was wrong, but he obeyed it). Piquet ran fourth comfortably until lap sixty, when his Honda V6 cracked a piston and the Lotus crawled into the pits with smoke pouring from the airbox; Alboreto inherited fourth ahead of the two Arrows of Warwick and Cheever, who had drafted past each other twice in the closing stint.
Prost and Senna spent the closing twenty laps in a private fastest-lap contest. Prost set 1m 18.608s on lap 52, a full second below Piquet's 1987 race lap, and Senna's reply of 1m 18.776s a lap later was not quite enough. Prost crossed the line 7.5 seconds clear for his thirty-first career grand prix victory, his first ever in North America, and McLaren's 59th constructor win.
Honda's monopoly on the lead lap
Only Berger, in third, finished on the lead lap with the two McLarens. The two Ferraris took fourth and fifth (Warwick beat Alboreto on the road but the official classification had Alboreto fourth as third in the constructors' table); Cheever sixth in the second Arrows; Nannini seventh in a Benetton whose driver was crying with foot cramp in the closing twenty laps; Boutsen eighth. The McLaren-Honda 1-2 placed Prost on 33 points (of a possible 36) versus Senna's 15 and Berger's 18 after four rounds, with the constructor's table at McLaren 48, Ferrari 27. Ron Dennis's sixteen-from-sixteen target was looking less impossible by the day.
"For the first time in a season, I've held him off properly," Prost told French TF1 afterwards, having driven a race in which Senna had qualified ahead and ended the race second. The start had been decisive, a pop-off-valve glitch, a half-second hesitation, a Prost launch that took advantage of all of it. Mexico 1988 was the race that proved, decisively, that the Frenchman could still match the new McLaren team-mate over a full grand prix when conditions allowed. Two weeks later in Canada, the same two drivers would write the same script with the roles reversed.
Classification 1988 Mexican F1 GP
Fastest lap: 1:18.608 min by Alain Prost (McLaren MP4-4) in lap 52
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