1989 San Marino F1 Grand Prix Race Report & Results
Event: San Marino Grand Prix
Track: Autodromo Imola
Weather: cool, partly cloudy, dry
Ayrton Senna won his 15th F1 World Championship race at the 1989 San Marino F1 GP. The McLaren driver started from pole and won on the Imola circuit for the second time. It was also his 1st win of the season and the 71st win for the McLaren F1 team.
Tamburello, lap four
The Imola circuit was newly renamed Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari for the first race after the Commendatore's death. Senna took his second pole position of the season; Prost second, Mansell third for Ferrari, Patrese fourth for Williams-Renault. Behind the scenes, the McLaren-Honda relationship had cooled visibly since Rio. Prost had spent the intervening fortnight complaining that Senna had skipped a Silverstone test session, and that Honda, through a senior executive he refused to name, had told him directly that the Brazilian represented "youth and verve" and was thus prioritised. Before the race, at Senna's instigation, the two drivers struck what would soon be the most controversial gentleman's agreement in F1 history: whoever led the first corner would not be attacked by the other before the first braking zone of the second lap.
Sunday's race took 270 km/h to deliver the most violent crash of the year. Senna led off the line and held it cleanly. Berger, accelerating out of the Villeneuve curve on lap four, lost something at Tamburello, Boutsen, following behind, swore he saw the right-front wing fly off, and the Ferrari speared straight into the outer wall at almost 270 km/h. The car broke apart, somersaulted across the run-off, and burst into flames as the punctured fuel cell met the hot engine. The marshals were on it inside fourteen seconds with foam extinguishers; Sid Watkins and three Italian colleagues spent ten minutes cutting Berger out of the wreck. The Austrian was conscious throughout, agitated, with first-degree burns to his arms and third-degree burns to his hands. Niki Lauda, watching the recovery on television in Vienna, noted that "I was in flames for fifty-five seconds at the Nurburgring; Gerhard was out in fourteen." Berger flew to Innsbruck that evening to begin his recovery at Willy Dungl's clinic. He would race at Monaco a fortnight later.
The restart, the broken pact
The race was red-flagged for forty minutes and restarted from lap four onwards over a 58-lap distance, with results aggregated. The grid was reformed in the order of the third lap; three cars, Caffi's Dallara, Boutsen's Williams and Grouillard's Ligier, required repairs over and above what the regulations allowed. John Corsmit, the stewards' delegate, gave them ambiguous permission to fix the damage; Grouillard would be black-flagged on lap five for it anyway. Guy Ligier filed a protest; Boutsen and Caffi were temporarily disqualified post-race, then reinstated weeks later when the FISA accepted Corsmit had approved the repairs.
The lap-four restart was where the McLaren truce died. Prost was first off the line and led into Tosa; Senna, behind him, drafted out of Tamburello, dived inside at Tosa, and was through into the lead. The move was clean enough, but the gentleman's agreement had specified no overtaking before the first lap had finished, and what to Senna was the fourth lap of the race had begun nine seconds after a red flag. Prost was furious. From that lap onwards the Frenchman drove a controlled second; Senna pulled away by half a second a lap and was 25 seconds clear by the chequer. Prost spun briefly on lap forty-four trying to push, recovered, and accepted second.
Mansell's gearbox, Ferrari's reality check
Patrese ran fourth comfortably for the first twenty laps before his V10 Renault threw a camshaft, the same failure that had cost him the Brazilian Grand Prix three weeks earlier. Mansell, the Jacarepagua hero, ran third and was looking like a credible podium finisher until his Ferrari semi-automatic gearbox jammed mid-shift on lap twenty-four and beached him in the gravel. The reality check Cesare Fiorio had begged the tifosi for the previous week, that Brazil had been a one-off, arrived on cue.
Nannini took third for Benetton on what was the team's 50th grand prix start; Boutsen scored fourth for Williams-Renault, the partnership's first ever points after disqualification was overturned, with Derek Warwick fifth for Arrows and Jonathan Palmer sixth in the brand-new Tyrrell 018 that had been handed to him after Alboreto's Saturday refusal to drive it. Palmer's six-point opening race in a car he had never driven before warm-up was one of the season's small miracles.
Prost-Senna: the relationship breaks
Prost refused to spray champagne on the podium and walked into the Marlboro motorhome straight afterwards. Ron Dennis arrived to find his number-two driver delivering a long indictment of Senna, fourberie, déloyauté, broken pacts, and of Dennis himself, accused of failing to police the agreement. Senna gave the press a sparse defence, "I didn't attack him on the first lap; we were on the fourth", which was true but obtuse. Dennis spent the evening trying to broker peace between his two world champions; he succeeded only in making Prost cancel a Monday meeting with Mansour Ojjeh about a 1990 contract extension.
Senna's victory was clean enough on paper: pole position, fifteen of the fifty-eight laps led from the front, 25 seconds clear at the flag, his 15th career grand prix victory and McLaren's 71st. The championship table now read Prost 12, Senna 9, Mansell 9. The 1989 season would never recover from this afternoon. The Senna-Prost rupture that exploded at Suzuka in October was the same rupture that began here, on a sunny April Sunday at Imola, six laps after a Ferrari driver had survived a crash nobody at the circuit had thought he would walk away from.
Classification 1989 San Marino F1 GP
Fastest lap: 1:26.795 min by Alain Prost (McLaren MP4-5) in lap 45
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