1993 San Marino F1 Grand Prix Race Report & Results
Event: San Marino Grand Prix
Track: Autodromo Imola
Weather: wet at start, drying then dry
Alain Prost won his 46th F1 World Championship race at the 1993 San Marino F1 GP today. The Williams driver started from pole and won on the Imola circuit for the third time. It was also his second win of the season and the 63rd win for the Williams F1 team.
Senna threatens to skip Imola, then jets in via Bologna
Imola opened in farce. Ron Dennis spent the week before the race trying to extract the new Series VII Ford-Cosworth V8 from Flavio Briatore, whose Benetton held it under contract. A FOCA meeting at Heathrow's Edwardian on Monday 19 April produced what Dennis interpreted as a deal, the modernised Ford in exchange for McLaren's TAG traction control. He immediately telephoned São Paulo and told Senna the engine was his. Senna, who had been threatening to skip Imola altogether, leapt onto a plane to Rome that evening, transferred to a private jet to Bologna, then a helicopter to the circuit. He arrived twelve hours later, after a full transatlantic journey, and proceeded to hit the pit wall during Friday morning's first free practice.
Tom Walkinshaw was meanwhile in Warley, Essex, with Ford Europe's lawyers, looking for the precise loophole that would allow Benetton to use TAG software. Late Friday he came back empty-handed: Ford had refused. Senna, who had spent his Friday afternoon telling reporters that the new V8 would be in his car for the race "on the authority of a senior Ford person," was furious. So was Briatore: "Senna is mocking the world!" There was a further indignity when Dennis's Challenger jet broke down at Bologna airport and he asked Senna's pilot to give "a friend" a lift home. Senna only learned later it had been Walkinshaw. "If I had known, I would have had him chucked into the Channel," he joked, though nobody was sure he was joking. Dennis went on the record: "Walkinshaw is a traitor! He changed the terms after we had a deal. Everything is finished between us!"
Prost's pole, Hill's spin, Senna fourth
Friday morning, before any of this had blown up, Prost's race got off to a flying start when Jean Alesi punted him into the gravel at Acque Minerale. The Williams was unraceable for the rest of the morning, and Prost had to qualify on Hill's setup. He took pole anyway on Saturday at 1m22.070s, with Hill making it a Williams front-row lockout. Schumacher's Friday third time was confiscated when Dennis filed a protest over an experimental Goodyear "E" compound, only restored when Bernie Ecclestone personally summoned both team principals to the Goodyear truck and demanded a ceasefire. Senna lined up fourth, with Wendlinger fifth in the Sauber and Andretti sixth in the second McLaren.
Two laps and three races
Heavy rain on Sunday morning gave way to a damp track at the start. Prost's clutch slipped on the line and he was passed by Hill and Senna into Tamburello. Behind them, Mark Blundell crashed his Ligier hard into the inside wall and Rubens Barrichello collected Christian Fittipaldi. Patrese spun on the dirty oil-coated asphalt out of Tosa and stalled. By lap 6 Hill led from Senna and Prost, with Schumacher, committed to dry settings, slipping back into fourth.
Lap 7 brought the first dry-line decision. Wendlinger pitted for slicks; lap 8 Senna pitted, lap 9 Prost pitted. On lap 11 the Williams pair, both newly on dry tyres, came together at the Senna corner in lapped traffic. Hill, Senna and Prost arrived three abreast at Tosa to lap Luca Badoer and Andrea de Cesaris. Prost, on the cleanest line, dummied past Senna under braking and then took Hill at Piratella in the same sequence. Senna inherited second in the next breath. Hill, third, was now lining up to lose the race.
On lap 21, with the track fully dry, Hill arrived at Tosa and pressed the brake pedal. It went to the floor. The Williams understeered straight into the gravel trap. Senna's race ended twenty-two laps later when the McLaren's active-suspension hydraulics failed on the apex of Tosa and the Brazilian coasted into the same gravel that had snared his team-mate Hill. Prost was suddenly alone at the front, with a 25-second lead over Schumacher, a 50-second cushion over Brundle's Ligier, and nothing but a damaged exhaust system on Andretti's McLaren to remind him that any of this had ever been competitive. The cars in front were Williams's two championship leaders only because the rest of the field, including both Saubers, both Lotuses and most of the back markers, had been gutted by hydraulic failures, gearbox failures, blown engines and a misfiring race for fifth between JJ Lehto, Alessandro Zanardi and Johnny Herbert that lost two of the three to broken engines in the final ten laps.
Brundle's Ligier podium, Senna's Hill lecture
Prost won by thirty seconds over Schumacher, who scored a podium on a Benetton set up entirely for dry weather. Brundle's third place was Ligier's second podium of the season. Lehto held fourth despite his V10 dying on the last lap (he was a lap clear of fifth-placed Alliot, who gave Lehto a lift back to the pits on his car). Alliot's fifth was Larrousse's first points since 1989. Fabrizio Barbazza took the final point for Minardi, who, with five points to Ferrari's one, were temporarily the highest-placed Italian team in the championship. "I feel like I'm in a desert," sighed Luca di Montezemolo, who watched his first home race as Ferrari president limp out with both cars retired.
"It's perhaps one of the most important victories of my career, given the difficult moments in which it was obtained," Prost said. "I'm happy to have won on a track quite similar to Donington. In better conditions which did not require an extra pit stop for wet tyres, certainly, but very changeable, lap to lap. A kind of lottery. I prefer not to think about the criticism if I had not won." He went on to announce, sourly, that he would no longer share any technical detail of his car with journalists, since they considered his explanations excuses.
The afternoon's most discussed moment took place not on the track but in the McLaren motorhome. Damon Hill, after his retirement, was summoned to see Senna. The Brazilian, glacial: "You are new in this sport. You should be careful. It's a dangerous sport. You don't weave in front of me!" Hill, levelly: "Thank you, Ayrton, but I don't think I did anything I haven't seen you do before." It was the first proper conversation between the two men. By the time they next met, in a year's time, the world would have shifted; for now, in late April 1993, Prost was back in striking distance of Senna for the championship, 26-24, and Williams had reasserted its supposed inevitability. The pit-lane war over the Ford V8 would resume in London on Tuesday.
Event: San Marino Grand Prix
Track: Autodromo Imola
Classification 1993 San Marino F1 GP
Fastest lap: 1:26.128 min by Alain Prost (Williams FW15C) in lap 42
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