The McLaren-Hondas totally dominated qualifying for the San Marino Grand Prix. Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost occupied the front row of the grid with times of 1:27.148 and 1:27.919 respectively. Their nearest challenger was the Lotus of reigning World Champion Nelson Piquet with a time of 1:30.500. Piquet's Lotus was powered by the same specification turbocharged Honda engine that powered the McLarens. The lowline McLaren MP4/4s were untouchable under acceleration and had superior grip to any other car on the grid.
This was only the third time that there was an all-McLaren front row for a Grand Prix, considering the team's success in its Formula One history dating back to 1966. The other two times had been at the 1972 Canadian Grand Prix and the 1986 German Grand Prix.
Nigel Mansell missed qualifying on the front row of the grid for the first time since the 1986 Mexican Grand Prix. He qualified his Williams-Judd in 11th place, five places behind teammate Riccardo Patrese in 6th. The fastest atmo car in qualifying was the Benetton-Ford of Alessandro Nannini who ended up 4th on the grid in front of the Ferrari of Gerhard Berger. Berger, along with teammate Michele Alboreto, found the turbocharged Italian V6 engines down on power throughout.
The claims of Berger and Alboreto were backed up by the speed trap figures. The fastest car on the long run to Tosa was the Lotus-Honda of Piquet timed at just over 302 km/h. The Ferraris were much slower at 293 km/h. Both Ferraris were almost 5 km/h slower over the start line than the atmospheric Benettons.
One of the surprises of qualifying was American veteran Eddie Cheever. Cheever qualified 8th in his Arrows-Megatron. Cheever and Arrows had tested at Imola a week before the race. The same settings were put on Derek Warwick's Arrows but he could only qualify 14th.
The EuroBrun-Ford Cosworth of Oscar Larrauri, the Ligier-Judds of Stefan Johansson and René Arnoux, and the Zakspeed turbo of Bernd Schneider all failed to qualify. The Osella of Nicola Larini was excluded after scrutineering when it was discovered that the car's engine mounting points had been illegally changed. For Ligier it was the first time since the team's début in Formula One in 1976 that neither car had qualified for a race. For Arnoux it was a bitter pill to swallow as he had sat on the pole at the circuit three times previously when he had driven for both Renault and Ferrari.
After qualifying, Lotus team boss Peter Warr and lead driver Nelson Piquet made the claim that despite the three second gap between the McLarens and the rest of the field, they believed the Lotus and even the Ferraris were better aerodynamically than the McLarens. Warr predicted the McLarens would not be able to maintain their advantage and still finish the race on their 150-litre fuel limit. His public predictions would prove to be wrong.
The McLaren of Ayrton Senna led from the start, whilst his teammate Alain Prost had his engine stall coming to take his place on the grid. Prost later reported that the engine had also stalled earlier on the parade lap. He dropped to 7th place behind the Arrows of Eddie Cheever. Prost recovered to second place by lap 8, but could not catch Senna who controlled the gap. Senna slowed on the last lap to make sure he finished without running out of fuel, which reduced the gap to Prost to just 2.3 seconds at the line. Prost later admitted he had turned up his turbo boost in his fight up to second.
Nelson Piquet battled with an ill-handling Lotus but used superior Honda power to maintain 3rd place ahead of a train of cars including both Benettons, both Williams and Berger's Ferrari. He was lucky to make it to the finish line as the extra boost needed to keep his position cut severely into his fuel.
Nigel Mansell made a superb drive from 11th place on the grid to be briefly up to 3rd place after taking Piquet under braking for the Rivazza on lap 40. Blue oil smoke started to appear from the back of his Williams and Piquet again used his Honda's superior power to slipstream Mansell through the Tamburello and re-take 3rd through Villeneuve. Mansell retired just a lap after dropping to 4th with a faulty voltage regulator.
Thierry Boutsen's Benetton came home in 4th ahead of Gerhard Berger in the Ferrari, though late in the race he was hampered by a down on power engine thanks to a cracked exhaust on his car. Rounding out the points was his teammate Alessandro Nannini. Nannini had been fighting for 3rd place with Piquet, but despite being consistently quicker in the corners, he had to yield to superior Honda power on the straights. Piquet and Nannini banged wheels at the Tosa hairpin. Nannini dropped to 7th with Boutsen, delayed 2 seconds by Nannini's spin, now charging after Piquet. A fired up Nannini then put in the fastest atmospheric lap in a climb back into the points and 5th place. Nannini had to settle for 6th though after being passed on the last lap at the Acqua Minerale chicane by a grass-cutting Gerhard Berger.
Both Senna and Prost recorded a fastest race lap faster than Nelson Piquet's qualifying time. Both McLaren drivers had lapped the entire field up to and including Piquet in 3rd place by lap 56 of the 60 lap race. Prost's second place earned him 6 points which saw him surpass his 1984 and 1985 McLaren teammate Niki Lauda as the all-time career points leader, with 421.5 to Lauda's 420.5 points.
Both McLarens stopped within metres of taking the chequered flag. Prost had started the last lap some 7 seconds behind his teammate but was only 2.334 behind at the flag as Senna had driven only as fast as he needed to both win and conserve fuel. No turbo runner ran out of fuel at Imola in 1988. The only turbo starter to not finish was the Ferrari of local hero Michele Alboreto, who was classified as 18th and last despite suffering engine failure on lap 54. This was his second engine failure of the day after his Ferrari also blew up in the morning warm-up session.
This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.
Gallery · 2 related images
