Nigel Cowperthwaite was responsible for the M189's design. The car ran on Pirelli tyres and was powered by the Ford Cosworth DFR V8, an upgraded version of the same engine family that had propelled the preceding Minardi M188. The DFR was a naturally aspirated unit, placing Minardi firmly in the normally aspirated tier at a time when the sport's turbocharged era was drawing to a close.
The M189 did not appear at the start of the 1989 season, making its debut midway through the calendar while Minardi continued to develop it. When the following season began, the new M190 was not yet ready, so the team prepared an interim M189B specification to bridge the gap for the first two rounds.
The M189 made its race debut at the Mexican Grand Prix, where Martini qualified twenty-second and retired with engine failure, while Perez-Sala failed to qualify — a pattern that would recur for the Spanish driver on three more occasions during the year.
Martini encountered a difficult stretch after Mexico, retiring from the next three consecutive races. The turnaround came at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, where Martini finished fifth to score two championship points, with Perez-Sala backing him up with sixth — the best result of the Spaniard's season. Martini repeated his fifth-place finish at the Portuguese Grand Prix, having qualified fifth on the grid, and rounded out the season with sixth in Australia after starting from third on the grid.
Minardi ended the 1989 season with six points and eleventh place in the Constructors' Championship. Martini finished equal fourteenth in the Drivers' Championship with five points, alongside Johnny Herbert.
For 1990 the M189B served at the United States Grand Prix and the Brazilian Grand Prix while the M190 was completed. In the United States, Martini qualified on the front row of the grid — a remarkable achievement for the small Italian team — but finished seventh in the race. He placed ninth in Brazil before the new M190 took over at San Marino.
The M189 wore Minardi's traditional black and yellow livery, supplemented by a white diagonal stripe that distinguished it from its predecessor. The primary sponsorship was provided by Lois, a Spanish clothing brand.
The Minardi M189 represented a competitive step for the Faenza team during the naturally aspirated reset of 1989, demonstrating that small-budget constructors could still extract consistent points from the midfield. Pierluigi Martini's front-row qualifying effort at the 1990 United States Grand Prix with the updated M189B remains one of the most unexpected grid positions in Minardi's history, illustrating how a well-sorted older chassis in the right conditions could outperform many better-resourced rivals.