In the shadow of Suzuka - F1's fractious 500th race

The 500th world championship round was predominantly a hangover from the 499th. At Suzuka two weeks earlier, three years of ever-worsening animosity between former McLaren team-mates Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna had reached the point where Senna sealed the 1990 Formula 1 title by deliberately ploughing into his rival on the run to the first corner.

New champion Senna was not punished for the incident and appeared in relaxed mood at the season-closing Australian Grand Prix that followed.

But it was clear Prost had little else but the events of Suzuka on his mind in Adelaide - even though the Autosport news story 'Petulant Prost' was perhaps a touch harsh in the circumstances:

Alain Prost refused to talk to journalists after the Australian Grand Prix on any matter but the basic details of the race.

Asked about his future, Prost indicated that: "Anything that happens from now on is my own problem - the problem of a human being, and not just racing driver."

Prost had an unhappy weekend in Adelaide and was clearly fed up with discussing matters relating to the incident with Ayrton Senna at the start of the Japanese Grand Prix.

On Sunday morning, Alain earned a reprimand from the stewards of the race for leaving the driver's briefing. The Frenchman walked out of the meeting after nine minutes, despite remonstrations from the chief steward and orders for him to stay. He was apparently upset from a question from McLaren boss Ron Dennis, concerning the manoeuvres permissible at the first corner.

The stewards also decided that the matter should be referred to the new Special Commission for Safety in Formula 1.

Prost qualified fourth behind Ferrari team-mate Nigel Mansell, as the McLarens of Senna and Gerhard Berger shared the front row.

Starting grid for F1's 500th GP - Australia 1990

Then during the race morning warm-up, Prost's engine blew after just a single lap.

Though that misfortune seemed to fit his demeanour, it didn't stop Prost jumping into the spare car and emerging to go fastest by 0.094s over Senna.

It didn't change much, as Nigel Roebuck made clear in his Autosport race report:

His mood, though, remained low, as in the previous days. This time it was Alain's turn to walk out of a drivers' meeting, just as Senna had done in Japan, and he then missed the traditional 'end of term' photograph session in front of the pits.

Why had he walked out? It was in response to a question addressed to the stewards by Ron Dennis, but Prost himself declined to talk about it.

Later Piquet voluntarily suggested an explanation of Alain's behaviour: "I think he did it because FISA, for a long time, has promised to take action against drivers who behave badly on the circuit. Look at what Senna did to Alain in Japan - and FISA took no action. At the point of the accident it wasn't even a corner - it was a straight line where you brake for the first real corner. Alain was just hit in the back..."

Roebuck was also unimpressed by the decision to refer Prost's meeting departure to the governing body's new safety commission, adding:

The risks inherent in one little bloke's walking out of a meeting seem to be minimal to most sane minds, but there you are...

It was clear through the morning, though, that Alain was in no real mood to go motor racing this day. He would do the race, and do it well, but the fire in his belly - for this season, anyway - was largely quenched that afternoon at Suzuka.

Prost finished the race third, hampered by tyre and brake wear. Ferrari's 1991 car proved disastrous, and he parted with the team before the end of the season then sat out the '92 campaign before returning to claim a fourth F1 title with Williams in dominant style in '93.

Driver aids craze expands

After the disappearance of turbo engines from the grid, the focus strayed towards electronic aids for performance. Ferrari introduced the semi-automatic gearbox in 1989; initially it was unreliable, so Ferrari and Magneti Marelli set to work on ironing out the electronically-actuated shift to bolster the effect of the seven-speed gearbox.

Two seasons prior, Lotus had trialled an early form of active suspension on the 99T, before dropping the underdeveloped system to slash weight.

As Lotus lost its spark, Ferrari continued to innovate and rolled out traction control part-way through 1990, as the driver aids craze showed no signs of abating. This was developed further, with the team adding an adjustable rev limiter in the cockpit.

As seen in Giorgio Piola's illustration from the time (below), the dial was placed above the rev counter - easily in reach for the drivers to minimise wheelspin as they left the line, exited the pitlane or on the run out of slow corners.

Autosport wrote in its November 8th, 1990 edition:

Ferrari introduced an interesting development at the recent Japanese and Australian GPs. The electronic adjustable rev limiter controls excessive wheelspin. The system is fed with information from sensors on each wheel. These monitor the wheel speed and feed the information back to an electric box which will cut the engine if the rear wheels are rotating faster than the fronts. The system has three settings controlled by the drivers.

Arguably, McLaren took advantage most of that early phase; while the Ferrari squad suffered from the difficulties associated with its new toys, McLaren stuck to the tried-and-tested manual gearbox and cleaned up - at least until Williams got its electronic aids up to speed.

But at that time, the Benetton team - Piquet's brace of victories at the end of 1990 aside - wasn't among those pushing the envelope of electronic aids. Instead, the cars were just simply well-penned designs, products of Rory Byrne and John Barnard's fertile minds. Instead, the team later popularised the raised nose designs still seen (to some degree, at least) today.

As it was reticent to join the wave of driver aids that engulfed the late 1980s and years thereafter, it was ironic that Benetton's 1994 car was the one in the firing line over banned traction and launch control systems.

But those initial forays of Lotus and Ferrari into the world of driver aids continued to build and, by 1993, hugely intricate active suspension systems, semi-automatic shifting and anti-lock braking were just scratching the surface of the complex features dialled into the majority of the F1 field.

After Williams's experiments with a CVT car during 1993, the majority of driver aids were banned ahead of 1994 in one fell swoop, rather placing the onus back on the drivers - or at least, that was the intent.

A bleak year

Senna and Prost's antics were put into perspective by the accidents that ended the F1 careers of GP winner Alessandro Nannini and highly promising rookie Martin Donnelly during the 1990 season. The Adelaide week's Autosport news pages carried updates on both their recoveries from appalling situations.

Lotus driver Donnelly had suffered horrific injuries in a crash during Spanish GP in qualifying at the end of September 1990. The fact that a month later a news story about his progress was headlined 'Donnelly regains the use of speech' said all you needed to know about its severity.

Martin Donnelly last week spoke his first words since suffering his horrific accident in qualifying for the Spanish Grand Prix on September 28.

Donnelly spoke several words to a Royal London Hospital anaesthetist, although the exact details of what he said are best not published. Martin has been taken off permanent dialysis and has been moved out of intensive care and into the Gloucester Ward. He has spoken at length with medical staff, family and friends.

Last Friday he spent an hour enjoying lively banter with a visiting Perry McCarthy.

"It was great to see him so well and talking," said McCarthy. "I told him a few jokes, and he was in good spirits.

"I now have no doubt that he will be back in a Formula 1 car before too long and he is clearly over the worst period."

On Sunday, Donnelly underwent a minor operation to remove an abscess from his leg and he is now resting comfortably.

Donnelly ultimately only managed to get as far as testing an F1 car again, and his subsequent racing in other categories was also limited - with team management eventually becoming more of a focus.

Nannini's injury came in a helicopter crash just before the Japanese GP in 1990. He would race more extensively than Donnelly once recovered, but his F1 career was also over. In November '90, he was showing characteristic racing driver impatience:

Sandro Nannini was re-admitted to hospital for three days last week, having been too active with the arm which was injured in his recent helicopter crash. This has slowed the healing process.

In order to increase healing his right arm - which was severed below the elbow in the accident - has been sewn inside the skin of his stomach. This is common practice in such instances, designed to enhance healing in a controlled situation.

Some karma for Senna?

While Prost was muted all weekend, Senna seemed determined to emphasise his champion status with a dominant finish to the season.

He claimed a 10th pole from the 16 rounds, and looked unstoppable in the race - though as Roebuck's report made clear, it wasn't as easy as it seemed:

Ayrton, too, had his worries, although it didn't look that way. "I was on the limit all the way, because I couldn't use the brakes as I would have liked; to save the fronts, I adjusted the balance too much towards the rears."

And in the end, that brake choice turned a minor error and gearshift niggle into a race-ending crash:

The complexion of the race changed absolutely on lap 62, when suddenly there was no Senna. The McLaren-Honda had been close to half a minute in the lead when Ayrton arrived at a corner, tried vainly to get down to second and slid off into a tyre barrier. With the gearbox in neutral, those rear-biased brakes had been little use to him.

Old rivals at the front

At Suzuka, Benetton had found itself with a shock one-two finish for Nelson Piquet and Nannini's replacement Roberto Moreno.

It was an emotional result for both - triple world champion Piquet's Benetton move having been a career lifeline after two miserable seasons at the declining Lotus team, and Moreno having been more accustomed to non-qualifying with his usual minnow employers before his sudden Benetton call-up led to a podium (the only one of his F1 career) at the first attempt.

But that one-two had been handed to Benetton. Berger had followed his team-mate's assault on Prost by crashing out solo, and Mansell's Ferrari then suffered transmission failure.

In Adelaide, Piquet started only seventh. But he was soon on the move - overtaking both Prost and and Berger within the first nine laps as he edged up to third behind Senna and Mansell.

"I knew the car was good on full tanks," Piquet said in Roebuck's report, "and also that we had a really brake good set-up - which is vital here. OK, we haven't the power of Honda or Ferrari, perhaps, but we start the race with less fuel than them, which means we hurt the tyres and brakes less in the early laps than they do."

And when Mansell pitted for fresh tyres after a spin and Senna had his crash, Piquet was suddenly leading for a second GP in a row.

Mansell was flying up behind him on fresh tyres, though. The men who'd endured such a fractious relationship as Williams team-mates and title rivals in 1986/87 were about to go head to head again. Roebuck's report takes up the story:

The closing laps were all Piquet and Mansell. Moreno did sterling work for his friend and team mate, holding up both Mansell and Prost for a time. With five laps left, Nelson had 6.6 seconds over Nigel; with four laps left, they were nose-to-tail, and surely the race was Ferrari's.

Not so, Piquet had made a mistake, run wide at a corner, lost virtually all of his lead, but now bent himself to the task of holding on. "All I could do was go for it," he said.

Nelson's increased pace in the dying laps rather shook Mansell, who frankly admitted as much afterwards: "I think he'd agree that those last four or five laps were like qualifying..."

On the last lap, coming to the end of the long Brabham Straight, Nigel tried one of his famous all-or-nothing moves. Piquet was coming up to lap Modena - and under braking for the corner Mansell tried to overtake both of them.

Into the corner the Benetton and Ferrari j-u-s-t avoided contact, and Nigel lost time in the ensuing confusion as he ran very wide. At the chequered flag Piquet was 3 seconds to the good.

At Suzuka Nelson won without much pressure, the race effectively handed to him by the antics of the McLaren and Ferrari representatives. This win, though, was reward for a real fight.

"I'm very grateful to Benetton for giving me the chance again, after the two bad years I had," he said. It was an incongruously gracious remark with which to bring down the curtain on a singularly graceless Grand Prix season.

Piquet would manage one more F1 win the following year - at Mansell's expense in Canada - before leaving the fray, while 1991 was the least eventful of Senna's three championships as Ferrari crumbled and Mansell moved to a Williams team still getting itself set up for the domination that it would unleash in 1992/93.

Results - F1's 500th GP, Australia 1990