Senna and Prost clash at Suzuka, Pt 1

On Sunday Honda men were very sad for him. Gerhard Berger's race lasted under 2 minutes, and his was the second McLaren to retire. Everyone's worst fears for the Senna-Prost confrontation had come to be.

This is Monday morning, and I find myself writing more, as they say, in sorrow than anger, although not by much. What I feel about yesterday's farcical proceedings is best summed up by a post-race conversation between a couple of engineers, one from McLaren, the other from Ferrari.

"Well," said the McLaren man, "that was a bloody waste of everyone's time, wasn't it?"

"Yes," agreed the Ferrari man, "Still, er, congratulations..."

Someone else piped up: "Ron Dennis says it would never have happened if Senna had been allowed to have pole position on the left-hand side of the road."

At that, the Ferrari man responded with some vigour. "Jesus, where the hell does this end? It wouldn't have happened, either, if they'd just given Senna the nine points, and not run the goddam race at all!"

The McLaren man said nothing, just stared at the ground.

It was good that the Benetton team had something to celebrate afterwards, for it meant there were elated faces somewhere in the Suzuka paddock. If there were none at Ferrari, equally there were none that I saw at McLaren. Such pleasure as there was in Dennis's team appeared to come from the winning of the constructors' title, made certain when Mansell's Ferrari expired.

The atmosphere in the paddock after the race was flat, low-key, empty. There wasn't the overt rage of last year, but simply the impression of waste. Fourteen previous races, endless travel, constant testing, virtually unchecked expense, had all led to this: a barging match within the first few seconds. As an advertisement for modern Grand Prix racing, it was the sickest joke.

Where and when did the rind of Formula 1 begin to turn rancid, so that winning - in whatever manner, and at any cost - subjugated all else? I remember being shocked, after the Las Vegas race in 1981, to hear a driver pouring contempt on Carlos Reutemann. "All he had to do, to win the championship," he said, "was to finish ahead of Piquet." And then, oafishly: "And all he had to do to make sure of that was put Nelson in the wall..."

There was no point in trying to argue with a scum mentality that Carlos was an honourable man. Years later, I mentioned this conversation to him. "I wanted to win the World Championship," he said, "and putting Piquet off would not have been winning anything. Yes, OK, I would have had the title by doing that, but I would not have been World Champion - not for myself, anyway, and that's all that matters."

I would have expected nothing else of him, but perhaps Reutemann was symbolic of another era, when the manner of winning was as significant as the doing of it.

After last year's race in Japan, I found myself wishing again we could do away with the World Championship, and today these feelings return. What price a list of titles, after all, which omits the name of Stirling Moss, for me, and countless others, the greatest ever? Moss's Vanwall team mate, Tony Brooks, put it best: "So long as Stirling wasn't World Champion, the whole thing was meaningless. We all knew he was the best driver, by a long way, and that was what counted."

Would Prost have closed the door on Senna at Suzuka in 1989 if the title hadn't been at stake? I doubt it. Without the championship beckoning, would Senna have pitched into Prost on Sunday? No way. This was no namby-pamby walking pace chicane, but a fifth gear corner, with 23 cars rushing up behind. If either the Ferrari or McLaren had finished up on the track, the consequences could have been catastrophic, both in human terms, and also for the future of F1.

As it was, they came to rest in the relative safety of a run-off area, and no one got hurt. The two drivers climbed from the multi-million dollar wreckage without a scratch, and walked back to the pits. Back in France, FISA President Jean-Marie Balestre got on the blower to every newspaper he could think of, believing that it was 'scandaleux!' But that was as far as it went.

I'm glad there was no protest from Ferrari afterwards. Such a move would have served no purpose, and probably would have elevated feelings of quiet disgust to the open hatred we saw 12 months ago. And I like to think that, had the boot been on the other foot, Ron Dennis would have behaved similarly.

It was a surprise, after the race, to find that both Prost and Senna were still on the premises. The new World Champion staged an impromptu press conference outside the McLaren 'office' in the paddock, while a few yards away Prost sat quietly at Ferrari.

Only six weeks ago, you will remember, there was something of a thaw in their hostilities. At the Monza press conference, prompted by a question from the floor, the two men went as far as shaking hands. There was no suggestion this was the start of a bosom friendship, but still it was moving to witness the two greatest drivers on earth putting ego aside briefly, perhaps trying to make a little space for the other.

Afterwards, though, Senna said that words were easy, actions something else. "I want to know he is sincere in this," he said. After Sunday, he may find his own words being thrown back at him. Ever since the race in 1989, he has suggested that Prost acted dishonourably that day: how, then, to excuse his own actions this time around?

"Prost was not in a position to take a chance today," he said on Sunday evening. "He knew that if there was a gap I would go for it. When I did, he did not open the door..." This, to my mind, is not quite the same thing as 'he closed the door'.

Some people in the paddock described the incident as 'poetic justice', Ron Dennis going further with 'rough justice'. Are we then to expect - and excuse - Mansell's pitching Berger off the road in Hungary next season because Gerhard did it to him this year? Sooner or later, this foolishness is going to kill someone, and then per-haps FISA will address the situation. It seems now sadly ironic that, at his press conference in Jerez, Senna went on at length about the dangers of falling standards in driver discipline.

This, we are reminded constantly, is a business of 'realists', where old grudges are repeatedly swept aside in the face of expediency. There are elements who will relish, no doubt, the reawakening of loathing between Formula 1's grand masters, but I am not among them. I don't care to see this more perilous than it need be - than it already is.

Perhaps some of those who rub their hands in anticipation of 'good stories' to come from the situation were not around when Villeneuve died eight years ago. You may say he was the victim of his own all-or-nothing personality, that he overreacted to the duplicity of his team mate, and I wouldn't argue with you. But he was as clean and decent a sportsman as racing has known, and bitterness killed him.

Prost was a good friend of Villeneuve's, and has often referred to the circumstances which led to his death, taking care, he says, not to fall prey to the same emotional response.

This year it has been fashionable to be anti-Prost, to mutter about his 'political' skills, and so on, and there is no doubt that behind Alain's quiet charm there is an intensely ambitious man. Certainly, he likes his own way; unlike some, he is prepared to earn it. These are characteristics he shares with Senna, and perhaps go some way towards explaining their pre-eminence in contemporary Formula 1.

Until last year's Japanese Grand Prix, however, there had been nothing remotely questionable about his driving, and there has been nothing since. "You could tell," Keke Rosberg laughed, "that Alain had never closed the door on anyone in his life before -because he did it so badly! He simply didn't know how to go about it. There's an art to it..."

He didn't close the door on Sunday, that much is sure, because he didn't have to. It was already shut. And when, in Senna's words, "he didn't open the door", Ayrton broke it off its hinges. Rough justice, according to his boss.

"Senna talks all the time about honour, and this and that," Prost said on Sunday evening. "According to him, I was completely in the wrong last year, and he would never have done something like that. Then we got what happened today. So I was wrong, and he was not, huh? He can't have it both ways. The thing about Senna is that he always wants to... show the people something he is not. Yes, I know he's very convincing, but, for me, he is the absolute opposite of honest.

"I went into the corner ahead of him, OK? Not alongside - ahead. What he did gave him two chances: either I would go off-line to make room for him to get past, or we crash. On a fifth gear corner. If this kind of thing is acceptable now, racing is finished, dead. If some people think I'm just whingeing because of the championship, well, too bad. Believe me, if I'm obliged to do the same to win the championship, OK, let him win, no problem! As for my feelings about him now... he is not a man; I forget him."

"I don't care about anything Prost says," snapped Senna on Sunday evening.

Do you wonder I feel sad for racing, this morning here in Japan? It has been a long trip to nowhere. I should imagine the McLaren and Ferrari mechanics feel much the same way.