Ayrton Senna's 1989 McLaren MP4-5 Honda V-10 on its way to a crushing victory at Monaco. The in-car qualifying footage of this driver, on this track, and in this car is legendary. (Photo: Getty Images)
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Tyres:
There was no tyre war back in 1988. Pirelli quit at the end of 1986 and Goodyear had the monopoly. There was one construction and three compounds on offer: soft, medium, hard. The soft tyre was taken to tracks such as Monaco and Budapest; the hard option to Spa; Silverstone, Monza, Zeltwig; the medium compound was for everywhere else. Here's your tyres, lets go racing. Simple. And Goodyear insisted that all tyres were returned to them at the end of each race, ensuring that no team could keep a set of soft tyres from, say, Monaco, and use them as qualifying tyres at a later venue such as Monza.
Engine:
Perhaps the most significant difference between the MP4-3 and the MP4-4 was in their choice of engine. Out went the TAG/Porsche and in came the all-singing Honda RA168E. Although new to McLaren International, this 80° V6, equipped with twin IHI turbos, was a carefully considered evolution of the engine that had powered Williams and Lotus to a combined total of eleven victories in 1987. Along the way Williams had clinched both the constructors' and the drivers' championships too. Clearly the Honda was no slouch lump, it was the envy of the entire pit lane.
Nevertheless, Honda's somewhat abrupt decision to up sticks and leave the Williams camp in favour of McLaren certainly caused a few raised eyebrows – but that's a whole other story. The bottom line to the affair was that the MP4-4 was equipped with a thoroughly tried and tested (read ultra-reliable) race winning, championship winning engine. Quite a coup.
But there's more: 1988 was destined to be the last year of the turbo. The FIA wanted them gone: too powerful, they said, and outlawed them for 1989. Also, this swansong year would see the FIA impose a greater fuel restriction on the turbo
cars, down to 150ltrs, a reduction of 45ltrs from the previous season, and turbo boost was cut from 4bar to 2.5bar. This had a dramatic effect on horsepower, in race trim the 1988 Honda dropped from 890bhp to 680bhp.
For McLaren, however, this particular cloud had a silver lining: the drop in brute power resulted in even better reliability. If Honda's engineers could build a competitive and durable engine running at 4.0bar, then detuning it to 2.5bar would make it only more bullet-proof. And so it proved ... nearly.
The team suffered but one race failure all season, round twelve, Prost at Monza. After locking-out the front row of the grid, this lone engine breakdown, combined with Senna's unnecessary tangle with Jean-Louis Schlesser's Williams (with but two laps of the race remaining...) saw both McLarens sidelined, out of the Italian grand prix.
From April to September the dream had been alive. History shows that McLaren went on to win the remaining four races of the year... but the perfect season had slipped through McLaren's fingers. Yet, while the ultimate prize certainly had eluded them, the subsequent tales of McLaren's 1988 championship quest and of the heroic performance of the MP4-4 chassis itself have grown to become the stuff of motor racing legend.
SPEED's Formula One technical analyst Steve Matchett presently resides in the south of France. In addition to his duties on SPEED'S F1 broadcasts alongside Bob Varsha and David Hobbs, Steve will be providing insight into the high-tech world of Formula One through regular video features and commentary on SPEEDtv.com
The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of
SpeedTV.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or Speed Channel
