Mc Laren MP4/4 - Team Performance

Team Performance

The situation improved immensely when Ayrton Senna signed to partner Alain Prost (at Prost's suggestion) on a 3 year contract. The McLaren chassis, the Senna and Prost pairing, and finally the new Honda engines with 650 PS (478 kW; 641 bhp), looked like a formidable combination. However, there were concerns after the FIA introduced a fuel regulation for the turbo powered cars of 150 litres for a race distance. Honda's engine management team worked feverishly on the fuel consumption of the RA168-E which was especially built for the reduction in turbo boost from 4.0 bar to 2.5 bar rather than upgrading the 1987 spec engine, trying to improve it in order to avoid embarrassing late race retirements. The team also experimented with active suspension in early testing but this was abandoned, and the car appeared 'as-is' through the season, save for a few aerodynamic revisions. The car appeared at the first race in Brazil with very little pre-season testing at both Imola and Rio, but Senna was able to put the car on pole position by half a second from surprise 2nd placed qualifier, Nigel Mansell driving the naturally aspirated Williams-Judd V8, with Prost qualifying 3rd.

Before 1988, the most dominant car seen in F1 had been the Lotus 79, however the MP4/4's successes made the Lotus seem almost ordinary. The season was an almost embarrassing walkover for McLaren, who took 15 victories from 16 races, including 10 1-2 finishes and Prost finishing 1st or 2nd in every race he finished (he had 2 retirements - Britain and Italy). The dominant run was only interrupted once, at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, when Senna had an accident with only two laps remaining while lapping Jean-Louis Schlesser, who was making his first and only F1 start for Williams in place of Mansell who was suffering from chickenpox. With Prost already out after a rare engine failure, Gerhard Berger of Ferrari took an unexpected and emotional victory, just a month after the death of Ferrari founder Enzo Ferrari.

Perhaps the most telling example of the MP4/4's emphatic domination was seen at San Marino in just the second race of the season. Senna and Prost both qualified the 5.040 km (3.131 mi) Imola circuit in the 1:27's (Senna 0.7 faster than Prost) while no other driver could get below 1:30. Third on the grid was defending World Champion Nelson Piquet in his Lotus which used the same Honda engines as McLaren. Piquet could only qualify in 1:30.500, 3.352 seconds slower than Senna and 2.581 slower than Prost. Despite both Piquet and Lotus telling the assembled media at Imola that they believed the Lotus 100T to be better aerodynamically, and therefore more fuel efficient than the MP4/4, both McLaren-Hondas had lapped the entire field, including 3rd placed Piquet, by lap 55 of the 60 lap race. Prost and Senna's fastest laps (again the only drivers under 1:30) were 1.5 seconds faster than the next fastest, Gerhard Berger's Ferrari. Piquet's fastest lap was only the 9th fastest of the race, and some 2.8 secconds slower than Prost's fastest lap of 1:29.685.

The car retired only 4 times in the season - with Prost retiring at Silverstone during a very wet British Grand Prix (handling), and at Monza for the Italian Grand Prix (engine), along with Senna's infamous accidents at Monaco and Monza. Another example of McLaren's domination was at the 3rd race in Monaco where Senna qualified 1.4 seconds faster than acknowledged Monaco master Prost, who himself was 1.2 seconds faster than third placed Gerhard Berger in his Ferrari.

During the season both McLarens qualified for a race over one second faster than the rest of the field on six occasions (San Marino, Monaco, Germany, Portugal, Japan and Australia), while the team achieved 15 pole positions (13 for Senna and 2 for Prost) to go along with the 15 wins. Only Gerhard Berger's pole position at Silverstone prevented a perfect pole record for McLaren. Britain was the only race where neither McLaren qualified on the front row with Ferrari's Michele Alboreto qualifying 2nd, Senna and Prost occupying the 2nd row. Britain was also the only race of the season that Ayrton Senna didn't qualify his McLaren-Honda on the front row of the grid.

It was at Silverstone that McLaren introduced revised aerodynamics to the MP4/4, doing away with the turbo "snorkels" on the side pods. While this proved troublesome on the first day of qualifying, with both drivers feeling it created imbalance in the cars, and the snorkels re-introduced for the rest of the British GP weekend, it was the last time the snorkels were seen on the MP4/4s for the rest of the season, as testing before the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim had shown the imbalance was not caused by the removal of the snorkels. Team boss Ron Dennis estimated that the R&D on the revised aerodynamics had cost the team somewhere around GBP£150,000.

At the end of the season, McLaren had taken both the Constructors and Drivers' titles (Senna edging out Prost by default - only the eleven best results counted but Prost scored more points with fewer wins). McLaren, who scored a then record 199 points in the Constructors Championship, wrapped up the Constructors title with a 1-2 finish in Belgium for Round 11 of the 16 race season, it was the team's eighth 1-2 finish of the season (Senna and Prost would finish 1-2 twice more, in Japan and Australia). The team finished the season a massive 134 points in front of 2nd placed Ferrari.

The MP4/4 would be succeeded by the Honda V10 powered McLaren MP4/5 in 1989.

Former McLaren Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton drove the MP4/4 on Top Gear. After driving the car, Hamilton said to host Jeremy Clarkson "I love this car. It's one of the best days of my life. I finally can check off my dream of driving this car."

A modified car, the MP4/4B, was used as a test mule for Honda's new 3.5 litre V10 designed around the new regulations for the 1989 season banning turbo-charged engines.