35mmMan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Formula 1 in 1983 was not a sport burdened by an excess of regulatory precision. René Arnoux demonstrated this fairly efficiently at Imola on 1 May, when he managed to go the wrong way on the circuit at some point during the San Marino Grand Prix, continued racing, finished third and was not penalised for any of it.
Arnoux and Ferrari in 1983
Arnoux had arrived at Ferrari for 1983 following a complicated exit from Renault, where his relationship with the team had deteriorated sharply after he ignored team orders at the French Grand Prix the previous year and won a race he had been asked not to.
René Alexandre Arnoux
- Races (starts):149
- Wins:7
- Podiums:22
- Pole positions:18
- Fastest laps:12
- Driver of the Day:0
- World titles:0
- Points (total):181
Data source: F1DB (GitHub)
It was the kind of move that made him a folk hero to some and unemployable to others.
Ferrari, who have occasionally appreciated a driver with an independent spirit when it suits them, took him on alongside Patrick Tambay.
The 1983 Ferrari was a competitive machine. The turbocharged 126C2B and its successor were capable of winning races, which Arnoux did that year, and the team were in genuine contention for the constructors’ title across much of the season.
The incident at Imola
The details of what precisely happened during Arnoux’s excursion against the flow of traffic at Imola sit in the category of incidents that were noted, discussed briefly and then absorbed into the general texture of a different era of the sport.
He went the wrong way, rejoined, and carried on.
The stewards looked at the situation and concluded that third place was a reasonable outcome to allow to stand.
Whether this reflected a genuine assessment of the incident or simply the regulatory looseness of the period is a question that probably cannot be answered cleanly at this distance.
What the era allowed
This was 1983, and Formula 1’s approach to incidents on track operated on a different framework to the one the sport uses now.
The infrastructure for reviewing, penalising and communicating decisions during a race was considerably thinner.
Stewards worked with what they could see, and what they could see was sometimes limited.
Drivers knew this, even if they did not always plan around it.
Arnoux keeping his third place at Imola was controversial in the paddock but consequential to almost no one outside it.
The race result stood, the points were awarded and the season moved on.
It remains one of the minor curiosities of that year, a small example of what could happen and what could quietly be overlooked when the sport had not yet developed the apparatus to prevent either.
