Angelo Orsi, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ayrton Senna had joined McLaren that winter with something to prove, which was not unusual for him. What was unusual was the scale of the machinery available to prove it with. On 1 May 1988, he won the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola, his first race victory in McLaren colours, and began writing the chapter of his career that would define him most.
The new arrangement
Senna had arrived at McLaren for 1988 as the teammate of Alain Prost, who was already a two-time world champion and the team’s established leader.
Ayrton Senna da Silva
- Races (starts):161
- Wins:41
- Podiums:80
- Pole positions:65
- Fastest laps:19
- Driver of the Day:0
- World titles:3
- Points (total):614
Data source: F1DB (GitHub)
The internal logic of the arrangement was not especially comfortable for either man from the start. Prost had expected a number one status that McLaren, perhaps deliberately, never quite granted.
Senna had no interest in being number two to anyone.
Between them, they had the MP4/4, a car built around a Honda turbocharged engine that was producing power the rest of the grid could not match, wrapped in an aerodynamic package that Gordon Murray and Steve Nichols had conceived as something close to a clean-sheet statement.
It was, almost immediately, obvious that McLaren were going to be very difficult to beat in 1988.
The question was which McLaren driver was going to do the beating.
Imola, May 1988
The San Marino Grand Prix was the third race of the season.
McLaren had already won the first two, with the victories split between the two drivers. At Imola, Senna led from the front, managed the race with the controlled intensity that was already becoming his signature in the McLaren cockpit, and brought the car home first.
Prost finished second. The field was lapped. It was, in the context of 1988, a fairly typical afternoon.
What it signalled
The significance of Imola was less in the result itself and more in what it confirmed.
Senna was not going to ease into McLaren gently, defer to Prost’s experience or find his rhythm gradually over the course of the season. He was competitive, fast and entirely prepared to treat his famous teammate as an obstacle rather than a colleague.
That dynamic, established in the first three races of 1988, would run through the entire year at increasing temperature.
Senna and Prost together were extraordinary in pure performance terms.
As teammates they were, from fairly early on, barely that. The politeness was thin and getting thinner.
The season that followed
McLaren won 15 of 16 races in 1988. Senna won eight of them and took the world championship, his first. Prost won seven.
The one race neither of them won was Monaco, where Senna was leading by a distance and crashed at Portier while in a mental state he later described with unusual candour.
By the end of the year, Senna’s position at McLaren was unambiguous.
He was the fastest driver in Formula 1, in the fastest car, and he had demonstrated both facts with a consistency that left little room for argument. The San Marino Grand Prix was where that story properly began.
His first McLaren win was not a turning point in the romantic sense. It was more of a confirmation. The direction had already been set. Imola simply made it visible.
