After weeks of speculation,
Nigel Mansell announced that he would race for
Ferrari in the season, encouraged to go to the Italian team by a series of high speed accidents on Friday as a result of problems with
Williams'
reactive suspension, as well as a streak of seven consecutive retirements. Williams struggled during qualifying. With Mansell only 13th after the Friday session and
Riccardo Patrese 30th and last, some 14 seconds from 26th place, the team's Technical Director
Patrick Head made a snap decision to dump the reactive suspension until the end of the season. This they did overnight between the Friday and Saturday sessions of the event after previously telling both drivers that changing to the more conventional suspension was next to impossible without months of work. Head said in an interview on race morning that ''"It's a bodge frankly. We've put steel mechanical springs and dampers on. We've changed the front struts into dampers, designed some new bits and pieces which we machined up overnight. We did some new pistons for the front struts...it's a bit of a bodge as I said"''. The grid had an unfamiliar look to it. The
McLarens were suffering handling problems because of new bodywork introduced that was more suitable for high speed circuits coming up later in the season. Meanwhile, the Ferraris of
Gerhard Berger and
Michele Alboreto got the jump on everyone and occupied the front row of the grid. Berger's pole time of 1:10.133 was three seconds slower than the
1987 pole time set by
Nelson Piquet. Although on pole, Berger was far from confident going into the race stating that the Ferraris could not live with the McLarens on fuel consumption, words echoed by Alboreto. For his part Alboreto secured his first front row start since he scored pole in the opening race of the season in
Brazil, it was the last time the Italian would start an F1 race from the front row, until the
2025 São Paulo Grand Prix. Senna and Prost qualified in 3rd and 4th place, the first time no McLaren had been on the front row of the grid since the
1987 Mexican Grand Prix and first time in 1988 that neither McLaren was on pole. During the Friday qualifying session, Senna had two high speed spins at Stowe corner as both he and Prost searched in vain for balance with their cars' new bodywork. The team reverted to the cars having the turbo snorkels for the rest of the weekend which restored some of the cars' balance, but the time lost and the Ferraris with their better top end power put pole out of reach of even Senna. Further testing at Silverstone before the next race in
Germany revealed other factors and not the missing snorkels were the cause of the cars' imbalance and the McLarens did not appear with the turbo snorkels for the rest of the season. The naturally aspirated
March-
Judds impressed with
Maurício Gugelmin qualifying 5th and
Ivan Capelli 6th, ahead of the turbos of
Lotus and
Arrows, while Mansell and Patrese qualified in 11th and 15th respectively with Patrese almost 18 seconds quicker in Saturday qualifying than he was on Friday. Despite Patrick Head describing the converted suspension as a bodge, both Williams drivers expressed their delight at their cars' new 'conventional' suspension, saying it was amazing how much more confidence they had in their cars knowing that they would now behave the same way lap after lap and not different from lap to lap and sometimes corner to corner as it was with the reactive cars. Both
Zakspeed turbos failed to qualify for the race showing the cars' lack of handling and lack of power from the
team's own 4 cylinder engines with
Bernd Schneider the slowest of the 30 drivers, some 7.9 seconds slower than Berger's Ferrari. His experienced teammate
Piercarlo Ghinzani fared little better, being almost 6 seconds slower than the Ferrari. Also failing to make the grid were the
EuroBrun of
Oscar Larrauri and the
Ligier of
Stefan Johansson, who complained of lack of grip from his
JS31 and was amazed when told that Gugelmin claimed to have taken Club corner flat out in his
March which used the same Judd V8 engine as his Ligier. The
Coloni of
Gabriele Tarquini failed to pre-qualify, despite setting a time faster than what Schneider managed in qualifying. == Race summary ==