RA168E
V6 turbo used in the MP4/4 For 1988
Ayrton Senna was signed to partner
Alain Prost (at Prost's suggestion) on a three-year contract. The McLaren chassis, the Senna and Prost pairing, and finally the new Honda RA168E engines with , 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 RA168E which was specially 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 car appeared 'as-is' through the season, save for a few aerodynamic revisions. The car arrived at the first race in
Brazil with very little pre-season testing at
Imola only a week before the race, but Senna was able to put the car on
pole position by half a second from surprise second-place qualifier,
Nigel Mansell driving the naturally aspirated
Williams-
Judd V8, with Prost qualifying third after not finding the balance of his car until the race morning warmup session. One feature of the MP4/4 was the driver's position. Due to the car's low-slung aerodynamics and the FIA safety rule which stated that the top of a driver's helmet had to be below an imaginary straight line drawn from the top of the roll bar to the top of the cowling, the drivers were required to be in a reclining position rather than in the conventional upright seating position of rival contemporary Grand Prix cars. As the MP4/4 was a new car, it had to conform to FISA's new-for-1988 safety regulations which stipulated that the driver's feet be behind the line of an imaginary front axle. Teams running cars from the previous season were able to continue to do so under the earlier regulations for which they had been designed. Before 1988, the most dominant car seen in a single season of F1 had been McLaren's 1984 car, the John Barnard designed MP4/2 which had won 12 of the 16 races that year driven by Prost and World Champion
Niki Lauda (Lauda had defeated Prost in the Drivers' Championship by only half a point). However, the MP4/4's successes eclipsed the MP4/2 not only in wins but in qualifying performance. 1988 was almost a walkover for McLaren, who took 15 victories from 16 races, including ten 1-2 finishes, while Prost finished 1st or 2nd in the 14 races he finished (he had 2 retirements - Britain and Italy). The car also sat on pole position in 15 of the 16 races (including a record 13 poles for Senna), locked out the front row in 12 races, and also set 10 fastest race laps. The dominant run was only interrupted once, at the
Italian Grand Prix at
Monza for Round 12, when Senna crashed out of the lead 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 claimed an emotional victory for Ferrari 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 1:27s (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 100T, which used the same 1988 specification Honda engines as McLaren. Piquet could only qualify in 1:30.500, 3.352 seconds slower than Senna, and 2.581 seconds slower than Prost. The Lotus actually recorded faster speed trap figures (, 1.5 km/h faster than the McLarens) on the run to Tosa, but around the rest of the circuit the McLaren's acceleration and downforce were unmatched. Despite this, both Piquet and Lotus boss
Peter Warr told the assembled media at Imola that they believed their car to be better aerodynamically, and therefore more fuel-efficient than the MP4/4. However, both McLarens had lapped the entire field, including 3rd placed Piquet, by lap 55 of the 60 lap race. The fast Imola circuit with its long periods of full-throttle racing was notoriously hard on fuel, especially for the turbo cars which had seen numerous late race retirements in recent years, and the McLarens lapping the field at the speed they did prove the aerodynamic efficiency of the car as well as the work Honda had undertaken to reduce fuel consumption. 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 ninth fastest of the race, and some 2.8 seconds slower than Prost's fastest lap of 1:29.685. Both Prost and Senna lapped faster in the race than Piquet had qualified, putting an exclamation mark on McLaren's dominant weekend. The car retired only four 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, the only in race engine failure McLaren suffered all season), along with Senna's infamous accidents at
Monaco (where he totally dominated qualifying and by lap 66 of the race had built a 50-second lead over Prost who had been stuck for 54 laps behind Berger, only to throw it away by crashing into the barriers at Portier. As he lived in Monaco, Senna went back to his home and did not contact the team until that night when he finally returned to the pits as the team was packing up, such was his disappointment), and Monza. Monaco was another example of McLaren's domination, 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. Prost failed to qualify on the front row four times during the season (
Brazil,
Detroit, Britain and
Hungary). Hungary saw the worst qualifying position for a McLaren in 1988 when Prost was only 7th fastest. Senna, as usual, was on pole at the tight
Hungaroring, though only 0.108 in front of Nigel Mansell's Williams-Judd. Other than at Silverstone, this was the closest any car got to knocking one of the MP4/4's off pole position. It was during qualifying at
Hockenheim in Germany, the MP4/4 set its top speed record, and the fastest speed trap of the 1988 season when both Senna and Prost achieved on the 1.6 km long straight that took the cars into the forest (they had recorded during qualifying for Round 4 in
Mexico at the
Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez on its long front straight). Both speeds compared favourably to the fastest non-McLaren, the Ferrari of Berger who trapped at at Hockenheim, and the fastest of the non-turbos, the slippery,
Adrian Newey designed
March-
Judd of
Maurício Gugelmin which was trapped at , also in Germany. However, with the reduction in engine power from the levels of 1986 and 1987, the McLaren-Honda's top speed was slower than the fastest speed of 1987 (Nelson Piquet in a
Williams-Honda at Monza), and slower than had been achieved in 1986 (Gerhard Berger in a
Benetton-
BMW, also at Monza). At Silverstone, McLaren introduced revised aerodynamics to the MP4/4, doing away with the turbo "snorkels" (which force-fed air to the turbos) located on the top of the side pods. While this proved troublesome on the first day of qualifying, with both drivers feeling it created an 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 at Silverstone the week after the British Grand Prix had shown the imbalance was caused by incorrect suspension settings on the cars and not by the removal of the snorkels. Team boss Ron Dennis estimated that the research and development on the revised aerodynamics had cost the team somewhere around £150,000 for something that even Steven Nichols considered a minimal aerodynamic gain and gave no extra horsepower to the Honda engine. Nichols also dispelled the myth that somehow Honda had managed to get around the FIA's pop-off valves and that their engines in the McLarens somehow had around more horsepower than the often quoted . As he pointed out, there was no getting around the fact that the cars could only carry 150 litres of fuel per race and the alleged extra horsepower would have meant not finishing on the allowable fuel, plus winning made the MP4/4's an obvious target of the
FISA scrutineers who meticulously checked and re-checked the size of each cars fuel tank after every race. Senna's Chief Mechanic in 1988, Neil Trundle, also confirmed that the Honda engines basically ran on what was generally termed "Rocket Fuel" or "Jungle Juice" that was supplied by team sponsors
Shell, with the fuel consisting of a special blend made up of around 84%
toluene / 16%
methanol for qualifying and around 60-40 toluene/methanol for racing. . Other than the four retirements, the lowest finishing position for the MP4/4 was a 6th in Round 13 in
Portugal, and 4th in the next race in
Spain, with both recorded by Senna. During both races, his car was hampered by fuel readout problems which forced him to run slower than he otherwise could have in order to have enough fuel to finish. Both races were won by Alain Prost. Those lower finishing places in the top 6 actually helped Senna's championship position as, under the Best 11 Scores rule, he could drop both whereas Prost, who only ever finished 1st or 2nd in the 14 races he finished, had to drop three of his 2nd place finishes. driving the MP4/4 at the 1988 Canadian GP. At the end of the season, McLaren-Honda had taken both the Constructors and Drivers' titles (Senna edging out Prost due to winning more races - only the eleven best results counted, so even though Prost scored more overall points, Senna's 8 first-place finishes to Prost's 7, meant Senna took the championship title.) McLaren-Honda, 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 . Although statistically not as successful as the MP4/4 (more because others such as Ferrari, Williams and
Benetton improved rather than McLaren and Honda faltered), the 1989 car would give the team another Constructors Championship, with Prost and Senna finishing 1-2 in the Drivers' Championship. 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 season banning turbocharged engines. According to some McLaren personnel at the time including Steve Nichols, front end designer Matthew Jeffreys and Chief Mechanic Neil Trundle, the test mule was actually faster and arguably a better car than 1989 and 's highly successful MP4/5 and MP4/5B designed by
Neil Oatley, cars that brought the team 2 Drivers' Championships, 2 Constructors' championships, 16 wins, 27 poles, 12 fastest laps and 36 overall podium finishes from the 32 races ran over those two years. == Acceleration data ==