40 years ago today: How a tyre war prompted Senna’s unfinished Monaco masterpiece

The story of how Ayrton Senna was denied his first Formula 1 victory driving an unfancied Toleman at a rain-soaked Monaco 40 years ago today has become part of the driver’s legend.

But as is often the case with such celebrated stories, revealing details and potentially significant moments tend to get overlooked next to the drama.

The moment the race was stopped – controversially early, just before half-distance – accusations flew that it was halted deliberately by the race organisers in favour of its winner, Alain Prost. It was seen as the starting point of the enmity between those two drivers.

1984 Monaco Grand Prix qualifying

McLaren arrived at the sixth round of the 1984 season as heavy favourites. They had won all of the preceding rounds except the Belgian Grand Prix at Zolder, where the MP4/4s of Prost and Niki Lauda were halted by technical trouble.

Surprisingly, the team had not taken a pole position up to that point, relying on the superior race pace and economy of the TAG Porsche engines to claim victory. But Prost made sure he took the crucial pole position in Monaco, lapping the Principality in 1’22.661 in his spare car.

Lotus driver Nigel Mansell also had to switch to his spare for qualifying after blowing his turbo. Lapping less than a tenth of a second off Prost, he joined the McLaren driver on the front row, though his complaints about traffic had grown so frequent his mechanics had jokingly left a horn in the cockpit of his 95T.

The next two rows were taken up by the Ferraris of Rene Arnoux and Michele Alboreto, then the Renaults of Derek Warwick and Patrick Tambay. Andrea de Cesaris took his Ligier up to the rare heights of seventh, sharing the fourth row with Niki Lauda. Reigning world champion Nelson Piquet was only ninth for Brabham ahead of his predecessor Keke Rosberg, who had won brilliantly on a slippery track the year before.

Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and go ad-free

Senna was only 13th, behind Elio de Angelis (Lotus) and Manfred Winkelhock (ATS), eight-tenths of a second quicker than team mate Johnny Cecotto, though separated from the other Toleman by four cars.

Among that quartet was Piquet’s team mate Corrado Fabi, who in a bizarre arrangement had taken over the second Brabham from his brother Teo. The older Fabi brother was prioritising the American CART IndyCar series, which he had almost won the year before, and had a clashing commitment at Milwaukee.

None questioned the prestige of Monaco’s round of the championship, and what the organisers wanted, they got. This included an exception to the usual grid size, so only 20 cars were permitted to start instead of the usual 26.

Stefan Bellof was therefore the last to qualify, just two tenths of a second faster than his team mate. Martin Brundle was in no condition to start anyway having sustained a concussion in a fearful crash on his final qualifying run.

Brundle clipped his throttle as he tried to brake for Tabac and slammed into the barrier, wiping the right-hand side off his car, skidding on its side along the track. Although he returned to the team’s spare car with eight minutes of the session remaining, team principal Ken Tyrrell told him to climb out when Brundle revealed he didn’t know which track they were at.

Marc Surer missed the cut by a tenth of a second, having used a normally aspirated Cosworth engine while Arrows team mate Thierry Boutsen was slower with their turbo. Bellof was therefore the only driver on the grid lacking the power of a turbo, but with the potential benefit of a more responsive engine, as the weather was about to turn foul.

Senna stuns team in warm-up

On Sunday morning the clouds closed in and rain soaked the track. Unlike today, a single ‘warm-up’ practice session remained for drivers to assess the conditions and – most importantly – the performance of their wet weather tyres.

The 15 teams sourced their tyres from three different manufacturers. The 12 Goodyear-shod drivers, including front row starter Mansell, put their hope in a new front tyre construction that Riccardo Patrese saw potential in during a test at Imola earlier in the year.

Senna was the only driver to have scored a point on Pirelli rubber up to that stage in the season. But Toleman boss Alex Hawkridge had been won over by his driver’s argument that they needed more competitive rubber and switched to Michelin at the previous race.

In the warm-up, Michelin’s soft rubber proved the thing to have. Lauda set the pace using it with a 1’57.242 followed by De Cesaris on the same rubber and Rosberg the first of the Goodyear runners.

Tyre manufacturers would customarily give the limited examples of their best product to their favoured teams. Toleman did not enjoy that treatment from Michelin and Senna had to use a harder wet weather tyre in the warm-up.

But Senna’s 1’59.892 on that rubber raised eyebrows. “I remember our Michelin engineer was gobsmacked when he saw the times Ayrton was doing on them,” recalled the team’s designed Rory Byrne, “so much so, they gave us a set of soft tyres for the race.”

The team had only raced Byrne’s new 184 chassis for the first time at the previous race in Dijon. The first glimpse of what Senna could do in the new car on Michelins lasted only until his turbo failed before half-distance, but on race day in Monaco he stunned the watching world.

Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and go ad-free

1984 Monaco Grand Prix

The drivers had been so alarmed by the variation in grip between the soaked track and the relatively dry surface in the tunnel under Loews hotel the organisers took the remarkable decision to send in a fire engine to hose down the enclosed section. This forced a delay to the start of the race.

Once it began, Prost led a portion of the field through Sainte Devote. Behind him the Ferraris got away poorly and Warwick attempted to drive around the outside of Arnoux, only to hit the barrier. Tambay then collected his team mate and De Angelis arrived on the scene to find his path blocked. The Lotus driver reversed away from the melee, thumping the sidepod of Patrese’s stationary Alfa Romeo as he did. The pair drove off while both Renault drivers nursed leg injuries.

De Cesaris also incurred damage on the first lap and retired. With Cecotto spinning on his first tour, a fifth of the starters were out by the end of lap two. Prost led Mansell, the Ferraris of Arnoux and Alboreto, Lauda and Rosberg in the six points-paying positions. Winkelhock’s ATS (which had gained five places at the start), Jacques Laffite in the second Williams, Senna’s Toleman and Fabi completed the top 10, with Bellof already up to 11th.

Lauda picked off the Ferrari drivers to take up third place. Senna was making progress, passing Laffite and Winkelhock, then moving into the points positions when Fabi spun at the exit of Portier.

This caused a heart-stopping moment for Prost. A marshal appeared on the track in front of him at the scene of Fabi’s crash. The McLaren driver braked to avoid him and Mansell, who had already been paying him close attention, moved to within striking distance. On lap 11 the Lotus driver claimed the lead for the first time in his grand prix career.

Mansell stayed at the head of the field for six laps, but climbing Beau Rivage on the 16th tour he lost control of his car as he crossed one of the painted white lines on the curving road and swiped a barrier with his right-rear wheel.

Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and go ad-free

Afterwards Mansell remarked he’d “been penalised beyond reason” for his mistake, a comment which drew a withering response from some commentators who’d long asked whether the driver with 51 grands prix to his name would ever win one. “It was my mistake for sure, but I got stick for explaining the circumstances,” reflected Mansell later.

According to his team manager Peter Warr, who never disguised his dislike of Mansell and spent several pages of his autobiography slating his former driver, some team members even created an ‘excuses board’ for him at the Lotus factory, which was updated following this development.

That restored Prost to the lead, 28 seconds ahead of Lauda. Alboreto had spun off and Arnoux had been passed by Senna. The Toleman driver had also demoted Rosberg, but potentially risked too much doing so, clouting the high kerbs as he did at the harbour-front chicane, which was still a dangerously fast left-right flick.

Now Senna lay little more than a second behind Lauda, who was losing several seconds per lap to his team mate. As lap 19 began car 19 – Senna’s Toleman – swept around Lauda on the curving run towards Sainte Devote into second place.

By lap 21, having lapped Patrese, Senna faced a 35 second deficit to Prost, and no prospect the Safety Car might appear to erase it. He set about cutting it down, incredibly finding multiple seconds per lap at times.

Meanwhile Bellof was also making progress. He passed Rosberg, gained another place when Lauda spun out at Casino, then got stuck into Arnoux. The Ferrari driver squeezed him hard at Mirabeau but Bellof was soon through, exiting the lower Mirabeau corner with an exuberant armful of opposite lock.

By now the conditions were visibly worsening, but there was no let up from either of Prost’s pursuers. On lap 27, as Bellof passed Arnoux, Senna took a stunning 4.4 seconds out of the race leader. The Tyrrell driver gained over three seconds even as he passed the Ferrari. On the next lap Senna gained 3.6s and Bellof 5.1s. Nor were they alone: The top six drivers, the only ones still on the lead lap, were closing up and seventh-placed Alboreto was filling Prost’s mirrors, trying to un-lap himself.

Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and go ad-free

By lap 31 Senna was just over seven seconds behind. Were the two rivals who had clashed weeks earlier during an exhibition race at the new Nurburgring about to fight for the Monaco Grand Prix? The conditions were worsening, though Bellof produced his fastest lap on the 29th tour.

Nonetheless, with only nine cars circulating, the decision was taken to stop the race. This proved enormously controversial, as it halted not only Senna’s pursuit of Prost but also Bellof’s pursuit of the pair of them. But given the conditions, the decision to stop the race was not nearly as controversial as the simultaneous decision to call an end to the event and not wait to see if the conditions would improve enough to allow for a restart.

This went against the regulations of the time, which allowed races to be run in two parts if between two laps and 75% of the race distances had been completed, as was the case. This exact procedure had been followed in the French Grand Prix at Dijon three years earlier, where Prost scored his first win.

Clerk of the course Jacky Ickx was criticised by some for the sudden abandonment of the race, while others accused Michel Boeri of erring by showing the chequered flag to signal the end of the race. Boeri had become president of the Automobile Club de Monaco in 1972, the last time its grand prix was held in such dreadful conditions, when Ickx finished second to Jean-Pierre Beltoise in a race which was not stopped.

Ickx was unfairly targeted by conspiracy theorists who claimed that, as a Porsche Le Mans driver, he had acted in favour of ther TAG-branded Porsche engines in Prost’s car. Others vaguely accused ‘the French’ of trying to help Prost, overlooking the detail that the ACM and FIA were at loggerheads over various points relating to the race. Illustrating that point, the FIA later fined Ickx $6,000 and took his licence away for “not consulting FISA officials before stopping the Monaco Grand Prix in heavy rain.”

None of this was any consolation to Ted Toleman, who passed away earlier this year, and was present in Monaco that day to see the closest his team ever came to winning the race.

Others also believed the race should have continued, such as Frank Williams, as both his cars were still circulating. “Frank wanted it restarted,” wrote Rosberg in his autobiography the following year. “He kept me hanging around and insisting on a restart.

“But I was glad it had stopped without a mess. It was good to have Jackie [sic] Ickx in charge of the race. At the morning briefing everyone was delighted that, for once, we had a race director who knew what he was doing. I felt sorry for the flak he got afterwards. He stopped the race at the right time and that’s what counts.”

Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and go ad-free

It’s tempting to speculate what might have happened had the race not been stopped. Would Senna have caught Prost? Would the suspension component he damaged passing Rosberg have eventually failed him? Would Toleman have had the opportunity to repair that in a race which was stopped and restarted? Would Bellof have joined the fight at the front?

The 1984 Monaco Grand Prix left many ‘what if’ questions. But while Senna went on to enjoy much success before his untimely end, Bellof is perhaps the saddest figure in this story. He too was unhappy with how the stoppage was handled. “I think that the racing official were right to bring out the red flag but they shouldn’t have brought out the chequered flag at the same time,” he said. “We could have had a second start.”

Bellof’s fine third place was eventually taken away from him as Tyrrell were disqualified from the championship due to a controversial ruling on the legality of their water tanks. He undoubtedly showed he had the potential to succeed in F1, perhaps even become its first great German driver, but he died the following year in a crash during a sportscar race at Spa-Francorchamps. In an unfortunate coincidence, the driver he collided with was Ickx.

1984 Monaco Grand Prix result

Pos.	No.	Driver	Car	Laps	Time / gap / reason
1	7	Alain Prost	McLaren-TAG	31	1:01’07.740
2	19	Ayrton Senna	Toleman-Hart	31	7.446
3	28	Rene Arnoux	Ferrari	31	29.077
4	6	Keke Rosberg	Williams-Honda	31	35.246
5	11	Elio de Angelis	Lotus-Renault	31	44.439
6	27	Michele Alboreto	Ferrari	30	1 lap /0.664
7	24	Piercarlo Ghinzani	Osella-Alfa Romeo	30	1 lap /37.062
8	5	Jacques Laffite	Williams-Honda	30	1 lap /59.725
	4	Stefan Bellof	Tyrrell-Ford	31	Disqualified
	22	Riccardo Patrese	Alfa Romeo	24	Steering
	8	Niki Lauda	McLaren-TAG	23	Spun off
	14	Manfred Winkelhock	ATS-BMW	22	Spun off
	12	Nigel Mansell	Lotus-Renault	15	Spun off
	1	Nelson Piquet	Brabham-BMW	14	Electrical
	25	Francois Hesnault	Ligier-Renault	12	Electrical
	2	Corrado Fabi	Brabham-BMW	9	Electrical
	20	Johnny Cecotto	Toleman-Hart	1	Spun off
	16	Derek Warwick	Renault	0	Collision
	15	Patrick Tambay	Renault	0	Collision
	26	Andrea de Cesaris	Ligier-Renault	0	Accident

F1 history

• Magnussen is tenth F1 racer to receive a ban for a driving infringement
• F1 now has 13 race-winning drivers – but when were there more on the grid?
• Norris did as he was told but which other drivers obeyed – and disobeyed – their teams?
• Hamilton called his last race ‘one of his worst’ – but is it among his 10 poorest?
• “So emotional – very, very special”: Gasly drives Senna’s first Formula 1 car

Browse all history articles