The story of the McLaren-Honda MP4/4 #Blogpost

10 Apr 2017

When you think of McLaren-Honda in modern F1 you think of slow cars who brake down after 10 laps and a frustrated Spaniard who shouts “GP2 engine” and keeps making sarcastic remarks. But it hasn’t always been like this.

The McLaren-Honda MP4/4 was a car that competed in the 1988 FIA Formula One Worldchampionship. The car was designed by Steve Nichols and driven by Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost.
The Honda powered MP4/4 was one of the most dominant F1 cars ever made. Winning all but one race and claiming all but but one pole position.
The car has won 93.8% of all the races it competed in, with the closest any other car has come was in 2016 when Mercedes won 19 out of 21 races (90.5%)

History

1987 was quite a disappointing season for the team. Their TAG powered car with a power output of approximately 800bhp lost out nine times over the course of the season to the dominant Honda powered Williams of Nelson Piquet and Nigel Mansell. And was beaten a further four times by Senna (Lotus) and Berger (Ferrari). Reining Champion and McLaren driver Alain Prost could only manage three wins and ended up fourth in the final standings.
For the 1988 season McLaren switched to 1.5L V6 turbo engines from Honda.

Performance

The car turned out to be pretty much unbeatable, winning 15 out of 16 races and often lapping almost the entire field. The only race the team didn’t win was the Italian Grand Prix where both cars retired, though Senna did get classified since he retired with only two laps remaining.
The race was won by the Ferrari of Gerhard Berger. This race was the first race after the death of Enzo Ferrari.
The car also took ten 1-2 finishes and 15 pole positions, 13 of them being for Senna.

Perhaps the most telling example of the MP4/4’s domination came at the second round in San Marino. Where both the McLaren qualified in the 1:27s (Senna 0.7 faster than Prost) with no other driver managing to get below 1:30. Third place Nelson Piquet in his Lotus 100T could only manage a 1:30.500, 3.352 seconds slower than Senna.
During that race Senna and Prost managed to lap the entire field including third place Nelson Piquet.