This car is the most successful Formula One car to date. In 1988, in the hands of Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna, it won 15 out of 16 races. The only race it did not win was the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. Senna had been comfortably leading the race up to the point where he had to lap the slower Williams of Jean-Louis Schlesser (who was standing in for an injured Nigel Mansell). Some say Senna misjudged his passing manoeuver or that Schlesser was too enthusiastic in getting out of Senna's way, and instead hit Senna. Either way they collided and Senna was out of the race. Prost had retired earlier, so the race was won by Gerhard Berger, with Michele Alboreto second, giving Ferrari an historic 1-2. The timing could not have been better for Ferrari, as Enzo Ferrari had died just weeks earlier, and team morale was low. Most Italian Ferrari fans believed that Enzo himself acted by divine intervention to sweep the Williams into the path of Senna to give Ferrari it's only win of the year! An interesting postscript to this race was that McLaren bosses Ron Dennis and Mansour Ojjeh along with chief designer Gordon Murray, discussed the idea of building the ultimate road going sports car to raise McLaren's profile, while waiting for their flight home from Italy. The result of this informal discussion was the McLaren F1.
Senna went on to win the championship ahead of Prost, despite Prost having scored more points. Under the scoring system in 1988, a driver had to drop some of his worst results from his score, and as Senna had more wins that year than Prost, he came out on top. Naturally Prost was not happy about this, especially as the points system was later changed. Under todays points system, Prost would have been champion, not Senna.
The reason this car was so dominant was due to a combination of an excellent chassis (designed by Gordon Murray) and a superb 1.5 litre turbocharged Honda engine. While the car was excellent, the engine was what made it unbeatable. 1988 was the last year that turbocharging was allowed in F1, and all the other teams decided either to develop their old turbo engines for use in this final turbo season, or to switch to the new 3.5 litre normally aspirated engines which were to become the standard for 1989. The rules for this hybrid season were drawn up to handicap turbo cars by severely restricting the amount of fuel they could use in a race (thereby negating their power advantage over the non-turbo cars, which had an unlimited fuel allowance), meaning most turbo cars had to run at very low boost pressures to ensure they could make the end of the race. Honda decided to develop an all new version of their already highly successful turbo engine, even though it could only be used for one season. This new engine was incredibly fuel efficient, allowing the McLaren's to run at higher boost pressures (hence more power) than the Ferrari's. The Ferrari engine was potentially as powerful as the Honda engine, but not nearly as fuel efficient. Consequently the Ferrari's ran at a lower boost pressure, and were left behind.
This model is one of many F1 cars made by Minichamps. It is part of the Ayrton Senna collection, which to date (Feb 2004) includes most of his Formula 1 cars, including several Lotus, McLaren cars, and his unfortunate Williams-Renault FW16 the car he died in). On this model there is no engine detail (the engine cover is not removable), but there is a driver figure representing Senna, and the finish of the model is generally good. As with all of their F1 cars, Minichamps does not put any tobacco advertising on this car. Instead of "Marlboro", the engine cover has a "barcode" type logo in place, (which is actually how the car appeared for the British and German Grand Prix), to get around local bans on tobacco advertising on TV. The wheels and tires look good and there is reasonable brake detail (although the callipers are fixed to the discs and do not rotate with the wheels). The decals used are only ok, in particular some of them on the rear wing are a bit rough at the edges. Overall only 5/10 from me, mostly due to the total lack of engine detail, and less than perfect paint and decals.
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