Formula 1

About the season

The McLaren-Honda MP4/4 won 15 of the season's 16 races through Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, missing out only at Monza, largely due to a mistake of its own driver's making. At Monaco, Senna produced a pole lap 1.427 seconds faster than teammate Prost, later describing the experience as driving through a "tunnel," beyond his conscious limits. In that same Monaco race, Senna was leading by more than fifty seconds when he clipped the barrier at the tunnel entrance, climbed out of the car, and walked home without returning to the pits that day. The season was also the last of the 1.5-litre turbo formula before regulators banned forced induction altogether from 1989. Senna won his first World Championship despite scoring fewer points overall than Prost, because the rules only counted each driver's best results of the season. Ayrton Senna won the 1988 Drivers' Championship with 90 points (McLaren), 3 points ahead of the runner-up. McLaren won the Constructors' Championship with 199 points, 134 points ahead of the runner-up. Across 16 completed races this season, there were 215 retirements. 3 different drivers won a race this season. Ayrton Senna took the most race wins, 8 in total. Prost won the season-opening race, the Brazilian Grand Prix. Tarquini made the biggest gain of the season at the Canadian Grand Prix, from grid position 26 to finishing 8 (up 18 places). The most dominant win of the season came at the Detroit Grand Prix, with a margin of 38.7 seconds. The Detroit Grand Prix saw the most retirements of the season, with 19 drivers failing to finish. The closest finish of the season came at the Italian Grand Prix, with a gap of just 0.502 seconds. Prost won the Australian Grand Prix, the final race of the season.