Senna Makes Short Work of His Third Straight Detroit Grand Prix Win

The Detroit Grand Prix was run on a breezy, sunny Sunday before 60,903 spectators, but the race was really won on Friday.

That’s when Ayrton Senna won the pole for Sunday’s Formula One race through the streets of downtown Detroit. Once that was decided, for all intents and purposes, so was the race winner.

To be more charitable, perhaps the race was decided when Senna won the short dash with Ferrari driver Gerhard Berger from the starting line to the first turn. Once the swift Brazilian put his turbocharged Honda-powered McLaren in front, the parade began--and lasted nearly 2 hours before Senna took the checkered flag by 38 seconds over his McLaren teammate, two-time world champion Alain Prost of France.

The win was Senna’s third straight here and also his third this season.

Sunday’s Grand Prix was certainly one of the most boring automobile race that will be run in the United States this year, but it followed form.

In six Formula One races this year, Senna has won every pole position and one of the two red and white McLarens has led every lap of every race, a total of 397 laps. In the six races, there has been only one lead change when one car passed another--when Senna passed Prost to win last week in Montreal.

Prost won the other three Formula Ones this year and in each of the three races he failed to win, he finished second.

Senna was nearly a minute ahead of Prost and had lapped third-place finisher Thierry Boutsen of Belgium before he slowed dramatically because of poor track conditions.

“The beginning of the race was quite close, but the farther we went, the worse the track conditions became,” Senna said. “Towards the end, with the big advantage I had, I slowed up and ran as gently as possible for the last few laps. The surface was so slippery (from oil, rubber and crumbling asphalt) that I was locking front and rear brakes and the car still didn’t want to turn in the corners.”

Boutsen, in a Ford-powered Benetton, was the first driver to finish using a normally aspirated engine. Next season the turbocharged engines, such as the ones developed by Honda for the McLaren team at a cost estimated at $50 million, will be outlawed.

“I knew I couldn’t finish better than third before the race started, so I feel like I was first,” Boutsen said. “After the first 15 laps the track became so bad that it was impossible to race. Together with Dallas, it has to be the worst track I have ever driven.

“The track broke up so badly that if you went 10 centimeters (about 4 inches) off line your tires picked up dirt and gravel and it would take at least half a lap to clean them again. That made overtaking backmarkers (lapped cars) very precarious.”

Prost, whose second-place finish helped maintain his series lead over Senna, 45-33, did not change his attitude toward the 2.5-mile track with its 20 turns--10 of them 90 degree angles. He despises it.

“I am heartened by the news that this is the last time we will have to suffer this circuit,” he said. “As we knew all week, the track was in a dreadful state. As for catching Ayrton, I couldn’t touch him, and it was too dangerous to try.”

It was Prost’s best Detroit finish, however. He was third the last two years.

Each of Senna’s three wins here have been in different cars, in 1986 with a a Lotus-Renault, in 1987 with a Lotus-Honda and Sunday with the McLaren- Honda.

“I cannot say which of my Detroit wins was the most demanding,” the 28-year-old Brazilian said. “I know that this one appeared to be easy, but it was extremely tiring from a mental and physical point of view. Always, in the back of my mind, was to be careful. There was no opportunity to relax, even with the big margin. The walls were always there and there was no predicting what could happen with the track.”

When asked if he thought the McLaren dominance might be harmful for the future of Formula One, Senna smiled and said: “I don’t care.”

Which is probably a likely answer from a young man who receives in the vicinity of $5 million a year for driving a race car.

Only 8 of the 26 starters finished the 63 laps, or 157.5 miles.

The two turbocharged Ferraris, the only cars given any hope at all against the McLarens, went out early.

Berger, who started on the front row with Senna, lasted only six laps before a flat tire sent him skidding off course at Turn 12, right in front of Cobo Hall.

Michele Alboreto, who had pushed Prost back to fourth position on the starting grid, was running third in the other Ferrari when Benetton-Ford driver Alessandro Nannini gave him a bump and sent him spinning in Turn 10, at the intersection of Woodward Ave. and Jefferson Ave., two of Detroit’s main thoroughfares.

“I was not making a serious attempt to overtake Alboreto,” Nannini said. “I had been having a problem with locking front brakes and when Michele braked a little sooner than I expected, I ran into the back of him.”

Before Alboreto could get his car turned around and headed in the proper direction he was a lap down. He persevered, however, and seemed about to pull into sixth position late in the race--enough to gain season points--when he spun out and slid into the barrier at Turn 4.

Nelson Piquet, the defending world champion from Brazil, changed tires on his Lotus-Honda and crashed on his first lap after the change.

“When my first set of tires were new at the beginning of the race they were great,” Piquet said. “But eventually I couldn’t put the power down in a straight line without sliding. I put on a new set and started to push hard, but I went wide into the gravel and . . . bang.”

The two McLarens also pitted for tire changes, but both were so far ahead that they never lost their position. Senna’s stop was particularly quick, only 10.71 seconds.

After seven years of running in downtown Detroit, over manhole covers, train tracks and deteriorating surfaces, Mayor Coleman Young says that the Grand Prix will move next year to Belle Isle, a sylvan-like park on the Detroit river between Detroit and Canada.

It has to be an improvement. The downtown track was so narrow in places that cars had to go single-file during the parade lap--which, as it turned out, was the same way they ran all day.