MONACO · JUNE 1984 · THE RED FLAG RACE
1984 Monaco Grand Prix
THE STORY
Senna was closing at three seconds a lap. The race director had seen enough.
Gary — 33 · Three Fantasy F1 leagues
Right, the numbers. Senna was closing at 2.8 seconds per lap on average over the preceding five laps. The McLaren was 4.9 seconds ahead when the red flag came out. Basic arithmetic says Senna overtakes on lap 33 — two laps after the race was stopped. That's not speculation. That's a straight line on a graph.
The championship damage: Prost gained 9 points, Senna gained 6. If Senna wins: Prost gets 6, Senna gets 9. Three-point swing in the title fight — which Prost ultimately won by 4.5 points. The red flag is the most consequential non-racing decision in F1 championship history, and I can model it to two decimal places. The models have never forgiven Monaco.
Kat — 30 · Technical journalist
What people miss about 1984 Monaco is the tyre story. Senna was on Michelins; Prost was on Goodyears. In those specific wet conditions, the Michelin wet compound generated heat more efficiently — and heat in a tyre is grip, and grip is everything in Monaco in the rain. Senna's charge wasn't mystical. It had a technical basis. His Toleman was just eating its tyres correctly.
The Hart 415T turbo was actually better than people remember in the wet. It had torquier low-end characteristics than the TAG-Porsche, which helped Senna modulate traction out of the hairpin. He wasn't driving faster than the car was capable of — he was driving the car exactly at the limit of what was physically possible. The tragedy is we'll never know whether the lap times would have held. The red flag took that answer away from us.
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