1989 Australian Grand Prix

The 1989 Australian Grand Prix was a Formula One motor race held at Adelaide on 5 November 1989. It was the sixteenth and final race of the 1989 Formula One World Championship.

The race took place in wet conditions, with only 70 of the scheduled 81 laps run before the two-hour time limit was reached. It was stopped and restarted following a first-lap collision, with Frenchman Alain Prost declining to take the restart in his McLaren- Honda. Prost's Brazilian teammate, Ayrton Senna, started from pole position and led the first 13 laps before colliding with the Brabham- Judd of Briton Martin Brundle, after which Belgian Thierry Boutsen led the remainder of the race in his Williams- Renault. Boutsen won by 28 seconds from Italian Alessandro Nannini in a Benetton-Ford, with another Italian, Riccardo Patrese, third in the other Williams-Renault.

This was the final Formula One race for Frenchman René Arnoux, American Eddie Cheever and Italian Piercarlo Ghinzani, and the final race entered by Briton Jonathan Palmer, who failed to qualify. It was also the final race entered by the German Zakspeed and Rial teams.

Background

The race weekend saw continuing fallout from the events in Japan two weeks previously, where the McLaren- Hondas of Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna had taken each other out in their battle for the race lead and the World Championship with seven laps remaining. A post-race disqualification to Senna for cutting the chicane to return to the circuit saw Prost confirmed as a triple World Champion and Senna was unhappy with the sport's governing body, the Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile (FISA), and in particular its French president Jean-Marie Balestre whom he accused of rigging the championship for his countryman. Senna initially threatened to boycott the event and leave Formula One altogether. However, after lengthy talks with his family and McLaren boss Ron Dennis, he reluctantly showed up at Adelaide and immediately set the pace on Friday. Prost was determined to go out on a high note in his last Grand Prix for McLaren before joining Ferrari.

McLaren were appealing Senna's Japanese Grand Prix disqualification. Ron Dennis said in a press conference that the appeal was not motivated against Prost (who was leaving the team) winning the championship, but simply that the team believed it had unjustly lost a race win, including the prize money as well as sponsorship bonuses from team backers such as Marlboro. This meant that if Senna won in Adelaide he could still be declared champion if his disqualification from Japan was overturned. In a hearing in Paris the week after Japan, FISA had also labeled Senna as a 'dangerous driver' (citing a number of incidents involving the World Champion) and gave him a six-month suspended sentence, a decision that was met with criticism from many in the F1 paddock, including rival team bosses such as Ken Tyrrell. Most agreed the collision between the McLarens, while the culmination of the growing hostility between Prost and Senna that had been building since Imola, was nothing more than a racing incident and that Senna was being harshly punished by the governing body of the sport. Dennis also claimed that the charges and subsequent Paris hearing against Senna were farcical and that the stewards report of the incident had been "badly changed" from the initial one given in Japan.

In other news, after pre-qualifying his car on the Thursday, Piercarlo Ghinzani announced his retirement from Formula One after 76 races. Ghinzani qualified 21st for his final Grand Prix. He had taken one points finish in his Formula One career, when he finished 5th at the 1984 Dallas Grand Prix for Osella. At the drivers meeting before the race Ligier driver René Arnoux also announced his retirement from Formula One racing, at the age of 41. He qualified 26th and last for what would be his 149th start in Grand Prix racing having begun his career in .

Qualifying

Pre-qualifying report

In his last appearance for the Osella team, Nicola Larini was fastest in pre-qualifying for the third Grand Prix in succession, and his team-mate Piercarlo Ghinzani pre-qualified third fastest in his final Formula One event. Both Osellas lapped inside the lap record. Philippe Alliot was second fastest in the Larrousse-Lola, with the Onyx of JJ Lehto in fourth, edging out his team-mate Stefan Johansson by just under a tenth of a second. It was Johansson's eighth pre-qualifying failure of the season.

Sixth was the other Lola of Michele Alboreto, who had failed to qualify for any of the last three races of the season. Both Alliot and Alboreto left the team at the end of the season. Bernd Schneider was seventh in the Zakspeed, his fourteenth failure to pre-qualify in 1989. Roberto Moreno was eighth in his last appearance for Coloni, with Oscar Larrauri ninth for EuroBrun in his last Formula One event. Aguri Suzuki was tenth in the other Zakspeed, having failed to pre-qualify in any of the sixteen Grands Prix this season, and Zakspeed elected to pull out of Formula One at the end of the year. The AGS team struggled again with Yannick Dalmas eleventh and Gabriele Tarquini twelfth, although both drivers were staying with the team for 1990. Bringing up the rear, as he did in all six of the pre-qualifying sessions in which he participated this season, was Enrico Bertaggia in the other Coloni, who like his team-mate Moreno, left the Italian team at the end of the season.

Pre-qualifying classification

Qualifying report

Friday qualifying saw Prost pip Senna to pole, with Thierry Boutsen less than a tenth of a second behind Senna in third. Pierluigi Martini also continued his late season qualifying form with fourth in his Pirelli-shod Minardi. 4th–9th were filled with Italians with Japanese Grand Prix winner Alessandro Nannini fifth, Riccardo Patrese sixth, Stefano Modena seventh, followed by the two Dallaras of Andrea de Cesaris ahead of his teammate Alex Caffi. British driver Martin Brundle was 10th. Ferrari were struggling, with Berger 11th in his last race for the team before joining McLaren, and Nigel Mansell in 16th, neither driver able to find handling balance with their V12 Ferrari 640s.

Saturday was cooler, and Senna set a time below 1:17s, to take pole overall for the race. Prost did not improve and settled for 2nd, while Martini beat Nannini to third by just one tenth. The two Williams- Renaults were fifth and sixth with both drivers complaining of traffic on their runs, while Nigel Mansell was doing much better to qualify seventh going a second faster than he did on Friday while Berger fell to 14th. Berger was unable to better his Friday time as his car experienced engine failure on the track. He was forced to use Mansell's race car for his qualifying run which was halted when the on-board fire extinguisher was triggered (Berger could not use the spare Ferrari as it reportedly had a development engine planned for 1990 and it was strictly for Mansell's use only). The Dallaras were 9th and 10th on the grid with Nicola Larini in the Osella in his (and the team's) highest qualifying result in 11th.

Only 24 seconds before the end of the final qualifying session, Eddie Cheever in his Arrows-Ford caused the red flag to be shown when he heavily crashed his car at the entrance to the pit straight directly opposite the pits. Television broadcasts showed a driver's eye view of the accident, as the Arrows of Cheever and Derek Warwick were carrying forward-facing cameras for the weekend. Coming out of the final hairpin onto pit straight, Cheever ran wide over the curbing and hit the concrete wall that protected the grandstand from the cars, severely damaging the left front and rear of the car and leaving a large pool of oil on the racing surface as the car came to rest lying across the middle of the track. Cheever himself was unharmed; after he threw his steering wheel away in disgust he climbed from the car, ran across the track and jumped the wall into the pits.

The four that failed to qualify were Jonathan Palmer in his Tyrrell, in what proved to be his last Grand Prix before becoming a pit lane reporter for the BBC
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