In defence of Alain Prost

I, like most people who've seen it, consider the recent Senna film to be a triumph, for a number of reasons. But I do have one major criticism of the film: it is immensely harsh in its treatment of Ayrton Senna's chief rival, Alain Prost.

Credit: Mark McArdle

Prost is very much presented as the story's villain, with ex-ESPN commentator John Bisignano describing him as a driver who drove for safe points rather than wins, and used 'politics' to prevail in the sport.

I can understand why this is to an extent. The makers felt that the film had to have a coherent Hollywood-style narrative, complete with a protagonist and antagonist. But the problem is that their presentation Prost is rather jaundiced, and at the negative end of the possible interpretations of him as a man and driver.

I have always thought Prost curiously under sold as a driver generally (and this is coming from someone who spent most of his childhood hero-worshiping Ayrton Senna). This was the case long before the Senna film was even thought of - indeed some commented thus during his career as well as after it. I also always say that if I could buy shares in former F1 drivers I would buy shares in Alain Prost. I feel that his stock will surely only rise: there has to be a point where his driving genius receives the wider appreciation it deserves from history.

First of all, the numbers. In a F1 career that spanned 13 seasons Prost won four drivers' world championships. And he very easily could have won anything up to five further titles (1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1988 and 1990) but for factors for which he was not to blame denying him. You could also argue that Prost was the last driver to win a championship in not nearly the best car, which he undoubtedly achieved in beating the Williams-Hondas to the 1986 crown.

He claimed 51 Grand Prix wins, and 106 podiums finishes, from 202 starts. And all this was achieved in a time when cars weren't nearly as reliable as they are now, and Prost was invariably up against an all-star cast of contemporaries: Senna, Lauda, Rosberg, Mansell, Piquet among others (and of those, all but Piquet spent some time as Prost's team mate. No Schumi-style rear gunners here).

But of course statistics only mean so much. Which is just as well for Prost as there was so much to appreciate about him other than the numbers.

Prost, nicknamed 'the Professor', is commonly associated with calculation and consistency rather than spectacular racing, which is most probably what John Bisignano was referring to in part. It's less well-recorded that he was bloody quick as well, and that when called upon could go wheel to wheel with rivals as decisively and aggressively as anyone. As one Australian journalist said, Prost had the head of Stewart and the right foot of Villeneuve.

Credit: Stuart Seeger

If you doubt Prost's speed and bravery, try this quote from Niki Lauda for starters: 'In qualifying, particularly, you need that extra something, a mixture of enthusiasm and madness. Prost - six years my junior - was more capable of it than I was. At Monaco in particular, I couldn't believe how he went through traffic'.

And how about this from Keke Rosberg, widely considered to be F1's fastest and bravest driver for much of the 1980s, after going up against Prost as team mates at McLaren: 'He's the best I've ever known, no question about it. As an all-round race driver he's head and shoulders clear of anyone else (he's raced against), because he's brilliant in every department...and he's bloody quick, I can tell you'.

Prost's F1 career is strewn with attacking drives of the sort we'd more naturally associate with Gilles Villeneuve or Lewis Hamilton than with 'The Professor'. For example, in the South African Grand Prix of 1982 while he was leading just after half distance one of Prost's tyres punctured. A subsequent three-quarter lap on a shredded tyre and pit stop (lengthy as it was not part of the F1 drill in those days) left him in eighth place and a lap down. But he then got on with it, lapped routinely three seconds and more quicker than anyone else (including his team mate Rene Arnoux, now in the lead) and he regained first place with nine laps left - only 27 laps after his puncture - which he kept.

Then in the 1986 Belgian Grand Prix at the classic Spa track he was involved in someone else's accident at the first turn, which crumpled his front wing. A long delay in the crash, slow lap and a long stop to replace his nose left him way off the back of the field. He then proceeded to smash the lap record repeatedly, and never once touching his turbo boost, to claim the final point for sixth place. And he did this in a damaged car, his engine mountings bent and suspension damaged in the first corner contretemps. In the words of McLaren designer John Barnard: 'the thing was like a banana!'

Credit:  Lothar Spurzem

Then there was as similar performance in Suzuka the following year. This time it was an early puncture that delayed Prost, and it left him so far behind it took him 22 laps of a 53 lap race to even catch the next car ahead. But he again went fast for the sake of it, and made up almost an entire lap on winner Gerhard Berger (and set a fastest lap 1.7 seconds quicker than the next best by anyone else) to come seventh, just out of the points.

And there are many examples beyond these, such as plain beating team mate Senna for pace in Mexico, France and elsewhere in 1988, coming through the field to win from 13th on the grid in the Mexican race in 1990 and hauling an off-colour Williams in qualifying and the race to win in Barcelona in 1993. And then there's Imola the same year, when but one round after Senna's famous triumph in wet conditions at Donnington, Prost swarmed all over Senna's McLaren in the damp early stages of the race, before going on to win.

Indeed, in a race situation Prost was rarely lacking for pace. This much is demonstrated by his collection of 41 fastest race laps in his career, which was a record until Schumi hoovered that one (along with everything else) up.

Indeed, the man himself never concurred with the 'cruise and collect' persona that continues to be attributed to him. After winning his first title, in 1985, Prost commented: '...the last two races I haven't really enjoyed, to be honest. Driving "tactical" races is not what I like to do...I can race in Kyalami and Adelaide (the last two races of the season) now, and feel I can just go for it, which is much more natural to me'. And in a line that could have been in response to Bisignano, on tactical races he said: 'Everyone - Keke (Rosberg), Piquet, has driven this kind of race in the circumstances'.

And while Prost is often viewed as having been something of a 'wimp', in fact he was rarely faint of heart in on track battles. He after all did not flinch when Senna tried to drive him into the pitwall at 200mph in Estoril in 1988. Two years earlier, this time at Montreal, and up against the same rival, Prost showed similar nerve. There once featured a fast right-left-right sweep on the track layout there, with forbidding walls very close by (there's now a straight instead). Prost, having sought for many laps to pass an unaccommodating Senna, nosed ahead there, and decisively claimed the racing line, causing Senna to lift from the throttle and jink his car half onto the grass, and thus cede the place.



So, with all of this in place, you may ask why Prost continues to be under rated by posterity? In my view part of the reason may be related to the way that Prost went about his business, on and off the track.

In both cases there was none of the dramatic legend, continuous confrontation and altercation and mystical charisma that charcaterised Senna's existence, and his posthumous mythology, for the most part. Prost, unlike Senna (as well as unlike Mansell and others), tended to generally go about his business with a lack of fuss, certainly when it came to the racing.

Prost's appearance also, somehow, emphasised this difference. Prost was physically short in height, had thick curly hair, a crooked nose and often rather downbeat attire and a complete lack of pretension and self-promotion. Certainly to look at him it was hard to see an archetypal international superstar. He was never the romantic and charismatic hero that Senna was. And Prost's willingness to speak frankly on various issues, which often included the FIA's and his own team's shortcomings, led him to be viewed by many as something of a 'whinger' (this was a charge Senna often sought to pin on him). And for some reason a major part of Senna's (in my view, deserved) passing into folklore has been to trash his rival Prost's reputation at the same time. Unfair, and also unnecessary, in my book.

And on track Prost never looked quick. But rather than being seen as a weakness it should be seen as a major part of Prost's genius.

Nigel Roebuck once commented: 'Probably no one ever made the driving of a Grand Prix car look as easy as Alain did. He was quite uncannily smooth. I remember watching qualifying at Monaco one year with Denis Jenkinson, and we talked about who was going to be on pole. There were various possibilities – and then suddenly they announced that Prost had just shattered the previous best time. "Now where the hell did that come from?" said Jenks. "Didn’t even notice he was out…"'

Something similar happened in 1986 at the same venue. Prost took pole and won easily, but anyone in attendance without a stop watch to hand could have reasonably assumed that Prost was the slowest guy out there. As everyone else rubbed barriers and smashed kerbs Prost, far ahead, looked unhurried and completely smooth and precise. As Jackie Stewart said 'To some, that's boring; to me, it's artistry - and so much more difficult that just throwing a car about'.

Nigel Mansell, having observed Prost at close quarters as his team mate (and was usually far behind on track) once rather contemptuously described Prost a 'chauffeur', in the sense that he let his car do the work. Prost's response was slightly incredulous, pointing out that this was the object of the exercise. But in a sense Mansell may have been onto something: it's possibly harder to for those watching on to appreciate a driver whose hard work is done in an unglamourous test session, or in private session with their engineers, rather than by throwing the car around and pulling off spectacular overtakes. But Alain Prost is right, set-up and car development is all part of the game.

Credit:  Stuart Seeger

Another former team mate, Eddie Cheever, certainly agrees with him: 'If you had a good race, the next weekend it would be hell, because he’d (Prost) have made sure that he took a further step forward, and it was hard to keep pace with him. He never did anything in an underhand way, I must say. I never in my life came across anyone as detail-orientated as Prost was. He just went about his job – he was like a little general.

'Alain was a genius when it came to set-up, and I only started really to appreciate that when I drove at Indy the first two or three times. If the car wasn’t handling well, you just had to hold on, and then start working towards a set-up goal at the end of the stint. That was when I started to learn a little bit about how Prost did it – he was just phenomenal'.

There was also a lack of fuss and rancour about Prost's progress on a Sunday. Instead, his progress up the lap charts was somehow quiet, but no less inexorable for that. Patrick Head summed it up: 'Very often we'd be way ahead of him at first, and think, "Where the hell's Alain?" He'd qualify third or fourth, make a slow start, and you'd think, "Great, he's ninth or whatever, that's him out the way." Then you'd see that he was sixth, fifth, fourth, third, and you'd think, "Oooh, shit!" That was very much him wasn't it? That inexorable quality'.

The overtaking moves themselves had a similar quality, almost never did he lock up, bang wheels, or elbow his way past, passes were always clean. This was painted best by Rob Walker: 'Prost's overtaking manoeuvres were graceful in themselves, weren't they? So graceful and sure, almost like ballet'.

Prost's reputation is also perhaps not helped by the fact he tended to hide his light a lot of the time. I read a story in this excellent article on Prost by Peter Dick about Prost's early days at the Winfield racing school at Paul Ricard, which somehow sums Prost up. Prost initially looked of about average talent and pace compared with the other drivers at the school, but then one day when it rained the instructors noticed he was braking at the end of the straight at the same point as he had in the dry, and then in the final Prost suddenly blew his rivals away easily. It seems that before the final he'd deliberately been pacing himself to those around him, and then destroyed them at the precise point they'd be least equipped to deal with it. And all this brain power and discipline was already on display from a driver just starting out.

It was to be the shape of things to come. Prost's ability to think through a weekend was unrivaled throughout his career, and possibly so in the history of F1. Again this should be seen as a strength rather than a weakness. Like Fangio, Stewart and others before him, Prost was a disciple of winning at the lowest possible speed, saving himself and his car as much as possible. Perhaps in the strange world of F1 this visible lack of drama has led to him being under rated rather than treasured.

But surely The Professor's prodigious use of his loaf should be celebrated? There are some classic examples of him out foxing opponents with considerable elan. At Monza in 1988, a year that he and Senna dominated in their McLaren-Hondas, with his championship hopes hanging by a thread he discovered early on, while running second to Senna, that his engine wasn't going to last the distance. So he cranked up the turbo boost, thus putting his fuel consumption well into the 'red', hoping that Senna would do the same. Senna indeed took the bait, and after Prost retired he had to tail off his pace disastrously in order to finish. As the Ferraris closed in, Senna tripped over a backmarker on the penultimate lap, putting him out, and keeping Prost in championship contention. Then at the next meeting, at Estoril in Portugal, Prost was the quicker of the two McLarens in qualifying. And part way into the final session he unclipped his belts, left his car and soon after conspicuously appeared in the McLaren garage dressed in his civvies, hanging around nonchalantly. This had the desired effect on his team mate, who became increasingly desperate in his attempts to beat Prost's benchmark, and went slower and slower as a result.

And another reason we should admire Alain Prost is that, not unimportant in my book, his on track conduct Prost was as clean as they come. In an age when on track ethics took a conspicuous dive, Prost resolutely stuck to his principled standards. Yes, it's probable he knew what he was doing in the collision with Senna at Suzuka in 1989, but I for one can forgive him one aberration over a long career.

It's also ironic that it's commonly thought that Prost was close to FISA President Jean-Marie Balestre, and that as such 'politics' assisted him throughout his career, as claimed by Bisignano. For the most part the two didn't see eye to eye particularly, mainly because of Prost's tendency to speak out with frankness on his perceptions of the shortcomings of the powers that be.

In my view, the persona that Alain Prost has had developed for him, both during his career and subsequently, is ill-fitting. Yes, Prost had strengths in calculation and in avoiding brute force, but it should also be appreciated that he was as quick as they come and one hell of a racer. And his breathtaking smoothness, ability to set a car up, and the inexorable nature of his race progress are facets that should be marveled at rather than seen as reasons to discredit him. He is surely one of the most impressive performers behind the wheel of a racing car that the world has ever seen. It's about time for an Alain Prost reappraisal.