Looking back: the Austrian Grand Prix of 1986

Now 30 years on we presumably can expect a few retro features. There is a consensus that the 1986 F1 season is an all-time classic, and it brings many familiar things to mind to even the fan who was not around at the time to witness it.

This includes not least its extraordinary finale, encapsulated by the oft-repeated footage of Nigel Mansell's exploding Goodyear - the vast shower of sparks and all - on Adelaide's Brabham Straight which helped Alain Prost to a long shot drivers' championship. A title that, still three decades on, is arguably the last claimed not in the best car. Whatever, it was an achievement about as extraordinary for The Professor as the finale that delivered it.

The McLaren team, seen here at Brands Hatch,
was one of the major players in 1986
"McLaren pit 1986 Britain" by Phil - mclaren in
brands hatch pits. Licensed under CC BY 2.0
via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:McLaren_pit_1986_
Britain.jpg#/media/File:McLaren_pit_1986_Britain.jpg

It's also viewed more broadly as a golden age: rip-snorting turbos and a stellar cast of drivers to tame them. Mansell and Prost we've mentioned, but you can add to it Nelson Piquet and a young Ayrton Senna. It also was a season with a strict in-race fuel limit and many resultant economy runs - some comical last gasps of races too as various cars ran dry - but best not spoil the moment.

One could argue also that competitiveness or variation at the front beyond these names weren't the season's strongest boasts either. That year many spoke of a 'Gang of Five' with Prost's McLaren team mate Keke Rosberg variously added to the quartet mentioned, though perhaps 'Gang of Four' would have been more fitting as Rosberg was the least regular presence among them at the sharp end by a way. Almost never would anyone else beyond this five get a look-in. Yet in among the 1986 rounds was an extraordinary outlying weekend on this front. That in Austria.

Even compared with the later round in Mexico where alone that year one of the usual suspects didn't win, even compared with that finale in Adelaide, this was the weekend of the season that really turned the order onto its head. Though you wouldn't necessarily know it from the result, which in its victor at least looked slightly ordinary. Perhaps that's therefore led to it being forgotten. And a winner whom you'd have got long odds on at the weekend's outset was denied, cruelly, as well as by an unlikely (perhaps absurd) source. Someone would have to remember to purchase a new car battery

Jules Quest

Rewind to last Saturday afternoon, and the first part of Hungary's qualifying session. Lewis Hamilton was out; Pastor Maldonado was out - both victims of technical maladies ending their sessions before setting a time. The remaining four of the six drop-out slots would therefore surely be taken by the 'B class' of two Marussias and Caterhams each, given they appeared way off the back of the pack as usual. This even with the soft tyre looking much quicker than the medium that all of the haughty A class had set their times on. Cool your jets in the garage and save the softs for the next part.

Jules Bianchi's Hungary qualifying lap was stunning
Photo: Octane Photography

But there was a tiny flaw in these best laid plans. That flaw being they reckoned without Jules Bianchi. At the very last he put his Marussia on its end and grabbed the final spot to get into Q2 of P16 all for himself. Further it was the revered scalp of Ferrari and Kimi Raikkonen - straggling at the back of the A class - that was bagged.

We can criticise Ferrari for a misjudgement - and indeed plenty have - which gave Bianchi his opportunity to pip one of its cars, but looking at the lap times one can begin to see perhaps why the squad's supposedly very clever people were caught out. Put simply the prodigious Frenchman pulled a rabbit out of the hat.

Looking back: F1's first visit to Suzuka

Next weekend the F1 circus visits Suzuka for this season's Japanese Grand Prix - a track that all true fans of F1 eagerly anticipate seeing the cars on.

Such is the classic and challenging nature of Suzuka's fast sweeps, and its lack of modern sterility, it's easy to assume that the likes of Moss, Clark and Lauda pounded round the circuit in years past. In fact, the track was only used as a World Championship venue for the first time in 1987.

Indeed, the date of the track's opening stretches even further back - to 1962 (no gleaming new Tilke facility being brought onto the calendar here). It was designed by John Hugenholtz, who also gave Zandvoort to the world (he designed Jarama, Nivelles and Zolder as well - but for the sake of the point I'll ignore those!). But despite the staging of a couple of 'Japanese GPs' in its early years, Suzuka remained criminally undiscovered by much of international motor racing for the first quarter century of its existence.

The history of bringing an F1 race to Japan was equally haphazard. The track at Fuji, who were always more proactive than Suzuka in bringing international motorsport to Japan, held the first two F1 World Championship events in the country in 1976 and 1977. The first visit has gone down in folklore as the scene of James Hunt and Niki Lauda's championship showdown, held initially in monsoon conditions that resulted in Lauda quitting a couple of laps in on safety (or sanity) grounds. This left Hunt to dramatically claim the crown by taking third, having to pass cars frantically in the late laps, after a pit stop to replace a blown tyre.