Stop the Race: The Day Senna Was Robbed of Immortality

Even those who were not there remember it. The footage exists — grainy, rain-flecked, shot from the barriers and from helicopters hovering in the mist — and it remains among the most mesmerising images in motor racing history. A white and green Toleman threading through the Monaco streets in a downpour, impossibly fast for the conditions, impossibly close to the barriers, closing on the red and white McLaren of Alain Prost at a rate that seemed to defy physics. Ayrton Senna, 24 years old, in just his second season of Formula 1, was about to win the Monaco Grand Prix.

Then the race stopped.

The rain had begun falling around the second lap, building gradually and then dramatically as the cars completed each circuit of the tightest, most unforgiving track in the world. Prost, twice a Monaco winner and famously sensitive to conditions, had led from pole position but as the standing water deepened through the tunnel exit and across the swimming pool section, his Michelin tyres began to struggle. Senna's Toleman, fitted with Pirelli rubber, was on a different level entirely in the wet.

Senna was catching at nearly three seconds per lap. By lap 31, he had closed from almost a minute behind to just over seven seconds. The gap was narrowing visibly, measurably, inexorably. The commentary teams around the world were framing his advance in increasingly incredulous terms. Prost could see in his mirrors what the whole watching world could see: a man absolutely in his element.

On lap 31 of the scheduled 77, the race director — Jacky Ickx, the former racing driver — showed the red flag. The official justification was the safety of the competitors. The result was declared at the end of the previous completed lap, lap 31, where Prost was still ahead. Senna's Toleman, which had been behind Prost at the moment the red flag was shown but had been registered ahead by some timings by that point, was classified second. Stefan Bellof of Tyrrell, himself making an extraordinary charge through the field in the conditions, was classified third on the road. To many observers — and to Senna himself, whose composure barely concealed his fury — the race had been halted at the exact moment required to prevent him winning. The controversy has never fully resolved.

Alain Prost was declared the winner in his McLaren-TAG Turbo, his third Monaco victory. He had led from the start and was, until Senna's charge began, entirely in control. Ayrton Senna, whose Toleman TG184-Hart had been visibly, demonstrably faster in the worsening conditions, was classified second — arguably the most famous second-place finish in the sport's history. Stefan Bellof of Tyrrell completed the podium in third, though his team's results would later be struck from the championship record due to a separate technical infringement matter.

The victory added to Prost's championship points tally in a season where he and teammate Niki Lauda were dominant in the McLaren. But it is Senna's race — a race he didn't win — that every serious student of Formula 1 returns to when they want to understand what the Brazilian was and what he would become.

The 1984 season belonged to McLaren with a totality that had rarely been seen. The team won 12 of 16 races, and the championship came down to a straight fight between Alain Prost and Niki Lauda — who had been retired and then persuaded back into the cockpit by McLaren boss Ron Dennis. Prost won more races; Lauda won the championship, by half a point, at the final round in Portugal. That half-point winning margin remains the smallest in history.

Senna, meanwhile, was not in the title fight but was making his presence felt race by race. His drives in the Toleman — a car with no realistic chance of winning on merit — announced his arrival to anyone still uncertain about what he would become. Monaco 1984 was the definitive moment of that announcement. It changed nothing in the standings and everything in the sport's understanding of who Senna was.

June 1984 was the fortieth anniversary month of the D-Day landings, commemorated with ceremonies in Normandy attended by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and other world leaders. The Cold War was acute: the Los Angeles Olympics that summer were boycotted by the Soviet bloc in retaliation for the American boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980, ensuring the Games would be politically incomplete. In the paddock at Monaco — among the grand hotels and the superyachts in the harbour — the talk was of computers, of turbo engines, of the extraordinary technical sophistication of a sport entering a new era.

Monaco itself was, as it has always been, a place apart: a principality of approximately 30,000 people whose economy was built on finance, luxury and the annual glamour of the grand prix. For one weekend in June each year the streets became a circuit, and the circuit became a stage on which reputations were made and broken. In 1984, one reputation in particular was made — definitively, indelibly — by a young Brazilian driver in a car that finished second.

Dry at the start, with rain beginning around lap 2 and intensifying steadily thereafter. By the time of the red flag, the circuit was severely compromised with standing water through the tunnel exit, around the harbour chicane and through the swimming pool section. Track temperatures dropped sharply as the rain intensified. The conditions were genuinely dangerous, giving some retrospective credence to the decision to stop the race — though the timing of that decision, and its coincidence with Senna's imminent pass of Prost, has never been satisfactorily explained.