The Monaco Grand Prix
And yet... while the race is the world's fastest parade, the sight of Formula 1 cars scrabbling through the narrow confines of the barriers, bucking and weaving over the bumps and cambers, washing shockwaves of noise over the buildings, is unique and something special in a homogenized world. The streets may be lined with empty tower blocks and designer handbag stores, but they are real roads with manholes, drains, white lines and a crown. Unlike so many other motor racing 'venues' - where the objective is to drive around a smooth and wide circuit faster than the others - the streets of Monaco themselves are also the adversary. The narrow toboggan run of high steel barriers leaves no room for error. In a world of huge tarmac paved run off areas and energy absorbing barriers this is a true challenge of speed and concentration the likes of which has mostly gone now from the Grand Prix calendar.
Back when racing cars still had soft springy suspension and thin tall tyres the Monaco Grand Prix was slow and tight, but in its fundamentals quite similar to several other races. It has always been a short lap, but then Monaco is a very small place. Starting by the harbour, right through Saint Devote climbing the hill to the Casino, a quick flick left and right over the crest, turning right around the casino garden at Mirabeau and then left at the hairpin. Once the Station hairpin, then most well known as the Loews hairpin, before going through sporadic renames as the hotel changed ownership. After by far the tightest corner in racing the road goes dropping through another two rights down to the waterfront again at Portier before running down the esplanade and back to the harbour. After Portier is where the famous tunnel makes an appearance - the only such feature on a current GP circuit if we don't count the crossover at Suzuka and the side-switching pit exit at Abu Dhabi. Originally a brief affair on the corner, building works in the 1970s turned it into a long curved underpass. Once a very dark place to negotiate at close to 150 mph, more and more lights have been added over the years, though less can be done about the lingering spray on the surface if it's wet. (While commentators have noted that "its dry in the tunnel", at high speeds this isn't always practically true). Until the 1990s photographers and other personnel could be seen traversing the pavement behind the barrier but nowadays the road is all fenced-in.
The corners are mostly slow, but the constant trips up and down the gearbox ensured that the driver rarely had two hands on the wheel for long. The chicane on the waterfront was once a white knuckle quick flick left and right and the fast left at the Tabac shop afterwards remains probably the most demanding corner, and the most likely to be overcooked by the driver. After Tabac the layout once ran straight to the final 180 at the hairpin, a half decent overtaking spot by Monaco standards. But the need for a proper pit road in the early 1970s put paid to that. The old track became the pits and the circuit rerouted around the lower road on the harbour. This road winds left-right-right-left around an open air swimming pool and the Rascasse restaurant, all in all the alterations adding six extra corners to the already tight path. When the semi-automatic paddle gearshift first appeared in 1989, after the wide tyres, wings and huge power boosts, it was all-but Game Over for the chances of overtaking at Monaco. The missed gearshift was just about the only way past a car in front. Nelson Piquet likened threading the six foot wide late 1980s F1 car around the Principality to riding a bicycle around the bathroom. Even the bicycle races would find it tight.
The popular imagination, especially for the Northern Europeans, imagines the Riveira basking under constant sunshine from Spring to Autumn. The drizzly late May reality has livened up many Monaco GP, as the close proximity of barriers and a wet road are frequently a terminal combination for many favourites. The underdog often slips through on such occasions. None more spectacularly than in 1996 when four fifths of the field never saw the chequered flag after two hours of carnage, breakdowns and embarrassing gaffes. The last was dominated by figure of Michael Schumacher, world champion for the previous two years, on his Monaco debut for Ferrari sliding wide into the barrier on the short chute to the seafront having completed half a lap. Worse, he had started from a brilliant pole position in a Ferrari that was not the best car on the grid. Damon Hill in the Williams led for much of the race before his engine failed, handing the lead to Jean Alesi, still with but one victory to his name six years after first leading a race. Six years after Alesi had taken full advantage of another, very different, street circuit, in Phoenix, Arizona, and led the early stages in his Tyrrell before finally succumbing to the inevitable advance of Senna. The unpredictability of street racing was then highlighted as Alesi then proceeded to re-pass the complacent Brazilian and lead another glorious lap before being put away for good. Now, in 1996 a big prize was coming the way of Alesi, when all but inevitably his Benetton' s suspension broke.
So who would win? The other Benetton of Berger was out already with a broken gearbox. Barrichello in the Jordan started 6th but also spun on the first lap. Frentzen in the Sauber would have been there to pick up the pieces, if he hadn't knocked his wing off trying to overtake the other Ferrari of Irvine. The other Williams of Villeneuve had crashed into the barrier. Irvine's rolling red roadblock had been stuffed into the barrier at the hairpin when the Ligier of Olivier Panis came scooting up the inside in an opportunistic move. The Frenchman had been fastest in the morning warm-up and with the demise of Alesi now found himself in an unbelievable lead. Ligier had last won a race in 1981, and Panis and started 14th. He passed Johnny Herbert and Mika Hakkinen on track and leapt over several other cars with a well timed pit stop for new tyres and at the finish led the McLaren of Coulthard over the line to complete one of the unlikeliest but also well earned victories ever in a Grand Prix. Not just for who it was but this was Monaco, and winning from 14th place at Monaco was all but impossible.
Panis and Ligier never won another race. They had a lot in common with the 1972 race, where the rains came and Jean-Pierre Beltoise won a solo victory for his scorecard aboard a BRM - the last of many for the now-extinct marque. Where Panis fought through the field, Jean-Pierre led from flag to flag, leaving the likes of Fittipaldi, Stewart, Ickx, and Regazzoni behind to fight over the minor places.
The 1972 race ran to nearly two and a half hours - the two hour time limit (a concession to television coverage) being still a thing for the future. A decade later the race stopped short at sixty minutes, and was won by Alain Prost. Nothing especially unusual in that at the time, except for the rapidly gaining presence of young Ayrton Senna in the midfield Toleman car. With the track wet the previous year's British Formula 3 champion had been unleashed, passing two world champions - Lauda and Rosberg - with ease. Senna breezed past Lauda's McLaren on the outside of the first corner, all but signalling the changing of the guard with one spectacular move. Behind Senna another young prodigy, Stefan Bellof, was also catching up, surfing his Tyrrell around the shining tarmac. Equally matched on speed, their two destinies would be very different. Senna went on to win the Monaco GP six times. Bellof crashed to his death at Spa a year later in a Porsche endurance racer. Senna's remarkable record was enhanced by the manner in which he achieved it; for five years nobody else won at Monaco but the Brazilian.
It would have been seven years on the trot but for a major, character forming, gaffe while leading handsomely in 1988. The number 4 McLaren Honda left the sister car of Prost miles behind as Senna lapped the track at mesmerising speed, fully intent on crushing the morale of the incumbent driver and erstwhile team leader. But Senna's operation to bend the team to his will went awry when they came on the radio near the finish and told him to ease off. He was way ahead, Prost was beaten, he should slow down. Trance broken by the message, he managed one more lap before clouting the inside of waterfront right hander - metres along from where Schumacher would come to grief in 1996 - and ending up wedged into the guardrail on the other side, race over. Prost took the top of the rostrum as the team manager tried the phone to Senna's Monaco apartment. The driver had marched off, looking stunned, and not come back to the garage. It was the only place he could be and finally he picked up the phone, and as everyone was packing up to go home, the man who had thrown the win away to his own need to dominate was still distraught by his error.
In 1992 and 1993 he owed his trophies to a little bit of luck. With only seven laps to go in 1992 it looked as though Mansell's dominant Williams Renault would take a sixth consecutive victory, but a puncture saw the Englishman sent to the pits. He came back out just in time to see Senna motor past. For the next few frantic laps the blue and yellow car climbed all over the back of the white and red one. After all the years of seeing the Marlboro-sponsored car with the yellow-helmeted driver be the class of the field, the sight of another, much superior car hounding it like a predator was a surreal one at the time. Such is the nature of Monaco that even that level of speed difference was not enough and Mansell stayed in second. In more recent times Daniel Ricciardo kept the field back with a broken energy recovery unit in his engine dropping his power output by 25% for half the race to win in 2018. In 2001, Enrique Bernoldi in the Arrow notoriously kept the McLaren of Coulthard at bay for half the race
1993 saw Senna mired in third, far back from Prost's Williams and Schumacher's Benetton. The stewards meanwhile had other plans, docking Prost a 10 second pit lane penalty for jumping the start. In the days when former driver Louis Chiron was stand in front of the grid with the Monegasque flag and start the race while almost being run down by the front row nobody would have noticed Prost's slight creep forward, but with electronic timing sensors the infraction was unmistakable. Prost then compounded the problem by stalling after serving the penalty. Schumacher picked up the lead only to see his engine fail at the hairpin in a cloud of steam. So Senna won yet again, and the next year Schumacher would take the honours. This was the first Monaco without its most successful driver after the tragedy stricken Imola weekend and if the shadow of Senna loomed over the day then it was
at least fitting that his heir apparent as the fastest driver should win.
Twelve years earlier a similar mood fell over the Riviera as the Formula 1 teams came to Monaco in the shadow of the death of Gilles Villeneuve, the much beloved Ferrari favourite who had been the quickest and most flamboyant driver throughout his brief career. Villeneuve, like Senna, was the absent defending race winner having dragged his Ferrari turbo around the streets to win in 1981. A year later the drivers could see clearly the message Gilles sei sempre con noi. "Gilles, you are still among us" on a large banner some spectators had hung by the pit lane. Considering the 1981 Ferrari was only competitive because it's great power offset the clunker of a chassis then Monaco should have been the least likely place for it to win. Ferrari missed the genius touch of a Villeneuve - they didn't win again in Monaco till Schumacher in 1997.
They came within a few litres of fuel of winning again in 1982, but that bare fact barely covers the shenanigans at the end of the race. Prost, then driving for Renault and yet to score any of his four championships, led in the late stages before lightly brushing a barrier. A few laps later his suspension gave way and threw him into the barrier hard after the chicane. Riccardo Patrese took over in the Brabham. Yet to win a race the Italian got as far as the hairpin before dropping it in the light drizzle. He rolled backwards and watched helpless as Pironi in the Ferrari and some others tiptoed past. Kicking himself he managed to pull the clutch in and roll down the hill, bump starting his engine on the way. Pironi rolled slowly onto the last lap. He rolled even more slowly around the casino, and down into the tunnel. To the consternation of the TV audience he came to a halt in the gloom, out fuel. So the Alfa Romeo of Andrea de Cesaris took the lead... except it didn't since it had run out of fuel at the Casino Square. Poor de Cesaris would race on in F1 into the 1990s, going from flaky youngster to respected elder, but never came as close again to winning. The next contender should have been Derek Daly in the Williams, but just before Prost lost it he had shunted backwards into the barrier at the Tabac, knocking off his rear wing and damaging the gearbox. He pressed on with his crippled car but came to a halt like the others just a little too soon. In the BBC commentary box James Hunt bemusedly summed up the situation at the finish; "We're waiting for a winner, and we don't seen to be getting one."
Meanwhile Riccardo Patrese crossed the line, saw the flag, and was furious with himself for throwing away the most prestigious win of all. He picked up the hitchhiking Pironi in the tunnel, and headed for the pits, until, the officials directed him to park in front of the podium where Rainier and Grace were waiting with the trophy. The shy young Italian was the last winner to be greeted by the former Grace Kelly. She died in a car crash later that year on the roads up in the hills. Back in the glory days the royal couple handed the trophy over to many legends of the sport. Stirling Moss made it all look easy three times in his career, most famously in 1961 when he held back the three Ferraris of Ginther, Phil Hill and von Trips for the entire race, constantly matching their lap times and holding them a few seconds back. In these days when drivers could never hope to push their cars hard for the entire race it meant a lot for Moss to undercut his pole position time by three seconds on such a short lap. The man himself always reckoned it was his best win - and this in a career that saw him win almost everywhere.
The close confines of Monaco seemed to suit the stylists, the drivers who made progress without fuss. Before Senna's era 'Mister Monaco' was Graham Hill, who won five times in the 'sixties, including a glorious hat trick. Hill was perfect for Monaco with charisma and charm to spare he could mix with the royalty and movie stars. In the days when motor racing could be almost suicidally dangerous in some venues, Monaco was a relatively safe outpost. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton could shack up and be fairly sure that the headlines would not be stolen by some dreadful accident, that the kind of bloodshed that seemed routine elsewhere would not be dominating the newspapers. The main obstacles at Monaco in the days before guardrails and tyre barriers were the sharp kerbs and the lampposts, but speeds were low, and a mistake was more likely to be race-ending than fatal. The most famous incidents had come ten years apart when first Ascari in 1955, and the Paul Hawkins in 1966, ended up ditching in the harbour, both without injury. For once the once routine habit of driving with no seatbelts did come in handy for both drivers could swim to shore. A third driver took a dunking in the Med - but this was Pete Aron (aka James Garner) in the MGM movie 'Grand Prix' (he also was unscathed though he ended up fired from the Jordan team (no relation to the 1990s real Jordan team) for hitting his teammate). Sadly neither Hawkins or Ascari escaped from later crashes elsewhere to live to tell the tale in a modern era where such a crash would be inconceivable. The great Italian perished mere days after his dip, with the inevitable question being whether his mysterious death at Monza had been partly a result of being more shaken up by the Monaco crash than first thought.
After Hill the mantle of Monaco master passed to Jackie Stewart. With his sideburns, long hair and big sunglasses he cut a more up to date figure for the Woodstock generation than the mustachioed and brylcreemed Hill. Prior to his exile from Hollywood Roman Polanski and film crew joined Stewart for the weekend - The Weekend of A Champion, as the eventual movie release was known - in 1971 for the second of his three wins in Monaco. The film captured the race at a period of change. It was the last year that the course ran with pretty much the exact same layout it always had. Minor changes to the harbourfront chicane happened in 1972, and the swimming pool section appeared in 1973. Stewart's Tyrrell was racing around the same course as the 1929 winner, one William Grover Williams in a Bugatti, and all the others. The giants of the 1930s - Caracciola, Nuvolari, Chiron, Dreyfus, all took a win on the streets. In those days such a course was less of an outlier, but the location was still special, and for the same reasons.
The race itself had been proposed by one Antony Noghes, of the Monaco Automobile Club. The club already organised the Monte Carlo Rally, but that was an event that to all intents and purposes was mostly run in France and merely finished in the country. Thanks to the exploits of the Bentley Boys at Le Mans and the high rollers playground at Brooklands, motor racing was by now synonymous with the idle rich and their money. The Grand Prix was also established to bring a little bit of that publicity and excitement to the area. The venerable Casino had been around for decades by the twenties and was becoming a little passe in the jazz era. Many races now styled themselves as 'Grand Prix' but only the most prestigious events drew then best drivers and cars. Since the Monaco GP was the default national event for the country it could get itself included in the European Championship in the 1930s and that meant relevance. When the German Mercedes and Auto Union teams turned up with their overpowered monster racing cars later in the decade, they took the to Monte Carlo streets.
After the war the GP appeared sporadically, missing out 1949 after the monarch Prince Louis II had died, being run as a sports car race in 1952, and again being laid fallow for another two years. In 1955 was Formula 1 reinstated and the race has never been missed since. Grover-Williams set the fastest lap in 1929 at 2 minutes 15 seconds. Fangio, on the way to his first of twenty four championship race wins did a 1m 50s. Sixteen years later Stewart went round in 1:22, and that was without his rear brakes, which had failed soon after that start. The innocent carefree nature of the event had been overtaken by the great increases in speed that came along at the end of the sixties. The big tyres and wings meant even at Monaco the edge was becoming more perilous. The circuit had once been marked out merely with some straw bales in strategic locations. At the hairpin the bales prevented any errant drivers from ending up in the railway station concourse. The old Victorian station was replaced by a newer one in the sixties and eventually the whole line was completely obliterated by the bleached stacks of concrete of the Loews Hotel. Where once the cars drove under railway arches at Portier, now it's an anonymous beige flyover - thanks to the constraints of space Monaco is nothing if not a mixture of old fashioned glamour and functional banality.
All the champagne and yachts in the world couldn't disguise the horror of the 1967 race however. Attrition as usual was high. Late in the going the 2nd place Ferrari of Bandini, chasing Hulme's Brabham in lead, clipped the chicane and smashed into the bales and then a mooring post on the quayside. This time the car did not fly cartoonishly into the water in a cloud of steam but overturned in a horrific fireball in the middle of the track. The remaining other cars crept past the inferno, as the hopelessly under equipped bystanders tried to help the driver. It was an appalling five minutes before the car was finally turned over and the fire put out. The driver, nightmarishly, had not been given the mercy of being knocked out or suffocated, and somehow stayed alive in hospital for several days before succumbing. After that disaster, beamed on television for all the world to see, the race was finally reduced from the marathon 100 laps to a more sensible 80, the bales became barrier, and the marshals became some of the best drilled in the world, helped by some well placed cranes they could whisk trouble out of the way In seconds. Nevertheless in later years the medical chief of the sport, Professor Watkins, would still admit to a relief every time the Monaco race was safely completed. Dealing with a badly hurt driver In the tight confines of the circuit was not something to look forward to. Nonetheless the safety team did an admirable job rescuing Karl Wendlinger from his serious crash at the harbourfront chicane in 1994. Coming so soon after the traumas of Imola, another death from head injuries, and at the most famous race of all, would have been hard for F1 to escape.
There were still some bales around the track in 1970 when the race came to arguably it's most sensational finish, putting lie to the argument that the race never produces actual racing. True, there is very little passing per se, but there is the relentless grinding pressure of perfection every lap, as passing becomes much easier when the car in front disposes of itself in the barriers. The 1970 race saw that even the most experienced driver in the field can err under the pressure of the chase. Jack Brabham, forty years old with three championship trophies on his mantlepiece, and countless laps of Monaco completed had started the race fourth, and by half distance was in the lead as Stewart retired with engine problems. Jochen Rindt, now the number one driver at Lotus, had started in eighth. He had expected the team to bring the new Lotus 72 - a rakish doorstop-wedge shape car that made the rest of the field look very old fashioned - but instead they played safe with the type 49, by now a car four years old in its fundamentals. Discouraged by this, the Austrian had further problems with seasickness brought on by sleeping on a yacht in the harbour. He told his wife he was in the race simply to drive around and finish.
By the time Stewart dropped out things had changed Rindt's mindset somewhat. Other attrition had already gifted him two positions, and now he was fifth. He passed Pescarolo for fourth, and needed only five more laps to get by Hulme for third. The reliable unreliability of any car that Chris Amon ever sat in arrived with 19 laps to go. The Lotus now up to second but fifteen seconds behind Brabham. The chase was now on, but seemingly it was in vain. Four to go and the stopwatches still clicked around nine long seconds between the leader and the chaser. Then Brabham caught lapped cars and began haemorrhaging time. Five seconds went in one lap, and Rindt undercut Stewart's pole position time by almost a second as he closed in. Still not quite enough to win, surely? The gap was now two seconds, and the loss was dramatic enough to unnerve the veteran so much that all sense went out of the window. Into the Tabac went Brabham, spying both lapped cars moving slowly ahead, and a looming red Lotus 49 impossibly behind in the mirrors. Into the hairpin he needlessly dove to the inside of Piers Courage's car, slid on the 'marbles' of shed tyre rubber flicked into the area off the racing line, and thumped helplessly into the bales on the outside of the corner. He found reverse and extricated himself, trundling his car with it's sudden nose-job over the line, but Rindt was already long gone, welcomed by a wall of excited noise in the pits. The voice on the tannoy jabbered the lap times in French. Jackie Stewart had forgotten his own disappointment as he cheered the finale on the pitwall.
Years later, Ayrton Senna would describe the feeling of driving on the limit at Monaco, and taking pole position...
"I was already on pole and I was going faster and faster. One lap after the other, quicker, and quicker, and quicker... Suddenly, I was nearly two seconds faster than anybody else, including my team mate with the same car. And I suddenly realized that I was no longer driving the car consciously..."
"It was like I was in a tunnel, not only the tunnel under the hotel, but the whole circuit for me was a tunnel... I was way over the limit but still able to find even more. Then, suddenly, something just kicked me... Immediately my reaction was to back off, slow down. I drove back slowly to the pits and I didn't want to go out any more that day. It frightened me because I realized I was well beyond my conscious understanding."
Perhaps Rindt had known the same experience of being in a trance that day. Nobody will know. Three of the players at Monaco 1970 would be gone by the autumn, including Courage and Rindt. As the cars got wider and the engines more powerful, more barriers piled up and the fences grew higher. Maybe there never needed to be another Monaco GP after that race. Nobody could repeat Rindt's charge today even if they were of a mind to. The balance between race and spectacle swung far towards the latter in the following years. But Monaco persists, and probably will for years to come. Now there is an FIA Formula E electric race, held on a shorter course a few weeks before F1 time. One day in the not too distant future the electric technology will advance enough to justify closing off the full circuit for a further week, maybe merging FE and F1 entirely. Before the race itself there is the Monaco Historique weekend, where the cars and (occasionally) the drivers of the past turn the clock back and go racing, frequently putting on much better show than the modern cars. But still the modern cars race on the old street course, a ridiculous, but also glorious anachronism.
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