1989 Japanese Grand Prix: Senna, Prost and the Suzuka Clash

Ayrton Senna crossed the line first at the 1989 Japanese Grand Prix, and it did him no good. On October 22, 1989, 37 years ago today, he and Alain Prost tangled at the Suzuka chicane with roughly seven laps to go. Senna restarted, pitted for a new nose, hunted down Alessandro Nannini and took the flag. Then the stewards disqualified him for rejoining the wrong way. Nannini got the only Grand Prix win of his career. Prost got the world championship.

A title fight inside one garage

The 1989 season was the first of the new 3.5-litre, naturally aspirated era, after turbo engines were banned. McLaren-Honda had the best package by a distance and finished the year with 141 constructors’ points to Williams-Renault’s 77. The only real contest was between the team’s two drivers, and it was not friendly.

Suzuka was round 15 of 16. Prost led Senna 76 points to 60, which meant Senna had to win in Japan and again in Adelaide to keep the title alive. Only a driver’s best 11 results counted in 1989, a dropped-scores rule that is why the final table shows Prost on 81 raw points and 76 counted ones. Senna’s arithmetic was simple: win twice, and he would take the title no matter what Prost did.

Blue historic Formula 1 car cornering on a track — A historic-era Formula 1 car in period livery at a vintage meeting. Illustrative image, not from the 1989 Japanese Grand Prix. Photo: alban villain / Pexels

Pole for Senna, a better setup for Prost

Senna took pole with a 1:38.041, 1.730 seconds clear of Prost in second. Gerhard Berger’s Ferrari was third and Nigel Mansell’s was fourth. In the morning warm-up, though, Prost tried a low-downforce setting that was about 0.7 seconds quicker than Senna’s best lap, and he kept it for the race. Maurice Hamilton later reported that Prost had a Gurney flap removed without Senna knowing, which is the kind of detail that explains why this pairing never trusted each other.

Prost got the better start and pulled out a lead of nearly six seconds. Senna lost about two seconds with a slow pit stop, then settled in behind and began to close. By the late laps the gap had shrunk to under half a second, with a 283,000-strong crowd watching the two McLarens run nose to tail towards the final chicane.

The chicane

Late in the race, with about seven laps left, Senna went to the inside of Prost at the chicane. Prost turned in towards the apex, the two McLarens collided, and both Honda engines stalled on the escape road. Prost climbed out and walked away. His race, and in effect his argument, was over.

Senna waved for the marshals, got a push, restarted the car and rejoined. He then pitted for a replacement front wing and came out about five seconds behind Nannini’s Benetton, which had inherited the lead in the confusion. Nannini held him off for most of a lap, then left him room at the same chicane where the collision happened. Senna took the lead, led across the line and then had to wait for the verdict.

Black-and-white view of spectators watching cars on a racing circuit — Spectators watch cars wind through a circuit. Illustrative image, not from Suzuka; the 1989 Japanese Grand Prix drew a crowd of about 283,000. Photo: Jonathan Borba / Pexels

Won on the road, disqualified in the stewards’ room

The stewards excluded Senna for rejoining the track illegally after missing the chicane. McLaren protested at once, with Ron Dennis arguing that Senna gained no advantage from the shortcut. Senna accused FISA president Jean-Marie Balestre of fixing the outcome to help Prost, a claim that Balestre and the stewards denied. The disqualification stood, and Nannini was awarded the win ahead of Williams-Renault’s Riccardo Patrese and Thierry Boutsen.

Pos.	Driver	Team	Time/Gap	Pts
1	Alessandro Nannini	Benetton-Ford	1:35:06.277	9
2	Riccardo Patrese	Williams-Renault	+11.904s	6
3	Thierry Boutsen	Williams-Renault	+13.446s	4
4	Nelson Piquet	Lotus-Judd	+1:44.225	3
5	Martin Brundle	Brabham-Judd	+1 lap	2
6	Derek Warwick	Arrows-Ford	+1 lap	1

1989 Japanese Grand Prix, Suzuka, 53 laps. Senna was disqualified; Prost retired after the collision.

McLaren appealed, and the sport’s governing body upheld the exclusion. It also fined Senna $100,000 and handed him a suspended six-month ban for endangering the safety of other drivers, which put his Super Licence at risk. Prost, meanwhile, was confirmed as champion with one round still to run.

Adelaide was a formality

Prost clinched his third world title in the stewards’ room, not on the track, and the finale showed it. In the wet at Adelaide on November 5, Prost refused to take the restart after a first-lap accident, saying the conditions were unsafe. Senna went out on lap 13 when he ran into the back of Martin Brundle’s Brabham while lapping him. Boutsen won. Prost finished on 76 counted points to Senna’s 60.

Why the 1989 Japanese Grand Prix still matters

It ended the Prost and Senna partnership at McLaren. Prost left at the end of 1989 and moved to Ferrari, and the feud followed him there. In 1990 Suzuka’s first corner settled the championship the other way, and Senna later admitted he had done it deliberately as payback, a story we covered in our look back at Senna’s 1991 title at Suzuka.

It also turned a chicane into a courtroom. The verdict hinged on exactly where a car rejoined the circuit, and a stewards’ call over a few metres of Suzuka asphalt decided a world championship. Suzuka kept deciding things long afterwards, as in Mika Häkkinen’s farewell in our 2001 Japanese Grand Prix story.

For Nannini, it remains the single Grand Prix victory of his career. The Benetton team that handed it to him had won its first race only three years earlier, with Gerhard Berger’s non-stop run in Mexico in 1986. Nobody celebrated it much. The image people remember from October 22, 1989 is not a podium. It is two McLarens stopped side by side on a Japanese escape road.