Michael Andretti F1 1993 back story
 

This link takes you to a story from R&T about Michael's ill fated 1993 season. He's taken a lot of heat about this season but after 25 years he ready to talk about it. It's interesting knowing that Fernando Alonso has left McLaren and will be driving for him in the Indy 500 this year.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/theres-more-michael-andrettis-ill-170000472.html

There is a book, called American Grand Prix Racing, that has a chapter devoted to Michael. It goes much further into what he had to deal with at McLaren, the long and short of it is that the car was a piece of ****, the team couldn't get things together and he literally had no testing to start the year and the car failed him virtually every time he got in it.

The way he was treated by Ron Dennis that year soured me on Ron Dennis and I have hated the McLaren team ever since. The book is worth a read. It's the only honest analysis of what Michael had to face and it's a credit to him that he has never aired it in a more public fashion.

The car was so bad that Senna won how many faces in it?

Didn’t Senna win 5 races that year in it? And he finished second in the WDC to Prost in a Williams...whilst McLaren were second in the WCC.
Ford power too if I recall.

I think Michael did suffer more than others from the new pre- season testing rules as he needed to integrate the different technology in this generation of F1 cars... active suspension etc that were not present in his previous racing experience. Tough to do when racing against those who knew how to exploit it already.

I seem to remember hat he lived in the US during the season and that he missed some in season testing as a result.

So whilst Denis was no doubt a difficult man there were choices made by Michael that were detrimental to his own success.

If you read the story he talks about living in the US and racing in F1. He says it was not an issue. They could not test between races. So you want him to stand around the shop?

If you want to listen to Michael and Mario give Marshall Pruitt the information that's in that article, here is an audio recording of it :

https://marshallpruett.podbean.com/e/mp-419-michael-andretti-on-his-troubled-1993-formula-1-season/

You really need to read the chapter in that book I referenced above, as it is the only thing in print that gives an accounting of just how bad the car was. When I mean by that is Michael's early season laps were few, because the car literally would fail so often. There are times he would go to the grid not knowing whether they would even be able to get the car to function. Even later in the season, he had a semi automatic transmission that would shift erratically, a suspension that would change ride height at random times... even Senna had some of these problems, though not nearly as many as Michael, and it put Senna's car off the road too.

Some say, well what about Sennas wins? Do yourself a favor and go back and look at how many of those were on a dry track. You'll find that Senna won in the rain, sometimes because he was so good in wet conditions and sometimes because all the other top drivers had issues. I recall one race where Alain Prost had to pit seven times. And don't think they had equal equipment, Senna usually had a later specification engine than Michael did.

Then there is the issue of what some people would call sabotage. There were a couple guys in the team that did not want Michael to succeed and many people think that they deliberately slowed him down. Those that did not follow the formula one circus as deeply as I did in those days might think that sort of sentiment to be something along the lines of a tinfoil hat conspiracy. I sure you, as impossible as that seems, F1 can be that underhanded at times. Want proof? Go back and look at the lap times in the tests that took place after some of the races were run. You will notice a pattern.

As for his lack of living there, that's 100% bull**** that the European press put forth. They were not fans of his and they ran him into the ground. They also didn't like his wife, and had lots to say about her. Michael did consider living in Europe that year and nearly completed the purchase of a house in France, but how often had you heard that story? My bet is that you've never heard it.

You really do need to read the book, if you have any interest in this episode, as it will tell you and no one certain terms just how many problems the team had that kept Michael from turning laps in the car. For the life of me, I have never understood why Michael has remained silent to this day on those details.

It wouldn't have hurt. Bond with the team that puts in the long hours so you can drive.

One of the things I dislike about F1 is the allowable disparity between cars. I think, in equally prepared cars, Michael Andretti would have been among the best in the world. I don’t have any doubt that the situation that Michael was put in was directly responsible for his lack of F1 success.

I will make one other point, Senna saw what was going on and, as much as he could be an ******* when it came to his teammates, he saw what they were doing to Michael and it pissed him off. That year, Senna had as much power in the team as Ron Dennis, and sometimes told Ron Dennis what to do. I recall one race where Senna told Ron he was not going to show up, as he was so pissed off about the car, and Ron called him on the phone and agreed to pay him more money just to show up. Senna arrived at the track 10 minutes before the first practice.

At Michael's last race, where Ron had intended to let Mika drive in Michael's place, Senna told Ron to give Michael the same specification car as he had. Michael ran into trouble at the beginning of the race that dropped him to 20th, but worked his way up to third by the end of the race. That gave Michael his only podium that year.

I will also point out that in testing, Michael was faster than Mika consistently, but Mika was nearly free and Michael had a very expensive retainer...

He tried. They told him to piss off.

Listen to his interview with Marshall Pruitt. He alludes to that in a very offhand away. As petty as this sounds, they did not like his wife at all and that colored their perception of him. She could be quite a snooty little ***** and even Michael divorced her the following year.

There was a restriction on in season testing allied to a ban on testing on tracks that were used for GPs. However McLaren still ran a test team in 1993, with both Mika and Allan McNish as test drivers. I seem to remember McLaren also used non F1 Thruxton as a test venue.
The scope of differences between the F1 cars and his previous experience would alone have justified spending more time in the factory.
I find it interesting in the R+T story that he felt the factory did not want him around.... possibly a Dennis motivated feeling. Whilst I agree he was a real challenge he always came across as hungry for knowledge, ideas and thoughts and acknowledging the same in others. Maybe in 1996/7 he was a different person.....

I think we all knew at the time that Michael was a better driver than that season let on. Lots of contact that wasn't his fault, and yeah, the economics were such that McLaren wanted Mikka in the seat asap. I don't doubt that the settings on the car were changed just enough in race config to make sure he wasn't running with Senna.

McLaren was late getting the new car ready. Michael had two tests in the old car, the first one at Barcelona in December. He was within .1 seconds of the time that Senna would set in qualifying that year, in the previous year's car, at a track he'd never seen before and in his first outing in the obsolete car.

The only preseason testing he had with the new car was at Silverstone, where it rained nearly every day. In the few instances they had dry running, the car would quit on him. They were running TAG electronics and they had problems keeping the engine running. He completed his allocated seat time and they put Mika in the car. Michael left to go back to the states and they sorted out the electronics glitches after he left.

The first race was at South Africa and he had essentially no dry seat time in the car. He was sixth on day one but software glitches on day two left him three seconds off the pace. He was gridded 9th and when he selected first gear on the line, he didn't have a functional clutch and the car stalled. They pushed it to the pit entrance, got it started, he went out a lap down and was moving through the field when he caught a slower pack of cars. One of the drivers lost control in front of him and hit the brakes early, Michael got caught out and ran into the back of Derrick Warwick and knocked corner off of his car and was done.

The next race was Brazil, he qualified fifth. The cars had automatic upshifting but nobody on the team told him that it wouldn't shift from 1st to 2nd automatically off the start. That first shift, he had to do it manually. When it didn't shift into second on its own, he got swamped by the rest of the pack, then Karl Wendlinger veered into him and Michael moved over to keep from making contact and Berger collided with him from behind, as he had quite a bit more speed. The press had a field day but I don't recall any of them mentioning the team not telling Michael about how the transmission operated, only that Michael crashed out again.

The next race was at Silverstone and Michael qualified six. During the morning warm up, he was faster than Senna. He tangled with Wendlinger again in the race and that was that.

At Imola, he spun out of the race because the rear brakes locked. He had been trying to adjust the brake bias to suit changing conditions but the lousy layout of the car was such that he couldn't reach the brake bias adjuster.

At Monaco, he had more brake problems, and a wet practice limited his dry running time. He qualified ninth as a result. When the rain started, his transmission ****ed up again and he went from 1st to 3rd and he got swamped. He ended up almost dead last but was able to work his way through the field, turning lap times the same as the lead cars. He lost 45 seconds trying to get around Andrea De Cesaris then had to stop at the Loewe's hairpin, when Berger hit Hill and the track was completely blocked. He should've been in the points that day, but he wasn't.

At Canada his car failed in the morning warm up. They changed the alternator, put him on the grid and he failed to leave for the parade lap. It turns out that he had a dead battery and the geniuses at McLaren couldn't figure it out. He started the race three laps down, turned good lap times but was never a factor.

In France, during qualifying the car was downshifting at random times, in the middle of corners. The reason was that there was a beacon at the side of the track that transmitted to the car once a lap to tell the car where it was on the track and allowed it to know which corner it was approaching and how many downshifts to do. Someone had turned that function off in his car and therefore the car did not know where it was. He ended up qualifying 16th. He drove a good race, turned good times and finished sixth. That's when he started thinking that to someone on the team was out to get him. There is absolutely no reason for that function to have been turned off in his car. They tested at that same track two weeks later and he was magically 2 1/2 seconds a lap faster in the car. Drivers at that level are not that inconsistent.

Suspension software problems screwed with him all season. When the car rolled over a curb, the suspension software would drop the ride height and usually spin the car. Sanna spun off the track from this problem three times more than Michael did, but Ron Dennis reamed Michael out, not Senna. And it was no fault of the driver, anyway. That tells you something about Ron Dennis. At Hockenheim he had more software problems but the team wouldn't believe him. Only when he pulled into the pits running on three wheels, the fourth one raised into full bump position in the air and stuck there, did they believe that the car was at fault and not Michael.

At Hungary he had another DNF, because the fly by wire throttle failed.

At Spa he finished eighth because at his first tire stop the engine died as soon as he hit the neutral button. It took them a half a minute to get the car back running.

Even his best race results, at Monza, wasn't as easy as it could've been. He missed the entire first day because of engine problems. He was running an older specification Cosworth which was 3/10 of a second per lap slower than the one Senna was running. As I mentioned before, they gave him the better engine for the race and both he and Senna had more problems with the rear brakes locking, which put both of them off of the track. Senna was out for good, Michael managed to limp his car back to the pits for new tires and to clean the crap out of his radiators and re-joined the race dead last. He was able to work his way up to third by the end.

That's how his season went, but I bet all that you heard was that Michael drove over his head and couldn't keep the car on the track.

If you listen to Michael's interview with Marshall Pruitt, he makes a reference to someone at McLaren that didn't like him, but that is now gone. The person he is referring to is Tyler Alexander, who died in 2016. Those of you that know McLaren's history know how significant a role Tyler played and I would encourage you to think hard about what Michael said about people in the team sandbagging him. You might find that hard to believe, but then I would direct you to interviews that Tyler Alexander gave about Michael's performance after that year. You might find opinions given that matched fairly well to the press coverage of Michael that year, which should lead you to conclude where the press got their opinions of Michael's performance.

Formula 1 politics can be quite nasty. I would recommend that you read the book The Piranha Club, by Timothy Collings. Ron Dennis was quite an ******* and I hope he burns in hell for all eternity when he finally kicks the bucket.

OK, now tell us what you really think :D Thanks for the summary. Interesting reading!

always 2 sides to a story ;) would love to hear the McLaren version :cool:

Reading between the lines of javadog's post's I get the impression Micheal did most of his homework on the bus, I mean in 1st class flying across the Atlantic so wasn't prepared as he could have been.

Can't comment why, maybe it was arrogance from being so successful in Indy racing or maybe he under estimated how competitive F1 is or over estimated how quick a car he was going to be driving??

F1 isn't full of oval racing good olde boys but hard nosed and at times ruthlessly driven people that are in it to win. If the team didn't get the same feeling from their driver then I'm not surprised at the welcome a few people in McLaren gave Micheal with is fly in and drive approach

1993 was a bad year for Ron Dennis. He had lost the Honda factory engines that had worked well, and set his sights on getting Renault power. Alain Prost was still no friend of Senna and had enough political clout to kill those chances. Neither could he get the factory ford engine contract away from Benetton, so they ran customer engines. They were down 60 to 80 hp from the top teams all year. He thought he could make up some ground by running his own TAG electronics instead of the Ford electronics, but that turned out to be a really bad decision, as not only did that not help him, software problems all year screwed up the engine, the transmission, the suspension and other things. Because of his inability to get the contracts sorted in time, the car was late in development and it was only tested at one track before the season began. That was a real problem, as a couple weeks before the season began, regulations were passed that severely limited in-season testing, limited the amount of practice sessions and limited the number of tires available. The preseason testing was largely crap as it was plagued by bad weather and their inability to keep the engine running.

He also had driver problems. Senna really wanted a ride at Williams, so Dennis hired Michael and Mika Hakkinen. Michael had a normal contract with options for another two years, Mika essentially came on board for free. Dennis and Senna continue talking and only came on board four days before the season started. Mika was forced into a role as test driver. All three drivers got to do limited preseason testing at Silverstone, Michael had to share his car with Mika. Michael went first, got literally no useful seat time because of the rain and glitches but McLaren put Mika into the car anyway, which was not a good decision. After Michael left, they finally sorted out the engine problems and Mika was able to actually run the car. It would've been much more beneficial to give Michael more seat time, but the test arrangements were predetermined and they did not deviate from them. Michael did a little bit more testing during the year, but they also put Mika in the car which did Michael no good.

Dennis was also on Michael's ass from almost the beginning. He qualified fifth at the second race but, rather than tell him he did a good job, Dennis told him he had nothing to be happy about. Never mind that he was driving a dog of a car against a half a dozen people with better rides, on a track he'd never seen before. To illustrate just what a ****ty car they had, Senna finished the Spa race two minutes behind the winner. And, Dennis told him that he wouldn't discuss his contract with him until November, long after any other rides would've dried up in either F1 or in Indycar. And, he told Michael that he wouldn't be driving every race of the season as Dennis was determined to get Mika some seat time in races to evaluate his ability for the following year. If you look at this season in detail, there are times that Dennis put Mika in the car, at the expense of Michael.

Then there were at least two races were they ****ed his qualifying. No question that was on purpose. I mentioned earlier where they turned off the function in the software that told the car where it was on the track. There was another race, where they held him in the pits in qualifying, until a rain shower started on one part of the track, that prevented him from setting a good time.

And yet, all I hear from the British press and the British fans was that he should have spent more time there. I never hear of the practice sessions where Michael set a faster time than Senna. I never hear of the fact that Senna's commitment was on a race by race basis and there was no guarantee that Santa was going to show up for the next race. He didn't hang around the shop either, he had houses in a couple different places and flew in to the races. As I recount above, at one such race he arrived 10 minutes before practice started. 10 minutes.

I'm one of the people that think Ron Dennis was one of the biggest problems McLaren ever had. I was a big fan of McLaren in the late 60s and early 70s, but the more influence Ron Dennis had, the less I liked the team. If you look at their history, their greatest successes came when they were paired with an engine partner that was dominant, whether it be Porsche, Honda or Mercedes. When they didn't have the best engine, their results were less than wonderful. When Senna left McLaren at the end of 1993, it was 50 more races before they won a race again. And who among us can forget the year that they were stripped of all of their points for cheating?

There's no doubt that McLaren has an impressive facility in England and some of their cars, particularly those designed by Barnard and Murray, were ahead of their time. I'm also a big fan of their F1 road car, as our good captain will be pleased to know, as I think it is more interesting than some of the F1 efforts. I still hate Ron Dennis, and I am glad the F1 team is hopefully rid of his influence.


I'm also reminded of the success that Nigel Mansell had taking Michael's seat in IndyCar racing in 1993. Most of the press focused on the fact that an F1 driver took an IndyCar driver's seat and did well, whereas the IndyCar driver took an F1 seat and did poorly. If you will compare Michael's 92 season with Mansel's 93 season, in the same car, you'll note that they won the same number of races but Michael lead 550 more laps then Nigel did. In 1994, in their first race head to head at the first race of the season, Michael whipped his ass.

And I wonder how Andretti would have done if he had jumped into Mansell's all-conquering Williams FW14B for the '92 season with the same amount of testing as Mansell had for Indycar .... I'll bet more than a few wins. :cool:

It was no secret around the Lehigh Valley that his missus at the time was a loon. To Michael's credit, he came around on that. Very few former drivers have had his level of success as an owner either. Really, none. Bobby Rahal comes close.

He would've done well. Drivers at that level are all fairly equal.

What I wish he had done was stay in Indycar in 1993. He won eight races in 1992 and would have won more, but he had some reliability issues. They sorted those out and he was really looking forward to driving the same car in 1993, as he felt he had a chance to win it all. The formula 1 offer was too tempting though, what with his dad urging him on, and the rest is history. What is not as well-known is that he'd had discussions and tests with F1 teams from about 1990 on. Michael even had a race seat offer from Ferrari, but he had a commitment to Carl Haas that he didn't want to break. Al Unser Junior had similar test drives and explored a few possibilities, but his family warned him against a move to F1. Al had the ability to he was quickly up to speed and in one test was several tenths faster than Ricardo Patrese, in the same car.

I'm also reminded of the fact that Mario Andretti is a pilot and flew himself to race weekends for years. When Mario had his run in F1, not only did he fly back to the states between rounds, he often raced in the states between his F1 commitments.