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.

Speaking of Sandy Andretti, Michael's wife in that era, McLaren complained that she wanted to be in the pits during the weekend and have access to a radio headset. Fairly commonplace at the time in Indycar, but McLaren was offended that she would be so demanding... They also did not like the way she dressed, she attracted too much attention. Hard to believe, given the circus atmosphere in F1.

Then again, Ron Dennis is a very compulsive person (I'm watering that down) and likes things just his way. An OCD perfectionist, driven to distraction by fairly minor things. To illustrate, at the beginning of his recent misadventures with Honda, McLaren designed a car that was just about shrink wrapped around the Honda engine. This created all sorts of overheating issues, so some of the Honda engine problems were not really Honda's fault but a result of inadequate cooling from the two tight body work. Nevertheless, Honda took the blame. Here's a short anecdote, by a McLaren employee, about that sort of issue :

"For instance, a few seasons ago the team suffered 'heat-soak' issues with the bodywork burning around the exhausts each time the car stopped in the pitlane. An old rag, soaked in a bucket of cold water was laid onto the sidepod each time it returned from a run and was reversed into the garage, to alleviate the problem. When Ron next attended a race and saw this going on he hit the roof. Next race they had nicely tailored and shaped black towels, each beautifully embroidered with the drivers initials, and the bucket was kept well out of sight."

:D

Ganassi was a driver, so was one old guy, can't quite remember his name, Roger something?

SmileWavy

Pretty sure his dad was as much a detriment to his success in F1 as any other single factor.

Mario thought Michael would be able to participate in F1 the same way he (Mario) did in the '70's - i.e. fly in on the Concorde, kick ass, take names and go home. F1 in the 90's was a whole 'nother level of ruthless. Senna, Piquet, Prost, Lauda, those guys took no prisoners.

I would love for someone to explain to me sometime how Michael living full time in Europe during 1993 would have given his Ford engine 80 more horsepower, or cured the TAG software of it's endless glitches. I am more likely to blame Cosworth and Ford for the ****ty engine they built and McLaren's own software engineers that wrote the software, but what do I know?

Here is a photo from Nigel Mansell's first IndyCar test, at Firebird Raceway. Prior to taking the IndyCar out for a run, he took his Cadillac rental car out to see which way the track went.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1546030988.jpg

There is video of this somewhere on the Internet.

On the one hand you talk about Michael doing AMAZING things with a car that he barely knows and is down by 80 hp and isn't close to sorted. Then you have all these anecdotes where the team is sabotaging his success.

I'm just spitballling here, but lets say that he worked on his relationship between tests and race meetings with the engineers and the mechanics. Spent some time learning about the individuals and their families. Maybe in those off hours they might have told him he had to shift manually at the start from first to second to activate the software.

Schumacher famously knew the names of the wives and kids of the people he depended on to win races. Those people were happy to dig a little deeper because they knew success was a team effort.

There's no question, that it would be nice if they all were best friends and went down to the pub in the evening and had a beer.

Having said that, explain to me how an F1 team as prominent as McLaren can forget to tell the driver to shift the car manually after a race start.

Explain to me how bonding with the team would have given him 80 more horsepower. Or cured the electronics issues.

It's not like they weren't motivated to fix these problems themselves, if not for Michael, then for Senna, who was arguably the biggest name in the sport.

The point I'm making, is that he got a bad rap that he really never deserved and the reason given by the press and some of the pundits was 100% bull****. The problems laid elsewhere and anybody that truly followed the sport knows that.

Do take note that Ayrton Senna bailed from the team at the end of 1993, just as soon as he could ink a contract with Williams.

The Andretti's have always been controversial, some people like them, some people don't. Only fools would question their raw ability, the rest doesn't really matter. I saw some of these guys in their prime and I won't forget them. Another one I remember well was when AJ Foyt showed the sports car elites at Daytona that he could drive just about any ****ing car in any ****ing weather. That one was a lot of fun...

You forgot about Roger Penske, unless you are only comparing former Champ/Indycar drivers.

Maybe he was thinking of successful drivers... Roger's career behind the wheel was not one for the record books. Hell of a team owner and businessman though...

Hmmmm.....

"In the same year as his first racing win, Penske also graduated from Lehigh University with a business degree (industrial management) and went to work as a sales engineer for Alcoa Aluminum. Continuing his racing career, Penske won the F Modified in 1960. In 1961 he bought a Cooper and a Maserati, rebuilt a Cooper-Climax with an aluminum body, persuaded Zerex to sponsor him, and started to race professionally. Penske's first professional win was at Vineland, New Jersey, in a Maserati nicknamed the "Telar Special." He also set a race speed record with his win at Road America. Penske then won three nationals in a row in 1961, the year he became the SCCA National D Modified champion and was named Sports Illustrated 's SCCA Driver of the Year.

In 1962 Penske was named the New York Times Driver of the Year when he became the United States Auto Club champion, driving in Monaco with the Cooper-Climax and in Sebring, Florida, with a Cunningham. In 1963 Penske won the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) Grand National Series race. In 1964 he won five races; two of them were the Nassau Tourist Trophy, when he drove a Chaparral Corvette Grand Sport, and the Nassau Trophy, when he beat Bruce McLaren, A. J. Foyt, and Dan Gurney. The race that established Penske as one of the world's best was the 1964 Governor's Trophy race in the Bahamas, where he confronted Foyt and Wait Hansgen, beating Foyt on the last lap."



Read more: https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/biography/M-R/Penske-Roger-S-1937.html#ixzz5b1DSw4LO

Surely the onus is on the driver to understand how to drive a car, maybe you should have posted...

'Explain to me how a professional driver as prominent as Micheal never thought to ask how to change gear after a race start.....' :rolleyes:

You seem to be blaming everyone else but the driver, as herr_oberst so well pointed out a driver needs to get involved more than just driving, this is one of the main the underlying problems for me. Read his posts!

Dude, get a grip, F1 teams don't sabotage their least favourite driver, manufacturers championship is worth so much more to a team than any drivers championship both in money and marketing value.

McLaren and Ron aren't blameless but I'm sure Micheal is replaying his memories with a slight bias toward himself not making any errors on his approach to the season

To the OP thanks for posting this, back in 1993 I was excited to see an Andretti back in F1 and sad when it didn't work out.

Honest question, does Hamilton know the names of the wife's and kids of the guys on his team?

Felipe Massa (and Alonso's Renault teammate) may have a different opinion on that point.

Maybe not sabotage but they may spend more time on the car they need to win for points and publicity.

Maybe so. However, all of the reasons that have been floated for Michael’s less than stellar F1 career (that are attributable to Michael), seem like bullsh|t to me. Especially the “not living in Europe” reason.

I’ll freely admit that I’m an Andretti fan (I live about 15 min from Nazareth, PA)...but c’mon...that situation that Michael was put in was a sh|t sandwich.

Yep, every single one of them, right down to the grand kids too :D

Here are just the guys looking after his engine :eek:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1546036578.jpg

Yes, I agree I left Rodger out. He's from an entirely different era. Chip is a good dude, but wasn't much of a driver. AJ, genius driver, never had the business acumen to be an owner.

I looked at Sandy's divorce house several years ago when it was on the market. Her taste hadn't changed much.

Don't know, (Don't really care about F1 any longer. I used to care a lot.) My point is, from the fact that Schuey DID know all of his team members that intimately, you can extrapolate that he was spending A LOT of time around them in order to learn as much about every aspect of the operation as he possibly could so that he would be more successful on race day. I really doubt if he wouldn't have known that the 1-2 shift on launch would be manual, not auto.

I'll admit to an Andretti bias, in my garage still hangs a board of photos I took of the two of them in 92 at Pocono, back in the day when you could walk around hot pits during practice and qualifying. Several of them huddled discussing the car, and many of Mario with his famous pout.

Okay, I really don't know if you're sh!#ing us or not?

If not, that's absolutely redonkulous!!

The information I posted above was not taken from Michael's recent interview with Marshall Pruitt. It was taken from material that was compiled more than 20 years ago when Tim Considine wrote his book. It wasn't Michael's vague recollections of the past, it was his contemporary recollections of what he had just been through.

Those recollections are consistent with those of other people that were there during the year and are familiar with what took place. Even Ayrton Senna came out in public in support of Michael after he was sacked, as he knew firsthand what a raw deal Michael had gotten. He even held a press conference about it.

Keep one thing in mind. Michael never publicly blamed others, he kept his observations to himself and only related some of them when asked. He's been reluctant to talk about the issue, people like me seem to talk about it for him. He could have gone public and made all sorts of noise, but that wasn't the type of person he was.

I do realize the value of constructors points. 1993 was an era in which the top six scored points, unlike today. In those days, they were truly precious. I'm also aware of any number of instances where teams did some underhanded things, that cost them finishing positions. I'm sure you were aware of even more, given that you have been heavily involved in the sport for many years.

You and I will not agree on the subject, as we have different points of view. You have worked for McLaren, I haven't. Perhaps you even like Ron Dennis, I don't know. I just happen to put as much blame on McLaren as I do Michael for the problems of the year and I will go to my grave thinking that Ron Dennis is one of the biggest *******s to have been in F1. Granted, he wasn't as much of an ******* as someone like Bernie, but after 50 years as a fan of the sport, the politics and other bull**** has gotten the best of me and I have lost my enthusiasm for it.

Forgot about Piquet Jr., now that was sabotage :(

Big difference between sabotage and favouritism, just ask Massa or Bottas or Kimi

Much more of a McLaren, Ron Dennis and Bernie fan than Micheal Andretti fan, as the former contributed enough to allow me to buy my house :cool:

Quite happy to swap sides if the Andretti's want to pay for my man cave build :D