[javadog]

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.