The McLaren MP4/4, also known as the McLaren-Honda MP4/4, was one of the most successful and dominant Formula One car designs of all time. Powered by Honda's RA168E 1.5-litre V6-turbo engine and driven by teammates Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna, the car competed during the 1988 Formula One season. The design of the car was led by American engineer Steve Nichols.
Honda had provided the Constructors' Championship-winning engines of 1986 and 1987, and for 1988 they switched partners from Williams to McLaren, who had struggled with their dated TAG-Porsche engines. The engine's design and development was led by Osamu Goto. The MP4/4 was a distinctly lower design than the previous year's MP4/3, forcing the drivers into a more reclined, almost lying down driving position.
In the 1988 season the MP4/4 won all but one race and claimed all but one pole position. The team won the year's constructors' title with about three times as many points as runners-up Ferrari. It holds the record for highest percentage of laps led in a season with 97.3% (1,003 out of 1,031). The car held the record for the highest win rate in a season until 2023, when the record was broken by the Red Bull Racing RB19, which was also powered by a Honda V6 turbocharged engine (95.45% win rate).
The McLaren MP4/4 was the last turbo-powered McLaren car to win the World Constructors' Championship title until the Mercedes-powered McLaren MCL38 won in the season.
Background
In 1987, it had become increasingly difficult for McLaren to compete with major manufacturer-backed teams using, effectively, a privateer engine financed in-house by TAG and built by Porsche. For the following year, 1988, McLaren secured the use of the 1.5L V6 Honda turbo engines which since the middle of the season had been the best engine in Formula One. Team boss Ron Dennis had previously tried to secure Honda engines for his Formula 2 team, and, after four successful years with the TAG engines, welcomed the Japanese company. Most teams were making a concerted effort to establish themselves with naturally aspirated cars in 1988 because it was due to be the last year for the turbo engines before they were banned.
It was a transition year prior to a naturally aspirated-only formula in 1989, and the regulations were framed to reward those teams that had already made the switch. The decision to continue with a turbo engine put the McLaren team at a potential disadvantage. Over a race distance, the MP4/4 would suffer a significant power deficit compared to its naturally aspirated rivals. It was possible to modulate the turbo boost, but with a fuel tank allowance of only 150 litres (naturally aspirated cars were unlimited) it meant that the team would have to go into extreme fuel conservation to get to the end of a race.
Although there was speculation that Honda would introduce their V10 engine during 1988, Ron Dennis confirmed during qualifying for the Italian Grand Prix at Monza that racing the V10 was never part of the plan for 1988. By keeping the V6 engine, Honda and McLaren also gave themselves more development time on the 1989 car, which was to be an evolution of the MP4/4.
The sleek-looking, all-new MP4/4 was produced and first appeared early in 1988. It was one of the few competing cars that year that was an all-new car; Ferrari, Lotus, Arrows, Tyrrell, and others were using updated or developed versions of their previous year's cars in order to build new cars for the 1989 season.
Team performance
For 1988 Ayrton Senna was signed to partner Alain Prost (at Prost's suggestion) on a three-year contract. The McLaren chassis, the Senna and Prost pairing, and finally the new Honda RA168E engines with , looked like a formidable combination. However, there were concerns after the FIA introduced a fuel regulation for the turbo-powered cars of 150 litres for a race distance. Honda's engine management team worked feverishly on the fuel consumption of the RA168E which was specially built for the reduction in turbo boost from 4.0 bar to 2.5 bar rather than upgrading the 1987 spec engine, trying to improve it in order to avoid embarrassing late-race retirements. The car appeared 'as-is' through the season, save for a few aerodynamic revisions. The car arrived at the first race in Brazil with very little pre-season testing at Imola only a week before the race, but Senna was able to put the car on pole position by half a second from surprise second-place qualifier, Nigel Mansell driving the naturally aspirated Williams-Judd V8, with Prost qualifying third after not finding the balance of his car until the race morning warmup session.
One feature of the MP4/4 was the driver's position. Due to the car's low-slung aerodynamics and the FIA safety rule which stated that the top of a driver's helmet had to be below an imaginary straight line drawn from the top of the roll bar to the top of the cowling, the drivers were required to be in a reclining position rather than in the conventional upright seating position of rival contemporary Grand Prix cars. As the MP4/4 was a new car, it had to conform to FISA's new-for-1988 safety regulations which stipulated that the driver's feet be behind the line of an imaginary front axle. Teams running cars from the previous season were able to continue to do so under the earlier regulations for which they had been designed.
Before 1988, the most dominant car seen in a single season of F1 had been McLaren's 1984 car, the John Barnard designed MP4/2 which had won 12 of the 16 races that year driven by Prost and World Champion Niki Lauda (Lauda had defeated Prost in the Drivers' Championship by only half a point). However, the MP4/4's successes eclipsed the MP4/2 not only in wins but in qualifying performance. 1988 was almost a walkover for McLaren, who took 15 victories from 16 races, including ten 1-2 finishes, while Prost finished 1st or 2nd in the 14 races he finished (he had 2 retirements - Britain and Italy). The car also sat on pole position in 15 of the 16 races (including a record 13 poles for Senna), locked out the front row in 12 races, and also set 10 fastest race laps. The dominant run was only interrupted once, at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza for Round 12, when Senna crashed out of the lead with only two laps remaining while lapping Jean-Louis Schlesser, who was making his first and only F1 start for Williams in place of Mansell who was suffering from chickenpox. With Prost already out after a rare engine failure, Gerhard Berger claimed an emotional victory for Ferrari just a month after the death of Ferrari founder Enzo Ferrari.
Perhaps the most telling example of the MP4/4's emphatic domination was seen at San Marino in just the second race of the season. Senna and Prost both qualified the 5.040 km (3.131 mi) Imola circuit in the 1:27s (Senna 0.7 faster than Prost) while no other driver could get below 1:30. Third on the grid was defending World Champion Nelson Piquet in his Lotus 100T, which used the same 1988 specification Honda engines as McLaren. Piquet could only qualify in 1:30.500, 3.352 seconds slower than Senna, and 2.581 seconds slower than Prost. The Lotus actually recorded faster speed trap figures (, 1.5 km/h faster than the McLarens) on the run to Tosa, but around the rest of the circuit the McLaren's acceleration and downforce were unmatched. Despite this, both Piquet and Lotus boss Peter Warr told the assembled media at Imola that they believed their car to be better aerodynamically, and therefore more fuel-efficient than the MP4/4. However, both McLarens had lapped the entire field, including 3rd placed Piquet, by lap 55 of the 60 lap race. The fast Imola circuit with its long periods of full-throttle racing was notoriously hard on fuel, especially for the turbo cars which had seen numerous late race retirements in recent years, and the McLarens lapping the field at the speed they did prove the aerodynamic efficiency of the car as well as the work Honda had undertaken to reduce fuel consumption. Prost and Senna's fastest laps (again the only drivers under 1:30) were 1.5 seconds faster than the next fastest, Gerhard Berger's Ferrari. Piquet's fastest lap was only the ninth fastest of the race, and some 2.8 seconds slower than Prost's fastest lap of 1:29.685. Both Prost and Senna lapped faster in the race than Piquet had qualified, putting an exclamation mark on McLaren's dominant weekend.
The car retired only four times in the season - with Prost retiring at Silverstone during a very wet British Grand Prix (handling), and at Monza for the Italian Grand Prix (engine, the only in race engine failure McLaren suffered all season), along with Senna's infamous accidents at Monaco (where he totally dominated qualifying and by lap 66 of the race had built a 50-second lead over Prost who had been stuck for 54 laps behind Berger, only to throw it away by crashing into the barriers at Portier. As he lived in Monaco, Senna went back to his home and did not contact the team until that night when he finally returned to the pits as the team was packing up, such was his disappointment), and Monza. Monaco was another example of McLaren's domination, Senna qualified 1.4 seconds faster than acknowledged Monaco master Prost, who himself was 1.2 seconds faster than third-placed Gerhard Berger in his Ferrari.
During the season both McLarens qualified for a race over one second faster than the rest of the field on six occasions (San Marino, Monaco, Germany, Portugal, Japan and Australia), while the team achieved 15 pole positions (13 for Senna and 2 for Prost) to go along with the 15 wins. Only Gerhard Berger's pole position at Silverstone prevented a perfect pole record for McLaren. Britain was the only race where neither McLaren qualified on the front row with Ferrari's Michele Alboreto qualifying 2nd, Senna, and Prost occupying the 2nd row. Britain was also the only race of the season that Ayrton Senna didn't qualify his McLaren-Honda on the front row of the grid. Prost failed to qualify on the front row four times during the season (Brazil, Detroit, Britain and Hungary). Hungary saw the worst qualifying position for a McLaren in 1988 when Prost was only 7th fastest. Senna, as usual, was on pole at the tight Hungaroring, though only 0.108 in front of Nigel Mansell's Williams-Judd. Other than at Silverstone, this was the closest any car got to knocking one of the MP4/4's off pole position.
It was during qualifying at Hockenheim in Germany, the MP4/4 set its top speed record, and the fastest speed trap of the 1988 season when both Senna and Prost achieved on the 1.6 km long straight that took the cars into the forest (they had recorded during qualifying for Round 4 in Mexico at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez on its long front straight). Both speeds compared favourably to the fastest non-McLaren, the Ferrari of Berger who trapped at at Hockenheim, and the fastest of the non-turbos, the slippery, Adrian Newey designed March-Judd of Maurício Gugelmin which was trapped at , also in Germany. However, with the reduction in engine power from the levels of 1986 and 1987, the McLaren-Honda's top speed was slower than the fastest speed of 1987 (Nelson Piquet in a Williams-Honda at Monza), and slower than had been achieved in 1986 (Gerhard Berger in a Benetton-BMW, also at Monza).