Senna Drives Into Prost on Purpose, and Says So Afterward

The story of the 1990 Japanese Grand Prix cannot be told without the 1989 Japanese Grand Prix that preceded it. Twelve months earlier, at the same Suzuka circuit, Senna and Prost — teammates turned bitter rivals at McLaren — had collided at the chicane while Senna attempted a pass; Senna rejoined the race and won, only to be disqualified afterward for cutting the chicane, handing the title to Prost. Senna considered the disqualification a politically motivated injustice, orchestrated in part, he believed, by FIA president Jean-Marie Balestre in Prost's favour. He carried that grievance, undisguised, into the following season.

By 1990, Prost had moved to Ferrari, and the two men arrived at Suzuka with the championship on the line once again — Senna needed to finish ahead of Prost to secure the title outright. Senna had qualified on pole but discovered, to his fury, that pole position that year was situated on the dirtier side of the racing line, a configuration he had unsuccessfully protested to race stewards in the days before the race, arguing it left him at an unfair disadvantage off the start.

At the start, Prost got the better launch and moved ahead into the first corner. Senna, from directly behind, did not lift. He drove into the back of Prost's Ferrari at full racing speed, launching both cars off the circuit and out of the race simultaneously. Because Prost was now out, and Senna held enough of a points advantage over the rest of the field, the retirement was enough to secure Senna the World Championship on the spot, in the strangest and most controversial possible circumstances. A year later, in an interview, Senna admitted openly that the collision had been deliberate — a confession that reshaped how the entire incident, and Senna's public image, were understood.

Neither Senna nor Prost finished the race, both retiring from the collision at the first corner. Nelson Piquet won for Benetton, with teammate Alessandro Nannini second, and Aguri Suzuki completing the podium in third for Lola — the first ever podium finish for a Japanese driver at their home Grand Prix, a genuinely joyous footnote almost entirely overshadowed by what had happened at turn one.

Senna's retirement was, paradoxically, the result that mattered most: because Prost also failed to finish, Senna's points total from earlier in the season was now mathematically unassailable, and he was crowned 1990 World Champion without completing a single further lap of racing.

The 1990 season had developed into a two-way fight between Senna's McLaren and Prost's Ferrari, with the underlying tension between the two men — dating back to their bruising 1988 and 1989 seasons as McLaren teammates — coloring every encounter between them on track. Senna's second World Championship, secured at Suzuka, arrived under a cloud of controversy that took years, and Senna's own eventual admission, to be fully understood by the wider public.

The rivalry between Senna and Prost is now considered one of the defining relationships in the sport's history — two of the greatest drivers of any era, sharing a garage for two seasons and then meeting as bitter opponents, with Suzuka hosting the decisive moments of both the 1989 and 1990 championships in near-mirror image collisions at the same corner.

Japan in October 1990 was still near the peak of its extraordinary post-war economic boom, though the asset price bubble that had inflated property and stock values to extraordinary levels was already beginning to show cracks that would trigger a prolonged economic stagnation through the following decade. Formula 1's growing popularity in Japan through the late 1980s, driven partly by Honda's dominant run of championship-winning engines, had made Suzuka one of the sport's most anticipated fixtures.

Globally, 1990 sat between the end of the Cold War — the Berlin Wall had fallen the previous November — and the Gulf War, which would begin just months later in January 1991, following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. It was a year of genuine, rapid geopolitical transformation, unfolding alongside a rivalry in Formula 1 that, in its own much smaller way, was equally unable to find any peaceful resolution.

Dry and clear at Suzuka, with mild autumn temperatures typical of late October in central Japan, in the high teens Celsius. Conditions were unremarkable and played no role in the collision, which was, by Senna's own later account, a deliberate decision rather than any product of the track surface or weather.