1993 F1 Season

1993 reads better with two columns side by side. Alain Prost won his fourth title with seven victories and thirteen poles from sixteen races, driving a Williams that took the constructors' championship with 168 points. The second best car of the year, Ayrton Senna's McLaren, scored 84. Exactly half.

With that machinery, Senna finished the championship second on 73 points with five wins. And one of them is the race everybody remembers: Donington, third round of the year, in the rain. He started fourth and won. The man who had taken pole, Prost, came home third in the car that scored twice as many points as his.

It was Prost's last season: the following year he does not appear on any grid. He retired with four championships and with probably the best tool he ever had, which leaves an uncomfortable question this site cannot answer but can at least put numbers to: how much of that fourth title is his, and how much belongs to the FW15C.

The simulation block below gives a partial and fairly brutal answer: running the year a hundred times with those cars and those drivers, Prost comes out champion almost every time and Senna almost never. So with that machinery the result was written in advance. What the model cannot do, and this is worth saying out loud, is win five races in the car that scored half as many points, which is exactly what Senna did that year.