1988 British Grand Prix - Qualifying

Qualifying

Nigel Mansell announced that he would race for Ferrari in the 1989 season, encouraged to go to the Italian team by a series of high speed accidents on Friday as a result of problems with Williams' reactive suspension, as well as a streak of seven consecutive retirements. With Mansell only 13th in Friday Qualifying and Riccardo Patrese 30th and seemingly set to fail to qualify, some 14 seconds from 26th place, Williams' designer Patrick Head made a snap decision to dump the system until the end of the season. This they did overnight between the Friday and Saturday sessions of the event after previously stating that changing to the more conventional suspension was next to impossible without months of work. Head said in an interview on race morning that "Its a bodge frankly. We've put steel mechanical springs and dampers on. We've changed the front struts into dampers, designed some new bits and pieces which we machined up overnight. We did some new pistons for the front struts...it's a bit of a bodge as I said".

The grid had an unfamiliar look to it. With the McLarens suffering handling problems because of new bodywork more suitable for high speed circuits coming up later in the season (the turbo snorkels on the sidepods were removed at an R&D cost estimated by McLaren to be at more than £150,000), the Ferraris of Gerhard Berger and Michele Alboreto occupied the front row of the grid. Berger's pole time of 1:10.133 was three seconds slower than the 1987 pole time set by Nelson Piquet and although on pole he was far from confident going into the race stating that the Ferrari's could not live with the McLarens on fuel consumption, his words were echoed by Alboreto. For his part Alboreto secured his first front row start since he scored pole in the opening race of the 1985 season in Brazil, it was the last time the Italian would start an F1 race from the front row. Senna and Prost qualified in 3rd and 4th place, the first time no McLaren had been on the front row of the grid since the 1987 Mexican Grand Prix and first time in 1988 that neither McLaren was on pole.

An exceptional performance put the naturally aspirated March-Judds in 5th and 6th, in front of the turbo's of Lotus and Arrows while Mansell and Patrese qualifyed in 11th and 15th respectively with Patrese almost 18 seconds quicker in Saturday qualifying than he was on Friday. Both Williams drivers expressing their delight at their cars new 'conventional' suspension saying it was amazing how much more confidence they had in their cars knowing that they would now behave the same way lap after lap and not different from lap to lap and sometimes corner to corner as it was with the reactive cars.

Both Zakspeed turbos failed to qualify for the race showing the cars lack of handling and lack of power from the teams own 4cyl engines with Bernd Schneider the slowest of the 30 drivers some 7.9 seconds slower than Berger's Ferrari. His experienced team mate Piercarlo Ghinzani hardly faring better almost 6 seconds slower than the Ferrari. Also failing to make the grid were the EuroBrun of Oscar Larrauri and the Ligier of Stefan Johansson who, as usual, complained of very little grip from his JS31 while the Coloni of Gabriele Tarquini failed to pre-qualify, ironically with a faster time than Schneider managed in qualifying.