Race Summary
The first start was aborted because of Alessandro Nannini, who stalled the engine of his Benetton on the grid. On the second start, Prost made the best get away and took the lead. Senna was slightly slowed by the pop-off valve opening too soon and was passed by Nelson Piquet. This allowed Prost to take advantage and build a lead of almost two seconds by the end of the first lap. Senna passed Piquet for second coming into the Peraltada curve on the first lap, but could only ever bridge the ever growing gap to Prost when lapping traffic. While the McLarens held the first two places throughout the race, Berger had passed Piquet for 3rd place under braking at the end of the main straight, and by half distance he had moved to within three seconds of Senna when he backed off after receiving a 'low fuel' warning (which turned out to be incorrect). On lap 28 Nakajima retired with piston failure in his Honda engine, followed on lap 59 by teammate Piquet with a similar engine failure.
The two Ferraris thus finished 3rd and 4th ahead of the two Arrows of Derek Warwick and Eddie Cheever who had a race-long duel and were separated by just 0.7s at the line. The first 'atmo' cars home were the two Benettons who finished two laps down and out of the points in 7th and 8th after another race long duel with Nannini coming out on top, battling not only his team mate but a pinched nerve in his right foot. Yannick Dalmas (Lola-Ford) fought his way from 22nd up to 9th at the flag and after starting 15th, Bernd Schneider had run as high as 11th in the early laps before retiring with a blown engine on lap 17.
Alain Prost set a new lap record on lap 52 of the 67 lap race with a time of 1:18.608, half a second faster than Nelson Piquet's 1987 lap record when the turbo engines had approximately 300 more horsepower, which showed the advancements in engines, tyres, aerodynamics and chassis development in the seven months between the 1987 and 1988 races.
Read more about this topic: 1988 Mexican Grand Prix
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