Chaotic Monaco Grand Prix finish delivers the craziest three laps in F1 history

If you’re under 45 years old, then the greatest Monaco Grand Prix finish ever happened before you were born. Sorry about that.

That includes all future races at Monaco, for the rest of time. Think it’s impossible to know that without being some kind of psychic giant space baby that can see the future? Incorrect. Because the 1982 Monaco Grand Prix happened.

Picture the scene. It’s ‘82. You’ve flipped the TV over from an episode of Dynasty that someone in the house has taped onto a VHS. You can hear the faint strains of We Have a Dream, the single just released by the Scottish World Cup squad. You’re living in a world where no member of the public has ever heard the song Come On Eileen.

John Watson is the hot British driver, with Nigel Mansell some three years from his first race win. Margaret Thatcher is prime minister, rather than being dead. You are about to see the weirdest race finish of your life.

ANALYSIS: Ferrari just chose their guy and it is not Lewis Hamilton

‘Am I?’

Yes.

Let’s pick up the race on Lap 74 of 76. Alain Prost, leading after Rene Arnoux’s earlier crash at the Bus Stop, pushes too hard as rain starts to fall in the principality, and hits the wall hard. His day is over.

If it wasn’t for The Professor finding the edge of his Renault’s grip and stepping past it, nobody would ever revisit this race. The one moment that made everything that came next actually matter. This, Alain, is your fault.

The most 1982 things about this race

• A gaggle of seven (7!) marshals pushing a stricken car, on a live racetrack, around a blind bend in the tunnel.
• Alain Prost's car just kinda hanging out on track with cars racing past. Took a while to get the cranes in place, see?
• You can tell that F1 doesn't use safety cars at this point, can't you?
• Beautiful, beautiful squat old F1 cars.
• Not being able to tell if Riccardo Patrese's Brabham didn't have a front wing by choice or because he’d hit something (it was the former).
• Sorry, but the cigarette advertising looked really cool.

Riccardo Patrese comes through to take the lead, two and a half laps away from his first ever win in F1. ‘This will be easy’, he thought, but in Italian. He is wrong. What a dope.

This is the car of a man who did not know what was coming

Coming down to the Loews Hairpin less than two laps from home in the slippery conditions, with some oil on the track from the gearbox of Derek Daly’s Williams, he spins under braking and finds himself partway down an escape road, pointing the wrong way, and stalls. If you’re new to F1, that is not what he was hoping to achieve.

Didier Pironi and Andrea de Cesaris catch up and pass the stricken Brabham, the former becoming the third leader in under a lap of racing.

At this point, the race is a shambles. The nose of Pironi’s car is damaged from earlier contact, almost every driver still running (all eight of them) have been lapped, and at least one of those (Daly’s Williams) has made of mess of his rear wing. After taking over the lead with just over a lap and a half to go, the Ferrari driver is making the most of the gap back to De Cesaris in second, running so gingerly in the rain that four lapped cars come back past him within the space of about a minute.

Turns out that lack of pace wasn’t just caution, and you’ve probably figured out what happened by now. Coming into the tunnel for the final time, with just half a lap between him and victory, his Ferrari decides that it’s time to stop racing, as Italian cars often do.

"I thought maybe I had an electrical problem because of the wet," he said later. "For three or four laps the car had been misfiring – but it was more simple than that..."

‘He’s run out of fuel, hasn’t he?’

The Frenchman has run out of fuel.

That leaves De Cesaris a free run at his first victory...only for his Alfa Romeo to run out of fuel before he even reaches Pironi’s conked-out Ferrari.

At that point, the normal order of a motor race absolutely breaks down. The lapped, ailing car of Daly can vault up onto the podium - except that he crashes out immediately too. Of course he does.

Somewhere in the confusion, Patrese’s Brabham has been pushed out of the way of oncoming traffic, which puts him on a downhill slope. That, incredibly, allows him to get his car rolling (thanks to the force we now know as ‘gravity’), and he uses that momentum to restart his engine.

This is normally where, for the flow of the piece, we’d have a cutaway with the official Formula 1 YouTube channel’s footage of the final three laps in full embedded, so that you could watch it if you wanted to. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?

Unfortunately, F1 continue a bafflingly self-defeating policy of making sure it’s as hard as possible to make people watch their content, and they do not allow their video – theirs, which gives them the video views – to be embedded absolutely anywhere at all. 44-year-old footage. Baffling.

If you want to watch the last three laps, you have to actually click this link and leave the page. Stupid. Anyway, it’s there for you.

The car that was stalled, spun out at the side of the track, has managed to get going again thanks to what could generously be described as a loophole in the rules (marshals couldn’t help jump-start cars, and putting a car onto a downward slope where it could get rolling and restart its engine sure sounds like helping to jump-start it).

And he wins.

And neither of the drivers who join him on the podium crossed the finish line.

And... wait, what?

‘Okay, stop narrating and start explaining’

Fine. Pironi and De Cesaris both retired on Lap 76 of 76, and fourth-placed Nigel Mansell was a lap down on Patrese at the finish. While he was still running at the end, that meant he completed just 75 laps.

Derek Daly snagged a point for sixth place by the same rule, meaning that half of the points positions were occupied by drivers who didn’t take the chequered flag.

The more you look at it, the more you understand why Patrese wasn’t disqualified for his little push. If he hadn’t had the push, Mansell would’ve unlapped himself and led the race (barring any further catastrophes) - so do you give him the race win? Or do you simply remove the Italian from the race standings and give the win to Pironi, who didn’t finish the race at all?

Simple: you solve that problem by not disqualifying Patrese. Michael Masi would be so proud.

‘You’re right, that is the best Monaco Grand Prix finish of all time! Am I still picturing 1982, by the way?’

Thank you. And no.

‘Wait, Scotland are still about to go to the World Cup?’

I’m hanging up the phone now.

READ MORE: Where F1 drivers live, and why so many choose Monaco?

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