Three decades after competing for his last F1 race, Alain Prost still seeks to resignify his reputation in the scenario of world motorsport. For Frenchman, many racing fans often remember their rivalry with Ayrton Senna than their tracks.
About to complete 70 years of life, the legendary pilot is tired of being portrayed, he said, only as the villain of Brazilian history. “That’s just what people remember,” he complained in an interview with France’s+channel+, which recently launched a documentary about the Frenchman, called “Prost.”
The work is a kind of response to the recent series Netflix has released to tell the story of Senna, in which Frenchman, in many passages, is seen as a villain.
It is not today, however, that he complains about his portrait in the media. At the time he ran with Senna, he also accused journalists of having more sympathy for the Brazilian.
In the documentary of the French television network, the former pilot also complains about the French audience who dubbed him “a yellow dwarf”, color of the Renault team that he was driving in 1982, when he wages a rivalry with compatriot René Arnoux.
Even overcoming his rival from afar, bearing his four world titles today and the fact that he is still the fifth F1 biggest winner with 51 wins, Prost has the perception that his achievements are “reduced” to his role in the history of rivals.
“For 30 years, I live with a kind of reduction of my life, which is the episode Prost-senna,” he said.
Without denying the historical importance of this rivalry, French would like to see his trajectory from the beginning, starting from the period in which he claims to feel more proud.
Grandson of survivors of Turkey’s Armenian genocide in the early 20th century, Alain Prost had a middle -class childhood near Lyon, the third most populous city in France. His father owned a metal kitchen chair workshop.
The passion for cars, however, was not his exclusive. In fact, his older brother, Daniel, was predestined to become a pilot, but was prevented by fragile health – a brain tumor in adolescence and a lung cancer that killed him at 33, when the youngest was already champion of F1.
“I ran a little by power of attorney,” Prost said in the documentary about his career.
His outstanding talent combined with political skills helped him build his trajectory, started when he was 14 and started running in kart. He progressed in the junior categories, winning the French and European Formula 3 championships before joining McLaren in 1980 at the age of 24.
Prost ran over 13 seasons at F1 from 1980 to 1993, with a brief hiatus in 1992, when he walked away from the clues. With the exception of his debut year, when it was the 16th, he always closed the championship in the top five.
On eight opportunities, it was the first or second place, overcoming the 1985, 1986, 1989 and 1993 World Cups, besides the vices in 1983, 1984, 1988 and 1990. In the postcarrier, Prost continued involved with F1, having work in Alpine Construtora in different directive positions since 2015 until it is fired in 2021.
“My career did not last two or three years,” he said in an interview with Motosports.com. “Look at my other teammates: [John] Watson, [René] Arnoux, [Eddie] Cheever, Niki [Lauda]Keke [Rosberg]Stefan [Johansson]Nigel [Mansell]Jean [Alesi] e Damon [Hill]. No one talks about them. I had five world champions as teammates, so it’s a pity, “he criticized.
With none of them, however, Prost lived as intense as it was with Senna. The two were companions for two seasons in 1988 and 1989.
In the first year, the Brazilian won the F1 title, the first of his three. In the second year, the Frenchman took the trophy after the controversial outcome of that championship, when he crashed into Senna’s car in the last race.
In 1990, with Prost in Ferrari, Senna gave the change, practically the same way, and won his second trophy after an accident with the Frenchman at the same circuit of Suzuka, Japan.
In addition to numbers -based comparisons, episodes like these in Japan connected the trajectories of Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna so that it is almost impossible to talk about without quoting each other even if it bothers French.
Raio-X | Alain Prost
Full F1 -champion in 1985, 1986, 1989 and 1993, Frenchman participated throughout his 199 GPS motor career, with 33 poles and 51 wins.
