Stefan Johansson reports that Ayrton Senna had more talent than any other driver during his lifetime – but working with Alain Prost made him even better
Stefan Johansson may never have won a race in Formula 1, but he had several legends of the sport as teammates. In 1984, he drove two races at Toleman alongside Ayrton Senna, among others, and in 1987 he was even teammates with Alain Prost for an entire season at McLaren.
“The experience I had with Prost was a real eye-opener”, “In the first three or four meetings with Alain, my head was completely overwhelmed.”
The Frenchman, who already had two world championship titles to his name at the time, brought “too much information” to the meetings, which he was unable to process himself. It was only as time went on that he realized that everything Prost said had a “system” to it.
“He was way ahead of all of us back then in terms of his approach to racing, how he handled the car, how he organized the entire race weekend and how he operated within the team and so on,” he says of the “Professor”.
“I learned more from him that year than I did in the rest of my career, both before and after,” reveals Johansson, who lost his cockpit at McLaren after just one season and was replaced by his former teammate Senna.
Senna relied “above all on his natural talent”
In his very first McLaren season in 1988, Senna won the world championship title for the first time. “Of course, Ayrton was in a class of his own in terms of natural talent. Nobody could hold a candle to him. He was like an acrobat in a racing car,” Johansson recalls.
At the same time, he also believes that Senna took another step forward after his move to McLaren. “After that, he made great progress when he could sit in the same room as Alain and watch him,” Johansson suspects.
“Until then, I think he relied mainly on his natural talent, which was already far above that of everyone else in the paddock anyway, which is why he had already achieved great results,” says the now 69-year-old.
“But when you think about it, he was just on a different level [after his move to McLaren], and I think that was because [Alain] was just so good at everything,” said Johansson, who himself competed in Formula 1 until 1991.
While he never celebrated any major successes during his time in the premier class, Senna and Prost shared almost all the world championship titles between 1985 and 1993. Prost became world champion four times, Senna three times. Only Nelson Piquet (1987) and Nigel Mansell (1992) managed to straddle the gap once each.
Prost retired from Formula 1 at the end of 1993 after winning his fourth title, while Senna was killed in an accident in Imola at the start of the 1994 season. Johansson says he is still good friends with Prost to this day.
