HE DIVIDES OPINION. Always has done. And it tends to distil to a single, fundamental question: are you for Senna, or are you for Prost?
We can’t resist. We’ve just tipped beyond 30 years since that final podium they shared in Adelaide 1993. A little under six months later, Senna was gone – his blinding light extinguished against the Tamburello wall; his beatified legend only just beginning to shine. Prost, already in retirement, simply… survived. The McCartney to Senna’s Lennon. He toyed with a comeback, but fatefully chose instead to buy a team. Ligier became Prost Grand Prix and for five seasons made his existence a near-constant misery. He openly admits it was the biggest mistake of his life.
Today, at 68, the man remains something of an enigma – a figure from a fast-vanishing Formula One world who’s somehow fallen out of tune, caught in the everlasting after-burn of Senna’s white heat legend. Even Prost’s low-key presence as a guiding hand at Alpine turned sour, cast adrift in 2022 by CEO Laurent Rossi who would eventually too be shunted out of the F1 frame.
And yet this is still the man who won those 51 grands prix and four world championships, who set the benchmark that Senna himself (and all the rest) strove to match through a full decade and beyond. This is Alain friggin’ Prost for Chrissake! A racing demigod who belongs among the all-time greats – and who should be universally revered. Yet you sense he’s not. Why? Is there a tarnish that’s set in? If so, what’s caused it? And does he care?
As we discover, Alain Prost does care about how he’s remembered. In fact, he’s angry and hurt by how too many choose to frame him. It’s time he reclaims his own story, beginning with his first one-on-one interview with Motor Sport for decades.
“I don’t speak very often,” says Prost as he takes a seat. “I’m very much still looking at motor racing and always with a passion, but I don’t find the right opportunity or desire to talk and talk and talk. Sometimes it’s okay, but not very often.”
This interview has been a long time coming. But here, in the James Hunt room at the McLaren Technology Centre, he is in front of us. Master James looks down from the wall, irreverently sticking his tongue out. Prost, in a cool blue suit and white pumps, looks at home in our sophisticated setting. The lines on his face, the unkempt hair, the doleful eyes, that fabulously crooked nose – yes, this is Alain Prost. He couldn’t be more French.
There’s no superstar
