F1 Season Reviews Reviewed: 1986

The 1986 Grand Prix season is regarded by many enthusiasts as the best F1 season ever.

It had all the ingredients with 3 championship contenders coming into the final race in Australia. Alain Prost and Nelson Piquet were already established champions but British driver Nigel Mansell was the firm favourite needing only a third-place finish to be certain of the title.

But what followed was a scene that has since been seen by pretty much every Formula One fan out there as Mansell’s left rear tyre blew which lead Murray Walker to scream those words “AND LOOK AT THAT”

In the end, it was Alain Prost in the somewhat unfancied McLaren that took the championship as Piquet was brought in for a tyre change for safety reasons.

Australia however was just one of a handful of great races that season. We had the closest finish in F1 history in Spain where Ayrton Senna won by a nose from Mansell in 2nd, We had extraordinary finishes in San Marino and Germany where cars started running out of fuel.

A great fight in Hungary between Nelson Piquet and Ayrton Senna. This was also the first Grand Prix of the modern era to be held behind the iron curtain. 1986 also saw the return of the Mexican Grand Prix after a long absence in a race won by Gerhard Berger.

The TV coverage of the season continued to evolve in 1986. The onboard camera that had debuted the previous year was now seen in a lot more races, although they were still seen as novelties in the coverage.

But by the Australian Grand Prix we started to see multiple onboard shots with a second car carrying a camera by the end of the season. It’s important to note that they didn’t appear in every race.

There was still nothing uniform about the coverage, the graphics differed from race to race as the local TV handled each individual race, and they not only did the camera direction but also (obviously) the sound and (less obviously) the graphics.

For those who may not know when I say graphics in this sense I mean the way that text and information are presented on the screen.

So what about the end-of-season review video? Well on the surface at least it is a marked improvement from last time for the most part. The commentary has been worked on. The sound has been worked on and the footage used has even been tweaked as well.

There have been a lot of wrongs righted with this video but as I’m about to explain there are a few problems. Not all of them are the fault of the people that put the video together I have to confess.

The intro is worse than in previous years. The footage for this is the onboard camera footage from Johnny Dumfries’s Lotus with a few bits of exterior footage from the same race. It’s not an intro that gets me interested about what lies ahead in the video. The music (which I can’t find a file of) is also terrible. It’s easily the weakest start to a season review since the 1983 intro.

But then things pick up after that. We see Clive James do a quick piece to camera from the Adelaide pit lane at the final race of the season introducing the season review. Then some pointless footage of some women sunbathing on a Brazilian beach before we get to the “good stuff”.

This starts with something new for the 1986 review, a complete rundown of each driver and team in the 1986 season which is something I’m surprised they haven’t done before this.

There have been mentions of who’s driving for whom in previous reviews but this is the first comprehensive take with on-screen graphics to go with it. Another great touch is showing the results of each race after we’ve seen it.

Again this sounds like an obvious thing to do but yet we haven’t seen it before. The graphics are simply white emboldened text on a blue background. Basic but better than nothing.

So what about the footage? It follows a very similar formula of pictures that were broadcast on TV with extra footage added but there seems to be more emphasis on the extra footage on a few races.

Portugal and Mexico are two examples of races where it’s virtually all footage shot by the FOCA crews within Portugal just one clip taken from the TV feed.

But it’s not all bad. There’s great footage of the incident between Senna and Mansell in the Brazilian Grand Prix and the incident between Dumfries and Rothengetter in France. You also get to see the incident that brought out the red flag in the British Grand Prix in real-time as well.

What lets the footage from the review down however is the lack of onboards. This was the first real season where the onboard camera came into it’s own, yet the only on-board footage we get is in the intro.

It would have been good to see it implemented a bit more, especially in Australia where Johnny Dumfries was one of 2 camera cars and he had a very eventful race. The time felt right to implement it into something more than just a brief bit of intro.

Something else that just wasn’t necessary. Once again the appearance of topless women sunbathing which again for an official F1 product seems a little bit too much.

Monaco and France are the two races where this can be seen if you haven’t heard of a little thing called the internet where pictures of naked women are now readily available.

What we also get to see are shots of Clive James looking at cars in the pit lane but this doesn’t feel in the slightest bit over obtrusive and they are done before you even feel like they’ve started.

What of the audio quality? The extra footage again has the distortion issue on the audio which makes races where the extra footage is the backbone of the race somewhat tough to watch in places.

It’s not fun hearing the cars create a distorting noise on the microphones on the camera’s. Eventually, this problem would be solved but it seems to be a very silly problem to have had for the past 4 years (counting this one).

That aside however the audio quality is really good. Again it doesn’t feel atmospheric compared to other years although again on the extra footage through the distortion, you can hear at times the rattle of gravel and the sounds of the crowd better than on the TV feed pictures. That footage still sounds good however.

So what about the commentary? Last time it was done by the drivers and it was very much a hit-and-miss affair. This time it’s done by Clive James.

His third and sadly final appearance in an end-of-season review. It’s done very much in the style of the previous reviews that he has narrated. Although there are a lot of cheeky comments that are thrown in but it’s done in a very much non-cringe-worthy way and watching this video doesn’t feel awkward at all.

Saying for example that “Senna’s gearbox sometimes selected 3rd gear and sometimes BBC2” is the kind of comment that I can just about live with.

The wrongs from before have been righted with this video and this is certainly a huge step up from 1985 and very much from 1983.

So overall this review isn’t without its faults. The audio has a few issues here and there with the extra shot footage and the picture quality (although this could just be my copy) wasn’t great with regards to the colour balance even allowing for the fact that this is a VHS.

But in terms of simply telling a story and showing what physically happened, this review is perfect for that and I can’t think of an event that was missed that’s worthy of note.

In the 1984 review for example there’s no mention of Brundle’s crash that ruled him out of the race that weekend. Here even Fabi’s crash in the start and finish straight in qualifying for Canada is noted.

To finish with. Just in case you’ve missed any of the reviews so far then here’s a brief summary of what I think about each review so far

1981… 4/5. Good but the audio anomalies can be annoying at times.

1982… 5/5. Pretty much perfect. It’s very atmospheric, the commentary is perfect. Yes there is the same kind of audio anomaly as the 1981 review but you don’t always notice it and it’s pretty much sorted eventually.

1983… 1/5. The worst review so far. Yes the footage is great and the extra footage helps a lot but the commentary ruins it for me. The interruptions of that woman are unforgivable on an official F1 review.

1984… 4/5 Almost a 5-star review but the audio distortion on the extra footage and the appearance of topless women for reasons that I can’t fathom taking a top score away

1985… 2/5. A very hit-and-miss review. The audio quality is poor in places and so is the commentary. But the good moments in the review (the footage) save it from a 1 out of 5 review.

1986… 4/5. Almost perfect, again there’s no need for the topless women in my opinion. Certainly in an official F1 end-of-season review video, I can’t give something like that a 5 star mark. If you want topless/naked women then go on the internet there’s plenty out there.

Before I go into a rant about nothing I’ll wrap it up there. Up next 1987. And a surprising opinion about that season review.