(Motorsport-Total.com) – Stefan Johansson never won a race in Formula 1, but he had several legends of the sport as teammates. In 1984, he drove two races for Toleman alongside Ayrton Senna, and in 1987 he was a full-season teammate of Alain Prost at McLaren.
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“The experience I had with Prost was a real eye-opener,” reveals the Swede in a video interview on the YouTube channel of GPTotal and reports: “In the first three or four meetings with Alain, my head was completely overwhelmed.”
The Frenchman, who already had two world championship titles at the time, brought “too much information” into the meetings that he himself could not process. Only over time did he realize that everything Prost said had a “system.”
“He was far ahead of all of us back then in terms of his approach to racing, how he handled the car, how he managed the entire race weekend, and how he operated within the team, and so on,” he says about the “Professor.”
“That year I learned more from him than in my entire remaining career, both before and after,” reveals Johansson, who lost his McLaren seat 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 for the first time. “Of course, Ayrton was in a class of his own when it came to natural talent. No one could match him. He was like an acrobat in a racing car,” Johansson recalls.
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At the same time, he also believes that Senna took another step forward after moving to McLaren. “After that, he made great progress when he could sit in the same room with Alain and observe him,” Johansson suspects.
“Until then, in my opinion, he relied above all on his natural talent, which was already far beyond that of everyone else in the paddock, which is why he had already achieved great results,” says the now 69-year-old.
The Formula 1 career of Alain Prost
“But when you think about it, he [after moving to McLaren] was simply on another level, and I think that was because [Alain] was just so good at everything,” says Johansson, who himself raced in Formula 1 until 1991.
While he never celebrated the very big successes during his time in the top class, Senna and Prost shared almost all 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 interrupt once each.
Prost retired from Formula 1 at the end of 1993 after his fourth title win, while Senna tragically died at the beginning of the 1994 season in Imola. According to his own statement, Johansson remains good friends with Prost to this day.
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