The best of the rest

In 1988 there were two races inside every race. There was the contest the McLaren-Hondas of Senna and Prost ran among themselves, winning 15 of 16 rounds, and there was the fight for everything behind them. The Benetton B188 won that second race more often than any other car ¹².

Rory Byrne's design arrived in a strange transitional season — the final year of F1's first turbo era, run to a deliberately split formula. Turbo cars had their boost choked to 2.5 bar and their fuel cut to 150 litres; the 3.5-litre normally-aspirated cars, by contrast, were handed a 40 kg lighter minimum weight and no fuel limit at all, the rule-makers nudging the grid toward the all-atmospheric world of 1989 ³. The B188 read that brief perfectly and became, in the words of the period, "usually the class of the atmospheric cars" ¹.

“The B188 was the first car the team had built without a turbo since its Toleman origins.”

Byrne's atmo blueprint

The B188 was the first car the team had built without a turbo since its Toleman origins ¹. Where the old turbo cars had needed huge intercoolers, Byrne's atmo machine carried a bulkier engine cover and larger twin air intakes — one above each sidepod — to feed a big, hungry V8 ¹. He also pushed the cockpit back behind a longer, sleeker nose so the driver's feet sat behind the front-axle line, quietly adopting a 1989 safety rule a year early ¹.

The engine was the other half of the story. Benetton was effectively the Ford works team and had exclusive use of the new DFR — a fresh evolution of the immortal Cosworth DFV — while every other Ford runner made do with the older DFZ ¹². At roughly 620 bhp it was the most powerful atmospheric engine on the grid, giving the green cars a real edge over their normally-aspirated rivals from Williams and March, both of whom were lumbered with comparing newer but no quicker Judd V8s ¹.

Boutsen, Nannini and a points machine

The driving was shared between the serious, almost surgical Belgian Thierry Boutsen and the hard-charging, chain-smoking Italian Alessandro Nannini, freshly poached from Minardi ²⁴. Boutsen was the consistency: he scored in most rounds and reeled off five third places — at San Marino, Canada, Detroit, Portugal and Japan — every one of them behind the untouchable McLarens, and ended the year 4th in the Drivers' Championship on 27 points ⁴⁵.

Nannini's season had more rough edges but bigger emotional payoffs. At a sodden Silverstone he spun twice and still came home third for the maiden podium of his career; later in the year he repeated the result in Spain ¹². He also planted the car's only fastest lap of the season at Hockenheim ⁵. His twelve points, added to Boutsen's twenty-seven, lifted Benetton to a clear third in the Constructors' Championship on 39 ²⁵.

What might have been

It should have been 46. Both Benettons were initially classified third and fourth at the Belgian Grand Prix, only to be disqualified long after the flag for a fuel irregularity, stripping the team of seven points ³. Even so, third overall — behind only the turbocharged McLaren and Ferrari giants and ahead of the Honda-powered Lotuses of reigning champion Nelson Piquet — was a statement ¹².

The B188's real significance, though, was what it pointed toward. As the turbos were legislated out of existence, Byrne had already built and proved a quick, light, normally-aspirated car. It rolled almost unchanged into 1989 as the B189, and the design pedigree behind it — Byrne, with a young engineer named Pat Symonds on the pit wall — was the same brain trust that would later carry Benetton, and then Ferrari, to world titles ¹⁴. The 1988 B188 was where that future first showed its colours.

Period footnote

The year was bracketed by tragedy and emotion: Enzo Ferrari died on 14 August 1988, and weeks later his cars scored the season's only non-McLaren win, a 1-2 at Monza ³. Benetton, meanwhile, simply did the quiet, important thing — it was the team that showed the post-turbo era could be colourful, competitive and fast.