1985 South African Grand Prix

The 1985 South African Grand Prix was a Formula One motor race held on 19 October 1985 at the Kyalami Circuit in South Africa. It was the fifteenth and penultimate round of the 1985 FIA Formula One World Championship.

Contents

• Qualifying
• Championship standings after the race
• References

The race was marked with some teams boycotting the event due to apartheid -- the segregation of blacks and whites -- and was the last South African Formula One race until apartheid ended in 1992. The race was won by Nigel Mansell in a Williams, who also took pole position.

The event was boycotted by several Formula One teams, namely Ligier and Renault due to mounting international pressures against tolerating the country's system of apartheid. French teams Ligier and Renault's boycotts were in lockstep with the French government's boycott and sanctioning of South Africa, apparently doing so under pressure. Most of the Formula One drivers, including Alain Prost, Niki Lauda and Nigel Mansell were personally very much against racing in South Africa, but the drivers held the mentality that because they were contracted to drive at every Grand Prix, they would race at Kyalami.

Some governments tried to force their drivers from entering the race. Brazil's sanctions on South Africa nearly prevented Nelson Piquet or Ayrton Senna from racing.

Finland and Sweden held similar reservations regarding Finn Keke Rosberg and Swede Stefan Johansson competing. Sweden's National Automobile Federation had announced Johansson could not race in South Africa before the event, but he did race.

Ayrton Senna changed his mind on personally boycotting the race, saying he would race if his Lotus team went. It did and he did, retiring outside the points.

It was the final South African Grand Prix until apartheid ended, with FIA president Jean-Marie Balestre announcing days after the race that a grand prix would not return to the nation because of apartheid. Even without the political pressures, this might well have been the final Formula One race held at Kyalami in its then form. The FIA had long since deemed that circuits where lap times were under 60 seconds were considered too small for Grand Prix racing and with car speeds increasing all the time it was reasonable to conclude that lap times from 1986 would be under 60 seconds, (the same fate had also fallen on the French track Dijon-Prenois and would after 1990 claim the French Paul Ricard "club circuit". Kyalami had actually seen a drop in pole position time of over 10 seconds since the 1981 race and Mansell's 1985 pole position time of 1:02.366 was 2.505 seconds faster than Nelson Piquet's 1984 pole time of 1:04.871.

The South African Grand Prix would only return in 1992, after the apartheid ended, in a new configuration of the Kyalami circuit. Nigel Mansell, driving a V10 Williams-Renault, would also win the race when it returned to the Grand Prix calendar in 1992.