Formula 1: Monaco Grand Prix - 5 Classic races featuring - Senna, Prost, Raikkonen and more

1996 Monaco Grand Prix

Oliver Panis of France en route to victory

An incredible racing contest, trumped by Oliver Panis for Mugen Motorsport, the 1996 thriller was a wet-weather race, so implicit to the heart of one of F1’s most admired tracks.

Incredibly, the race that at the start saw 21 cars running in contention for the fight to the checkered flag saw only 3 contending in the final moments in an incredibly action-packed GP that was aced by the Frenchman, Oliver Panis.

By the time Lap 1 was complete, 3 of the 21 cars had bowed out of the race, including Andrea Montermini’s Ford that couldn’t be repaired in the aftermath of a warm cup crash and Schumacher’s Ferrari, that crashed into the back of Ste Dovete, resulting from a series of collisions further down the grid at the start of the Grand Prix.

Interestingly, by lap 11, by which time the wet weather had begun affecting the race tremendously, only 11 cars were running in contention.

This would, soon after, change to four cars owing to a big collision between Mika Hakkinen, Eddie Irvine, and Mika Salo, with two further race retirements of Luca Badoer and Damon Hill severely hampering the Grand Prix further.

Eventually, Frenchman Panis won the Grand Prix and to this day remains the most recent French racing driver to have aced the Monaco Grand Prix, his triumph dating back to over two decades in time.