On the nineteenth of May, three times across four decades, Monaco did what Monaco does. It destroyed the favourites and handed the race to someone else.

1. Stirling Moss, Peter Collins and Mike Hawthorn — three of the fastest drivers in the world — eliminate each other at the same chicane on the same lap. Juan Manuel Fangio threads through the wreckage at low speed and wins by going slower than everyone else. He is forty-five years old, in his final championship season, and he barely breaks a sweat.
2. Ayrton Senna takes pole position in the Lotus, leads with authority, and retires on lap fourteen when his Renault engine detonates — the victim of an accidental over-rev in Sunday morning warm-up. Alain Prost starts fifth, waits, manages, and inherits the race that should never have been his. He wins with a sticking wastegate and a broken car. He wins because he is still there.
3. Michael Schumacher crashes alone on lap one, from pole position. Damon Hill leads by thirty seconds and retires with a failed oil pump on lap forty-one. Jean Alesi inherits the lead and retires with broken suspension on lap sixty. When the two-hour limit ends the race after seventy-five laps, three cars take the chequered flag. One of them belongs to Olivier Panis, who started fourteenth. He has just won the only Grand Prix of his career, in a Ligier, on fumes, by refusing to stop.

Three races. Three dates. One circuit. Monaco doesn't care who qualified fastest, who has the best car, or who leads with twenty laps to go. It has its own ideas about who deserves to win.

The race destroys its favourites. The patient, the composed, the ones still moving at the end — those are the ones it crowns.

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