page_title: 1995 Monaco Grand Prix
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: 1995 Monaco Grand Prix / Report / Background
caption_attribution_description: Le Mans Series 2007 Rd.6 Mil Milhas Brasil: Jean-Christophe Boullion (Pescarolo Sport)
context_page_description: The 1995 Monaco Grand Prix was a Formula One motor race held on 28 May 1995 at the Circuit de Monaco, Monte Carlo, Monaco. It was the fifth round of the 1995 Formula One season. The 78-lap race was won by Michael Schumacher for the Benetton team after starting from second position. Damon Hill finished second for Williams after starting from pole position and leading the first 23 laps of the race, ahead of Gerhard Berger in a Ferrari car. The remaining points-scoring positions were filled by Johnny Herbert in the second Benetton, Mark Blundell and Heinz-Harald Frentzen. Schumacher's win was his third of the season thus far and extended his lead in the World Drivers' Championship over Hill to five points. It was also Renault's first win in the Monaco Grand Prix, as Benetton's engine supplier.
  Schumacher won the race comfortably, over 30 seconds ahead of Hill. Hill's speed advantage in qualifying, in which he had set a lap time almost one second faster than Schumacher, vanished in the race, enabling Schumacher to follow him closely from the start, despite carrying a heavier fuel load for a one-stop pit strategy, as opposed to Hill's two.
context_section_description: Heading into the fifth race of the season, Benetton driver Michael Schumacher was leading the Drivers' Championship with 24 points, a single point ahead of Williams driver Damon Hill. The two Ferrari drivers, Jean Alesi and Gerhard Berger, lay third and fourth in the rankings with 14 and 13 points respectively, whilst David Coulthard and Johnny Herbert, in the second Williams and Benetton respectively, had scored 9 points each. Just four points separated these three teams in the Constructors' Championship, with Ferrari (27 points) leading Williams (26) and Benetton (23). After a trying start to the season, Schumacher had dominated the preceding Spanish Grand Prix, but both championships were open, with no strong favourite for the race victory.
  There were two driver changes going into the event: McLaren driver Nigel Mansell was replaced by the team's test driver, Mark Blundell, and Sauber driver Karl Wendlinger was replaced by Williams test driver and reigning International Formula 3000 champion Jean-Christophe Boullion. Mansell's departure was the main talking point prior to the beginning of the race meeting, as it brought the 1992 World Champion's troubled relationship with McLaren to an end after just two races with the team. Mansell had made a part-time return to Formula One in 1994 as a replacement for the late Ayrton Senna at Williams, but was passed over in favour of Coulthard for 1995 and opted to sign for McLaren instead. When he tested the MP4-10 chassis for the first time, it became apparent that it had a major handling imbalance, and, more seriously, that he did not fit comfortably in the cockpit. Mansell was thus forced to miss the opening two races of the season whilst the team built a wider monocoque to accommodate him. He competed in the San Marino and Spanish Grands Prix in the wider MP4-10B, but struggled to match the pace of teammate Mika Häkkinen and retired his otherwise healthy car from the latter race with handling problems. Mansell and team principal Ron Dennis subsequently agreed a mutual termination of their contract, and Blundell was restored to the seat that he had already occupied in the first two races. Blundell was employed on a race-by-race basis. The split marked the end of Mansell's Formula One career. His presence was still strong at Monaco, however, as the official tickets and publicity material featured a prominent image of his McLaren.
  Wendlinger had crashed heavily in practice for the previous year's Monaco Grand Prix, sustaining a serious head injury from which it took the rest of the season for him to recover. Since rejoining Sauber at the beginning of the current season, he had struggled to match his pre-accident form, lapping several seconds per lap slower than teammate Heinz-Harald Frentzen in the first four Grands Prix. Sauber released a statement clarifying that Wendlinger had not been sacked, and that he would still test for the team with a view to improving his performance. Boullion, who made his Formula One début as a result, was loaned to Sauber by Frank Williams, who was keen to use the known quantity of his test driver to evaluate Frentzen's potential for a future race seat in his team. Frentzen was in his second season of Formula One, but this event also marked his first race start at Monaco, as Sauber had withdrawn him from the previous year's race after Wendlinger's accident.
  The state of the Simtek team's finances was also a major topic of interest. On the Thursday before the race weekend, team principal Nick Wirth held a press conference in which he admitted that the outfit faced imminent closure unless it received money that had been promised by various sponsors. Wirth admitted that Simtek faced a budget shortfall of several million dollars needed to complete the season, part of which was due to him being the victim of "a broken deal". He also pledged to arrange a meeting of all Simtek's financial backers over the race weekend in an attempt to raise additional capital, and that the team would not travel to the following Canadian Grand Prix, an expensive "fly-away" 
caption: Jean-Christophe Boullion (pictured in 2007) made his Formula One début with the Sauber team, replacing Karl Wendlinger.
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