Monaco's greatest lap? Roberto Moreno remembers his Andrea Moda miracle

Thus the Brazilian became involved with notorious Andrea Sassetti and his eponymous team. Staff and some dilapidated equipment had come had come over from the Coloni squad Sassetti purchased, as well as the intellectual rights to an aborted BMW F1 car.

Despite having some of the basics in place, the team seemed barely able to make it to a race – not that it put Moreno off.

“I still had the willpower to be involved in Formula 1, basically,” he explains. “That was the first opportunity that showed up for me in ‘92.

“I got a call from a guy in Monaco that rented my apartment to me who said ‘Look there’s a team going to Brazil, you’re down there and the drivers [Alex Caffi and Enrico Bertaggia], they don’t want to drive for this guy anymore.

“I said ‘As long as he pays me on arrival immediately at every race, I’ll do it.’ Every round I saw Andrea [Sassetti] and he handed me an envelope full of cash, and I stayed for my job. It was as simple as that.”

Turning up in the Rio paddock for his first attempt at pre-qualifying, Moreno found a car and team quite literally in bits. The Brazilian had been tasked with getting the car to turn three laps, thus securing FIA approval to head on to the next race, whilst the other AM machine – driven by the hapless Perry McCarthy – was there “just for show” in Moreno’s words.

“They didn’t have much – just pieces of a new car and a bunch of good people trying to put all together,” he says.

“The [Nick Wirth-designed] Simtek was a definitely a well-designed car,” Moreno says. “The only problem was that it wasn’t designed for the Judd engine that went in it, so the cooling wasn’t effective – it couldn’t last more than six laps before overheating!”

Unsurprisingly Moreno was a sizeable 16sec off the pre-qualifying pace set by Bertrand Gachot’s Larrouse, and things didn’t get much better at the next race in Barcelona, but Moreno saw light at the end of the wind-tunnel.

“I was asked to park the car on the Circuit de Cataluyna back straight, because the rear wing could have fallen off,” he says, somehow managing not to grimace.

“I refused to do that, drove it back to the pits and just parked it there.

“Afterwards I was looking at the car and thought ‘It’s not too bad, we have a bunch of very willing people to work hard that I know: Luciano Guazzeroni and his friend Borgovich – two mechanics from Coloni, and my engineer Hayden Burvill,’ who I sat down with.

“I said ‘Why don’t we at least try to get it through pre-qualifying? Put at least one car together and see what we can do.'”

This mild increase in ambition saw the team nearly qualify for San Marino were it not for a seized wheel bearing, but Moreno and co had a plan for Monaco.

“We went to a very small track in Bari, south of Rome,” he remembers.

“At that place I could do only first, second, and third gears though the corners, but we were able to learn that we didn’t have the steering angle needed for the tight Monaco turns.

“So Hayden worked on that and also the differential – I was always quite sensitive with diff settings.

“We didn’t even do a full lap-time, just three or four corners that were very good for Monaco. I got out of there quite happy with the results.”

It was going to take more than a few set-up changes to get the Andrea Moda S921 through into qualifying though.

With Monaco cited so often as the ultimate test of driving skill, Moreno knew it would take a special level of application to secure the lap-time he needed, and did it in his own inimitable fashion.

“I did a lap around the track with my motorbike at midnight, and I stopped at every corner,” he remembers.

“I took my helmet off, sat on the ground and imagined myself getting the best out of each corner, like I was sitting on the race car, and thought about every single detail.

“Then I did a few laps with a motorbike thinking about everything I had gone through.

“Those were my last thoughts before I went to bed – I had to be up at 5:30am with prequalifying at 7am, there was no Free Practice!”

Heading up to crucial moment just a handful of hours later, Moreno found himself entering that zone that only racing drivers know.

“The thing I remember most was sitting in the car, and nobody could talk to me, no-one could distract me,” he says. “I was on my lap in my head, thinking about what I had to do and everything I thought about that night before – we pulled it off somehow.”

And then some. Moreno blitzed his effort, putting all the challenging corners of Monaco together to not only get his car into the main show, but also come in third out of the four successful pre-qualifiers, just half a second of Michele Alboreto’s Arrows.

The achievement was not lost on the rest of the F1 fraternity.

“Every team member from most of the teams were standing up, applauding me as I drove into the pits after pre qualifying,” he remembers.

“It was an incredible sensation which thinking about makes me emotional now, it was a feeling so unique it will stay in my mind forever.”