As a mark of respect for the Ferrari founder, Alboreto and Berger were allowed to be the first cars to take to the track for Friday morning's first practice session.

Ever since the item was made compulsory for turbo powered cars at the start of the 1987 season, the Arrows team had been experiencing problems with the FIA pop-off valve on their Megatron turbo engines, the problem being that the valve was cutting in too early and the drivers weren't able to exploit the full available power.

This newfound power allowed Cheever and Warwick to line up 5th and 6th respectively, one place in front of reigning World Champion Piquet in his Lotus Honda.

Defending World Champion Piquet, the race winner in 1986 and 1987 when driving for Williams, never looked at ease during qualifying at a track where the Honda powered Lotus 100T should have been a long way ahead of at least the 'atmo' cars.

Martin Brundle, his replacement in Belgium, was asked to race again but his Jaguar Sportscar team boss Tom Walkinshaw vetoed the move, so the second Williams seat went to team test driver (and Brundle's chief rival for the 1988 World Sportscar Championship) Jean-Louis Schlesser.

Berger had initially given chase and stayed within a couple of seconds of Prost, but before lap 10 had started to drop back in order to save fuel.

While this was happening Alboreto, troubled by gear selection problems early in the race, had dropped back from Berger to allow his gearbox oil to cool hoping it would come good.

Senna headed to the left to pass the Frenchman on the inside of the first chicane, but Schlesser locked his brakes and the Williams slid forward towards the gravel trap.

He also added that if Senna had thought about it he'd have realised that to stay close to him, Prost must have also been using too much fuel and that was not something the dual World Champion usually did.

However, with the Megatron engine now producing full power the Englishman began to charge and ran the last 10 laps challenging his teammate.

Another hard luck story was Alessandro Nannini who was forced to start his home Grand Prix from the pits due to a failed throttle on the warm up lap.

For the rest of the afternoon Nannini charged, setting the fastest lap of the race for atmospheric cars and finishing in 9th place.