unreliable, only moderately powerful and hard on fuel. For he was contracted to the Ligier team, alongside former Grand Prix winner René Arnoux. The team planned to run the new turbocharged 4 cylinder Alfa Romeo engines, but those plans were suddenly scuppered by Arnoux's scathing pre-season comments that likened the engine to dog food and gave Alfa's parent company Fiat the excuse they needed to pull the plug on the engine project. This forced the team to hastily adapt their cars to fit Megatron engines, though luckily both were 4-cylinder and almost the same size (the Megatron was actually the BMW engine used by Brabham and previously by Arrows and Benetton, but as BMW had pulled out of F1 at the beginning of the season, Arrows and their sponsors, USF&G, bought the remaining engines from BMW and renamed them "Megatron"). However, while both were 4-cylinder engines, their respective 'plumbing' was completely different, forcing the team to miss the opening race of the season in Brazil while the rear suspension was re-designed to fit the new engine. Ghinzani occasionally ran in the points for Ligier, notably in Germany, but suffered the indignity of being excluded at Silverstone from the British Grand Prix. In Ghinzani drove for the small German Zakspeed team, which ran its own 4 cylinder turbo engine, though generally without success, and his best finish for the year was 14th in the German Grand Prix at a wet Hockenheim (his teammate, young German Bernd Schneider finished 12th in the race, the best finish for the team in 1988). Despite being one of the few teams to use turbo powered engines in 1988, Ghinzani and Schneider often struggled to qualify for races and were often slower than the atmospheric cars. One such time was at the ultra fast Silverstone Circuit for the British Grand Prix. Neither driver qualified, with Ghinzani six seconds and Schneider eight seconds slower than the pole sitting Ferrari of Gerhard Berger. For he once again linked with Osella as teammate to young Italian driver Nicola Larini. Ghinzani announced his decision to retire from Grand Prix racing before official practice of the final race of the 1989 season in Australia. He qualified 21st for his final race, but it ended when his Osella was violently hit from behind by the Lotus of triple World Champion Nelson Piquet on lap 19 under braking for the hairpin at the