Lauda and Prost The faster man, the half point and the friend

The last race of 1983 was the South African Grand Prix at Kyalami, where Alain Prost lost the championship by 2 points. John Watson, Lauda’s team-⁠mate at McLaren, told in 2022 what happened next:

At the end of ’83 I came home from the South African Grand Prix, and on the Monday I got a call from my team-⁠mate Niki who said, ‘Be careful – Prost has lost his drive at Renault and is looking to take your seat.’ Niki didn’t want Prost in the team.

Lauda’s version was the reverse: Watson, he said, had brought it on himself, and Prost was simply the quickest driver of the day. In another telling, which McLaren printed after his death, he said that Watson and Ron Dennis had been only a few thousand dollars apart, and that he had offered to make up the difference himself. Adam Cooper, writing in Motor Sport in 2014, found Watson still in his salary negotiations when Dennis signed Prost.¹ McLaren announced him on 24 October 1983, and Watson had no seat for 1984.

Prost came cheaply. Lauda’s own return to Dennis’s team for 1982 had cost a record sum, by Cooper’s account, and Prost’s contract was by his own account not very much in his favour; Der Spiegel put the two salaries at about US$2 million and about US$500,000. Prost was born on 24 February 1955, six years and two days after Lauda, and he had already raced him for two seasons, in a Renault: in 1982 Prost finished ahead in 10 of their races and Lauda in 4, and in 1983 in 11 to Lauda’s 3.

Lauda had his own reasons to want 1984: it was he who had made McLaren race the TAG Porsche engine in 1983, a year before its designer, John Barnard, wanted to race it. The story, in Lauda’s and Barnard’s words, is in 1983.

1984

The car was the McLaren MP4/2–⁠TAG, and McLaren won 12 of the 16 races with it. At Jacarepaguá on 25 March Prost was the quicker in practice; Lauda was in front when his car’s electrics failed, and Prost won. At Kyalami on 7 April Lauda won from 8th on the grid, with Prost 2nd after starting from the pit lane; then Lauda retired at Zolder and at Imola, and after four races Prost led him by 24 points to 9. At Dijon-⁠Prenois on 20 May Lauda won again, from 9th on the grid.

In qualifying the gap never closed. Prost out-qualified him in 15 races of 16; Lauda was the quicker only once, at Dallas. So Lauda gave up the fight for the grid and spent his practice on the race. Prost, in 2014, saw it from the other side: he was always the quicker in qualifying, but in the races Lauda was always there, and in the first part of the season he never thought that Lauda could beat him.

Der Spiegel saw less harmony in 1984 than the two men remembered 30 years later: it described suspicion in the team, an unhappy crew and a warmth that was only for show, and printed Lauda’s complaint that the team cheered Prost’s wins more than his own. The season’s words are in 1984.

Monaco, 3 June

Monaco was run in heavy rain. Lauda, from 8th on the grid, spun off at Casino Square after 23 laps, an error which, Alan Henry reported in Motor Sport, he confessed was his own, not the car’s. Prost led when the race was stopped after 31 laps, short of three-quarters of its distance, and so the points were halved: 4.5 for his win instead of 9.² No one could know it yet, but it would decide the title.

The summer

He won at Brands Hatch, at the Österreichring, his home Grand Prix, with fourth gear gone, and at Monza. Of the home win he said in 2014: “It was a very big win, because this was a key part of the championship. Alain crashed – and for me that was the important thing. It was one of the most significant races for me, to win despite the gearbox trouble.” He went to the last race 3.5 points ahead, 66 to 62.5.

Estoril, 21 October 1984

The sum was simple. If Prost won at Estoril, Lauda had to be 2nd. Prost qualified on the front row and Lauda, after a troubled practice, 11th.

Place on the grid, Estoril 1984

11

At the flag: champion by half a point

2

Prost won. Lauda, with a turbo short of power by his own later account, worked his way up through the field, and when Nigel Mansell’s Lotus lost its brakes, 2nd place was his, with the race’s fastest lap; the race is told in 1984. Barnard remembered both Lauda’s complaint about his team-⁠mate’s pace and what he did that day:

I remember him saying to me, ‘This f***ing little Frenchman is always half a second quicker than me, I’ve got to figure out what to do’. … It was the one time I saw Niki just chuck everything at it and go for it big time.

He was champion for the third time, by 72 points to 71.5: half a point, the narrowest margin the championship had seen. On the podium, Cooper writes, Lauda told Prost that 1985 would be his year; Prost, 30 years on, still counted that night’s party among the best.

1985

Lauda nearly left. That autumn he talked to Renault, which by Der Spiegel’s report offered him US$2.5 million for 1985; when the talks collapsed he stayed, for less money than before. Prost, as Motor Sport quoted him in 2005, was glad he stayed: what mattered was the trust between them, and by the end of 1984 he was certain that Lauda was completely honest.

As champion Lauda carried No. 1 on the MP4/2B, and finished only three of his 14 races; of the others, only a spin at Monaco was clearly his own mistake. Prost won the title, with 73 points; Lauda scored 14 and was 10th. In the races they both started, Prost finished ahead 10 times and Lauda 4.

On Saturday 17 August, at the Österreichring, Lauda said that this season would be his last, and he later named Prost among his reasons. The next weekend, at Zandvoort, he started 10th, led after the mid-race stops, and held off the faster Prost over the last laps to win by 0.232 seconds, the last of his 25 Grand Prix wins. How the career ended, at Adelaide in November, is told in The retirements.

Friends

Not everyone thought the pairing would work. John Watson, who knew them both, put it plainly: “I’m not sure it was made in heaven, for they are both single-minded, selfish, wanting kind of people” (attributed). Lauda himself, in one later telling, said that he had hated the sight of his team-⁠mate in 1984; in another, that as people they never had a problem, and got on well while fighting each other as drivers. Prost said the same: they never had any problems.

Prost remembered a lesson, too. After one race that year, furious about a mechanical failure, he was taken by Lauda to a nightclub and given a whisky and coke: the point, Lauda told him, was to keep work apart from the rest of life, and to stop looking back. It was Lauda, Prost said in 2019, who taught him to do that.

In 1984 Prost had learned something else, he said in 2014: that the quickest driver does not always win the championship. He went on to win four of them. When Lauda died, on 20 May 2019, he told Agence France-Presse, in Motor Sport’s English, that the sport had lost a titan who never complained about anything, and that theirs had been the greatest partnership he had known.