1978 Brabham, the fan and Monza

In the pit lane at Buenos Aires on 15 January 1978, Alan Henry of Motor Sport watched the second man of the Argentine Grand Prix, Niki Lauda, pull off his fireproof balaclava and look thoughtfully down the pit lane towards his old team. Then he turned away. The World Champion of 1977 no longer drove for Ferrari. He had finished his first race for Brabham 13.2 seconds behind Mario Andretti’s Lotus, still carrying the No. 1 he had won with Ferrari.

It was a year of two wins and nine retirements. He won once in a car that raced only once, and once on the day his first Formula One team-⁠mate was fatally injured. Every race he finished, he finished on the podium.

Ferrari’s champion at Brabham

He had signed in the autumn of 1977 for Bernie Ecclestone, who owned Brabham and led the constructors’ association. Der Spiegel reported that Ecclestone fixed the start money the organisers paid, while Lauda chaired the drivers’ safety commission, and that as Brabham’s lead driver Lauda could control the business of Formula One better still. The magazine put Brabham’s offer at 1.4 million marks, against the 700,000 his Ferrari contract had been worth.

The team’s cars were designed by Gordon Murray and powered by Alfa Romeo’s flat-12, 3 litres and more than 500 bhp by the figure of Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport. The sponsor was Parmalat, the Italian dairy company that, as Watson tells it, had been Lauda’s own personal sponsor and became the team’s. His team-⁠mate was John Watson, who had asked Ecclestone for equal status. Looking back in 2022, Watson saw how it had turned out: “I liked Niki personally but he didn’t give a damn about me professionally.” Lauda, he said, had become number one in effect. Of the races both of them started that year, nine ended with Lauda ahead and seven with Watson.

He began in the old car, the Brabham BT45C. In Argentina its ignition failed in practice and he started 5th; in the race he ran behind Watson until Watson retired, and finished 2nd. At Jacarepaguá, in Rio, the car was almost undriveable until an older nose was fitted, and he started 10th. A balance weight flew off Hans-⁠Joachim Stuck’s Shadow, past his head, and lodged in the Brabham’s rear wing. He finished 3rd; Carlos Reutemann’s Ferrari won.

In March, Der Spiegel printed the words that open this page: a finish at the front and points could matter more than winning at any cost. Looking back in November, Jenkinson wrote that he had looked as if he meant to win the championship again without winning a race, by finishing 2nd or 3rd every time.

The BT46

Murray’s new car, the Brabham BT46, was dart-shaped, with a triangular monocoque. It was meant to cool the wide flat-12 with radiators laid flush on its bodywork. They did not work well enough, and conventional radiators went into the nose, which spoiled the shape and added weight ahead of the front wheels. The width of the engine ruled out the kind of ground-effect car Lotus was racing.

Still, at its first race, at Kyalami on 4 March, Lauda put it on pole with 1:14.65, the only pole he would take for Brabham. He was enjoying the new car, Jenkinson reported. With 10 minutes of the last session left he sat in the pits, sure that his time was safe; Riccardo Patrese, on better tyres, went 0.02 seconds faster than Lauda’s cruising lap of that session, but not faster than his pole. In the race the engine failed after 52 laps.

At Silverstone on 19 March, in the BRDC International Trophy, a stuck throttle kept him from starting. At Long Beach on 2 April he ran 2nd behind Gilles Villeneuve’s Ferrari until the Alfa engine cut out on lap 27. He told television, curtly: “no fuel pressure”. Jenkinson used the moment to show how live television wanted an explanation at once.

At Monaco on 7 May he started 3rd and banged into Reutemann at the start. A puncture and a stop for a new tyre dropped him to 6th. He drove back to 2nd, 22.5 seconds behind Patrick Depailler, and on lap 72 he lapped in 1:28.65, the race’s fastest lap and a new record.

To Jenkinson it was Lauda at his best, precise and determined. In the same column he doubted, from some of Lauda’s interviews, that Lauda cared at all for the history of motor racing.

At Zolder on 21 May Jody Scheckter’s Wolf clipped the Brabham into the barriers at the start. Lauda was out before he had completed a lap, and angry. At Jarama on 4 June, in a new chassis, he was fighting Jacques Laffite, Ronnie Peterson and Watson for places when the engine broke after 56 laps.

The fan

Murray’s answer to the Lotus was a fan at the tail, driven from the gearbox, that drew air from beneath the car. The car was the Brabham BT46B, the “fan car”; the chapter on the machines explains how it worked.

Moving aerodynamic devices were banned. The question was what the fan was for. By Murray’s calculations it worked 70 per cent to cool the engine and 30 per cent on downforce, and after the Spanish Grand Prix the layout was described, in good faith as Jenkinson put it, to the sport’s governing body, the CSI, at a meeting in Madrid. The CSI accepted Murray’s word without seeing the car. It was tested at Alfa Romeo’s track at Balocco.

One race, then the ban

Lotus and Tyrrell took their protest to the Swedish federation and to the FIA, then withdrew it. Ecclestone’s fellow constructors in FOCA agreed a compromise that would have let the Brabham run its fan until 1 August. A special commission of the CSI met in Paris and split two against two; its chairman, Pierre Ugeux, gave his casting vote against the fan. From that day, 23 June 1978, fans were banned on grounds of safety, and the result of the Swedish Grand Prix was allowed to stand. By the letter of the rules, Jenkinson wrote, the BT46B had not been illegal; the CSI’s own technical commission had more or less agreed with Murray’s figures.

Later accounts tell it another way: that Ecclestone withdrew the car himself, against Murray’s wishes, to keep the peace with the British teams in FOCA. Both versions have Ecclestone accepting that it would not race again; the ban itself was the CSI’s.¹

Colin Chapman flew home from Sweden with his mind busier than usual, Jenkinson wrote, and by the Monday morning Lotus had a mock-up of a Lotus 79 with an extractor fan behind each sidepod. With fans on the Lotus, Chapman told him, “… and the Brabham wouldn’t have seen which way we’d gone…”

No fan car raced again. Lauda’s chassis went back to being a BT46 for the rest of the summer, and afterwards it stayed with Ecclestone; in March 2025 it was among the cars of his collection sold to Mark Mateschitz.

Summer

At Paul Ricard on 2 July the Brabhams were back as they had been before Sweden, with radiators in the nose, without the fans and all the cowling. Lauda was fastest in one session and started 3rd; the engine failed on lap 10.

At Brands Hatch on 16 July he started 4th and ran in a mixed group at the front of the British Grand Prix. He pressed Reutemann to the line and finished 2nd, 1.23 seconds behind him, with the fastest lap, 1:18.60.

At Hockenheim on 30 July he ran 3rd behind the two Lotuses until his engine broke after 11 laps. In practice at the Österreichring he was unhappy with the car, and a transmission failure left him on foot; he started his home Grand Prix 12th and crashed in the wet after the restart. At Zandvoort on 27 August he was 3rd behind the two Lotuses, the best of the rest, and set the fastest lap.

Alfa Romeo’s own car

Alfa Romeo was building a Formula One car of its own, developed by Vittorio Brambilla on Pirelli tyres. Before the Italian Grand Prix, posters round the Autodromo at Monza blamed Ecclestone and Lauda for killing it off, and Italian enthusiasts were scathing about the two of them. That autumn Lauda, under personal contract to Goodyear, tested the car on Goodyears at Paul Ricard and judged it a useless waste of time, and he and Ecclestone suggested that it would be abandoned. Jenkinson saw the Brabham team’s interest in keeping Alfa Romeo’s engines to itself.

Monza: declared the winner

A second accident and the damaged barriers delayed the restart. At 5.50 pm the race was cut from 52 laps to 40. Shortly after 6 o’clock the two cars on the front row, Villeneuve’s Ferrari and Andretti’s Lotus, went before the green light, and each was penalised a minute. When the penalties were announced, Jenkinson wrote: “… so officially Lauda was leading the race! But nobody really cared, it was all too silly.” Andretti beat Villeneuve on the road; with the penalties they were 6th and 7th. Lauda, who had started 4th and was 3rd on the road, was declared the winner, with Watson 2nd: officially a Brabham one-two.

Andretti, Peterson’s team-⁠mate, became World Champion that day.

America

At Watkins Glen a group of established drivers, Lauda among them, asked the organisers to refuse Patrese’s entry and said that they would withdraw if he were allowed to race. In the United States Grand Prix on 1 October Lauda was running 3rd behind Reutemann and Alan Jones when his engine blew after 28 laps. A week later, at the first Grand Prix in Montreal, his brakes failed on lap 5, and Villeneuve won at home. Brabham had entered a third car for a young Brazilian, Nelson Piquet.

Andretti finished the season with 64 points, Peterson 51, Reutemann 48 and Lauda 44, 4th. Of his 16 races he finished seven, all on the podium. The other nine ended with five broken engines, an ignition failure, failed brakes and two accidents.

He stayed at Brabham. Watson left for McLaren, and the young man from the third car in Montreal became his team-⁠mate for 1979.