1979 The V12, the Procar and Montreal

In the last hour of practice at Buenos Aires in January 1979, Niki Lauda gave up on his new car. He climbed into the old flat-12 Brabham instead, to get himself into the race at all, and started the Argentine Grand Prix 23rd. Alan Henry, reporting for Motor Sport, judged: “Most miserable of all was undoubtedly Lauda and the new Brabham–Alfa Romeo V12.” At the first start the Brabham stalled with low fuel pressure, and after 8 laps of the race its fuel system had failed.

It set the pattern of the year. Lauda started 13 World Championship races in 1979 and finished two. He scored 4 points. In between he won a championship in another kind of car altogether, won a race for Formula One cars that did not count, and in September, in Montreal, he stopped.

The V12 Brabham

For his second season at Brabham, after 1978, Gordon Murray drew a ground-effect car, the Brabham BT48, with a long, pointed, finless nose. Alfa Romeo built it a new V12 engine in place of the flat-12; the reason usually given is that the flat engine’s width blocked the tunnels under the car that made its downforce. Lauda carried No. 5. His team-⁠mate was the young Brazilian who had driven a third Brabham in Montreal the autumn before, Nelson Piquet. That spring Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport told his readers how to pronounce the name, since he expected them to be saying it often.

At Interlagos in February the gear change failed after 5 laps. Murray was impressed all the same by the way Lauda simply got down to work on a problem instead of throwing up his hands. At Kyalami on 3 March he started 4th and ran 3rd in the wet early laps; he eased off in the rain, the rear wing worked loose, and he finished 6th, a lap down. It was his only point before September.

At Long Beach he practised in the spare Brabham with a film camera fixed behind his head. In the race on 8 April he started 11th, and at the first hairpin Patrick Tambay’s McLaren rode over Jan Lammers’s Shadow and landed on the Brabham. A week later, at Brands Hatch, he led the Race of Champions early, stopped for tyres after 8 laps and finished 5th, lapped by Gilles Villeneuve. To Jenkinson he seemed to be driving without conviction.

At Jarama on 29 April he passed the damaged Lotus of Mario Andretti and then Jody Scheckter to run 3rd, until a water leak stopped him after 63 laps. At Zolder two weeks later Jenkinson thought he looked as if he were about to follow James Hunt, who was on the point of retiring. Lauda started 13th, dispirited, could not shake off Hans-⁠Joachim Stuck’s ATS, and stopped after 23 laps with his engine pouring oil.

Late in qualifying at Monaco he came into the pits with a sheepish look and told Murray that he had hit a guard rail with the left rear wheel; he had been trying very hard. He started 4th and was 2nd on lap 2, behind Scheckter’s Ferrari, until Villeneuve dived past on lap 3. After 21 laps he was out, in a collision with Didier Pironi.

The Procar

The race he won that weekend was the one before the Grand Prix. BMW and Max Mosley had devised the Procar series in 1978 to race the BMW M1 coupé, which could not yet be homologated for sports-car racing. At each round, run before a European Grand Prix, the five fastest Grand Prix drivers of Friday practice took factory M1s, and the rest of the field drove cars that were privately owned or sponsored. Drivers under contract to Michelin could not race on the series’ Goodyears, which moved Lauda and Piquet up the list.

Lauda had already arranged sponsors to buy him a car for the whole series. When he was not in a factory car he raced the BMW M1 of Project Four, the team of Ron Dennis. He retired at Zolder, and on 26 May, on the eve of the Monaco Grand Prix, won at Monaco for Project Four. He did not arrive for the round at Donington, raced the M1 at the Norisring in the German national championship, finishing 18th, and was 8th at Dijon. In July he won at Silverstone on the 13th and at Hockenheim on the 28th, each time the day before the Grand Prix. Of the M1 he said: “They were easy to drive, nice and powerful.”

He retired at the Österreichring, crashed in practice at Zandvoort, and at Monza on 9 September finished 2nd. It was enough: he was the first Procar champion, ahead of Hans-⁠Joachim Stuck and Clay Regazzoni, with 78 points to Stuck’s 73 and Regazzoni’s 61 by a specialist history’s count. The connection with Dennis, made in the Procar series, would bring him back to Formula One two years later.

Lauda Air

Away from the circuits the year had begun another business. In April 1979, while still a Brabham driver, Lauda founded Lauda Air, buying the charter licence of a company called Alpair, with the travel firm ITAS as his partner. On 24 May, the week of the Monaco Grand Prix, the airline began flying: two second-hand Fokker F27 turboprops, carrying holidaymakers from Austria to the Mediterranean. Sources differ on the day of the founding. Later accounts often have him starting the airline after he stopped racing; he founded it five months before.

Summer

At Dijon-⁠Prenois on 1 July he was dropping back behind his team-⁠mate, Jenkinson noted, not going as fast as the young Brazilian, when he spun on lap 24 and could not restart. After the race, in which Villeneuve and René Arnoux had banged wheels in their duel, Lauda led a small campaign in the drivers’ safety committee to have the two of them reprimanded, even punished. Nothing more was heard of it.

At Silverstone on 14 July, the day after his Procar win, he started 6th in a Brabham with carbon-fibre brake discs and led the chasing group when Piquet spun; the brakes failed after 12 laps. At Hockenheim on 29 July, again the day after winning in the M1, Piquet let him through as the team had arranged, and the engine failed after 27 laps. That weekend the spare Brabham was set up for Lauda’s leg length, which caused panic in the pit when Piquet needed it.

Lauda has made it clear he is fed up with the whole operation and in particular Carlo Chiti and the Alfa Romeo V12 engine.

The Österreichring was his home race, and Jenkinson thought him about to try harder than he had all season. He started 4th and was 3rd on the first lap, ahead of Piquet for once, until the oil pressure went with about 10 laps left and he stopped after 45.

The drivers’ safety committee had demanded a chicane on the fast back section at Zandvoort, and Lauda and Scheckter threatened a boycott if the work was not done; Andretti, also on the committee, would have nothing to do with boycotts. In practice for the Procar race, the day before the Dutch Grand Prix, Lauda crashed and hurt his wrist. He started the Grand Prix 9th and withdrew after 4 laps. Jenkinson, who found the team’s mood unreal, with Lauda simply waiting to leave and a Cosworth-engined car already tested, called the wrist the excuse to stop driving the V12.

At Monza on 9 September, the day his Procar title was settled, Jenkinson saw his pride take over. From 9th on the grid he passed John Watson, the Tyrrells and Andretti, and finished 4th, 54.4 seconds behind the winner, for 3 points. It was his last World Championship finish of the decade.

Imola

A week later he won again, at Imola. The Dino Ferrari Grand Prix, held there on 16 September, did not count for the championship; it was run largely to qualify the circuit to hold a World Championship round in 1980, and 15 cars started. Lauda passed Scheckter on lap 16 and Villeneuve about 5 laps later on the straight. A collision at the hairpin and a broken exhaust slowed him, but he won. It was the only win the car ever gave him, and the last of his first career.

Montreal

For the last two races of the year Brabham built new cars with Cosworth engines, the Brabham BT49. Lauda had not seen them built, nor sat in one. In the first session of practice for the Canadian Grand Prix, on Friday 28 September, he drove about 10 laps in the new car, came in and stopped. Bernie Ecclestone first told people that he was unwell; in the afternoon Brabham admitted that he had retired from racing and broken his contract.

Jenkinson’s report records no words of his. The earliest printed, in Der Spiegel in 1982, have him asking why he should go on driving round in circles with the others; in 2017 he remembered hating the vibration of the Cosworth engine, and likened the moment he decided to a curtain coming down. The reasons on record are many and they add up: the V12, and Alfa Romeo’s Carlo Chiti, with whom he was fed up; the young team-⁠mate who was beating him more and more often; and the airline he had founded that April. The retirements tells the day in full.

Montreal was not one of his entries, and it has no row in the table below. His World Championship season had ended at Monza: 13 starts, two finishes, 4 points and 14th place, with Scheckter champion on 51. Villeneuve had finished ahead of him in all 13 races they both started. Against Piquet he finished ahead six times to five, with two level; against Scheckter, the champion, once in 13.