1983 From the Cosworth to the TAG Porsche turbo

At Zandvoort, on the last weekend of August 1983, a new McLaren stood in the pit lane with a label that read “8T”: his race number, and the letter the team gave its spare car. Behind the cockpit sat a 1.5-⁠litre V6 turbo, designed and built by Porsche and paid for through Techniques d’Avant Garde, the company of Mansour Ojjeh. Niki Lauda had pressed for that engine to race that year. His designer, John Barnard, had wanted to wait for 1984. Most of Lauda’s 1983 was spent in the car that came before it, and most of what he did in that car ended early.

It was his second season with McLaren International after the return of 1982, in which he had won twice, and his second beside John Watson. Over the winter FISA had banned the sliding skirts and shaped underbodies that sucked the cars to the road, and the cars of 1983 ran with flat bottoms. Lauda had been among the drivers who pressed for it, and he welcomed the change. In March, in an interview with Hans Halter of Der Spiegel, he said the car was his servant again, the line that opens this page, and he described what ground effect had done to a driver in a fast corner.

He looked forward, too: “I’m the right man for this turbo. … The future belongs to the turbo.” And, of the season ahead: “This year will be more exciting than ever.” For now McLaren had no turbo to give him. The team began the year with Barnard’s carbon-composite MP4/1C, the Ford Cosworth DFV V8 and Michelin tyres, and from Paul Ricard it tried the short-stroke DFY version of the Cosworth. Against the turbo cars it was a holding season. Denis Jenkinson wrote in Motor Sport in July that the kindest thing to say of the team was that it was marking time until the Porsche engine and a new chassis were ready.

Barnard’s MP4 had brought the carbon-composite monocoque to Formula One. McLaren made the tooling; Hercules, in Salt Lake City, laid up and cured the tubs, which were then bonded from five pieces. Barnard had specified the TAG engine too, and he reckoned later that the flat-bottom rule had taken away half the value of having it built.

Lauda carried No. 8 all year; Watson had No. 7. In qualifying Lauda was the quicker of the two, 11 times to 3 on the grids they shared. In the races it went the other way: Watson scored 22 points to his 12, and Watson won the race in which they both started from the back.

Rio and Long Beach

At Jacarepaguá on 13 March Keke Rosberg took pole, and Lauda said of the gap: “I can see how I might make up half the difference, but a full second and a half? No chance!” His Michelin qualifying tyres were no better than the race tyres, and he started 9th. He ran without a stop, was passed by Rosberg 10 laps from the end and finished 3rd on the road, behind Nelson Piquet’s Brabham. Rosberg was then disqualified for a push-start and 2nd place was left empty, so Lauda stayed 3rd in the official results, with 4 points.¹

A fortnight later, on the streets of Long Beach, the qualifying tyres failed the McLarens completely. Watson started 22nd and Lauda 23rd, both unable to lap faster than 1:30 on them. On race tyres they lapped in the 1:28s, and the race came to them. Patrick Tambay and Rosberg, leading, collided; Jacques Laffite’s Goodyears wore out; Riccardo Patrese spun; and the two McLarens went by one car after another. Watson passed Lauda at the end of the straight on lap 33 and went on to win by 27.993 seconds. Lauda was 2nd and set the race’s fastest lap, 1:28.330 on lap 42, and Arnoux was 3rd. It was McLaren’s second win in two years at Long Beach, after Lauda’s own in 1982, and by Jenkinson’s account the podium ceremony was tucked away in the pits. Jenkinson noted in his lap notes that Lauda could not keep up with Watson, and afterwards put it down to a poor choice of tyres.

His place on the grid at Long Beach

23

His place at the flag

2

From 22nd and 23rd on the grid the two McLarens had taken the first two places. It was also Lauda’s last podium for more than a year. The next came at Kyalami in April 1984.

A summer of breakdowns

From Paul Ricard to Montreal he did not score. At Paul Ricard he started 12th and spent the race in the midfield until a wheel bearing failed after 29 laps. At Imola he spun off at the chicane on the highest point of the circuit after 11 laps, his own mistake by Jenkinson’s account. He did not take part in the non-⁠championship Race of Champions at Brands Hatch on 10 April, where Watson drove the spare McLaren.

At Monaco on 15 May he failed to qualify for a Grand Prix for the only time in his World Championship career. The two McLarens were 22nd and 23rd fastest on Thursday, and on Saturday it rained, so that nobody improved and the Thursday times stood. Neither Lauda nor Watson started.

At Spa-⁠Francorchamps, where Roberto Guerrero’s Theodore qualified ahead of both McLarens, he started 15th and went out after 33 laps; the databases record a gearbox failure, Jenkinson an engine failure. In Detroit he started 18th, stopped for tyres after a spell stuck behind Danny Sullivan and Guerrero, and retired after 49 laps when the suspension broke, while Watson finished 3rd. At Montreal he led the Cosworth cars early on and spun off after 11 laps.²

First of the Cosworths

In the second half of the summer he was the fastest driver without a turbo, which was the most the car allowed. At Silverstone on 16 July the speed trap after the chicane showed the gap: the turbo cars went through at 142 to 146 mph (229 to 235 km/⁠h), Lauda, the fastest of the Cosworth runners, at 139 mph. He finished 6th, a lap down, the first Cosworth car home, and scored a point.

At Hockenheim three weeks later he started 18th and drove to the head of the Cosworth cars again, a drive Jenkinson called vintage Lauda, and then threw the result away in the pit lane. Coming in for his stop he slid past his pit with the front wheels locked and reversed back to it. He finished 5th on the road and was disqualified for reversing in the pit lane, the third and last disqualification of his Grand Prix career.

At the Österreichring on 14 August he started 14th and finished 6th, 2 laps down and again the first car without a turbo, for his last point of the season. It was the last time he raced a Formula One car without a turbocharger.

Forcing the turbo

Porsche designed and built the engine from nothing in a little over a year, an 80-degree V6 of 1.5 litres, and McLaren’s partner TAG paid for it. Barnard put the price McLaren paid for the design at about a million marks, and Bosch supplied its engine management. It first ran in July in a test car, the MP4/1D, at Weissach and at Silverstone. Barnard remembered what Lauda said after his first laps behind it: “It’s like taking off in my Learjet, it just keeps pushing all the way down the straight until you get on the brakes” (attributed).

Apart from testing it in a hack chassis, Barnard did not want to race it before 1984. He said later that he had been put under pressure, by Lauda and by the team’s title sponsor, and that Lauda had been urging on the sponsor’s John Hogan because he wanted the engine at once.

At Zandvoort on 28 August he practised in his usual Cosworth car, MP4/1C/7, while the new one was readied. The turbo car, the MP4/1E, chassis MP4/1E/6, had been built from the remains of an earlier MP4/1C; a second, unfinished one, MP4/1E/5, was in the transporter. Jenkinson found the Porsche engineers standing back proudly beside it. Lauda qualified it 19th, slower than Watson in the Cosworth car. It was quick down the straight, but it lost out under braking and in the corners, and after 25 laps he had used up its brakes and retired. Watson finished 3rd. Jenkinson noticed that Watson was more than a little put out to see Ron Dennis so busy around Lauda and the new engine.

At Monza the McLaren–TAGs went through the speed trap at 188 mph (303 km/⁠h), 2 mph slower than Piquet’s Brabham–BMW and 3 mph faster than René Arnoux. The engine was harder to run than to make fast. Its Bosch Motronic management defeated everyone that weekend: a diagnostic unit plugged into Lauda’s car showed the single word ERROR, and at one point six engineers and mechanics were searching the wiring. In the race he had a misfire and an extra visit to the pits, and at his routine stop the engine stalled and the car rolled to rest beside the Brabham pit, where Piquet’s crew was waiting; a crowd of hands pushed it out of the way, and the electrics failed after 24 laps. At Brands Hatch, in the European Grand Prix of 25 September, an engine broke in practice and another in the race, after 25 laps, while he was running with Watson and Derek Warwick.

Kyalami

At the last race, the South African Grand Prix on 15 October, the car showed what it would become. In the warm-up on the morning of the race he was fastest of all, in 1:09.504 on race tyres with the tanks nearly full, 1.2 seconds quicker than Tambay’s Ferrari, the best of the cars on Goodyears.

From 12th on the grid he came through quickly, passed Alain Prost, who was fighting Piquet for the title and soon retired, and settled a few feet behind Patrese’s Brabham. His stop for tyres and fuel took more than 23 seconds when the right rear wheel stuck. He rejoined, caught Patrese again and was running 2nd when the boost pressure dropped and the electrics failed, after 71 of the 77 laps. He was classified 11th. Patrese won, and Piquet was champion with 59 points.

Lauda finished the year 10th with 12 points, from 15 entries and 14 starts.³ He had been in the points four times, retired eight times, been disqualified once and failed to qualify once, and at Kyalami he was classified though no longer running. McLaren were 5th among the constructors with the 34 points of their Cosworth cars. The MP4/1C had given Lauda 11 entries, 10 starts, two podiums and all 12 of his points; the turbo MP4/1E, four starts and no points. Yet the last race had shown what the turbo car could do.

Watson out, Prost in

That year Prost had fought Piquet for the title in the Renault turbo, and at Silverstone and the Österreichring Lauda, first of the Cosworths, finished 6th. Then Prost lost the title at Kyalami, Renault let him go, and by the end of the year he had Watson’s seat; how that happened, told three ways, is in Lauda and Prost.

So ended a partnership that had begun at Brabham in 1978. Across their three seasons as team-⁠mates Lauda finished ahead of Watson 24 times and Watson ahead of Lauda 20 times. Looking back in 2022, Watson put him in good company: “So I simply respect drivers like Stewart, Lauda, Fittipaldi or Prost who didn’t take risks they could not control.”

The season closed with both halves of 1984 in place: the engine Lauda had pushed onto the grid at Zandvoort, and the team-⁠mate who would be the faster of the two in it. Lauda had a car that could win again. So did the driver in the other McLaren.