1984 Champion by half a point

The championship of 1984 was settled by a race that Niki Lauda did not finish and that nobody was allowed to complete. At Monaco on 3 June, in torrential rain, the Grand Prix was stopped after 31 laps, and because so little of it had been run, only half the points were paid. Alain Prost won it and was given 4.5 points instead of 9. Twenty weeks later, after 16 races, Lauda had 72 points and Prost 71.5. It is the smallest margin in the championship’s history.

They drove the same car for the same team. At the end of 1983 Renault had let Prost go, and McLaren International took him in place of John Watson.

The car was the McLaren MP4/2, John Barnard’s carbon-composite chassis built round the TAG Porsche engine whose first races Lauda had forced through the year before. It ran on Michelin tyres with carbon brakes, and under the rules of 1984 it carried 220 litres of fuel for the whole race, with no refuelling. Lauda raced the same chassis, MP4/2-⁠1, all season; the spare car went to one driver or the other from race to race. McLaren won 12 of the 16 Grands Prix: Prost seven, Lauda five.

Half a second

In qualifying the newcomer was faster, and stayed faster. Prost started ahead of Lauda in 15 of the 16 races; Lauda was in front only at Dallas. As Lauda remembered it, he was half a second slower at the first race, at Rio, and when he speeded up, Prost went quicker again. Barnard thought the difference lay in how the two men drove the car. The MP4/2 was firmly planted at the back, so its understeer on the way into a corner had to be set out of it; Prost could drive round that, while Lauda went into the corners a little deeper and harder and needed more grip at the front.

His answer was to stop fighting a battle he could not win. He gave up trying to match Prost over a single lap and set his car up for the races instead. Accounts differ on when: after three races, by Lauda’s own account in McLaren’s 2019 tribute; only after half a season of trying very hard, by the memory of his engineer, Steve Nichols. Lauda put the decision simply in 2014: “I worked only for the races, and not for qualifying, because I couldn’t beat him there.”

In October Der Spiegel reported that the crew and Ron Dennis would rather see Prost win, and that some of Lauda’s friends suspected sabotage. Lauda dismissed it: in practice, he said, he always lifted off half a second earlier than Prost, who kept his foot down. Both men said 30 years later that there had been no friction between them. The contemporary reports and the later memories do not agree, and both belong to the story.

Kyalami to Dijon

It began badly. At Jacarepaguá on 25 March he started 6th, took the lead when Michele Alboreto spun on lap 12, and stopped from the lead after 38 laps when a battery cable failed. Prost won. Lauda never forgot it: “My car, first race for him, and he wins.”

At Kyalami on 7 April he started 8th, passed Keke Rosberg on lap 4 and Teo Fabi on lap 10, took over at the front when Nelson Piquet’s tyres gave out on lap 21, and won by 1 minute 5.95 seconds. Prost, who had started from the pit lane, was 2nd.

Lauda’s performance was a copy book demonstration of precisely why the Austrian has won so many races in his decade-long Grand Prix career: he was smooth, and predictable to the point of boredom, whilst at the same time tremendously quick.

Then two more retirements. At Zolder he started 14th after a troubled practice and the water pump failed after 35 laps; Prost went out too. At Imola, from 5th on the grid, he could not find first gear at the start, came back through the field past both Ferraris, lapping faster than the leader, and was out with a broken engine after 15 laps. After four rounds Prost had 24 points and Lauda 9.

Six days after Imola, on 12 May, he raced a saloon car. The new Grand Prix circuit at the Nürburgring was opened with a 12-lap race in identical Mercedes-⁠Benz 190E 2.3-⁠16s. Lauda, who had missed the first practice and started 14th, finished 2nd. The winner was Ayrton Senna, in his first season of Formula One; Carlos Reutemann was 3rd.

At Dijon-⁠Prenois on 20 May his engines failed in qualifying, and fresh ones were flown in. Lauda started 9th, took the lead from Patrick Tambay, lost it at his tyre stop, took it back and won by 7.15 seconds. It was his 46th podium finish in the World Championship, one more than Reutemann’s 45 and the most any driver had then had. His final total, 54, stood as the record until Prost passed it in September 1987.

Monaco and the half points

The rain at Monaco on 3 June was torrential. Prost was on pole and Lauda 8th on the grid. On lap 19 Senna, in the Toleman from 13th on the grid, passed Lauda for 2nd, and a few laps later Lauda spun at Casino Square and stalled. He had completed 23 laps. He confessed, as Alan Henry reported it, that the mistake was “All Lauda and nothing to do with the car.” Hans Halter of Der Spiegel wrote that Lauda had let Senna past on purpose, to unsettle Prost; no other report says so, and it remains one journalist’s guess.

Was soll ich jetzt machen … Ich halt drauf. … Man sieht nix, kann das Risiko nicht kalkulieren, fährt nur nach Gehör.

What am I supposed to do now… I’ll keep my foot in. … You can’t see a thing, you can’t calculate the risk, you drive by ear.

A few seconds before 4.50 in the afternoon the clerk of the course, Jacky Ickx, had the red flag and the chequered flag shown together at the line. Prost had slowed and stopped by the line; Senna crossed it on the same lap. Under the rules the result was taken at the end of the lap before the one on which the race was stopped: after 31 laps, with Prost 1st and Senna 2nd.

The regulations said that a race stopped after the leader had completed 2 laps, but before 75 per cent of its scheduled distance, earned half points. Monaco was scheduled for 76 laps (some sources say 77), and 31 laps is about two-fifths of either, so every score was halved: Prost 4.5 instead of 9, Senna 3, and so on down the order. The often-repeated version, that the points were halved because the race had not reached half distance, is wrong: the line was three-quarters.

Lauda scored nothing at Monaco, so the rule cost him nothing. It cost Prost 4.5 points, and in October that was the whole of the difference. With full points for the same 31-lap result Prost would have had 76 and been champion by 4. Had the race run its distance and Senna caught him, a full-points 2nd place, worth 6, would still have made Prost champion, 73 to 72. Any result worth less than 4.5 would have left him behind.¹

The summer

At Montreal on 17 June he looked after his brakes and tyres in the early laps, passed Prost cleanly on lap 44, and finished 2nd to Piquet, 2.612 seconds behind, despite occasional trouble selecting fourth gear. In Detroit a week later his second-fastest time on Friday was disallowed because his rear wing was a millimetre too wide; he started 10th and was out after 33 laps, with an electrical failure by the databases’ record or an engine failure by Motor Sport’s.

The race at Dallas on 8 July nearly did not start. The track was breaking up, and the drivers met to protest; the protest collapsed. Lauda had crashed twice in the Friday sessions. In September he told Der Spiegel: “That was the most dangerous race of my life.” In qualifying he was 5th, the one time all year he started ahead of Prost. He set the fastest lap, and after 60 laps, running 3rd, he touched the wall with his right rear wheel and was out.

At Brands Hatch on 22 July the British Grand Prix was stopped after 11 laps and restarted for 60 more. Lauda started 3rd, passed Piquet on lap 29 and led from lap 38, when Prost’s gearbox failed. He won by 42.12 seconds from Derek Warwick, with the fastest lap, and closed to within 2.5 points: 33 to Prost’s 35.5. At Hockenheim, after spinning in qualifying on a tired engine, he started 7th and finished 2nd, 3.149 seconds behind Prost, having tried him once and then settled. The first six cars were weighed afterwards: Prost’s McLaren at 551 kg, Lauda’s at 546.

On the slowing-down lap the gearbox could be heard breaking up. On the podium, by his own account in To Hell and Back, as Motor Sport quotes it, he told Piquet “my fourth gear was shot” (attributed), and saw how shattered Piquet was to have let the chance slip. Nichols said later that a tooth had broken off inside the gearbox and lodged in the casing, plugging the hole it would otherwise have made.

At Zandvoort on 26 August he was late to the grid with a leaking radiator, started 6th, forced his way past Rosberg at Tarzan and finished 2nd to Prost, 10.283 seconds behind; the two McLarens lapped the field. To a friend afterwards he was reported to have said of Prost: “I don’t know how he does it. I know how hard I have been trying, and the cars are identical…” (attributed).

At Monza on 9 September he had strained his back on the Saturday. He started 4th, passed Fabi at the Parabolica on lap 40 and took the lead when Tambay’s throttle cable broke; Prost was out with a broken engine. He won by 24.25 seconds from Alboreto, with the fastest lap. It was his 24th Grand Prix win, as many as Juan Manuel Fangio, who was there to watch, and it gave him 63 points to Prost’s 53.5.

Three weeks later, in an interview with Der Spiegel, he described the mood in the team as he saw it: “If Prost wins, everyone’s happy. If I win, everyone looks cross, including Ron Dennis, the team boss… If I become world champion, they say Niki Lauda has become world champion. If Prost comes first, they say McLaren has won.”

The same interview mentioned an old voice from Maranello. Asked about Lauda, Enzo Ferrari was said to have replied “I don’t like reheated soup” (attributed), and Lauda’s answer was “Just don’t let anything burn.” The magazine also reported that Dennis had followed him by aeroplane for a week to make him sign for 1985, and that Lauda had been to Paris to talk to Renault.

The European Grand Prix on 7 October took Formula One to the new Nürburgring for the first time. A misfire in qualifying left Lauda 15th on the grid. On lap 22 he spun at the last hairpin avoiding Mauro Baldi, kept going and finished 4th. Prost won. With one race left Lauda had 66 points to Prost’s 62.5.

Estoril, 21 October

The arithmetic was simple. Lauda was 3.5 points ahead. If Prost won the Portuguese Grand Prix at Estoril, Lauda had to finish 2nd; anything less and the title was Prost’s.

Qualifying went wrong. He had engine and electrical problems, a dead ignition switch among them, and started 11th, with Prost 2nd on the front row. The car sprang a water leak in the race-morning warm-up, and Nichols remembered Lauda shouting at everyone, and at him in particular, about the preparation. Yet Lauda said later that before the race he knew he could do it, if he made no mistake.

His place on the grid at Estoril

11

At the flag, and champion by half a point

2

Rosberg led from the start; once Prost had taken the lead, nobody caught him. Lauda, hemmed in on the opening laps, was only 8th after 10 laps. He passed Stefan Johansson’s Toleman going down the hill, clipping its nose as he went by; then he passed Alboreto; Rosberg’s Honda broke; and then he passed Senna. He drove with the boost turned up, close to the limit of his fuel: “I had a turbocharger problem right from the beginning, so had to take risks to make up for my loss of power.” Barnard said it was the one time he saw Lauda throw everything at a race. He set the fastest lap of the race. But 2nd place still belonged to Nigel Mansell’s Lotus, until Mansell’s brakes failed and he retired.

Prost won by 13.425 seconds. Lauda was 2nd, and champion: 72 points to 71.5. It was his third title, after 1975 and 1977, won with five wins to Prost’s seven. Cooper records that on the podium Lauda promised Prost his turn would come the next year.

When he won the championship I was not sad at all… At the end I felt happy for him. … Coming back after stopping his career and being world champion, and beating me by half a point, it was so good for the history of F1 and I am really proud to be part of that story.

Prost later remembered the party they had in Estoril that night as one of the best. Eight days afterwards Lauda faced the press at Schiphol, the picture that opens this page. Looking back, in words McLaren published in 2019, he chose the Österreichring, not Estoril, as the race that had made the difference: “I won the Championship that year by half a point – I think this [race] is what saved me” (attributed).

The title did not make the autumn easy. In October Der Spiegel reported that Renault had offered him US$2.5 million to drive for them in 1985, and that the deal had collapsed after union criticism at a time when Renault was cutting 10,000 jobs. After painful negotiations, by Cooper’s account, Dennis kept him at McLaren on a contract worth a third less than the last, and from then on the relationship between driver and team principal was strained. In 1985 he would carry No. 1, and most of his races would end early: 1985 was his last season.

Prost took something away from 1984 as well. Thirty years later he said what the season had taught him: “In ’84 I learned a lot, because I said to myself that maybe the quickest driver is not going to win the championship… in the end Niki’s way was right.”