1985 Zandvoort, and the last race at Adelaide

For 2 laps of the last race of his career, Niki Lauda led. At Adelaide on 3 November 1985 he had come through from 16th on the grid, and on lap 56 he outbraked Ayrton Senna at the end of the back straight and took the lead of the Australian Grand Prix. His brakes had been fading for several laps. On lap 58 a rear wheel locked and the McLaren slid into the concrete wall.

He began 1985 as World Champion, with No. 1 on his car and Alain Prost, No. 2, beside him again at McLaren International. Michelin had left Formula One at the end of 1984, and McLaren had moved to Goodyear tyres. The car was the MP4/2B, still with the TAG Porsche engine; Lauda’s race chassis, MP4/2B-⁠4, had been rebuilt from a 1984 car. He had re-signed the previous autumn, after talks with Renault came to nothing, for a third less money than before, and his relations with Ron Dennis were strained.

The car was quick, and it broke. By the end of the year 11 of his 14 starts had ended in retirement: 10 times because something on the car failed (engine, turbo, electrics, fuel system, brakes, gearbox, transmission) and once, at Monaco, through a spin of his own. Prost, in the same car, won the championship. In qualifying Lauda was ahead of him once. Across their two seasons together Prost finished ahead of Lauda 18 times and Lauda ahead of Prost 12 times; in 1985 alone it was 10 to 4.

The MP4/2B gave him 15 entries, 14 starts, one win, one fastest lap and 14 points. In 1984 the same design had given him five wins.

Spring

At Jacarepaguá on 7 April he climbed from the fifth row to 3rd before his fuel system failed after 27 laps. At Estoril, in the rain on the day Senna won his first Grand Prix, his engine broke after 49 laps. Prost spun off too, and it was the first time since Dallas the year before that neither McLaren had finished.

At Imola on 5 May his gearbox kept jumping out of gear, and he spun at the entry to the pit straight. He finished 5th on the road, a lap down. After the race Prost’s winning car was found to be four kilograms under the limit and he was disqualified. Lauda’s car, weighed on scales set two kilograms in the competitors’ favour, came to 542 kg: exactly the 540 kg minimum. Promoted to 4th, he scored 3 points, his first of the year.

Qualifying at Monaco ended in a row: Lauda and Michele Alboreto complained that Senna had baulked them, and when Senna came to apologise, Lauda sent him away. He started 14th. In the race he was pressing Nigel Mansell for 5th when he spun on the oil left at Sainte-Dévote by a collision between Riccardo Patrese and Nelson Piquet, and stalled, after 17 laps.

Then came the North American races and a summer in Europe with nothing to show for them. At Montreal he started 17th and was pulling through the field when the engine failed, losing its coolant, after 37 laps. In Detroit, where the grid was set on Friday alone, he started 12th and gave up after 10 laps with no brakes. At Paul Ricard he was shadowing Keke Rosberg for 2nd, with Prost behind him, when the drive to the rear wheels went.¹ At Silverstone he climbed from 10th to 2nd and the electrics failed after 57 laps.

At the new Nürburgring on 4 August he finished at last. He had to stop to have loose ducting cut away from a tyre, and came back from it to set the fastest lap of the race and pass the ailing Mansell near the end for 5th: 2 points. After nine rounds he had 5 points. Alboreto led the championship with 46 and Prost had 41.

The announcement

On Saturday 17 August, at the Österreichring, before the morning’s test session, he told the press that he would stop racing when the season ended, and leave McLaren. Six years earlier he had stopped in the middle of practice in Montreal and simply gone. Denis Jenkinson’s verdict in Motor Sport on how he did it is in The retirements; he then set the fastest lap of the morning session.

His seat went to Rosberg, and the announcement set off a round of moves: Piquet to Williams, Elio de Angelis to Brabham. McLaren’s own account says he made the announcement very much against the wishes of Dennis, who wanted him for at least another year. Why Lauda stopped is a story of its own, told in the retirements: the reasons he gave over the years were that it was the right time, that he had an airline to run, and, above all, the man in the other car.

On Sunday he started 3rd and led the first start, which was aborted. After the restart he ran 2nd to Prost, began to close when Prost eased off, and took the lead when Prost stopped for tyres at half distance. Prost, on new tyres, was closing on him again when Lauda’s engine cut out at the end of lap 40. The team called it a turbo failure; Jenkinson, watching the interest of Porsche’s engineers, suspected something had broken inside. Prost won.

The next race was a week later, at Zandvoort. David Tremayne, writing 40 years afterwards, saw the slight Lauda felt at that press conference, where Dennis took the microphone too, as what spurred him on there.

Prost set the fastest lap of the race on lap 60, and Lauda the second fastest on the same lap, fighting to stay ahead. Senna, 48 seconds behind, was 3rd.

Lauda’s own words about the last laps come to us only through Tremayne, who printed them four decades on as he remembered them: “I drove just as hard as I needed to keep the other guy behind me. I had to work bloody hard over the last three or four laps, I can tell you that for sure!” (attributed). After the race, by Tremayne’s account, Lauda told Prost that he would help him to the title in the races that were left. Of Dennis he wrote, in To Hell and Back, as Tremayne quotes it: “I don’t believe him for one minute. Anyway, I couldn’t care less whether he’s pleased or not” (attributed).

He was 36 years and 184 days old. His first win had come at Jarama in April 1974, in his first season with Ferrari, more than 11 years before; this one, his last, came from 10th on the grid. He would start three more Grands Prix and finish none of them.

Monza, Spa and Kyalami

At Monza on 8 September he started 16th and was up to 3rd when he stopped for tyres and a new nose on lap 26; the transmission failed after 33 laps.

The Belgian Grand Prix, postponed from June, was run at Spa-⁠Francorchamps a week later. In practice on Friday 13 September his throttle stuck, the car spun into the barrier and he injured his wrist. He flew to Vienna and did not start.² McLaren wanted to run John Watson, who happened to be at Spa, in his place, but that needed the agreement of every other team, and Jenkinson observed that Dennis had made enemies who now made themselves felt. Watson drove Lauda’s car three weeks later, in the European Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, and finished 7th; Lauda was still not fit to race.

He came back for the South African Grand Prix at Kyalami on 19 October and qualified 8th, one place ahead of Prost, the only time all year that he out-qualified his team-⁠mate. He ran 2nd, and after 37 laps the turbo failed. Prost, the champion, finished the year with 73 points.

Adelaide

The last race of the season was the first Australian Grand Prix of the World Championship, on the streets of Adelaide. Lauda started 16th and drove into contention in what Alan Henry called his typically meticulous style. When Rosberg’s third stop was slowed by a sticking wheel nut, Senna took the lead, and on lap 56 Lauda went past him.

Unknown to the crowd, his brakes were failing. Two laps later the car got away from him and went gently into the concrete wall, damaging its left front suspension too badly to go on. He had completed 57 laps. The databases give the cause as brakes, or as an accident; both are true, since the failing brakes caused the crash, though Jenkinson’s review of the year counted it among the retirements that were the driver’s own fault. Rosberg won, from Jacques Laffite and Philippe Streiff.

He finished the season 10th, with 14 points, and his World Championship career with 171 starts from 176 entries, 25 wins, 24 pole positions, 54 podiums and 420.5 points.

That evening Lauda left Adelaide with Bernie Ecclestone and BMW’s Wolfgang-Peter Flohr and Paul Rosche, and Motor Sport reported a suspicion in many minds that he might yet drive a Brabham–BMW in 1986. Henry had also heard it said that Lauda might not have confirmed his retirement so quickly had he seen Gordon Murray’s drawings for the low Brabham BT55 sooner. He did not race again.

The chapters that follow go back to the days that made this record: the Nürburgring in 1976, Monza and Fuji, and the two retirements.