FORMULA 1 @ 70 - PART 4
OUR SEVEN-PART TRIBUTE TO F1’S MOST INFLUENTIAL CHARACTERS MOVES ON TO AN ERA SYMBOLISED BY POWER: THE 1980s, WHEN HORSEPOWER RULED ON TRACK AND BRUTAL POWERPLAYS ROCKED THE ESTABLISHED OFF-TRACK ORDER
Our analysis of another ten most influential people in Formula 1, focusing on the 1980s
The 1970s had ended with Gilles Villeneuve winning the US Grand Prix East at Watkins Glen. A month earlier he had shadowed Jody Scheckter, his Ferrari team mate, around a sunlit Monza on the day the South African became the Scuderia’s seventh world champion. Gilles was just doing the right thing, protecting the interests of the team’s designated number one. Among the fans around the world who had already taken him to their hearts, the assumption was that he would be the next Ferrari driver to take the title.
It was not to be, but in his brief career the little French-canadian reminded the world that Formula 1 should be about courage, risk, daring and, above all, panache. A punchy debut at Silverstone with Mclaren in 1977 had given glimpses of his potential. Later that year he joined Ferrari, where he established an affectionate bond with the man who gave his name to the team. Enzo Ferrari saw in Villeneuve some of the qualities he had prized in Tazio Nuvolari: sublime skill, dashing bravery and a generosity of spirit that extended beyond his personal ambition.
The statistic of six wins from 67 starts tells far less of the story than clips of Gilles sideways in a red car, tearing into the pits at Zandvoort on three wheels, or cheerfully banging wheels with René Arnoux’s Renault all the way round the last lap at Dijon as they scrapped for second place in 1979. Gilles’ job was to bring the crowd to its feet, and who cared who won?
All motorsport deaths are tragic, but Gilles’ death in a practice accident at Zolder in 1982, at the age of 32, had a special poignancy, coming a fortnight after he believed he had been double-crossed when his team-mate, Didier Pironi, snatched a win on the final lap of the San Marino GP at Imola. The number 27, which Villeneuve wore in his last two seasons, can still be seen on the tifosi’s banners four decades later. Never a champion in title, but forever a champion in the people’s hearts.
While Villeneuve was showing that racing could still be an affair of the emotions, a very different sort of battle was taking place for control of F1 itself. On the one side stood Jean-marie Balestre, the president of the Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile, an old-school sporting administrator, blazered and blustering, resistant to change, with a slightly murky wartime history and a fortune earned from magazine publishing.
His opponent came from a different world, with different priorities. Bernie Ecclestone was a former second-hand car dealer who had raced a bit and then managed a couple of drivers, including the 1970 world champion, Jochen Rindt. After Rindt’s death Ecclestone bought the declining Brabham team, made it a success again on the track, and used it as the platform from which to launch a campaign to change the way Formula 1 was run.
Recognising that the teams could wield significant bargaining power, Ecclestone became a prime mover in the creation of the Formula One Constructors’ Association. Crucially, he saw that F1 could be transformed by the centralised negotiation of its commercial rights, principally the fees from broadcasters,
sponsors and circuit promoters. A long war was waged between the predominantly British FOCA and Balestre’s FISA, which counted on the support of Ferrari, Renault and Alfa Romeo. A flashpoint came when those three teams showed their support for the governing body by boycotting the 1980 Spanish GP at Jarama, and were joined by further no-shows, Ligier and Osella, when Ecclestone ran a breakaway race at Kyalami the following year.
Enzo Ferrari stepped in to broker a deal through which the FIA, FISA’S parent body, retained control of the technical side of the sport while granting ownership of the commercial rights to FOCA. Ecclestone’s ruthless appropriation and shrewd exploitation of those rights transformed Formula 1, taking it into territories that would once have been considered unimaginable – China, Russia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Turkey – and making many people within the championship very rich, most of all himself.
Balestre, who had stood aside to let Bernie do as he pleased,
“WHILE VILLENEUVE WAS SHOWING THAT RACING COULD STILL BE AN AFFAIR OF THE EMOTIONS, A VERY DIFFERENT BATTLE WAS TAKING PLACE FOR CONTROL OF F1 ITSELF”
became president of the FIA in 1985, serving for eight years; he died in 2008, aged 86. Ecclestone supervised the sale of F1 from a private equity firm to Liberty Media in 2017, after which he was eased aside and went off to run his Brazilian coffee farm, becoming a father for the fourth time at the age of 89. He had taught every other sport in the world how to maximise its financial potential.
The success of Ecclestone’s Brabham team in the early 1980s brought the name of Nelson Piquet to the fore. Piquet was a fun-loving native of Rio de Janeiro who arrived in Europe in 1977. Within a year he had found his way into Formula 1, securing a seat in Ecclestone’s team alongside Niki Lauda for 1979. Piquet’s first win, in
the Dfv-engined BT49, came at Long Beach the following year. Three more wins in 1981 gave him the first of his two world championships with the team. The second came two years later, with a BT52 powered by BMW’S massively powerful four-cylinder turbo engine.
In 1986 Nelson moved to Williams, where he elbowed aside Nigel Mansell to win the 1987 title by virtue of a string of podium finishes, despite having won only three grands prix to the Englishman’s six. Two years with Lotus and two more with Benetton yielded the last of Piquet’s 23 wins from 204 starts, in the 1991 Canadian Grand Prix.
Piquet brought a malicious streak into Formula 1, accusing Mansell of having an ugly wife and insinuating that his compatriot Ayrton Senna was gay. He was also extremely quick, and enjoyed working with designers and engineers to push his cars up to and sometimes beyond the limits of the technical regulations.
Among the most influential of this particular era’s designers was John Barnard, a visionary who arrived at Mclaren in 1972. He worked with Gordon Coppuck on the M23, which won the drivers’ championship for Emerson Fittipaldi in 1974, before leaving to join Parnelli Jones’s unsuccessful F1 project and then working on Indycars, including the Chaparral 2K which won the Indy 500 and the CART title in Johnny Rutherford’s hands in 1980.
Returning to Mclaren, Barnard created the MP4, the first F1 car to use a carbonfibre composite chassis. Its combination of lightness, strength and rigidity revolutionised racing car design and manufacture. After switching to Tag-porsche turbo engines in 1984, the team won a world title with Niki Lauda and two more with Alain Prost. Barnard’s move to Ferrari in 1987 proved less happy, although he did introduce the semi-automatic gearbox operated by paddles behind the steering wheel, which became standard for all F1 teams.
Two years at Benetton were followed by a return to Ferrari, during which he designed the car in which Michael Schumacher took his first victories for the Scuderia in 1996 and 1997. A refusal to move from his Guildford HQ to Maranello led to Barnard’s departure for spells as a freelance consultant with Arrows and Prost. Since 2008 he has applied his knowledge of composite materials to advanced furniture design.
For two years in the 1980s the loudest sound in Formula 1 was that of the V12 Matra engine powering the cars of the team run by Guy Ligier. Born in Vichy in 1930, Ligier was a national rowing champion and played rugby for the French army. While founding and running a construction company whose work on big infrastructure projects gave him good contacts among senior French socialist politicians, including François Mitterrand, Ligier pursued a part-time career as a racing driver, entering 13 grands prix with his own Cooper-maserati and Brabham-repco before retiring from the cockpit after his friend Jo Schlesser was killed in 1968.
In 1976 he launched his first F1 car, designed by Gérard Ducarouge, with Jacques Laffite as his driver and Gitanes cigarettes as their principal sponsor. The all-french outfit achieved a first victory in its second season, when Laffite won in Sweden. At the turn of the 1980s, with Laffite joined by Didier Pironi and then Patrick Tambay, the Ligiers were a threat to everyone, but by the time the founder sold the company in 1993 the total of wins had been stuck on eight for a dozen years. Ligier himself remained as an ambassador for the team while concentrating on a new business dealing in natural fertilisers. He died in 2015, aged 85.
France had been robbed of its post-war grand prix stars by the crashes that killed Jean-pierre Wimille in 1949, Raymond Sommer in 1950 and Jean Behra in 1959. Maurice Trintignant’s two Monaco wins in 1955 and 1958 represented the nation’s only successes until the appearance of Jean-pierre Beltoise, Johnny Servoz-gavin, Henri Pescarolo and François Cevert in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By the time Alain Prost arrived on the scene in 1980, he was joining an entire generation of Frenchmen, among them Laffite, Tambay, Pironi, Patrick Depailler, René Arnoux and Jean-pierre Jabouille.
Prost was the star graduate of the Winfield Racing School, based at the Paul Ricard circuit, a calm stylist whose thoughtful approach soon earned him the nickname “The Professor”. Already recognised as a prodigy during his debut season with Mclaren, Prost moved to Renault, where he won nine races in three seasons. A return to
Mclaren opened the way to the world titles of 1985, 1986 and 1989, won against competition from his team-mates Lauda, Keke Rosberg and Senna, themselves world champions. Two years with Ferrari began promisingly – although a rancorous battle with Senna for the 1990 title went against Prost after the Brazilian intentionally crashed into him at the first corner at Suzuka – but ended with a humiliating late-season dismissal in 1991.
After a year off, Prost returned in 1993 to drive the car that everyone wanted: the Williams FW15C, with its active suspension and other driver aids. He duly cruised to his fourth title before retiring from the cockpit with 51 wins from 199 starts.
In 1997 he bought the Ligier team and rechristened it Prost GP, but not even the arrival of Jean Alesi could transform it into a real contender and after five poor seasons the project went bust. In 2017 Prost returned to Renault as an adviser to the F1 team; he is now Renault Sport’s non-executive director.
Frank Williams, the man in whose all-conquering car Prost won his last title, had taken the long route to the top of Formula 1. From his impecunious beginnings with an Austin A35 in club meetings, Frank progressed through the raffish world of European Formula 3 racing in the 1960s, alongside such pals as Piers Courage and Charles Lucas. A hustler in pursuit of his ambitions, Williams gave up driving and made his way into F1 in 1969, running a Brabham for Courage; they surprised everybody, not least themselves, by finishing second at
Monaco. For 1970 Frank made a deal to run a car built by Alejandro de Tomaso, but Courage’s death in a fiery crash at Zandvoort prefaced four seasons of struggle with assorted cars and drivers.
A meeting with the young designer Patrick Head in 1975 presaged a change of fortune. Raising money from Saudia Arabia’s national airline, they built a series of neat Cosworth-engined cars capable of winning grands prix, starting with Clay Regazzoni’s victory at Silverstone in 1979. The following year the FW07 and FW07B took Alan Jones to five race wins and the world championship. In 1982 Rosberg became the team’s second champion, followed in 1987 by Piquet in the Honda-powered FW11B, the year after Williams had been severely injured in a car crash, losing the use of all four limbs.
His racer’s brain, however, remained fully functioning, and further titles for Nigel Mansell in 1992, Prost in 1993, Damon Hill in 1996 and Jacques Villeneuve in 1997 illustrated the dominance of a team whose innovative brilliance was enhanced when Head was joined in the design office by the gifted young Adrian Newey. Hindsight would show that Newey’s departure at the end of 1996 prefaced a long, slow decline which not even a five-year tie-up with BMW could arrest.
As the fortunes of Williams waxed and waned, so those of Mclaren revived under the leadership of Ron Dennis, who had started in F1 as a teenaged mechanic with the Cooper and Brabham teams in the 1960s. A visionary with a proud and sometimes awkward manner, Dennis was among the most brilliant of the men
who cemented Britain’s dominance of grand prix racing.
Taking over the struggling Mclaren team in 1980, and insisting that his team’s factory and circuit garages be kept as spotless as the average operating theatre, Ron turned it back into a title-winner. With a string of great designers and drivers, and support from blue-chip sponsors, he achieved the kind of consistent success that justified the building of a spectacular £200m headquarters in the Surrey stockbroker belt, designed by the celebrity architect Norman Foster. Intent on creating a British equivalent of Ferrari, Dennis also applied the Mclaren name and racing technology to a series of road-going supercars, a decision that spelled the end for a close technical partnership with Mercedes, Mclaren’s engine supplier, and prefaced a gradual slide towards the back half of the grid.
Having supervised championships for Lauda, Prost, Senna, Mika Häkkinen and Lewis Hamilton during his three decades as team principal, in 2009 Dennis stepped back. In 2015 he relinquished chairmanship and in 2017 left the company altogether, selling his remaining 25% stake to existing shareholders for a reported £275m. Like Enzo Ferrari, Colin Chapman and Frank Williams, Dennis was a hard act to follow.
Williams and Dennis played contrasting roles in the career of a figure who emerged in the second half of the 1980s and a man who captured the global imagination like no racing driver before him. Ayrton Senna began karting in 1973, aged 13. Twice runner-up in the world championship, he arrived in England in 1981 to compete in Formula Ford. By the time he won the British Formula 3 title after a season-long battle with Martin Brundle in 1983, Senna was already marked for greatness.
Moving into Formula 1 with Toleman, Senna took his first grand prix win with Lotus – a brilliant drive in the rain at Estoril in 1985 – before joining Mclaren. Between 1988 and 1991 he and Alain Prost won four consecutive championships, three of them going to the Brazilian, amid an increasingly bitter rivalry which revealed Senna’s sometimes questionable reluctance to let anything stand between him and victory. His two most extraordinary performances came in Mclarens: at Monaco in 1988, when he qualified almost a second and a half ahead of the field with a lap of what seemed like supernatural virtuosity, and at a drizzly Donington Park in 1993, when he passed five cars on the opening lap to take a lead he would lose only temporarily, during the many pitstops that day.
Senna believed that a move to Williams in 1994 would put him back in the best car. After early disappointments, he was leading at Imola when he left the track and hit the wall on the outside of a fast left-hand curve called Tamburello. The causes of the fatal accident are still disputed. Not up for debate is the combination of sublime skill, fierce competitiveness and quasi-spiritual charisma that brought millions out on to the streets of Senna’s home town to say a last farewell in scenes of mourning echoed around the world.