Just four weeks later, at Hockenheim for the German Grand Prix, Pironi’s career ended violently while trying to pass me during untimed practice in wet conditions. Having qualified his Ferrari on pole position, he was testing a new prototype rain tyre for Goodyear and was over 2.5sec quicker than the next car. He was demonstrating superb pace given the conditions but made a slight misjudgement.

I was following Alain Prost’s Renault down the high-speed straight heading towards the stadium section. Pironi was catching us both. I presume all he saw was a big ball of spray. Perhaps he thought there was just one car creating the spray. As we approached the stadium right-hander, I pulled over to the right indicating that I was slowing and going to the pitlane. I can only surmise that he thought the road was now clear and he accelerated past me before realising that I was following Prost. He didn’t have time to brake sufficiently and smashed into the back of the Renault.

As the season unfolded, the missed opportunities piled up. At the British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch I finished fifth when really I should have been on the podium. I made a pitstop for new tyres and was delayed because my tyres were somewhere other than ready to go on my car. I think Keke had stopped twice and took my tyres. This was typical of the type of support I was now receiving from the team because of the strong focus on Keke.

A week later at the French Grand Prix at Paul Ricard, I was running strongly, ahead of Keke, when I got a puncture. Frank thought that my soft-compound tyres had just gone off and elected to put me on the harder compound. That effectively killed my lap times. During qualifying at Hockenheim, I lost a front wheel on my out lap with new qualifying tyres fitted. This was a terrible mistake by the team because, at last, I was now using a more powerful Cosworth engine.

Williams had commissioned specialist engine builder John Judd, who built my Formula 3 engines, to create a single-cylinder test-bed engine to the exact measurements and specifications of a Cosworth DFV and try to modify it to get more power. Judd’s efforts were successful and, when incorporated into a race engine, delivered an extra 40bhp. This was big stuff. That much extra power would transform the outcome of every qualifying session and every race. Because the supply of these engines was limited, only Keke usually got them.

At the next race in Austria, I lost another wheel, a rear one, which caused me to switch to the spare car. At this stage of the season, it was obvious that attention to detail was sorely lacking on my car. Again I was slated to use one of the more powerful Judd-modified engines but it misfired off the startline. Someone hit me and the knock broke part of the suspension. I should never have been in that position to get hit in the first place but, with the wheel falling off my regular car, I was again forced into the spare and that caused my potential good result also to ‘fall off’.

I never out-qualified Keke until we got to the Swiss Grand Prix, held at Dijon in France, but it wasn’t a legitimate effort. There was a section of the track where, if you missed your braking point, you could simply go through the run-off area and rejoin after a massive shortcut. I was running about 6sec behind Watson when I went through this run-off area. I stopped my car and waited for Watson to pass before resuming, now only about 3sec behind him. By the time I flashed across the start/finish line, the electronic transponder timing system had no idea what had happened, and my sizzling lap time was officially registered.

To get away with something like that, a confluence of circumstances had to align. Normally when a car missed a chunk of the track, the flag marshals posted there would report it to race control via radio, and the lap would be deleted. My guess is that the marshals’ post at this particular position didn’t have a radio connection, or it wasn’t working properly, and consequently a quirky qualifying time was recorded forever. At the end of qualifying, I told Charlie Crichton-Stuart what had happened and he immediately insisted that nobody tell Keke. Ironically, Keke scored his only win of the season that weekend.

Unfulfilled promise continued at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza when Roberto Guerrero clattered into the back of me at the first chicane immediately after the start. That left just the final race, in Las Vegas, where I was again at a disadvantage without the more potent Judd engine. I had a good run to finish sixth while Keke’s fifth place allowed him to claim the world championship title.

I often wondered whether the playing field was level for me. I’d raced against Keke Rosberg in Formula 2 and never had trouble being at least as fast as him and mostly faster. Yet, in qualifying in the Williams I wasn’t even close to him. I didn’t suddenly forget how to drive and, likewise, Keke didn’t suddenly unleash something he’d never displayed before.

In Detroit, Patrick Head said to me that the team would have to work harder to get me qualified closer to the front. He recognised that my lap times during the races were much closer to Keke’s and often better. Those words were hollow because he never followed through to ensure that I at least had a fair shot.

Unfortunately, I never clicked with Patrick like Keke did, or certain other drivers did. I don’t think he ever liked or respected me. I still remember an off-the-cuff remark he made about me ruining his aluminium chassis with salt residue because I perspired so much. Al Unser Jr tested for Williams on one occasion and also came away with a dislike for Patrick.

Keke was undoubtedly lightning-fast, but he didn’t suddenly gain that ability during qualifying. I often wondered why I appeared to struggle. I don’t know the full answer, but after some careful research I have a good idea.

At the end of my Formula 1 career, a lingering question hung over me for years: how did Keke Rosberg suddenly appear to get significantly faster than me in qualifying in ’82? Many years later I delved into the numbers.

“Williams was slowly killing off my F1 career by favouring Keke”

At Williams I competed against Keke 12 times. To all intents and purposes, he out-qualified me every time, if I overlook my illegitimate lap at Dijon. Frank Williams invested heavily in engines because by this time turbocharged engines – as used in 1982 by Brabham (BMW), Ferrari, Renault and Toleman (Hart) – definitely had the advantage. When he commissioned John Judd to modify the team’s Cosworth DFV engines, the result was the impressive power increase. It wasn’t until the seventh of my 12 races, in France, that I had use of a Judd-modified engine complete with its game-changing chunk of power in the back.

The 1982 season was also the year of underweight cars. There was turmoil going on between the turbo-equipped teams and the normally aspirated teams in a bid for supremacy and the weight limit of 580kg favoured the turbo teams. Some normally aspirated teams found a way to circumvent this limit. As the rules in place at the start of the season allowed cars to be replenished with cooling liquids after qualifying and the race before being weighed by the scrutineers, Brabham and Williams came up with the idea of ‘water-cooled brakes’ as a means to run lightweight cars that were way under the weight limit. First used at the Brazilian Grand Prix, this trick involved fitting a water tank that was quickly emptied – supposedly for cooling the brakes – once out on track. In Brazil, water-cooled brakes allowed Nelson Piquet to win on the road for Brabham (still with a Cosworth engine early in the season) and Keke to finish second for Williams.

Although water-cooled brakes were banned before I got to Williams, there was still an understanding that the new short-wheelbase Williams FW08 was able to run underweight.

As Niki Lauda observed, the problem with the water-cooled brakes saga was that Frank’s new car was too quick too soon, and its times in Keke’s hands got tongues wagging. If it had been only, say, 20kg under the 580kg limit, perhaps nothing would have been said, but the advantage was much more than that. When the water-cooled brakes were banned, the advantage was still there, but not as much as before. Anyway, the lightweight cars were built and available for combat, and it was common knowledge that Williams had one of the lightest and used it often for key laps. How else can you explain Keke’s speed during qualifying?

An overall view of my season at Williams could be summed up as poor qualifying. That meant that in the races I got caught up in other people’s accidents and had to strain the car and tyres too much too soon to try to get good results – just like in Formula 1 today. But why was I suddenly so bad in qualifying? Remember, I already had a track record against some of the fastest drivers in Formula 1, as with Pironi and Jean-Pierre Jarier when we were teamed together at Tyrrell in 1979–80.

In our first race together at Zolder, Keke was 2.3sec faster than me in qualifying, but his fastest race lap was 0.2sec faster. Why wasn’t he able to produce the same scintillating form in the race? Being 2.3sec faster in qualifying is impossible unless my car had something seriously wrong with it – which it didn’t. If Frank thought I was 2.3sec slower than Keke, he should have fired me – but he didn’t.

At Detroit, my third race with Williams, he was 2sec faster than me in qualifying, yet only 0.06sec faster in the race. Although on that occasion I was told that my car had a broken shock absorber during qualifying, the pattern was nonetheless the same. This race was held in two legs because of an early red-flag stoppage. I performed strongly and actually caught and passed Keke in the second leg, but the deficit from the first leg gave him a finishing position ahead of me, fourth to my fifth.

At Brands Hatch, one of my favourite tracks, he was 1.4sec faster than me in qualifying, but I was a second faster than him in the race. He didn’t forget what to do overnight and, likewise, I didn’t bring a bag of magic with me on race day. No one knew Brands better than me and certainly not Keke. No one in Formula 1 was 1.4sec faster than me at Brands in equal cars. If Frank thought that I was, in addition to what happened at Zolder, he should have sacked me there and then. He would have been justified.

Instead, when I look back today, Williams was slowly killing off my Formula 1 career by favouring Keke so heavily. Williams’s original driver choice for the No5 car, Carlos Reutemann, ended his own career with his sudden retirement two races into the season, and then his replacement driver was also systematically marginalised by the team.

At the French Grand Prix, Keke was a second faster than me in qualifying, but his best race lap was slower than mine. What might explain his meteoric form in qualifying? Was there a special (lightweight) qualifying car and more powerful Judd-modified engine available to him? Knowing what the facts scream, most people would say: “Yes.” It appears that my career was being sabotaged.

In race trim I was faster than Keke in Monaco, Canada, Britain and France. In Detroit, Holland and Germany, my race fastest lap was less than a tenth slower than his. By the time of the last race in Las Vegas, chatter about a lightweight qualifying car for Keke was pretty open. The secret was out. Las Vegas was an anomaly as I was 0.53sec slower than him in qualifying and 0.46sec slower in the race.

Considering that I lost a wheel during qualifying in Germany and again in practice in Austria, would it not be fair to question car preparation on my side of the garage? Then there were two first-corner collisions that took me out in Austria and Italy, both instances where my handicapped qualifying performance put me further down the grid and in a vulnerable position in the first-lap mayhem.

I believe the facts show that Frank and Patrick sacrificed my career and the constructors’ championship for focus on Keke. On reflection, in one key respect this didn’t make sense from the financial point of view because, just as it is today, most of the prize money was paid according to finishing position in the constructors’ championship.

I understand that I wasn’t their first choice for the seat – Reutemann was – and in a situation like that I was always going to have to do something special to win over their confidence. With what I now believe happened, however, that was all but impossible.