From the Batmobile to the DTM M3: Witness BMW's Greatest Race Cars in Action!

Taken from Motor Sport, March 2011

A bitter wind snakes through the Brands Hatch pits. Three cars stand within, racers of three distinct generations. Crew members check, prime, plug in starter batteries. Two race-suited figures look out at the empty track, talking quietly, then one jerks his head towards the furthest car.

Priaulx in the BMW CSL — Priaulx felt unprotected in the CSL.

“Had a look yet?” They walk over and admire the shape, pointing and nodding. Under the raised bonnet six huge orange intakes, like a bank of mortar launchers, gape silently, ready to inhale the cold Kent air. The two men gaze. They know it’s one of the great racing power units, and that if they were racing 40 years ago, this is what they would be driving. It carries the blue and white roundel they both revere, badge of the Munich marque that earns them both their living. BMW called it the 3.0CSL. Everyone else took one look at its fins and named it ‘Batmobile’.

Homologated for the European Touring Car Championship in 1972, its alloy, Perspex and thin steel qualified it to wear ‘L’ for ‘light’. Having taken the title in 1973 it grew up a little, sprouted those wings and carried the series every year from ’75 to ’79. In different forms CSLs scored successes in endurance racing, at Le Mans and in IMSA, and if you need an image of BMW’s motor sport passion it has to be a CSL off the deck at Pflanzgarten with Hans Stuck at the joystick.

Andy primes Soper for WTC drive before, below, trying M3

Greg Pajo

This is what ‘touring car’ used to mean – long bonnet, long legs – but the meaning had changed by the time these two men raced them. By then ‘touring car’ was a way of avoiding the phrase ‘saloon’ – too prosaic. But there’s nothing prosaic about what this pair can do with a ‘family car’.

Steve Soper – touring car legend with a reputation for tight-lipped toughness – and Andy Priaulx – touring car legend with a ready smile and four titles under him. Racing in different eras – overlapping by just one race – they tackled the same job in very different ways. Soper wrestled victories out of anything he could elbow his way into: brawny V8 Rovers, popping and banging Sierra Cosworths, snarling homologation ‘saloon’ BMWs and McLaren’s F1 in Le Mans trim. He retired 10 years ago, but not before coming up against a young stand-in for the Vauxhall team in a BTCC round at Oulton Park. From nowhere Priaulx put his Astra on pole, and Soper noticed. Thanks to his lobbying Priaulx signed early for BMW, and that suited both. Soper’s Munich allegiance is strong – he’s now a dealer – and he still wants BMW to win. And he recognised that the affable young Guernseyman would be good for the marque. Now that one has inherited the other’s mantle, they’re here to swap mounts: Soper to try Priaulx’s 2010 320Si World Touring Car, while Priaulx gets into a DTM M3 and relives the 1980s. But first, some neutral ground, a car neither knows, the CSL.

“Right,” says Andy, rubbing his race gloves together. “I’m looking forward to this.” It’s not happy with the cold at first, but within a lap or two that six-pot bark rings out clear and sharp. Andy sticks scrupulously to his rev limit, but very quickly he’s getting the most he sensibly can from the orange-nosed beast. Though it carries emotive livery, this was not a Schnitzer Jägermeister racer – but owner Roger Wills has the perfect excuse for the paint job. He has another CSL, a works Alpina car with great history and so original it would be a crime to risk it. This is the ‘costume jewellery’ version, which Wills can and does race with gusto.

BMW CSL wings and arches — Wings and arches define CSL

Greg Pajo

Now a gruffer noise joins the CSL’s deep boom; Soper wedges himself into the WTC car and gives the signal to fire up. It takes a whirring age to catch – the injected, restricted four has none of the CSL’s eagerness. WTCC is a showroom formula, tightly tied down. Yes, its 275bhp is 100 up on stock, but block, head, suspension layout, H-pattern shift, bodyshell all match the road car. Barring a million mods by Belgian team RBM which has turned the car, and Priaulx, into title winners, first in ETCC, then three times in WTCC. But equivalency regs have jumped on such success – now it’s front-drive diesels which make good box office…

With a last blaaap Priaulx rolls into the pitlane and climbs out of the Batmobile. “I don’t know how Stuckie drove that round the ’Ring,” he laughs. “In compression the steering practically locks solid!” But he loves the torque, the noise, the forgiving nature. “It’s quite an oversteering beast, but it’s progressive, not snappy. You expect to slide it, where you never slide my car. That’s just throwing away time.” He knows the history, too; knows who drove, what races, when the first Art Car CSL appeared at Le Mans.

Steve returns, levering himself out from the deep seat and complex rollcage.

“Thought I’d better come in before I crashed. It’s so heavy, once it goes it doesn’t want to come back.”

Priaulx knows what he means. “Shame it was cold. If there was some heat in the tyres you’d like it more.”

Now it’s Soper’s turn to be Batman. “I’ve never driven a CSL… Or have I?”

“Stevie, be careful,” calls Andy. “The throttle and brake are very close.” A flash of orange and Soper is away, plunging through Paddock, blipping into Druids, surging on to Cooper Straight as we watch. He’s at home now, and soon Andy is after him in the compact, muscular, blaring M3.

BMW WTC’s specialised lap technique — WTC’s specialised lap technique demands smoothness above all.

Greg Pajo

Ah, the ’80s – when if you wanted your car to win in Group A you built a racer that looked like it and sold some to the public. It might be going a bit far to call it a silhouette racer, but they say it shared only bonnet and sunroof with the road car. And it didn’t have a sunroof. Instead it had a 2.3-litre four, virtually two-thirds of the glorious M1 unit, a Getrag gearbox, LSD and wide-track suspension, all clad in a stiffer, broad-arched, airdammed body. In various Evo iterations it raised its spec, its capacity and its game, muscling its way between 1986 and ’92 to a sheaf of British, European, Italian, German and Australian saloon titles, not to mention rallying, and – especially if Soper was inside – continuing to punch above its weight in Germany’s much more liberal DTM even when the Audi 4WD steamroller looked unstoppable. A race winner which privateers could buy with theoretically the same shot at success as factory-supported teams. Except that they had first call on the aces – Roberto Ravaglia, Johnny Cecotto, Marc Duez and that man Soper.

Since then there’s always been an M3 for road and track – in fact, there are currently two racers, both V8s. There’s an almost standard GT4 and a more radical GT2 which races in the American Le Mans Series, won the 2010 Nürburgring 24 Hours, and ran at Le Mans as the latest Art Car, bedecked by Jeff Koons. And Andy Priaulx drives it, so when Soper makes unappreciative comments about the WTC car you can sense his frustration that his mate hasn’t enjoyed what a proper current BMW racer can be.

Dials change, but not much else – except safety factors

Greg Pajo

But now both are out in these historic machines, enjoying themselves remembering what opposite lock feels like, the urgent scream of the M3 interweaving with the Batmobile’s deep bark. It’s not racing, but it’s more joyful than running your dealership or battling midfield in a ballasted car… Andy returns first.

“Enjoyed that more than the CSL. Really nice, really racy.” The CSL crackles into the pitlane and with a defiant last blip shuts down. The guys from CCK Motorsport who maintain it on behalf of Twyman Racing (and handle four other CSLs) roll it inside and Soper unbuckles. Priaulx is there to quiz him. He’s never effusive, Steve, but he’s nodding, mouth pursed in restrained approval. He liked that. “Yes, it drove well. Good car for long distances.”

“I’d love to do a lap of the ’Ring in it,” says Andy. “But only one!” Then he hesitates. “Steve, did you feel – um, scared?” Soper looks puzzled; he never raced with the sort of protection the WTC car gives Priaulx.

“I liked it,” Andy continues. “The only thing that was tiring was the feeling that you’re going to die at every corner!”

Steve approves too. “If it weren’t for my back injury [in a Peugeot in that 2001 Oulton event which ended his career], I’d like to do some historic racing in that.”

Meanwhile there’s a warm M3 begging for walkies, and it’s clear from the crisp way Soper nips onto the track and attacks Paddock that, although he hasn’t been here for a decade, he’s feeling at home. We hear the revs whisk up to the identical limit on each gearchange, see him skittering on the edge of adhesion without falling off it. He’s in the blue-and-white zone.

Andy pats him, laughing, as he climbs out. “Didn’t want to come in, did you?” And even Soper has to release a grin. They’ve both met this M3 before; both have caned it up the hill at Goodwood. Plus it’s one of Steve’s own racers, part of the Bigazzi team for the Mainz DTM race in 1990, with Jo Winkelhock and Jacques Lafitte. Owner Howard Wise is still trying to confirm who drove which when, but anyway it brings back favourite days for Soper.

“Those years with Bigazzi in the DTM are my fondest memories of racing,” he muses, gazing at the M-power stripes. “Zakspeed were too German, but I clicked with Bigazzi.” After his Cosworth triumphs and the demise of the ETCC, it was Zakspeed which in 1989 gave him his first BMW drive, a loyalty which lasted 11 years, mostly with the Italian outfit.

“I’d love to do a lap of the ’Ring in it. But only one!”

There’s a whine as the Batmobile is winched onto its transporter, leaving the saloons. Side by side in the pit it’s a shock to see how distinct these two 3-series are. Though the M3 arrived in 1986, that body shape dates back to ’82, and with its slim pillars and clear-cut, boxy outline it looks leaner despite its bulging wheel arches than the squat and solid 320. Today’s car, hunkered down on rubber-band tyres, is larger, a softer, subtler shape despite the aero add-ons, while inside it the crash cradle of rollcage, deep A-pillar brace and bear-hug seat with helmet lugs seem to imprison the driver. Did Andy feel exposed in the M3?

“I admit I did. In the modern car you’re shut in you can hardly see the road, but the M3 is more like a stripped road car. Of course, I came from hillclimbing, so I’m used to not much protection, but things have changed a lot. For sure it’s not as safe as the car I drive now. And the performance is like a mountain peak – it falls off rapidly just a fraction either side. What revs did you use, Steve?

“This is red-lined at 9200. The hot ones hit 10k, but they’d only last 300km. You couldn’t practice and race the same engine.”

“But you can get away with a lot more,” Andy continues. “In my car you have to drive to the grip. After only a lap in the M3 I felt ‘this is a proper racing car’ and I got aggressive with it. WTC punishes you for overdriving, whereas in that DTM car you can push the envelope. I think that’s why you see the driving you do in WTCC. Steve was always known for being aggressive, but now WTCC is like karting, or BTCC. You’re touching, you’re pushing, you’re nudging because you feel safe. It still hurts when you go off, though, when you stop dead from 150mph. I suppose when you were driving that DTM car you never thought about it?”

“Never gave it a thought. But we did lose a couple of people in touring cars. Kieth Odor was T-boned and didn’t survive. I thought – bloody hell, touring cars are meant to be safe…”

“Mind you,” Priaulx recalls, “I won a historic race in Copenhagen this year, in an old BMW 2002, and it got a bit stupid because I was racing with Tom [Kristensen] and Allan McNish. And it was raining, a street track, but you go for it, don’t you? Your pride won’t allow you to back out.”

The two of them muse on how you forget to be scared once in the car, how Soper hated Le Mans but always said yes, how Priaulx sometimes says hopefully ‘I don’t mind if I don’t do that one’, but always signs on because racing is a team game.

“Of course,” says Andy, “if you’re scared actually in the car it shows in your lap time.”

“I was scared at Le Mans,” Steve ripostes with a sly glance, “but it didn’t show in my lap time.” Gamesmanship doesn’t stop just because you’ve retired.

“You could get away with some nice drifts,” says Priaulx of the M3. “It would reward slight overdriving where in our car you’re really penalised for it.”

“I think that’s right,” Soper replies. “In WTC there’s a lap time technique, and it’s not a race technique, it’s to get the max out of the car. Very tidy and early on the throttle with lots of grip is quick, and the ragged edge is slow. Because it’s so heavy, once it gets away it scrubs off speed very quickly, and the delay in getting that slide back takes even longer if you have to get off the throttle. A little slide in a single-seater can lose you a split second, whereas in that a big oversteer will probably lose you around three tenths.”

“I don’t think your DTM is as stiff as ours,” says Andy. “I wouldn’t want to clatter over too many kerbs in that car. I don’t know if you used a lot of kerbs in DTM?”

“We did. But on Howard’s car the ride height is too high; we’d be burning wheel arches. (Howard here points out that surprisingly there’s no series to race his car in, so he hasn’t needed to tweak it.)

“Your car would do a quicker lap time than mine, I would think,” Priaulx says.

“Oh yes. And if you spent a day messing with it you’d get more out of it for you than if I spent a day in adjustments with yours.”

“Yes. You might find a tenth, a tenth and a half, but you could find much bigger chunks with the DTM. That’s because these formulas nowadays are so controlled, so restricting; they’re so much about equality it doesn’t give you much you can do technically.” Both men look ruminatively at the 2010 car. Priaulx is a sound company man, putting up with the heavily restricted machine because the close-racing stock series brings brand exposure. And of course there’s always the GT2 to race for enjoyment. One wonders if Soper would have been so tolerant.

“I’d love you to drive the GT2 car, Steve.” He turns to me. “Can we do this again sometime with the GT2?”

“We could compare it with the last of the DTM M3s,” says Soper. They’re both excited by the thought, even though Priaulx has come here straight off the plane from Macau. Well, it’s another chance to drive racing cars. If he can find a gap between WTCC, ALMS, V8 Supercars and the GT2 programme. Not to mention doing pretty well in the Race of Champions. Soper used to be the same – 37 round trips to Japan in 18 months.

“Or the new DTM car. You’d love that, Steve.” Following its withdrawal from F1, BMW is preparing to return to the DTM for 2012 with a new M3.

“What’s the spec?” asks Soper.

“I always said I’d like to be Steve Soper in a BMW – I owe him a lot”

“The regs aren’t out yet, but it’s going to go in the direction of a GT2 car. But it’s good. It feels like a sports-proto – you can really feel the aero. Round the Nordschleife it’s very, very quick.” Enthusiasm for DTM bubbles out. “All rear-drive, all the same weight, same spec engines – that’s more like production racing. That to me is exciting; you can push the envelope, whereas with the WTC you have a very small envelope you’re trying to expand.” Steve wants to know more, but I have to steer them back to today.

“Jumping into the WTC car after 10 years away,” says Soper, “it just felt heavy, under-powered, under-tyred. Engine and gearbox were quite nice, and all the seat and security. But it made me focus very quickly that if you’re not careful this thing will bite. It’s what – 1200kg and 280hp? Mine was probably 975 kilos, with plastic glass, etc. That’s 200 kilos lighter, and over 300 horsepower. It was hard work to get them under 1000kg, mind you, and the more successful you were, the more weight you had to carry.”

“We’re on 1175kg. But in this formula they’re trying to equalise everything. The BMW would be the best car, with RWD and better brake balance, so they slow us down to make it equal to a FWD diesel. The tyre is made for a heavy front-drive diesel and doesn’t work for us.” This is why the triple WTC champ was mid-grid last season (what he calls ‘the shunt zone’) while Chevrolet and SEAT made hay. “But having driven sports and DTM Steve will never be impressed by a WTC car,” Andy says. “I’m not impressed by it – but what makes any championship exciting is how close it is.”

“I know – it’s the regulations, not the car. But having driven it – well, I knew Andy was good, but if he can win in that sort of car he’s even better than I thought!”

“Steve, from you I take that as a real compliment.” Andy turns. “I grew up watching this guy race. I always said I’d like to be Steve Soper in a BMW. I owe him a lot. He’s the reason I wear this badge.”

Soper explains about pushing a guy he didn’t know towards the team. “There were a lot of phone calls. But I knew he was right. I’ve got BMW branded on my forehead. At Munich even the receptionists know your last results. It’s in the blood. That’s worth a lot when you drive for a company like that.”

With so much to look forward to next season and beyond, Andy Priaulx’s repeated nod of agreement is entirely genuine.

Thanks to: BMW Park Lane, Roger Wills, Joe Twyman, CCK Motorsport, Howard Wise Cars, Soper of Lincoln, Brands Hatch.

Nelson Piquet, Bernie Ecclestone, and BMW: Inside the Drama of the 1982 F1 Season

Taken from Motor Sport, November 2009

If you ask me, the blokes on the board at BMW lost their nerve. “We communicated our 2009 target four years ago,” said Mario Theissen in Valencia at the roll-out of this year’s car, barely seven months ago. “We set out a plan aiming at the first points in 2006, the first podium in 2007, to win in 2008, and we then stated that we want to fight for the championship from this year onwards. So far all targets have been met, so there is no reason to abandon the final and most important target. We want to fight for the title with the two big teams and whoever else is up there.”

BMW Motorsport boss Paul Rosche, Bernie Ecclestone and Gordon Murray Hockenheim pits — From left: BMW Motorsport boss Paul Rosche, Bernie Ecclestone and Gordon Murray in the Hockenheim pits

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Then, in July, the members of the BMW board were faced with having to sign up to the new Concorde Agreement. They looked at this year’s results (eight points from 10 races at that juncture), decided they had a good reason to abandon that cherished target, and shut off the money supply forthwith. Now we’ll never know if they made a timely decision or if they surrendered a golden opportunity to follow Renault as a mass-market car manufacturer capable of beating all those dedicated racing teams at their own game by designing, building and steering their own car to a world title.

To put things in perspective, it’s worth looking back at the similar potential disaster which Munich faced in 1982. It was an ugly scene. BMW’s racing boss was in open conflict with Bernie Ecclestone, owner of the company’s racing partner, Brabham, and Ecclestone’s sponsor was in dispute with the car company. In those days, however, drivers exerted more influence on team strategy than they would be allowed to do now, and it was only an open rebellion against Ecclestone by number one driver Nelson Piquet that resolved the rows. The reward for Piquet, BMW, Ecclestone and two groups of exceptionally talented technicians in Germany and England was the glorious drivers’ championship, which the Brazilian snatched out of the grasp of Alain Prost and Renault in the final race of the 1983 season.

Piquet European Grand Prix at Brands Hatch in 1983 — Piquet in action at the European Grand Prix at Brands Hatch in 1983. This would be his third win aboard the BT52-BMW

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Although BMW had become a consistent winning force in both touring car racing and Formula 2 throughout the ’70s, the company’s first F1 campaign was amazingly short-lived. It wasn’t until April 1980 that Munich officially announced it would be entering grand prix races, and although the first turbocharged BMW four-cylinder engine made its GP debut in the first race of the 1981 season, the whole programme was almost immediately put on hold while Piquet concentrated on winning the ’81 title using Cosworth-Ford power. The first victory with BMW came in June 1982 when Piquet won in Canada, but a series of irritating breakdowns meant that the second had to wait until March ’83, in Brazil. Although the Brazilian only won two more races that year, much-improved reliability and some close battling between all four drivers in the Renault and McLaren-TAG teams kept Piquet at the top of the points table and ultimately allowed him to steal the championship title.

“In the pitlane, our racing partner screamed at me like I was a little boy”

Right from the first appearance of Renault’s ‘yellow teapot’ in July 1977, Ecclestone and the mainly British teams which formed part of the constructors’ association (FOCA) had demonstrated their strong philosophical opposition to the French company’s exploitation of the rules which permitted ‘supercharged’ 1.5-litre engines. By the end of 1980, though, even Ecclestone had to concede that the future lay with the new turbo technology. When BMW approached him, he agreed on a technical collaboration that the German company hoped would result in a BMW-engined Brabham being ready to race in 1981.

Piquet already had good contacts with several of BMW’s personnel. He had contested two 1000km races at the Nürburgring in works BMW M1s, each time with Hans Stuck co-driving, and they had won outright in 1981, the year the race was stopped following the fatal accident that claimed the life of Swiss driver Herbert Müller.

As soon as the first turbo-powered F1 Brabham ‘hack’ chassis was available, Piquet was there to test it. The car ran regularly throughout 1981, with Piquet – who could see the engine’s extraordinary potential – ready to go testing at every opportunity. As BMW’s popular racing boss Dieter Stappert told me 10 years later, the BMW board of directors was becoming just as anxious as Piquet to get it back into action again. Meanwhile, Brabham’s sponsor, the Italian giant Parmalat, insisted on seeing results and demanded that Ecclestone should run at least one car with the ancient but reliable Cosworth V8.

“Bernie said it would be too difficult and complicated to run two different types of car at the same time,” Stappert explained, “so we decided to postpone our race debut until the first GP of 1982 at Kyalami. I could understand Bernie’s attitude, because I had already been in racing for a long time. But it was difficult to explain all this to the board of BMW and to the German public. Anyway, we got over that…”

The practical difficulties of making the BMW engine reliable were not so easy to surmount. “The first engines used a mechanical fuel injection system and the first time we tried the new [digital] Bosch Motronic engine management was at the end of 1981, in the pouring rain at Donington Park,” Stappert recalled. “That was a great test for us, because the Motronic worked perfectly. I remember Nelson coming in to the pits when it was so late in the day that all you could see on the car was the turbo glowing red on the left-hand side. He just said, ‘perfect, perfect, perfect.’

“Paul Rosche squeezed more and more power from the little four-cylinder stock-block”

“The Bosch people were there, of course, so we told them to carry on their development programme but first to make three copies of the box we’d used at Donington, because we knew it was working well. That way we could carry on the chassis testing. But somehow Bosch screwed it up. Although we didn’t find out until much later, apparently in measuring the box someone put several hundred volts through it and it blew up in a little cloud of smoke. And they couldn’t get it back together.

“That was bad enough, but what made it worse was that they wouldn’t tell us what had happened. They insisted it was the same, even when Nelson complained. We then went testing at Paul Ricard, one of the most difficult times in my life, because in two weeks we blew something like 17 engines. Nelson was doing all the turbo testing whenever there was a car for him to run, while Riccardo [Patrese] had the Cosworth-engined car. That Brabham handled beautifully, and every day it seemed Riccardo broke the lap record. I was amazed how Nelson stuck to the turbo test. You must remember that in 1982 he was the current world champion, but not once did he go to [Brabham designer] Gordon Murray and ask to be given the Cosworth car so that he could do five laps and beat Riccardo’s time. He couldn’t care less about Patrese’s lap records.”

Piquet Renault’s Prost in 1983 — Eyes on the prize: Piquet had trailed Renault’s Prost by as much as 14pts in 1983, but came back to steal the title

For the South African GP at Kyalami in January ’82, BMW played safe and took engines fitted with mechanical fuel injection pumps instead of the electronic system. The BMW board was demanding positive results from the big investment in F1, and the last thing they wanted to read about was the famous drivers’ strike which caused the cancellation of the first day of qualifying.

“A lot of people got upset with Nelson, because he was the driving force behind the strike with Niki Lauda,” said Stappert. “I didn’t know Nelson as well then as I would later, but I was sure there must have been a serious reason which at that moment I didn’t understand. I took all my courage in my hands and went up to Bernie and told him the same. Right there in the pitlane, our racing partner screamed at me as though I was a little boy. It made me feel so sick that I just turned around and left.”

After some more histrionics from Ecclestone, who at first refused to let Nelson practise on day two of qualifying, the new Brabham-BMW BT50 only just missed pole position. “The engine characteristics were still rudimentary,” confessed Stappert, “and although that car was very quick on the straight, you really needed someone brave to drive it. In the race, Nelson made a mess of the start. Trying to catch up, he missed the braking point at the end of the straight and slid straight on.”

Nelson and his German/Dutch girlfriend Sylvia Tamsma (in 1985 she gave birth to ‘young’ Nelson) spent a week with Stappert in Austria at the ski world championships on their return from Kyalami, and a lasting friendship was established. The genial but practical Stappert found a great ally in Piquet, who was as dedicated to making the BMW turbo a success as anyone in the engine shop. They both wanted to test and race the new car intensively, to speed up progress. But Ecclestone had a sponsor, Parmalat, to placate. He wanted BMW to withdraw the turbo in Argentina and Long Beach, the next two races, and cleverly he managed to outwit Stappert at a lunch he arranged with Hans-Erdmann Schönbeck, one of BMW’s board members, soon after the team returned from South Africa.

BMW’s Stappert , Piquet and Sylvia Tamsma — BMW’s Stappert was close to Piquet and then-girlfriend Sylvia Tamsma

Stappert: “Bernie issued a press release saying that the engine was too strong and Brabham needed to improve their brakes, etc. That was all bulls**t. We continued testing but we always had trouble with the electronic management. Then there was a test in April at Zolder. Bosch had four or five different boxes, and all five of them worked. Nelson would do five laps, everything was OK, then five more with another box.

“After the test in Zolder Nelson called Bernie from the little office in the pitlane. They were shouting at each other, apparently because Bernie wanted to discourage Nelson from running the turbo. But Nelson insisted that he wanted to use the turbo for racing, starting at the next GP, which would mean splitting the team by using different engines for each driver. He came out of the office and immediately told our engine chief Paul Rosche and me, ‘listen, I’m prepared to stick my neck out with Bernie, but I now rely on you to convince your BMW board to run only the one turbo car for me.’

“The funny sequel to this took place the day after I got back to Munich from the test, only a few minutes after I had persuaded Herr Schönbeck to agree to Nelson’s proposal. I was still in Schönbeck’s office when Bernie rang, and Schönbeck switched on the loudspeaker so I could hear what was being said. I couldn’t believe my ears as I listened to Bernie telling Schönbeck that he personally had managed to persuade Nelson to run just one engine.”

“Imagine, I nearly lost a championship because I lost my knob!”

With most of the leading teams in direct confrontation with the FIA president, garrulous Frenchman Jean-Marie Balestre, over car regulations (sound familiar?), off-track politics threatened to destroy the 1982 season. Piquet had won the Brazilian GP in March, driving a Cosworth-engined car, but was disqualified (in favour, yes, of a French Renault) when Murray’s ingenious but infamous water-cooled braking system was ruled illegal. Ten teams, predominantly British, then boycotted the first race of the European season. Although Piquet’s BMW-powered car made a low-key return (fifth place) at the Belgian GP, the patience of the BMW board was being stretched very thin.

At Detroit in June, the decision to run only one BMW-engined car seemed to have gone horribly wrong when Piquet failed to qualify. “That was partly our fault,” confessed Stappert, “because the engine stopped on the far side of the circuit, and by the time he got back to the pits qualifying was over. The next day it was pouring with rain… Gordon Murray was completely flattened. He couldn’t believe that one of his cars hadn’t qualified. He insisted that the only way to go was to stop racing the turbo and go back to intensive testing. I said, ‘No, Gordon, this is not possible. The board will not accept it. We have to race in Montréal in one week’s time.’”

After a series of threats and counter-bluffs, Murray agreed to Stappert’s pleadings. With the BMW sounding tremendous, Piquet went into the lead from René Arnoux’s Renault after eight laps. Stappert was on cloud nine. “For me, the world could have ended there and then: after the hard time we’d been given in Detroit, we had shown the people back home in Germany that we had a competitive combination.”

Piquet and Prost wheel-to-wheel at Zandvoort. The Brazilian would pip the Frenchman to the title by two points

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Stappert got a big shock 10 laps from the end of the race when Ecclestone started to gather his things together in readiness to go to the airport for the evening flight home to London. Nelson was leading, but Patrese in the Ford car was not too far behind in second place. Stappert couldn’t believe that even Ecclestone would walk away from a race that his drivers were about to win in one-two order. “Feeling a bit helpless, I said, ‘but what do I do if Patrese catches Nelson and they start fighting for the lead?’ He just turned round and said, ‘Do what you like!’”

Inside the car, Piquet was in serious pain. “For that race the guys had done a lot of modifications, including an extra radiator in the nose of the car, which produced lots of heat which came straight back onto my feet. We should never have won – in fact it wasn’t BMW who won the race, it was me, because I did 72 laps with my feet completely burned.

“I didn’t stop because Patrese was behind me in the Ford car. I told myself there was no way I would stop, I’d done all the development on that car, no f***ing way was he going to win that one.”

Coming at a moment when BMW was ready to quit F1, the Canadian victory saved a situation which had seemed lost. The BMW board agreed to continue signing cheques and the Brabham crew breathed a sigh of relief. However, a string of mishaps and mechanical failures prevented Nelson from finishing six of the remaining eight races of the 1982 season. It wouldn’t be until ’83 that BMW could celebrate the world title.

Of his three titles, Nelson has always said that his 1983 success is the one which gave him the most satisfaction. “That was a fantastic period,” he remembers. “Wing cars with lots of downforce, turbo engines with 1500 horsepower, qualifying tyres good for maybe two laps… I loved it! If there are no escape areas, that makes perfection! We got paid a lot of money to drive those things in those conditions. It was the same for everybody. And good for me – that was my mentality about racing.”

There was also an incentive to beat Renault. With four races to go, and 36 points available, the manufacturer rashly plastered billboards across France with smug posters to congratulate Alain Prost, “our champion”. Granted, Alain had built up a 14-point advantage in the championship, but the adulation was to prove horribly premature…

Piquet was to win only three GPs that year (against Prost’s four), but he had four other podium finishes and two fourth places. Murray’s Brabham BT52 was a completely new design to meet the emergency ‘flat bottom’ regulations imposed at the end of ’82. With its small fuel tanks, the BT52 was also able to take full advantage of the mid-race refuelling ploy that Murray had introduced in mid-82. Fearing the legal consequences that would surely follow a fire in the pits, Renault hesitated to adopt making fuel stops. By the time this policy had been reversed mid-season, the French had probably sacrificed the two or three points which would have been enough to defeat Brabham, BMW and Piquet. As Nelson himself says: “It wasn’t Prost who lost the championship, it was Renault who threw it away.”

Renault’s overcautious strategy would again cause it to miss out on the F1 title that had eluded the company for more than five years. With that 14-point cushion built up before Zandvoort, Renault’s technicians were given instructions to “freeze” the specification of their engine. BMW’s Paul Rosche pounced on this weakness to press on with his development programme, squeezing more and more power from the little four-cylinder stock-block.

Aided splendidly by team-mate Patrese, Nelson led all but three laps at Monza, where Prost’s turbo failed. In the European Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, he beat Prost hands down despite a scare during the pitstop when an air gun failed. Suddenly, Prost’s advantage had been cut from 14 points to two. The title would be decided in the final race at Kyalami.

Prost never looked more than second-best in South Africa. Renault’s technical equality with Brabham-BMW was gone, and he was resigned to defeat, even if he finished. When a turbo failure forced him to stop in the early laps, it was just a matter of Piquet bringing the Brabham home safely. Expecting that it might be necessary to out-psyche Renault, Murray had started both drivers on soft tyres and (of course) with light fuel. Nelson built up a 30-second lead in 28 laps before his stop: he first waved Patrese through, then the Alfa Romeo of de Cesaris. One or two hearts fluttered in the Brabham pit when his BMW seemed to be misfiring. In fact, he had cut back the boost to almost nothing as he cruised to the third place which would give him the title.

“I dropped back because I wanted to be sure of the championship,” Piquet recalled when I visited him at home in Brasilia in 2000. “There was this boost control inside the cockpit, and I backed off until there was probably just one bar boost. The engine was fine, but it was making a strange noise, which worried me. Then suddenly I found myself in fourth. I needed to be third, and the guy behind me [Derek Warwick in a Toleman-Hart] was catching me. But when I tried to turn up the boost, the knob fell off. For five or six laps I was trying to find this thing, accelerating to make it come back, or braking to make it go forward, before I could put it back on the dash. Imagine, I nearly lost a championship because I lost my knob!”

The first man to congratulate Piquet after his slowing-down lap was Prost. Ecclestone, as usual, was an early departure, looking amazingly disgruntled for someone whose driver was about to win the title for the second time in three years. In fact, he left instructions for Nelson to be admonished for letting de Cesaris through.

The new champion got back at his boss later on in the press room though, where he was thumping his knee in delight as he chatted with the waiting journalists. “I wanted to win [the championship] this year even more than I wanted it the first time,” he said. “In 1981 I won it for Ecclestone, for my family and for the people who had shown their faith by taking me into F1 straight from Formula 3. This time I won it for myself.

“We were a long way behind on points, so we said ‘OK, we’ll win the last three or four races and get the championship.’ We planned it all, we did it – and it was just fantastic. Every time Brabham gave me a chance to win the championship, I never let them down. I never lost the championship by a few points. And that makes me feel very good.”

There was a nasty postscript to come when rumours began to circulate that BMW had used fuel with illegal additives to boost its power in those crucial last four races. A sample taken from Piquet’s car in Kyalami was sent for analysis, and the eventual FISA report indicated that it did in fact meet all the requirements. Rosche insisted ever after that there had been no cheating, and he was justifiably upset to discover that part of the scrutineers’ sample had found its way into the hands of Elf, Renault’s fuel supplier.

The defeated challenger was in no doubt about the propriety of the win, though. In one of the tough statements that (along with a more personal indiscretion) would ultimately cost him his job at Renault, Alain Prost gallantly observed that, “the best car won the championship – and Nelson was the best man to drive it”.

Our thanks to Bernie Ecclestone and Robert Dean for their help with this feature.

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