Four decades on from Nelson Piquet’s maiden victory, the man who discovered him is recalling their first shared Formula One memory.

“When we found Nelson in Brazil, he came to the track locked in the boot of my car,” explains Bernie Ecclestone.

“We didn’t have any passes for him but Nelson didn’t care. He was old school. He would clean the car. He would pitch in with the mechanics. He was willing to sleep on the floor if he had to. He would do whatever you wanted. He was desperate to be in Formula One.”


Piquet would go on to become a triple world champion. Monday marks the 40th anniversary of his first of 23 victories in the sport, ranking him 12th on the all-time list.

Under deep blue Californian skies on March 30, 1980, Piquet delivered a trademark lights-to-flag victory for the Ecclestone-run Brabham team at Long Beach.

It was perhaps ironic that he would claim his maiden triumph on Californian soil, for it was there where his disapproving father, a prominent Brazilian politician, packed him off as a teenager to tennis school.

But Piquet’s ambition was to become a Formula One world champion. He returned to his homeland, dropping the surname Souto Maior and adopting his mother’s maiden name of Piquet, in a bid to conceal his four-wheeled obsession.

He won back-to-back karting championships. A move to Europe beckoned, and, after romping to the British Formula Three title, he was picked up by Ecclestone.

“When Nelson came to England, he didn’t know where he was going to stay, so he told me he would happily sleep under the truck,” continues Ecclestone.

“So, on the first day of testing in 1979, I said to one of our mechanics, Bob Dance: ‘Put a sleeping bag under the truck, and tell Nelson that is where he is sleeping. Then we will see if he is really that keen.’ He had no problem with it.

“Nelson suddenly discovered a good English sense of humour. He was special. He was a super competitor. He wanted to win.”

Piquet would deliver 13 victories and two titles across six seasons for Brabham. A big-money move – reported to be in the region of a then-record £3million – to Williams followed.

Piquet teamed up with Nigel Mansell at Williams for two seasons
It was with the British team where Piquet would be paired with Nigel Mansell, leading to one of sport’s most bitter and vicious rivalries.

Mansell hunted down and passed Piquet to win at Silverstone, in one of the best displays by a British driver in F1 history, but it was Piquet who would go on to take the 1987 title despite winning three races to Mansell’s six.

John Watson, a five-time grand prix winner who competed against both men, said: “Nigel was a formidable team-mate, and a very courageous driver but he wasn’t as astute and smart as Nelson was.

“Nigel would always say: ‘The car let me down’. So, Nelson would play on Nigel’s weaknesses. He would use any unpleasant mechanisms to get under the skin of his team-mate.

“Nelson knew how to garner a team round him. The Brabham guys loved him for that, and it was the same at Williams, too. Nigel relied solely on what he could do in the car.

“Nigel was the better racer. He was a street fighter with big balls. I never thought that about Nelson, but he understood how to win a world championship.”

Piquet’s 1987 triumph would prove to be his best, but final title. He left Williams to join Lotus and then to Benetton, but when he departed the sport in 1991 – making way for Michael Schumacher – his stock had fallen.

In an interview with Playboy magazine the season after he left Williams, Piquet described Mansell as an “uneducated blockhead with a stupid and ugly wife”.

“I thought that was disgusting and outside the rules of engagement to bring in a third party,” added Watson.

“If he had said that about anyone I was with at the time I would have f****** hit the guy smack in the face, and I don’t know why Nigel didn’t. He should have because Nelson deserved it.

“There was a nasty streak to Nelson and that is why my respect for him as a person is low.”

Does Ecclestone concur? “Don’t forget that Nigel is very English and we have got Nelson who is very Brazilian,” the 89-year-old replies.


“They are two completely different type of people, who think differently and sometimes say things that they don’t really understand.

“If you are in an argument and you want to put something over very strongly it is not easy to be thinking about English grammar.”

Ecclestone, who is hunkered down on his Brazilian farm amid the coronavirus pandemic, says he remains in close contact with his former driver.

“He is in good shape,” Ecclestone says of Piquet who will be 68 this summer. “Normally we would have caught up with each other, but with how the world is now it is not easy to do that.”

The first of its successes came on this day 32 years ago when Alain Prost triumphed in the Brazilian Grand Prix. Here we look under its skin at the tech secrets that help make it such an F1 icon.

If we look through F1's history books, we can see fleeting moments where the stars align and suddenly one team has every ingredient needed for the winning recipe: an insanely talented driver pairing, the ideal design personnel and management structure, an unparalleled engine and a flawless chassis.

In 1988 McLaren had it all, a brilliant cocktail that helped it deliver one of the most dominant cars the sport has ever seen.

That's not to say it wasn't prepared, as the arrival of Honda as its new engine partner, had spawned the MP4/3B - a test mule that housed the Honda engine and was used to develop both the engine and car for the 1988 season.

But, with just four months to the first race of the season, the MP4/4 did not exist. And that's not just as a car: it didn't exist as a finished drawing either.

An extremely tight schedule prompted a no-nonsense approach, with not one aspect of the car able to take precedence over the other, as McLaren looked to create a totally solid all-rounder.

Outside the walls of McLaren a debate still rages as to who designed the MP4/4, as Gordon Murray's arrival from Brabham in the wake of John Barnard's move to Ferrari had seen Steve Nichols fill the management vacuum.

Looking at the lineage of cars during that era, it's clear to see that McLaren, much like the rest of the field, had already taken note of Murray's low-line design and also started to recline its drivers in the cockpit.

And, whether by the natural evolution of the McLaren challengers during this period or the fact it now had Murray on its side, it was clear to see the BT55's substrain of DNA within.

But new regulations requiring drivers' feet to be behind the front axle, and a reduction in the size of the fuel tank, meant McLaren would be able to push things further still for '88.

A decision was also taken to move away from Barnard's tradition of a V-shaped monocoque (seen here in 1986's MP4/2c) in favour of vertical sides that led to a flat floor. This not only had aerodynamic benefits, but also vastly improved the cars torsional stiffness.

Allied to this was McLaren's use of its own autoclave, which had arrived at great expense but allowed the team to bring manufacturing in-house.

Hercules Aerospace had been instrumental in McLaren's first full carbon fibre monocoque, introduced with the MP4/1, but with this car it would only supply the prepreg materials.

McLaren, short on time, bucked the trend with the design and manufacture of the monocoque, as whilst most of the grid had shifted to using a female mould, McLaren continued to use male tooling.

Not being led by one dominating factor, the MP4/4 had no stand-out features when it comes to the car's aerodynamics, an oddity when we consider its modern counterparts.

Nonetheless the car did feature three distinct aerodynamic configurations throughout the season, in order that it had the flexibility to overcome the challenges of a given circuit, which we will see in the gallery later on.

The design team had also literally flipped the script when it came to its sidepod design, with the Barnard style top outlet now to the side of the car, as seen on the MP4/1c below.

McLaren MP4-1C 1983 detailed overview

Senna's arrival from Lotus also saw the team make the switch to Honda, who would supply it with the 1.5 litre turbocharged engine it had been developing and would still continue to supply to Lotus.

Delivering in the region of 700bhp, the RA168-E was a new design that was not only extremely powerful but also very fuel efficient and, even by modern standards, incredibly reliable.

The RA168-E was designed as a result of the FIA's desire to reign in the turbocharged engines and restore some parity with their naturally aspirated brethren.

The 1988 regulations capped boost pressure at 2.5 bar, rather than 4 bar, whilst the total fuel at their disposal was reduced from 195 litres to 150 litres. The turbo runners were also handed a minimum weight handicap of 40kg over the 'atmos' cars, who were also allowed to carry 215 litres of fuel.

To recoup any potential losses, Honda worked on a special fuel blend with Shell to avoid premature detonation and required the fuel be preheated, such was its exotic aromatic hydrocarbon content.

This potent mixture helped to deliver a broad torque band that made the car much easier to drive than the now diminished turbocharged field and still provided an advantage over the 'atmos' cars.

The Honda engine featured a low crankshaft and was paired with a small clutch that had been developed by Tilton during 1987 for Lotus.

The Tilton carbon clutch measured just 5.5" in diameter and, whilst everyone else struggled on with 7.25" diameter clutches, the Tilton gave for superior heat management, smoother engagement, low inertia and high torque capacity that helped McLaren to deal with demands of the Honda engine.

With such a low crankshaft and small clutch, some lateral thinking was required when it came to McLaren's gearbox design.

To overcome these issues, Gordon Murray approached long-time Brabham contributor Pete Weismann to collaborate on the design.

They decided upon a triple shaft arrangement that would allow them to keep the engine as low as possible and not adversely affect the driveshaft angles, an issue that Lotus, by comparison, tried to overcome by slightly tilting the engine upward while using a two shaft gearbox arrangement.

The design of the gearbox, like Honda's engine, paid particular attention to the oil system, both of which used dry sumps to improve temperature control, reliability, reduce windage and tolerate the huge g-forces exerted on the car.

The MP4/4 is, without doubt, an era-defining machine and one of the most well rounded cars to have ever graced the sport. Conquering all that dare oppose it, it provided a fitting end to the sports first foray into turbocharged machinery.

He claimed seven world championships and 91 wins over a glittering career but when Michael Schumacher made his comeback with Mercedes in 2010, the wins failed to materialise and he never outscored team mate Nico Rosberg over a season – so had the magic simply gone by then?

Legendary F1 designer John Barnard, the guest on this week's Beyond The Grid podcast, has a theory as to why the super-quick German struggled after joining the Silver Arrows.

When asked who was the best driver he'd worked with, the former McLaren and Ferrari technical chief did not immediately choose Schumacher.

“Oh, for me the best driver was Alain Prost without a shadow. Nigel [Mansell] was quick but he was quick because he’d got big cojones basically,” said Barnard.

“Michael was quick but… I didn’t like the way he had the car set up. For me it wasn’t the way to go. And I would love to have been the fly on the wall when he drove for Mercedes in 2010 alongside Rosberg,” explained the ex-Ferrari engineer, who was working for the Scuderia when Michael arrived at the beginning of 1996.

It was then, when Schumacher tested both a V10 mule car and V12 Ferrari 412 T2, that Bernard understood his driving style, as the German preferred the V12, which had more engine braking – a feature which Gerhard Berger and Jean Alesi disliked as it would unsettle the car during off-throttle periods.

“I tried to speak to Michael and put across my viewpoint,” explained Bernard. “'For me, the way the car is quick is if you can plant the back end, if I can give you maximum traction at the back at all times, you can open the throttle sooner and you will be quicker.'

“Now, Michael didn't didn't drive like that. Michael drove what I call 'off the front of the car'. He wanted a front end [where he could] absolutely just turn the wheel and bang, into the corner and he would kind of look after the back.

“All the other guys said: 'we don't like that, because when we do that the back end comes out'."

Schumacher spent three seasons with Mercedes and took one podium in that time in an all-German line-up alongside Nico Rosberg – but this was before the turbo-hybrid era in which they’ve dominated with all six constructors’ and drivers’ championships since 2014.

Barnard continued: “He [Schumacher], quite often, was nowhere near as quick as Rosberg then and I thought: ‘This is strange, there’s something going on here.'

“My theory, and this is only my theory, is that Rosberg was like most of the guys who wants a car that’s nicely planted at the back and will then find a way to get as best he can around the understeer.

“Michael didn’t like that, and when they did set the car up for Michael he was quicker than Rosberg, but he wasn’t overall quick."

Schumacher was outscored 142-72 by Rosberg in their first season at Mercedes, and while he got closer to his team mate's points total in 2011 and 2012, the seven-time champion never beat him over the course of the season, and was a long way off the crushing form of his Ferrari days.

“I just think Michael’s approach to it [was the issue]," Barnard added. "It was good when he was young because his reactions were phenomenal but as he got a bit older, I’m not sure that that system worked so well."

On the back of that disastrous end to 1985, the drivers were dismayed to discover the prospects for '86 were worse. As Johansson remembered, “When we were first shown the F186, Michele and I looked at each other and said, ‘Fuck! This is going to be a long season'."

“He was one of the very few drivers who you could be friends with and a rival at the same time – a very difficult thing to do!” said a moist-eyed Prost the week after his old rival's death. “I met him first when we were both in Formula 3 in 1979 [and] in both F3 and F1 we competed in a good way.

"He was a very friendly guy, a lovely man. You just could not have a problem with him.”

Let that, too, be Michele Alboreto's legacy.