F1 in 1983: Zandvoort -Prost failure, TAG Porsche fantastic

F1 in 1983: Zandvoort - a rare Alain Prost failure and a TAG Porsche engine that looked promising

Alain Prost makes a rare mistake

The 1983 Formula 1 season took the title fight to Zandvoort in round 12 of the 15 races that year. Alain Prost even arrived at the Dutch GP with a 14-point advantage over Nelson Piquet as the Frenchman chased his first title, while the Brazilian was battling for his second crown. Prost was convinced to secure the title in the dunes at Zandvoort

Piquet on pole and was cleanly away from the line. Prost went past Cheever and followed. It stayed like that until lap 42 when both cars approached the horseshoe corner, the Tarzan bocht at the end of the straight.
Prost made what was a ‘classical attack’. Piquet moved to the middle of the track and Prost dived inside. He was virtually alongside Piquet. The Renault hit a bump, rose a fraction at the rear and as he braked the rear wheels locked. The Renault twitched, Prost held that with an opposite lock and now the car twitched the other way. This was into Piquet with his front left wheel.
Smoke from all four tyres of the Renault and from the front tyres of Piquet. Both cars plunged straight ahead, out of the track. Piquet pitched across the run-off area into the tyre wall; Prost tried to go on. His Renault was damaged, so he parked the yellow car a bit further.
Prost did not understood it. “It was my fault. He gave me enough room and I was not breaking extra hard”. What astonished the F1 world was that Prost did actually made a mistake!

And it would have a strong bearing on the championship, neither scored any points and there were three races remaining. Rene Arnoux picked up the pieces to win by nearly 21 seconds to Patrick Tambay in a Ferrari one-two. John Watson was third.
P04: Derek Warwick – Toleman TG 183B
P05: Mauro Baldi – Alfa Romeo 183 T
P06: Michele Alboreto – Tyrrell 013
P07: Stefan Johansson – Spirit-Honda 102C

The F1 cars at Zandvoort.

The debut of the McLaren MP1/E with a TAG Porsche turbo engine

Despite the fact that this race could be a title deciding event, there was massive attention for McLaren and his TAG Porsche engine, Niki Lauda and Porsche engineer Hans Metzger. The car however was a slightly modified MP4/1 with a bigger fuel cell and showed only strong on the long straight part of the track. He did 291km/h and only Brabham and the Ferrari of Arnoux were faster.
The project was started in 1981 when Ron Dennis and his Arabic sponsors TAG (Techniques Avant Garde) decided to built their own turbo engine. As both had no experience in this (McLaren knew how to build a race car and TAG was involved in the hotel business and the extraction of salt from sea water), they found in Porsche an interested partner. Metzger created a six cylinder aluminium based engine linked to two KKK turbo and one intercooler developing 700 pk power. One year after signing the contract, the engine ran his first test. March 10^th 1983, the engine was presented by Mansour Ojjech at the car show in Geneve.