How Prost could have been BMW's first champion

Alain Prost could have won the 1983 Formula 1 World Championship. Everyone knows that.

Few know that had things worked out differently three years before he could have done it not with Renault, but aboard a car powered by a BMW-built turbo engine, designed by Gordon Murray and run out of Chessington.

It wouldn't have been a Brabham, rather a Talbot courtesy of ambitious plans put together by former BMW Motorsport boss Jochen Neerpasch in early 1980.

Neerpasch had left his long-time employer at the end of 1979, after what he insists was a chance meeting with the boss of Talbot, a name that had been revived after the Peugeot Citroen (PSA) group had purchased Chrysler's European operations in 1978.

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The relaunch of a marque with strong motorsport associations involved an F1 entry. The French company needed someone to mastermind the plan and Neerpasch made the bold decision to quit a role he'd held at BMW since 1972 to take on the challenge.

Neerpasch reached a pre-agreement with BMW © LAT

The problem for Neerpasch, who'd run into Talbot boss Francois Perrin-Pelletier at the FIA prize-giving in late 1979, was that the new company wanted to be on the grid in 1981 - and hopefully at the start of the season - with its own team, car and engine.

"When I arrived, there was a clean sheet of paper," recalls Neerpasch. "They had the Matra engine within the PSA group, but it was a V12 and not competitive any more."

Neerpasch found the solution at his former employer. He and BMW engine guru Paul Rosche had been working on an F1 adaptation of the turbocharged version of its ultra-successful M12/7 Formula 2 powerplant, which had already seen service in two-litre form in North America in IMSA's GTX class and as a 1.4-litre in the German-based DRM.

"We were only working on it slowly alongside our sportscar engine, but we could get more than 500bhp from that and we had already built a new crank for a 1.5-litre version," explains Rosche.

The horsepower numbers might have been impressive, but the financial numbers quoted for a full-blown F1 programme - Neerpasch wanted BMW to run its own team - frightened the board. BMW Motorsport's ideas for F1 were rejected on grounds of cost in early 1979.

"There was a definite decision early in the year not to go to F1," Neerpasch continues.

"But we were absolutely confident that the engine could be used in F1 and could be made to be competitive. So I convinced the Talbot board of the idea to use the BMW engine.

"My plan was to buy the rights to the engine for Talbot, name it a Talbot and make a development and service contract with BMW. It would have been attractive to both companies in the same way as it was for TAG and Porsche a few years later.

"Talbot was not keen on a high-tech image and they only wanted publicity, so it could have worked."

Neerpasch was able to reach a pre-agreement - a "contract to make a contract" is how he explains it - with BMW's bosses and then set about solving the next issue: creating a team. One of his first steps was hiring Hugues de Chaunac, co-owner of the successful ORECA single-seater team, as a kind of operations manager.

The Talbot name did enter F1 with Ligier in 1981-82 © LAT

De Chaunac remembers there being a number of scenarios as to how Talbot would set up a team.

Link-ups with British constructor March and Ron Dennis's aspirant Project Four squad, both well-known to Neerpasch, were rumoured, but there was an another route - buying Brabham lock, stock and barrel from Bernie Ecclestone.

Neerpasch is insistent that it could have happened: "The plan was to buy Bernie's team. He was keen to sell and the contract was ready to sign."

De Chaunac doesn't dispute Neerpasch's contention: "It was definitely one of the options," he says.

Neerpasch is also adamant that Prost, who'd won the 1979 European Formula 3 Championship with ORECA, would have ended up as one of the drivers courtesy of de Chaunac. That overlooks the fact that Prost was contracted to McLaren, but de Chaunac recalls there were talks with the future four-time world champion.

"There were discussions with Alain, I remember that, but at that stage drivers were not our priority," he says. "We still had to build a team."

So it could have happened: Alain Prost driving - and potentially winning - aboard a Murray-designed Talbot powered by a BMW turbo engine. Given that the engine finally came good in 1983, we can assume that Prost would have been in the mix for that year's world title had the French manufacturer's plans come to pass.

Of course, it didn't happen; in fact, it didn't even get close to happening.

Prost did break his McLaren contract in 1981, but went to Renault © LAT

Neerpasch's masterplan was in tatters before he'd even officially taken up his role with Talbot on April 1, 1980. The plan was undermined by what the German calls "a revolution in Munich" led by his replacement, former journalist Dieter Stappert.

"Stappert and Rosche said that BMW could not give its engine to another company, so it ended up that the agreement was stopped," he explains.

Rosche insists it was the Stappert who scuppered the deal: "He said, 'If we are to build an engine, we should race it as a BMW.'"

It was also Stappert who brokered the deal for Brabham to use the engine.

"He was involved as a pressman in F1 and knew Bernie very well," explains Rosche. "It was from his side that the connection with Brabham came."

BMW ended talks with Talbot in March and by the end of April concluded a three-year deal with Brabham to use its engines. The Talbot programme lost momentum and succumbed to inter-company politics within the PSA group by the summer.

"It was decided that they didn't want a third, independent manufacturer and to only use the name on Peugeot and Citroen cars," explains Neerpasch. "The F1 project was cancelled in June."

The Talbot name would return to F1 through a link-up with Ligier, which would use the ageing Matra V12 in 1981-82.

Prost, meanwhile, broke his McLaren contract to go to Renault for 1981, and Brabham and BMW set out on the long, arduous and sometimes acrimonious road to turning Rosche's turbocharged engine into a race and, ultimately, a championship winner.

It was the will of Nelson Piquet that kept the relationship between British team and German engine builder going. And his reward was beating Alain Prost to the 1983 world championship.

This article originally appeared as part of the 1980s F1 turbo special in the January 23 issue of AUTOSPORT magazine