The car that cost Prost his French F1 dream

Before Esteban Ocon threw his lot in with Renault for 2020, the last time that a French driver properly ran in Formula 1 with a French car and engine (we're not counting Romain Grosjean's late 2009 cameo for Renault) was at the turn of the millennium. Back then, Jean Alesi was resigned to trundling around at the back of the field for the Prost team, powered by a Peugeot engine.

Alesi had become friends with team principal Alain Prost during their time racing at Ferrari together in 1991, and decided to join the four-time world champion's squad for the 2000 season when Olivier Panis crossed the Channel (or La Manche, s'il vous plait) to take a test driver role with McLaren.

At the time, Prost was stranded in the lower midfield, unable to match the promise it had showed in 1997 when - taking advantage of its Bridgestone tyres - Panis was a surprise contender for victories before breaking his legs in his horrendous Montreal crash.

After struggling to get back to full form on his return, Panis departed at the end of 1999 with just two more points under his belt, while his initial replacement in 1997, Jarno Trulli, was whisked off to the Jordan team after his breakthrough podium at the anarchic European Grand Prix at the Nurburgring.

In 2000, Alesi was partnered by reigning Formula 3000 champion Nick Heidfeld, although long-suffering reserve Stephane Sarrazin and British Formula 3 racer Jenson Button - who was given his first F1 test by Prost before signing for Williams - were also fleetingly in the frame for the second seat.

When the Prost AP03 turned out at its launch in the team's splendid metallic blue, it certainly looked the part. As well as continuing sponsorship deals with French companies Gauloises, BIC, Sodexho and Total, along with Sony via its Playstation brand, the team's coffers were also bolstered by then-Internet giant Yahoo. It was an impressive array of brands, and the design concept was equally auspicious.

Inspired by Adrian Newey's McLaren MP4/14, Alan Jenkins' design even featured the 1999 title-winning car's most intricate details, such as using fins either side of the chassis bulkhead to fulfil the FIA's dimension requirements, along with the large bargeboards also seen on the previous year's McLaren.

The wheelbase compared to Prost's 1999 challenger - the AP02 - had been shortened too, saving about 30kg. Prost had also ditched the novel sidepod diveplanes to reconfigure the inlet and improve aero efficiency.

The hope was that by emulating the previous year's front-runner, Prost would begin the year 2000 in the ascendancy. Except, it never really worked out like that.

Once coaxed out of its moulds, the chassis seemed to lack the necessary rigidity, which meant that handling the AP03 would become a particularly loathsome task. Then a McLaren junior, Heidfeld naturally has few fond memories of his first F1 racing experiences coming in that car.

"It was probably one of the worst relations I remember from car manufacturer to engine manufacturer" Nick Heidfeld

"It was obviously, looking at the results, not a quick car", Heidfeld tells Autosport. "From what I experienced in my career, I would say 90% of the time, quick cars are also easy cars to drive. And that was especially the case with the McLaren I drove previously, [which was] definitely one of the best cars I've ever driven in terms of how quick they are, and also about how balanced and predictable they were.

"And this was totally opposite with the Prost car. The car was not balanced, and I really did have to work a lot on the steering wheel. The guys at the back have so much more work to do fighting with the car, having lots of action on the steering wheel, and this was also the direction we had in the Prost - it was unbalanced and also unpredictable.

"That is, for racing drivers, the worst thing. If you know what to expect you can sort of get used to it, but if you don't really know what will happen that makes it difficult."

Not that Prost saw it that way. The team's relationship with Peugeot had been ropey at best since the two parties joined forces in 1998, scoring just one point that year as the team struggled to build a suitable gearbox for the engine. As the partnership shuffled into its third year with no apparent signs of a turnaround, relations became even more strained.

Peugeot didn't exactly cover itself in glory - rather it often covered the AP03 in some kind of blaze throughout the year. After a particularly difficult gestation period with manufacturing issues, the 2000 engine was particularly prone to popping - making an American patriot's Fourth of July celebrations look positively muted.

When he came on board as a shareholder in 2001, ex-F1 racer Pedro Diniz suggested that the team had managed to break nearly 60 Peugeot engines throughout the 2000 season. Save for Minardi's ex-Ford engines, which were updated units from 1998, the Peugeot was also the lowest-revving engine on the grid.

Heidfeld gets to the point: "It blew up often. I saw a picture of the car on fire, and it was nothing unusual - it happened too often. It was probably one of the worst relations I remember from car manufacturer to engine manufacturer.

"[But] I don't remember the engine as being the main problem. I would say the engine was not great in terms of drivability, but it was ok. You could get around [engine] performance more than the chassis side and the driveability."

In an unorthodox move, especially in F1 where a manufacturer's cards are kept incredibly close to its chest, then-Peugeot Sport boss Corrado Provera told the media that the Peugeot engine was capable of churning out just shy of 800bhp - a not-insignificant amount of power for the time. Feeling slighted by Prost, which had taken the opportunity to throw its engine supplier under the bus at every conceivable opportunity, Provera wanted to create a smidgen of good press.

But during the French Grand Prix, of all places, Peugeot played its trump card to put the squeeze on Prost.

"In hindsight it was funny," Heidfeld recalls, "but at the time when it happened, the worst experience I ever had in my career was being in Magny-Cours. We were sitting in our cars, Jean Alesi and myself. In practice, the car was ready to go, and we were not allowed to leave the box because of the fights between Prost and Peugeot, everybody blaming each other.

"And then Peugeot would not start our engines for the first 15 minutes to show, 'look, don't do this', for whatever was going on in the background. I was sitting in the car and I was fuming, I was thinking about what I could do - but the answer was not much! So we just saw the other cars going along and were just losing time not being able to drive - it was really horrible!"

Strangely enough, the AP03's deficits were masked somewhat in wet conditions, which Heidfeld suspects was a legacy of the car's lack of rigidity. With the overall lack of synchronicity between the chassis and engine, the power delivery was usually lacklustre, but in wet conditions that was less of a consideration.

Although Prost's engineers didn't share Heidfeld's theory, the car was markedly improved in the wet. Damp conditions at the German Grand Prix armed Heidfeld with more confidence in the recalcitrant AP03, and he managed to wrestle it to 13th on the grid - outqualifying both Williams drivers, Heinz-Harald Frentzen's Jordan and eventual race winner Rubens Barrichello in the Ferrari.

"There were many times where I spoke to different people in the team trying to change and improve things. And there were many discussions but never any actions" Nick Heidfeld

His race was significantly less positive however, as Heidfeld slipped down the order before his alternator packed up with five laps left - while Alesi endured a large collision with Diniz's Sauber at the third chicane.

On occasion, both drivers were able to qualify well within the midfield, but were too often resigned to battling at the back with the lime-green Minardi cars, which were saddled with the battle-hardened but long-in-the-tooth Ford engine. As early as the seventh race of 17, Monaco, where Heidfeld took the team's best result of the year in eighth, Jenkins was dismissed from the team. Then, the fallout from France prompted Peugeot to call it a day at the end of the season having become sufficiently disillusioned with F1.

Other misfortune manifested itself on track. At Austria, just one round prior to Alesi's crash at Hockenheim, the two Prost drivers took each other out, compounding the team's misery.

At no point did Prost ever look like sneaking a point - even the score-shy Minardi got closer, its drivers Marc Gene and Gaston Mazzacane collecting an eighth-place each, one more than Prost managed, to leapfrog ahead in the constructors' standings.

Heidfeld at least had done enough to earn a move to Sauber for 2001, and after finishing fourth on debut for the Swiss team in Australia, he took his first podium in Brazil two races later.

"The main reason that it was one of the most frustrating parts of my whole career," recalls Heidfeld, "was that this was a year where we started with a car that didn't work. But even worse, [there was] no progress. There were many times where I spoke to different people in the team trying to change and improve things. And there were many discussions but never any actions.

"Nothing happened, and this was the toughest part. I mean, you start with something that was not good, ok, [but] at least you try to make it better. It was just really horrible."

For the beleaguered Prost team, 2000's travails prompted a sponsor exodus, leaving it to run 2001's pre-season tests with a plain blue livery and sign well-backed Argentine Mazzacane - who was fired for poor performances after four races.

Peugeot's acrimonious F1 departure led the manufacturer to lease the intellectual property and its facilities to the Asiatech concern, which supplied engines to Arrows, while Prost secured a deal for customer Ferrari powerplants.

Although some of the bill was underwritten by electronics brand Acer, which rebadged the engines, it was still a heavy expense for a team that had lost all of its sponsors, and two heavy crashes for Mazzacane's replacement Luciano Burti at Hockenheim and Spa did nothing to help its cause.

Prost did at least manage to get points on the board thanks to Alesi's efforts in Monaco, Montreal and at Hockenheim, before he and Frentzen effectively switched places, with Alesi going to Jordan.

The AP04 was a markedly improved car in 2001, but despite Prost bolstering its coffers by signing Tomas Enge - who replaced the injured Burti - the team's finances dire could not be sustained and Prost Grand Prix was liquidated in early 2002 with no buyer found.

After purchasing Ligier, Alain Prost had wanted to turn his eponymous outfit into a French powerhouse, showcasing the best of French businesses and French automotive prowess, with the best French drivers leading the line at the front. But the galling experience of 2000 turned the Tricolore dream into Alain's bete noire.