The Right Engine at the Right Time — How Porsche Stamped Their Name on F1’s First Turbo Era
Formula 1’s first “turbo era” is a period of the sport’s history which is often fondly remembered. It is generally agreed to have begun in 1977 when Renault introduced the first car to feature such engine technology, and to have ended in 1989, when turbocharged engines were banned and the engine formula reverted to 3.5 litre normally aspirated units.
Within that 12-year span, engine power in Formula 1 climbed to previously unprecedented levels, with the special qualifying engines which lasted only a few laps used by some teams attaining power figures which remain unmatched even today.
What is for sure is that these fire-spitting monster engines were spectacular to watch, and it is likely this element which has made the turbo era so beloved. Among the engines that came and went during that period though, I believe that one can be picked out as definitive of the era, and that is the TAG-Porsche V6 used by McLaren from late 1983 until 1987, which powered the team to three driver’s and two constructor’s championships during that period.
During the early 1980s, McLaren had experienced a rebirth of epic proportions after spending several fruitless years in the doldrums with uncompetitive cars. The team had merged with Ron Dennis’ Project Four Formula 2 team towards the end of 1980 in a move which also made Dennis the team principal of a new outfit called McLaren International. During this period the team fielded its revolutionary MP4 chassis designed by John Barnard, which won McLaren its first race since 1977 in its debut 1981 season.
While the MP4 chassis was clearly solid, by 1981 there was a rising force in F1 which threatened teams like McLaren who had settled on the established Ford-Cosworth DFV engine, and it came in the form of turbocharging.
Turbocharged engines had first been introduced to Formula 1 in 1977 by Renault, and had initially looked a bit of a joke, being both chronically unreliable and seemingly failing to deliver on the hoped-for power advantages.
With years of steady development though, Renault and other teams like Ferrari who introduced their own system in 1981 had brought the technology on leaps and bounds, and made turbocharged cars into winners, with only the continued lack of reliability standing in the way of a potential world championship for a car featuring the technology.
Despite turbocharged engines’ drawbacks, Ron Dennis surmised that it wouldn’t be long before someone broke through and cracked the reliability problem, and throughout 1981 he therefore began looking to sign a deal that would put a turbocharged engine in the back of a McLaren so that his team would be in a position to meet the threat.
It didn’t take too long before Dennis’ search bore fruit, as he confidently announced towards the end of 1981 that McLaren had inked a deal with German giants Porsche, who had agreed to develop a turbocharged engine for McLaren’s exclusive use.
This seemed a huge coup for McLaren, as Porsche were recognised as one of the industry leaders when it came to turbocharged engine development due to their experience using the technology on variants of their 917 sports car. Hopes were therefore high that they would be able to use that experience to create a competitive F1 engine.
There were a few slight issues with the Porsche deal though. For one, development of the engine had not yet started, meaning that in 1982 and much of 1983, McLaren would have to continue using the Cosworth DFV engine that it had used since 1968.
Secondly there was a monetary issue. While Porsche had agreed to design the engine for McLaren, they were asking a hefty price to do so — one which McLaren could not afford, despite hefty backing from Marlboro.
Dennis did not let this stop him, and signed the deal regardless, confident that he could find a backer who would finance the development of the engine.
In the meantime, McLaren had a reasonably successful 1982 season with a development of the MP4 called the MP4/1B, showing that aerodynamically at least the car was excellent. The team’s drivers John Watson and the newly signed Niki Lauda won four races between them, and Watson even contended for the title.
However, the 1982 season also made Dennis’ reasoning for seeking a turbocharged engine very much apparent. The McLarens consistently struggled to qualify near the front of the field despite their good chassis, which made life harder for them on race day.
Turbocharged cars meanwhile had a near-monopoly on the top grid spots that year, with non-turbo cars managing just two pole positions all season. This was despite the fact that McLaren and several other teams had their Cosworth V8s specially tuned up by third party companies to output more power in an effort to keep up with the ever-climbing horsepower figures of the turbo teams.
McLaren’s plans took a hit when it became clear that the Porsche turbo wasn’t going to be ready for the start of 1983 either. From outside it therefore looked like McLaren was merely treading water, as they stuck with a development of the same old MP4/1 chassis and Cosworth engine for the third year running despite the combination’s slipping competitiveness.
There were a few things for McLaren to get excited about though. For one, the team did manage to win one grand prix early in the year, with Watson delivering a masterful drive from 22nd to first on the tight Long Beach street circuit, which minimised the non-turbo cars’ disadvantage.
Secondly, the team made a major coup which ensured that the funding issues surrounding the Porsche V6 could be put to bed. This came in the form of backing from Mansour Ojjeh, whose Techniques d’Avant Garde firm had previously prominently sponsored Williams, but had been lured away by the wily Dennis. Ojjeh and TAG agreed to finance the engine in its entirety, in return for joint naming rights on the engine with Porsche and a partial ownership stake in the McLaren International team.
Before the 1983 season was over, the time for the new TAG-Porsche engine’s unveiling finally came, and it was immediately clear to see that Porsche were not messing around. They presented a neat, compact V6 unit designed by engine whizz Hans Mezger at the firm’s Weissach Research and Development department in close collaboration with McLaren’s chief designer John Barnard, who outlined his requirements for the unit.
Rival teams were somewhat understandably worried about the prospect of such an established turbocharger proponent entering F1 with a team who were quickly becoming known for creating good chassis.
It was initially planned that the Porsche engine would not debut until 1984 in an entirely new car designed specifically to accommodate it. However, after increasing pressure from Niki Lauda and Marlboro who continually lamented the lack of competitiveness of the team’s Cosworth engines, Barnard relented and quickly bodged the old MP4/1 to accept the new engine.
It was at the 1983 Dutch Grand Prix that the new MP4/1E with its German powerplant first appeared in race-ready form. All eyes in the paddock were fixed on the new car and its engine, with its 80-degree cylinder bank angle and specially designed Kühnle, Kopp & Kausch turbochargers prompting some jealous looks from McLaren’s rival teams. This was clearly the work of a company that intended to win, and knew exactly what it took to do so.
However, it should be stated that the MP4/1E was essentially just a test car to get some mileage on the engine which many at both Porsche and McLaren would rather have never run at all. Indeed, it failed to score a point in any of the four races it competed in, which at surface level may give the impression that the new engine was a flop.
However, the MP4/1E was not expected to win given its glorified test-car status, and running it gave McLaren some much needed experience in running turbocharged engines to set them up for 1984, which with the gift of hindsight proved to be a masterstroke.
The 1984 season would see notable rules changes from 1983, which made the F1 world very different from the one that the TAG-Porsche engine had been designed for. Crucial among these was a ban on refuelling, which meant that suddenly an engine’s fuel consumption, and the power output that it could achieve with limited fuel flow was a key factor.
As it happened, the TAG-Porsche was brilliant in this regard, despite the majority of the engine’s design work having been done in an era of both ground effect cars and refuelling, both of which had since been banned. The engine featured an advanced “Motronic” engine management system from Bosch, which allowed McLaren to precisely control and monitor their cars’ fuel consumption during the race at a time when other teams had only a vague idea of their cars’ fuel usage.
This was paired with another cutting-edge chassis from the drawing table of John Barnard, with his MP4/2 building on the pioneering work he’d done with the MP4/1 by popularising features such as the now-standard “coke bottle” sidepods, which put McLaren ahead of the curve aerodynamically as well as in the engine department.
The combination of this chassis, the TAG-Porsche V6 and the Bosch engine management system led to unfettered domination for McLaren in 1984. Most other teams could only look on in envy as the MP4/2s of Lauda and the newly signed Alain Prost almost always ended up at the front of the field by the chequered flag, seeming to have absolutely no issues with the tight fuel restrictions of the time, which was very much not the case for other teams.
During the season, rival teams such as Renault resorted to measures such as freezing their fuel to try to pack more of into their tank, but this effort was made to look almost silly by McLaren’s inherently superior fuel consumption.
Even teams such as Brabham, who also had use of the Bosch Motronic engine computer were still left at sea in most races, as their BMW engine was very much of the previous generation of turbocharged engines which were immensely powerful, but prone to expiring in plumes of smoke. The Porsche unit represented a new dawn, and delivered a level of reliability which the BMW simply could not match.
What was undeniable was the result of McLaren’s technological cocktail. In 1984 they claimed an unprecedented 12 out of 16 wins over the season, and wrapped up both world championships with consummate ease. Each McLaren’s only real rival was the car on the other side of the garage, and in that battle it was the wily Lauda who won out by the razor-thin margin of half a point, despite only winning five races to Prost’s seven.
The foresight of Mezger and Porsche is due a lot of credit when it comes to appraising McLaren’s domination of 1984. It would have been easy for them to fall into the trap of designing an engine that was extremely thirsty and simply bank on refuelling to mitigate that, given that it was legal when the engine was designed. Indeed, the outcome of such thinking could be seen from rival teams such as Alfa Romeo, who suddenly found their turbocharged V8 engine to be totally incompatible with the new fuel rules in 1984, leading to many embarrassing retirements. Mezger and Porsche skilfully avoided this issue though, and instead produced an engine that was perfectly suited for the new post-refuelling era of the sport.
If there was an area where the McLaren and TAG-Porsche combination could be said to be lacking in 1984, it was in qualifying pace. Despite their dominance in the races, the two McLaren cars often struggled to take pole in 1984 — a fact which seems almost ironic given the team’s previous struggles in qualifying when they lacked a turbocharged engine.
Prost managed just three poles, while Lauda failed to take a single one. The P1 grid spot was largely monopolised by the Brabham of Nelson Piquet, who claimed a record-equalling nine pole positions in 1984, and with it won a total of nine Vespa motor scooters for his efforts.
The reason for this lack of qualifying pace was a very conscious decision by Porsche though.
Formula 1 at the time was caught in something of an arms race when it came to qualifying, as teams had realised that with the proliferation of turbocharged engines, they could also experiment with turning up the turbocharger boost pressure to get more power in qualifying, even if the engine would be unable to handle such boost levels over a full race distance.
Eventually, engine suppliers such as BMW, Renault and Honda took to creating completely disposable engine blocks just for qualifying, which would last only a few laps but could handle even higher boost pressures. The result was that as early as 1984, the Brabham of Piquet was quoted as exceeding the mythical 1000 horsepower figure in qualifying, which provides some context to his aforementioned run to 9 pole positions that year.
Porsche meanwhile stalwartly refused to partake in this arms race, opting instead to focus on optimising their engine for race trim, where their power output of around 700 brake horsepower at race levels of boost was indeed among the most powerful in Formula 1, which no doubt greatly assisted Prost and Lauda’s climbs through the field throughout the year.
It’s hard to argue that Porsche’s race-trim focus was wrong in 1984, as both McLaren drivers had no issues at all working their way up from almost any grid position to the front of the field, but it did sow the seeds for some trouble in the future…
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the utter domination they’d just meted out; McLaren went into 1985 with very few changes. The driver lineup of Lauda and Prost was retained, as was the MP4/2 chassis, albeit with some aerodynamic changes to comply with revised regulations which banned rear wing extensions as had been seen on the 1984 car.
Porsche also put in work for the new season, developing their engine further at Weissach in order to keep pace with their bevy of rival engine manufacturers, though they were still not tempted to produce a dedicated qualifying engine to well and truly silence their competitors.
The situation was therefore much the same as in 1984 for McLaren, with other teams dominating qualifying (this time Lotus with their powerful Renault engine and young hotshoe Ayrton Senna at the wheel), but the Woking team’s cars making up ground in the race.
However, the 1985 season showed signs of the TAG-Porsche engine’s ascendancy beginning to slip. The upgrades made by Porsche to the engine had indeed increased the power output, but they had also had unforeseen circumstances which impacted two areas where McLaren had been almost totally unassailable the previous year – reliability and fuel consumption.
This was first seen at the third round of the season in Imola, where Prost delivered a measured drive to cross the line first after several other cars had run out of fuel. However, after the race Prost too would see his result disappear, as post-race scrutineering was unable to extract a 1 litre fuel sample from his tank, which resulted in his disqualification. Such an eventuality seemed almost unthinkable given how faultless the McLaren-Porsche partnership had been the previous year.
Reliability was also something of an issue, particularly on reigning champion Lauda’s car. Indeed, the Austrian only finished three races all year after a season of constant issues which belied the fact that he was still driving well (if not quite as well as Prost). Lauda therefore resolved to retire for the second time at the end of the season, though he was able to sign off with an excellent victory at the Dutch Grand Prix towards the end of the year, leading Prost home in the only McLaren 1–2 of the season.
Despite these issues, the TAG-Porsche engine can still be said to be the best engine of the 1985 season. It is notable that few of McLaren’s rivals really fared better than them when it came to reliability in 1985, which shows how hard the engines were being pushed in an ultra-competitive season where four teams had a realistic shot at the championship.
In the end it was Prost and McLaren who triumphed though, and the TAG-Porsche engine was another step closer to establishing itself as the definitive engine of 1980s Formula 1 after proving that its initial success hadn’t merely been the result of everyone else dropping the ball when it came to the refuelling ban.
Then came 1986, and what would prove to be something of a last hurrah for the TAG-Porsche V6, as it provided the impetus to what is in my opinion the greatest season-long campaign by any driver in F1 history.
The season once again saw McLaren stick with a version of the tried and true MP4/2 chassis, while on driving duties reigning champion Prost was joined by 1982 champion Keke Rosberg.
Ironically, it was Rosberg’s former team Williams who would prove to be McLaren’s main threat in 1986, and that threat was more serious than anything McLaren had seen off before.
Williams were using a Honda power unit at the time, and after a rough start they had continually developed the engine until by the end of 1985 it looked to be a real threat to the TAG-Porsche’s crown in race trim, and comfortably superior in qualifying specification as Porsche still refused to develop qualifying engines despite repeated pleas from McLaren’s drivers.
This was confirmed in 1986, and what followed was a down-to-the-wire battle between the two Williams drivers of Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet, and Prost in his McLaren.
By all evidence the Honda engine and Williams chassis were more than a match for the McLaren and its Porsche power unit, but Prost fought gamely to keep himself in contention for the title, winning when he could and scoring relentlessly when he couldn’t as the two Williams cars duelled each other and a fiery intra-team rivalry between Mansell and Piquet began to escalate.
Prost’s season was far from free of issues though, which almost derailed his campaign. He retired from strong positions twice, once with an engine blow-up and once with a failure in his engine’s Bosch electrical system. A further reliability non-score came right as the championship battle was reaching fever-pitch in Monza, as Prost was disqualified from the front row of the grid after his car broke down just before the formation lap, forcing him to swap to his spare car later than the regulations allowed.
This was also compounded by a return of the fuel consumption issue seen early in 1985, as both McLaren cars ran out of fuel while in podium positions at the German Grand Prix, where Prost’s teammate Rosberg had taken one of just two pole positions for McLaren that year. This was yet another indication of just how hard the TAG-Porsche engine was now being pushed, and how the technological advantage it had enjoyed back in 1984 had begun to slip.
All in all that made four retirements for Prost where he was not at fault, which put a serious dent in his ambitions to become the first man since Jack Brabham in 1959 and ’60 to successfully defend the Formula 1 Driver’s championship.
It is a measure of Prost’s skill that he was able to stay in the championship fight despite these issues and while fighting against what was by every measure a superior car. When the dramatic season finale at Adelaide came around, some called Prost lucky when Mansell’s infamous tyre blowout allowed Prost to win the race and with it the championship, but over the whole season, his luck was if anything worse than the Williams pair. The third driver’s world championship for Porsche’s V6 engine was therefore perhaps its most significant yet, as it marked a triumph over a truly titanic opposition.
If there is one universal truth to Formula 1 though, it’s that all periods of domination eventually come to an end. In the case of the McLaren-TAG dynasty, the 1987 season saw the handover of the baton when it came to the greatest engine in F1. In a way it was fitting, as 1986 had seen the announcement that turbocharged engines were to be gradually phased out through continual power reductions until they were totally banned by 1989.
It was also fitting that at the 1987 Portuguese Grand Prix, when Alain Prost broke Jackie Stewart’s long-standing record for most victories in Formula 1 history, he did so with a TAG-Porsche engine in the back of his car, given the success it had provided him with during the previous three seasons.
By that time its reliability was a shadow of its former self as the old warhorse was pushed to its limits to match the newer engines fielded by the likes of Williams-Honda and Ferrari, but it was still able to win races in the back of the all new MP4/3 chassis with Prost at the wheel, even if the championship was out of the question in the face of a new generation of opposition.
1987 marked the end of the McLaren-TAG partnership, as the Woking-based team signed a deal with the very engine manufacturer that had usurped Porsche’s place at the top of the sport. 1988 would see McLaren using Honda engines in the final year of the first Formula 1 turbo era, and while the 1988 McLaren was if anything even more dominant than its German-engined forebears, it is the TAG-Porsche cars that defined the era by perfectly aligning with the changing landscape of Formula 1 in the mid 1980s, and proving that a turbocharged engine didn’t have to be a ridiculously fuel-thirsty and unreliable hand grenade.
