Brabham BT49 - Racing History

Racing History

The BT49's racing career got off to an unsettled start when Brabham's lead driver, Niki Lauda, abruptly quit the sport after 10 laps of the first practice session at the penultimate race of the 1979 season, the Canadian Grand Prix. The car soon showed promise: Piquet ran third in the race on the high speed Circuit Île Notre-Dame before retiring with a broken gearbox. Lauda's replacement, Argentine novice Ricardo Zunino, was seventh of the nine who completed the race. At the season finale in wet conditions at the Watkins Glen International circuit, Zunino spun off although Piquet set the fastest lap before a driveshaft failed, putting his car out of the race.

Early in the 1980 season, Piquet's car scored points finishes at the Argentine and South African Grands Prix, behind Alan Jones' Williams FW07-DFV and the turbocharged Renault RE20 of René Arnoux. At the fourth race of the season, the United States Grand Prix West, Piquet qualified on pole by over a second in a BT49 featuring some updates to the sidepods, bodywork and suspension, before leading the race, held on the streets of Long Beach, California, from start to finish. BT49s in Piquet's hands scored in seven of the ten remaining rounds of the championship. Towards the end of the season, the suspension was reworked for the Dutch Grand Prix on the high speed Circuit Park Zandvoort, lengthening the wheelbase by three inches and allowing the car to run in a lower drag configuration. Piquet won after Jones destroyed his FW07's skirts on kerbs. Piquet also won the next race, the Italian Grand Prix to give himself a one point lead over Williams driver Jones. By the end of the season the BT49 was "arguably the fastest Cosworth-powered car", but Piquet lost the title to Jones at the penultimate race of the year, the Canadian Grand Prix, when a development engine failed while he was leading the race. The BT49s driven by the team's second drivers—Zunino and then from mid-season Mexican Héctor Rebaque—either retired or finished outside the points, with the exception of Rebaque's sixth place at the Canadian race. The team finished third in the constructors' championship behind Williams and Ligier, unable to compete with only one car scoring points.

Disagreement between the teams and the sport's administrators over the technical regulations for the 1981 Formula One season contributed to Goodyear's temporary withdrawal from Formula One and meant that the 1981 South African Grand Prix was run by the teams to 1980 regulations using cars with sliding skirts. Piquet finished second in a BT49B, but the race did not count towards the championship. The season proper opened with the United States Grand Prix West, at which the BT49C was introduced. To the team's surprise, it was the only car to exploit the "obvious" loophole in the new ground clearance regulation by lowering itself, but the BT49Cs raced with conventional suspension after the hydropneumatic system repeatedly jammed. The team revised the system continuously over the next three races and used it to set pole position at the Brazilian and Argentine Grands Prix and win the Argentine and San Marino races while continuing to suffer from the system not rising or lowering correctly.

Frank Williams led an abortive protest against the car at the Argentine Grand Prix, objecting to the flexibility of the fixed skirts used to seal the underside of the car, which allowed them to replicate the effect of a sliding skirt. At the following race, the scrutineers rejected the flexible skirts. Brabham replaced them with stiffer material from one of the other teams for the race, which Piquet won. As the season progressed, other teams developed their own lowering systems—a front spring and cylinder were stolen from the Brabham garage in Argentina— but after a rule clarification from FISA many cars were lowered by the driver pressing a switch, a development that Murray found frustrating in light of Brabham's efforts to develop a system that he considered legal. The cars ran on Goodyear tyres again from the sixth round of the championship; motorsport author Doug Nye believes this cost the BT49s good results at several races while the American company adapted to the latest Formula One developments. Despite the virtually solid suspension now required to maintain a consistent ride height, which put components under greater strain, Piquet built a championship challenge on the back of consistent reliability: by the end of the season, his BT49Cs had finished 10 of 15 races, with only one mechanical failure. Piquet finished fifth at the final race of the season—the Caesars Palace Grand Prix—to take the title from Carlos Reutemann in a Williams FW07 by one point.

Brabham had been working with the German engine manufacturer BMW since 1980 on the development of a turbocharged engine for Formula One. The BMW-powered BT50 made its debut at the start of the 1982 season, taking advantage of the high-altitude Kyalami circuit in South Africa, which favoured turbocharged cars. However, the as yet unreliable BMW-powered cars were dropped for the next two races. Piquet finished first at the Brazilian Grand Prix in a BT49D, but was disqualified after a protest from Renault and Ferrari on the grounds that the car had raced underweight due to its water-cooled brakes. FISA ruled that in future all cars must be weighed before coolants were topped up, resulting in a boycott of the fourth race of the season by most of the DFV-powered teams, including Brabham. Under threat from BMW, Brabham did not use its Ford-powered BT49s again until the sixth race of the season, the Monaco Grand Prix, where one was entered for Riccardo Patrese alongside Piquet in a BT50. Patrese won the race after a chaotic final lap on which several other cars stopped. Patrese used the BT49 for the next two races, taking a second place behind Piquet's BMW-powered car in the BT49's final Formula One race, the 1982 Canadian Grand Prix.