TREMAYNE: The insult that spurred Niki Lauda on to his final F1 victory, 40 years ago at Zandvoort

Having been beaten there 10 years earlier by his pal James Hunt in his first World Championship-winning season, one might have thought that historic defeat would be a great spur as Niki Lauda fended off McLaren partner Alain Prost for the first time in wheel-to-wheel combat to win the 1985 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort.

But it transpired that the Austrian’s motivation was that day in 1985 was bred far closer to home…

From the moment they had started testing together as team mates chez McLaren, in Brazil early in 1984, Niki had come to realise that the Frenchman wasn’t just fast, he was blindingly quick, and that as he consistently pulled out laps five of six-tenths faster than him, especially in Qualifying, he was for the first time facing a partner who was genuinely and regularly faster than he was.

Niki had won the 1984 World Championship, his third and last, with a mixture of speed, racecraft, guile and luck, second place to Prost in Estoril’s finale being sufficient to win him the title by half a point. That was the smallest margin of victory in F1’s glittering history.

Now, at Zandvoort, a week after he had announced his intention to retire – this time for good, unlike his 1979 disappearing act – at the end of the season.

And such was his MP4/2B’s wretched reliability in 1985 that he was way behind Alain as the former Renault star dominated.

Up to that point Prost had won six races, losing Imola due to a penalty for being slightly underweight. Incredibly, Niki had yet to win that year, despite having such a competitive car – a string of mechanical problems robbing him of a chance at victory time and again over the course of the season.

Now, as Alain had 50 points to share the top slot in the World Championship table with Ferrari’s Michele Alboreto, Niki floundered in 12th with only five.

And when Prost took third place on the grid in Zandvoort, behind polesitter Nelson Piquet’s fleet Brabham-BMW and Keke Rosberg’s improving Williams-Honda, his chances of increasing his lead looked strong. Lauda was down in an unhappy 10th after a disastrous Qualifying.

Was the bad luck down to him? The car? The team? He admitted that it could not be just one thing, and admitted that he’d had to psych himself up for pretty much every race since the season began. Handling Alain was a major challenge he no longer always believed he could rise to.

He knew that Prost was Ron Dennis’s new darling, and his own relationship with the team boss who had so assiduously courted him for 1982 was deteriorating. And he was also thinking more and more of the dangers of the sport (as if he hadn’t already figured them out after his crash at Nurburgring in 1976).

He kept pondering a conversation with his pal Nelson Piquet, who had told him he actually expected to die in a racing car. Niki wondered: could he really believe that and still push so hard?

It transpired that this time in Qualifying he had been blocked on one lap by Teo Fabi, and that his engine later lost a cylinder. He had also been asked to give Alain his intended Qualifying car, leaving him in the spare. He was quite happy to do that.

But there was a bright spot on raceday, when he set the fastest time in the morning warm-up. So despite starting so far back, that imbued him with the belief that he could win. He had to seize this final Big Chance.

The start was a mess. Piquet stalled on pole, and Thierry Boutsen was also very slow away, but Keke Rosberg and Fabi made great starts to sandwich Ayrton Senna at the end of the opening lap. Alain was fourth, the canny Niki already up to fifth. Maybe things were looking up?

But when his car started to oversteer, he knew he had made a poor choice of tyres: softs on the right-hand side and the left front, a hard on the left rear. He had an arrangement with the mechanics: an early stop meant give me more hard tyres, a later stop meant softs all round, boys.

But he found that he needed to pit well before the halfway mark, and eventually did so on the 21st of the 70 laps, dropping from third behind Alain and Ayrton to eighth. But to his consternation, the oversteer was still there. Niki believed that Ron told the mechanics to mount another hard left rear, whereas he knew that Alain would get four soft Goodyears.

But soon he found the track ahead clearing. Rosberg had already retired from the lead with engine failure. Senna had pitted on Lap 27, and was now struggling with a misfiring engine; Michele Alboreto had pitted on Lap 32; and Prost from the lead on 34. Now Niki was in the lead! And Alain, delayed by a tardy 18s stop, had to fight past Senna. But Niki knew his team mate had the tyre advantage…

Initially the delayed Piquet ran ahead of Niki, who was thus running in his dirty air before the Brazilian realised, sped up and started towing the number 1 McLaren along.

With six laps to go, Prost – his car oversteering less on its full set of soft tyres – was on him. All Niki could see in his mirrors was the word Marlboro. But Zandvoort is Zandvoort, and the only real passing places were the chicane and the entry to the Tarzan hairpin in the fast corner, and that relied on a good slipstreaming run out of the final corner, Bos Uit.

But Niki was not a World Champion for nothing. He took canny lines into the chicane, discouraging Alain whom he knew could not risk a DNF in his quest for his first World Championship, even though a win would earn three points more than second.

Niki always played it fair, but wasn’t going to hand a win over since he figured his team mate, whom he liked, would do just fine in his MP4/2B against the fading Ferraris in the remaining five races.

He let Alain put two wheels on the grass as he tried an impossible move into the chicane on the final lap, and had enough in reserve to beat him through Bos Uit and to reach the finish line 0.232s to the good. It was a breathtaking performance.

“I drove just as hard as I needed to keep the other guy behind me,” Niki grinned toothily. “I had to work bloody hard over the last three or four laps, I can tell you that for sure!”

But we had to wait a long time for his version of the full story. On the face of it he had driven a perfect race just to remind everyone that he could still turn it on. He had avenged that 1975 defeat there, and in the process had equalled the great Jim Clark’s tally of 25 victories.

But the Austrian warrior’s weekend also wore another face, and it had an angry mien that had matured further at the previous race.

According to Niki in his biography To Hell and Back, published the following year in the UK, the relationship with Ron had deteriorated when he had made a heavy pay increase demand for 1984 and ’85.

Ron never felt that the drivers contributed anything like as much to what McLaren created as the people who toiled full-time behind the scenes in the factory, among them himself and designer John Barnard. He had a point.

And when Niki had called a Marlboro press conference in Austria the previous week, to announce his retirement, Ron had taken the microphone in a move condemned by many as graceless, and had said as much as he hijacked what had been intended as Niki’s event.

Niki had already gone so far as to try and join Renault for 1985 as he planned his final season (as it turned out he missed a bullet there), such was the depth of their rift. Being upstaged by Ron in Austria was what he regarded as the insult.

He told Alain after that Zandvoort race that he would support his championship quest for the rest of the year, which cheered the Frenchman up.

But when he recalled how Ron had congratulated him and said how pleased he was that he won, Niki was his usual candid self as he concluded in the relevant chapter in the book.

“I don’t believe him for one minute,” he remembered in print. “Anyway, I couldn’t care less whether he’s pleased or not.”