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No, Patrese isn’t positive on the car he struggled with for a whole season. “That thing was unreliable and not a joy to drive. The turbo “whole” was real big. Very uncomfortable.”

After served as engine supplier for Brabham, Alfa Romeo came on the scene with a own team leaded by the legendary Carlo Chiti. There were a few highlights: 2 pole-positions and 3 times a Alfa Romeo was in the lead. (Bruno Giacomelli in America in 1980 and Andrea de Cesaris 2 years later in Long Beach and in 1983 in Belgium). But most of the times Alfa Romeo operated in the shadow of “the big Ferrari”. In 1983 Alfa Romeo was given in the hands of the Italian Paolo Pavanello, the  boss of the succesfull Formula 3 team Euroracing. A year later Benneton came aboard as head sponsor, and the drivers Riccardo Patrese and Eddie Cheever came to enrich the team. The whole thing looked very “fresh and fruity” “The year 1984 didn’t go very smooth, but at least I got a top 3 finish in Monza and 4^th place in South-Africa. And it was our first new “setting”, and everybody was counting on it that the second season would go better. But it only would get worse. The team owner, Pavanello, always had a thing to remark. Our designer wasn’t allowed to do what he wanted to. He had to look for compromises with the ideas of Pavanello. And that’s why the car wasn’t good enough.” Patrese confirms what all drivers say: “When you go on track with a car, you almost immediately feel if there’s potential in the car or not. It has to be fast from the beginning, then you can go looking for reliability. Then you go tune your car and it should go better and better. But when you leave the pits and the car barely moves, with all sorts of errors, you have a big problem. The new chassis and aerodynamics were not OK. I presume that everything that happened during the winter had been tackled the wrong way. The engine was very thirsty, so we had to take very much fuel on board. If that wasn’t enough, the reliability of that engine was terrible to. It was impossible to do many kilometres. And that’s another handicap, you can’t develop the car any further, you just stand there in the pits, without anything to do. The season started of terrible, and it stayed that way.”

Even though the cars were good enough to qualify the middle of the “big pack” they droped in race set-up, and barely saw the finish line. Desperate as they were, they got the old car back on track. The 1984 one.

“I don’t have such a good memory”  Patrese continues “There’s one thing I remember quite good, the crash with Piquet in Monaco. Enormous spectacle. Despite that the car wasn’t good, the relations weren’t good either. Everyone blamed everyone, the engineers blamed the drivers, the drivers blamed the engine builders, and so on, and it only got worse.”

The moral didn’t improve when Patrese and Cheever crashed into each other in the first lap of the South-African race. “I believe Piercarlo Ghinzani tried to overtake me on the insede. Unfortunately my left wheel hit Ghinzani’s front wing. The car moved to left, the outside, but Eddie was in my way. Pavanello wasn’t exactly pleased with the incident, and the atmosphere in the team didn’t improve.”

After The Australian GP, the race where Niki Laude said good-bye to Formula One for the second time, Alfa Romeo was dead. “It was my worse year in Formula One and it wasn’t a good year for Eddie either. In the last race the team went bankrupt. There even wasn’t enough money to pay everybody. It looked like I wasn’t going to get any money, but I got some”

Original Version © the article owner - Article added in March 13 2003