Revealed Volkswagen’s top-secret 1980s F1 project

Volkswagen will be on the Formula 1 grid come 2026. Its Audi brand has confirmed its entry to the motor sport big time, while sister marque Porsche may or may not still have plans to join it. Yet for all Porsche’s heritage in F1, it will be Volkswagen’s first involvement. The Stuttgart marque wasn’t part of the German car giant when it was a race winner in the 1960s, nor when it was building the TAG turbo engines that powered McLaren to a trio of world drivers’ titles in 1984-86. What isn’t widely known is that the McLaren-TAGs might have faced opposition from the manufacturer that would eventually seize full control of Porsche in 2012 after a protracted ownership battle.

Nearly 40 years ago, VW was working on a 1.5-litre F1 turbo engine of its own. Much of the detail of a project that got little if any press coverage in the UK in period appears to have been lost in the midst of time, yet, says one of its architects, it was “very serious”. Those are the words of long-time VW engine boss Peter Hofbauer, who conceived what was admittedly a short-lived project along with the late Klaus-Peter Rosorious, the manufacturer’s even longer-serving head of motor sport.

There was an early stage development engine in existence at VW headquarters in Wolfsburg and a racing specialist was being lined up as a development partner. Discussions were underway with multiple F1 teams, which seem to have run alongside an alternative plan for an entry with a chassis bearing VW badges. It even had a driver under contract.

So there’s no doubting Hofbauer’s words that the project was very serious. The phrase “very unusual” might also be applied to the powerplant in the works. And that goes a long way to explaining VW’s F1 ambitions at the time.

Porsche and McLaren designer John Barnard conceived a purpose-built and highly-compact V6 paid for by Techniques d’Avant Garde and built by Porsche, Renault had its own V6 developed out of its sports car engine, while BMW and Brabham won the first drivers’ title of the turbo era with Nelson Piquet in 1983 with an in-line four based on a production engine with roots in the 1960s. VW would have entered F1 with a V8, though nothing like the gas-guzzler of that configuration used by Alfa Romeo.

It was working on a narrow-angle vee unit built to feed into the development and then the promotion of a new range of VW road car engines. They would become known as the VR6 and the VR5 when they reached production in the early 1990s.

“VW didn’t have the racing experience so it needed a partnership”

Hofbauer, the head of powertrain at VW who oversaw the development of the VW group’s first diesel engines in the 1970s, had conceived the VR6 engine as a way of getting a six-cylinder engine to fit in a front-wheel-drive VW Golf hatchback.

“We wanted to have a six cylinder in the Golf and only a four cylinder would fit, so I had to design an engine that was as long as a four but had six cylinders,” says Hofbauer, now in his eighties and based in America. “The primary goal [of the VR project] was to get a six-cylinder engine into the Golf engine bay east-west.”

In VW’s VR nomenclature the V stood for ‘vee’ and the R for ‘reihenmotor’, which means ‘inline’ in German. The name pretty much explains the concept: two banks of cylinders with an internal vee angle of 15 degrees were offset within a single block with a common head. “We thought this concept could be used in a highly compact performance engine,” says Hofbauer. “That’s how we came up with the idea of building an F1 engine with eight cylinders.”

A VR8 turbo F1 engine never made it onto the dyno, but Hofbauer and his team did start experimenting using one of the development production engines.

“We took our production engine, played with it and changed the stroke,” he says. “We undertook some preparation for a VR8 and did some preliminary tests. We wanted to see if our simulations were right.”

Hofbauer admits that he’s a little shaky on the dates all these years on, but others involved can pinpoint the timing of the programme quite accurately. One of them is John Nielsen, who was contracted to the Volkswagen Motorsport entity, which Rosorious had run since 1972. He believes he was on course to move up to F1 with VW from the Formula 3 ranks, where he had won the German title in 1982 driving a VW-powered Ralt RT3 and then finished runner up in the European series in ’83.

The future Le Mans 24 Hours winner with Jaguar was deeply embedded within the VW Motorsport structure: he ran the team from its premises in Hanover — and was allowed to live in the cellar below! The reason he left the employ of VW at the end of ’84 was because the F1 project had been axed. He departed for the Ralt Formula 3000 team to chase his dream of making it to grand prix racing.

The other is John Judd Sr, founder of Engine Developments with Jack Brabham at the start of the 1970s. VW didn’t have the necessary racing expertise in-house to develop an F1 engine, so it needed a partnership with an established motor sport tuner. It turned to the British organisation with which it was in the process of becoming a dominant player in the F3 engine market, that had followed on from successes building engines for the marque’s Formula Super Vee category in both Europe and North America. Judd had an entrenched position in F1 rebuilding normally aspirated Cosworth DFVs for Williams and Arrows among others, and also worked on turbo DFXs for CART in North America. It was an obvious partner for VW.

Judd Sr recalls helping to get paddock passes for VW personnel in the summer of ’83: Hofbauer and Rosorious were reported to have visited a number of races in the second half of the season. He met with Rosorious at the Dutch Grand Prix that year, which was the starting point for discussions that went on for a protracted period over the winter of 1983/84.

He remembers a meeting at the Royal Horseguards Hotel in Whitehall in late ’83 and then being flown to Germany along with Brabham to be wined and dined by VW senior management, Hofbauer included. Nielsen was also present, and both have strong recollections of the occasion.

“Three teams got in touch with us. These were secret discussions”

Judd and Nielsen’s memories of the location differ: for Judd it was in a fancy restaurant for dinner, while Nielsen recalls it being in the company’s executive canteen at lunchtime. But both recall VW’s efforts to impress the three-time F1 world champion – and since 1979, a knight of the realm.

“The VW people were kind of bowing to Jack and had come up with all this fancy food,” says Nielsen. “But Jack just said, ‘I’ll have a wiener schnitzel please.’”

“That was Jack,” reckons Judd. “He always liked his plain food. He got Betty, his wife, to sew polythene bags into his jacket pockets before a trip to Japan once, so he could pop raw fish in there. He’d pretend to eat it. He didn’t want to offend anyone.”

Judd also recalls their host’s efforts to impress Brabham.

“I do remember that dinner, because the Germans couldn’t get the Sir thing right,” he explains. “For them he wasn’t Sir Jack, he was Sir Brabham. They couldn’t understand that you could address such an important person by his first name.”

No deal between Judd and Volkswagen was ever struck, however.

“We did do a bit of a design study, probably a rough look at what we could do,” says Judd. “I do remember it as something we got quite excited about and it definitely went on for quite a few months. But I think I can say there was never any kind of formal agreement and certainly no money ever changed hands.”

During that time, Hofbauer insists that he and Rosorious were in discussions with F1 teams about using the forthcoming engine. “We had three teams get in touch with us,” he says, though he declines to name them today. “These were secret discussions and they were all a little nervous about talking to us.”

Nielsen remembers what appears to have been a Plan B – or possibly Plan A – to get on the F1 grid. He insists that VW had its own chassis in the works and had forged a relationship with British constructor March.

“March was definitely doing a chassis, though I don’t know about the team that was going to run it,” he says. “The car was on the drawing board; I remember seeing a drawing of it.”

No one involved with March at the time is able to back up Nielsen’s claims. Ian Phillips, March’s PR man and subsequently team manager when it re-entered F1 in 1987 with Leyton House backing, doesn’t have any recollection of the project, nor does James Gresham, the long-time sales director.

VW’s public relations stance when news of the project was broken in the European press by German fortnightly Auto Motor und Sport appears to back up the seriousness of the programme. The strength of its denials of any interest in F1 make it sound much more than wishful thinking on the part of a few motor sport enthusiasts at VW.

AMS published a news analysis about the project in the spring of 1984. The feature is light on detail, but VW’s media department in Germany felt compelled to send out a document briefing PRs in its national outposts on how to react to inquiries about F1 from the press.

“VW is not involved in a Formula 1 engine,” read the briefing document seen by Motor Sport. It continued to say that it had approached Judd with “theoretical design specifications for a high-performance engine and asked him to evaluate these ideas in light of current engine technology”.

“One question was, for example: are cast-together closely angled cylinders in one block a possible solution for a high-performance engine in the long term and for series production.”

VW, it added, was merely seeking the expertise of a “recognised engine expert”.

The document from Wolfsburg seems to have been correct when it said that VW wasn’t involved in an F1 project. Correct, that is, when it was sent out around Europe.

The briefing notes are dated April 9, while it appears that the project had been stopped early the previous month. Judd received notification too that the programme had been put on hold in March ’84. That means the AMS story was out of date by the time it was published.

Nielsen suggests that the VW F1 engine was axed because the plan for a range of VR narrow-angle vees in street cars was delayed. “The timing went wrong and it didn’t happen,” he says. Hofbauer, however, offers a different explanation.

“The end of the project came in a VW board meeting when we were discussing the service intervals for our trucks,” he says. “Then the board member responsible for sales, Dr Werner Schmidt, attacked me. He said, ‘Instead of looking at truck service intervals, you are playing around with F1.’ Before I could answer, my boss Dr [Ernst] Fiala [the board member responsible for research and development] said, ‘OK, Dr Schmidt the project is over.’”

Hofbauer believes that the narrow-angle vee engine conceived for a transverse application in a hatchback could have been successfully applied to F1.

“The output of a high-power engine comes from the speed at which you can run it — and the smaller the cylinder the faster you can run it,” he says. “This VR8, an eight cylinder with only one head with these stacked cylinders, would give you an enormously compact and light machine, so the power-weight ratio would be superior. The power density is the key number here.”

A VR8 F1 engine would have had a high centre of gravity had it been mounted upright in the car. Hofbauer explains that this was never the intention. It would have been canted over in the way that BMW did with its straight four in a line of Brabham Formula 1 cars. He also hints at a more extreme arrangement that would most likely have pre-dated Brabham’s low-line BT55 of 1986.

Hofbauer believes that if the project had continued, it would have been possible for the engine to have been in the back of a car and on the F1 grid “in two years”.

“I think we would have had a good chance with this engine, but unfortunately it was over before we really started,” he says today. “It was a political fight in the boardroom that killed the F1 project.”