Zakspeed: The Independent German Team That Built Its Own Formula 1 Car (and Engine)
Zakspeed was a small German team that built its own chassis and turbo engine in F1 from 1985 to 1989, scoring just two points. It later thrived in touring cars and GT racing before closing in 2010.
CLASSIC MOTORSPORT
9/28/20269 min read
A Rare Breed of Constructor
In the mid-1980s, most Formula 1 teams bought their engines from established suppliers and focused their in-house talent on chassis design. Zakspeed did something almost nobody else attempted: it built both the chassis and the engine itself, a distinction it shared for a time only with Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, and Renault, as the team became notable for building both their own chassis and engine. It was an extraordinary ambition for a small operation from a town most people had never heard of, and the story of how it got there — and where it ended up — is one of the more curious footnotes in F1 history.
From Tuning Shop to Ford's Works Team
Zakspeed was founded in 1968 by Erich Zakowski, based in Niederzissen, a small town in Rhineland-Palatinate roughly 25 kilometres from the Nürburgring. Five years later, the operation became Ford's official entrant in the Deutsche Rennsport Meisterschaft (DRM), essentially Germany's answer to a national touring car championship. Zakspeed built and campaigned Ford's Group 2 Escort and later the Group 5 Capri, cars driven by well-known names of the era including Jochen Mass and Klaus Ludwig. The partnership paid off handsomely: Zakspeed took the DRM drivers' title multiple times through the 1970s, including with Hans-Joachim Stuck, Dieter Glemser, and Hans Heyer, and again in 1981 with Klaus Ludwig.
Ford's confidence in the small German outfit extended across the Atlantic. In the early 1980s, Zakspeed prepared a Mustang for Ford's Special Vehicle Operations division to compete in the American IMSA Camel GT series. A follow-up prototype, the Ford Mustang Probe Turbo, ran in IMSA GTP with a driver pairing of Klaus Ludwig and Bobby Rahal, though it managed only a single race win, at Elkhart Lake.
Into Sports Car Racing
Zakspeed's relationship with Ford deepened further with a sports car programme. From 1982, the team's turbocharged engine technology — enlarged from its Capri roots — powered the Ford C100 in the World Endurance Championship, run by the Ford Germany works squad with drivers Klaus Ludwig, Manfred Winkelhock, and Marc Surer, though the car was a midfielder at best. Jonathan Palmer and Desiré Wilson nonetheless managed a fourth place overall at the 1000 km of Brands Hatch in 1982. When Ford pulled its official backing, Zakspeed kept developing the design independently, evolving it into the C1/4 and C1/8 chassis. This Group C effort would remain a parallel activity for years, and by most accounts the team's genuine high points in endurance racing came in the DRM and Interserie championships rather than in the world series itself.
The Break with Ford and the Leap into Formula 1
The pivotal moment in Zakspeed's history came from a rejection. As Ford began developing a turbocharged Formula 1 engine programme for a planned 1986 debut, Zakowski wanted in — he had, after all, already built the company's first purpose-designed aluminium turbo engine in 1983 for a Ford IMSA project, engineered by Norbert Kreyer and Gianni Marelli, both of whom had backgrounds at Ferrari and Alfa Romeo. But Ford instead commissioned Cosworth for its F1 turbo unit, cutting Zakspeed out entirely. Rather than walk away from the idea, Zakowski used the compensation from the terminated Ford partnership to fund an audacious in-house project: a Formula 1 engine and a Formula 1 chassis, both built entirely by his own company. Kreyer designed a 1.5-litre turbocharged inline-four, while engineer Paul Brown drew up the chassis that would become the Zakspeed 841.
1985: A Cautious Debut
Zakspeed entered the 1985 World Championship with a single car for British driver Jonathan Palmer, freshly arrived after a full season with RAM. The team's own established racing and tuning business, still working alongside Ford in other categories, gave it a springboard into the sport. To keep costs manageable, Zakspeed limited itself to the eleven European rounds of the calendar, skipping the long-haul races in Brazil, Canada, the United States, South Africa, and Australia. West, a cigarette brand owned by German tobacco company Reemstma, became the team's title sponsor.
The 841 made its debut at the Portuguese Grand Prix. Reliability was a persistent headache, as it usually is for any brand-new engine and chassis combination, but Palmer produced a few bright spots: a surprising seventeenth on the grid at San Marino and, notably, qualification for the tightly-contested Monaco Grand Prix at a time when only twenty cars were permitted to start. Palmer's season came to an abrupt and serious end when he crashed heavily during practice for the Spa 1000 km sports car race — the same weekend German driver Stefan Bellof was killed — and without a timely replacement, Zakspeed skipped the Italian Grand Prix. Christian Danner, fresh off winning the Formula 3000 title, was brought in for the final two rounds of the season but failed to finish either race with mechanical problems.
1986: Steady but Scoreless
For 1986, Zakspeed introduced the 861 chassis, again the work of Paul Brown, and the FIA's new regulations forced teams to manage fuel consumption within 195 litres per race. Palmer stayed on as the clear number-one driver, joined partway through the season by Dutchman Huub Rothengatter, who had previously had unremarkable stints at Spirit and Osella. Palmer remained faster in qualifying throughout, achieving a strong sixteenth on the grid at the team's home race in Germany — a solid result for an outfit with fewer than twenty grands prix of experience. Neither driver scored points that year, though Palmer finished five races, including an eighth place in Detroit.
1987: The Team's Finest Hour
Zakowski reshuffled his driver lineup for 1987, bringing in British driver Martin Brundle from Tyrrell in what amounted to a straight swap with Palmer, who went the other way, while Christian Danner returned to partner him. That year's turbo boost was limited to four bars by the FIA, and with several rivals — Tyrrell, Larrousse, March, and AGS — running naturally aspirated engines instead, Zakowski sensed a real opportunity to finally break into the points.
The results justified the optimism, if only briefly. Danner finished ninth in Brazil in the older 861 while the new 871 was readied. Brundle took over the fresh chassis, designed by Chris Murphy and Heinz Zollner, for the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola and delivered fifth place — the two points scored there remain the only points in Zakspeed's Formula 1 history. Danner nearly matched the feat in the same race with seventh place. It was, by any measure, the high point of the team's grand prix career.
The rest of the season, unfortunately, fell apart. Danner was disqualified from Monaco after causing what stewards deemed an unnecessary collision with Michele Alboreto in practice, and both drivers were plagued by relentless gearbox and transmission failures for the remainder of the year. Brundle managed only an eighth in Monaco and an eleventh in Spain after Imola, while Danner salvaged ninth-place finishes in Austria and Italy plus a seventh in the season-closing Australian Grand Prix.
1988: Turbo's Last Stand
The 1988 season brought a harsher fuel limit of 150 litres, the final and most punishing round of restrictions before turbos were banned altogether. With most of the grid — barring McLaren and Ferrari — now favouring naturally aspirated engines, life became difficult for underpowered turbo outfits like Zakspeed. Zakowski again overhauled his driver line-up, bringing in 23-year-old German rookie Bernd Schneider alongside Italian veteran Piercarlo Ghinzani, fresh from a season with Ligier.
The season opened badly, with both cars failing to qualify at the Brazilian Grand Prix for the first time in team history. Mexico, run at high altitude where turbo power was a genuine advantage, gave the team its best moment of the year: Schneider qualified fifteenth, the team's best grid slot of the season, though his race ended early with overheating, while Ghinzani brought his car home fifteenth. At their home race in Hockenheim, both cars started together for only the second time that year, with Schneider finishing twelfth in wet conditions. At Monza both drivers again started from the eighth row, but engine failures claimed them both before the finish.
1989: Yamaha, and the End of the Line
Facing the turbo ban, Zakowski chose not to gamble on developing an all-new 3.5-litre naturally aspirated engine in-house. Instead, Zakspeed struck a deal with Yamaha, the Japanese manufacturer entering Formula 1 for the first time. The arrangement came with a condition attached: Zakspeed had to field a Japanese driver, which opened the door for Aguri Suzuki as Ghinzani departed for Osella, with Schneider retained in the second car. Former ATS designer Gustav Brunner was hired to pen the new 891 chassis.
It proved to be a disastrous combination. The Yamaha V8 lacked power, and Brunner's chassis was unstable, particularly through fast corners. Both drivers were forced into a gruelling sixty-minute pre-qualifying session just to make the regular grid, and results were dire: Schneider's best moment came in Brazil, running fifteenth before a collision with Eddie Cheever ended his race, while Suzuki failed to qualify at all for much of the season. A glimmer of hope arrived at Yamaha's home race in Japan, where a fresh, more powerful engine helped Schneider set an impressive twenty-first fastest time in qualifying — only for the gearbox to fail on the second lap of the race.
With no realistic path forward, Zakowski withdrew the team from Formula 1 at the end of 1989. Zakspeed's grand prix career had spanned the 1985 Portuguese Grand Prix through to the 1989 Australian Grand Prix. The team is recorded as having entered 73 grands prix with 54 starts, though other tallies put the number of races contested at 53. What is not in dispute is the final points tally: two, both scored on that single afternoon at Imola in 1987.
Life After Formula 1
Unlike many failed F1 constructors, Zakspeed was not in financial trouble when it left the grid — quite the opposite. Peter Zakowski, Erich's son, took the reins of the company and steered it toward an unexpectedly successful second act in touring cars. Zakspeed prepared Opel Calibras and Mercedes-Benz 190Es and Class Cs for the DTM in the 1990s, run by drivers including Kurt Thiim. In sports car racing, the team fielded Porsche 911 GT1-98s in the FIA GT Championship and later ran Oreca-built Dodge/Chrysler Viper GTS-Rs at the Nürburgring 24 Hours, winning the endurance classic three years running.
Zakspeed also dipped briefly into American open-wheel racing, entering CART with a Reynard chassis run in partnership with Forsythe Racing and driven by Bryan Herta, though the alliance lasted only a single season. Zakspeed campaigned a Saleen S7-R in FIA GT with drivers Jarek Janis, Sascha Bert, and Andrea Montermini, winning at Brno and Dijon-Prenois and finishing fourth in the championship.
Later in the decade, the team returned to open-wheel preparation work, running Panoz-built Superleague Formula cars liveried for football clubs Borussia Dortmund and Beijing Guoan — the latter claiming the championship with Davide Rigon behind the wheel. The team also ran cars for Anderlecht and Sporting Lisbon in 2009.
Behind the scenes, though, the company's finances were quietly deteriorating. Peter Zakowski filed for bankruptcy proceedings at the Bitburg court in the Eifel region in September 2006, and while the racing operation continued under this strain for several more years, the situation caught up with it in 2010, when Zakspeed Performance Management filed for insolvency and the doors at Niederzissen finally closed for good. Erich Zakowski, the man who had gambled a compensation payout on building his own Formula 1 car from scratch, died on 3 November 2023.
A Small Team, A Big Idea
Zakspeed never won a grand prix, never scored more than two championship points, and spent much of its five-year Formula 1 existence struggling with reliability and underpowered engines. But its ambition — designing and building its own chassis and its own turbocharged engine at a time when only a handful of manufacturers on the entire grid could claim the same — remains a genuinely distinctive chapter in the sport's history. Long after the team packed up its Niederzissen workshop, Zakspeed is still remembered less for its results than for the sheer audacity of what a small, family-run German tuning shop tried to achieve against the giants of Formula 1.
