6 F1 engine manufacturers who fell from grace

#3 TAG Porsche

Despite Ferdinand Porsche designed Grand Prix cars in the 1920s and 1930s for Mercedes and Auto Union, the Porsche AG never felt at home in single seaters. For 1962, a newly developed flat-eight powered and sleek Porsche 804 produced the German manufacturer's only win as a constructor courtesy of Dan Gurney at the 1962 French Grand Prix. One week later, he repeated the success in front of Porsche's home crowd at Stuttgart in a non-championship race. At the end of the season, Porsche withdrew from F1 due to the high spiraling costs.

While still a sponsor of Williams, TAG’s Ojjeh financed the development of a turbocharged Porsche V6 engine for use by McLaren in the early 80s displaying the words "Made by Porsche". The engine made its F1 debut at the 1983 Dutch Grand Prix with Niki Lauda qualifying the car 19th before retiring with a brake failure. The TAG engined McLarens failed to finish a race in the late part of the 1983 season, though Lauda was classified 11th at the last race in South Africa even though he had retired 5 laps from the finish with electrical failure.

Better was to come for the TAG engines in 1984, with Lauda and Alain Prost sharing 12 wins of the season's 16 races between them and easily clinching McLaren the Constructors' Championship by the penultimate round in the Netherlands. Prost went on to become the first French F1 champion when he drove the McLaren-TAG 1.5L v6 turbo to the title in 1985. McLaren did not dominate as they had been in the previous year with rivals Ferrari and the emergence of the Honda turbo engine with Williams upped the ante in the spending war.

Prost would claim back to back championships in 1986 with TAG engine, however, the better power and fuel economy of Honda RA164E 1.5L V6 turbo meant than the TAG-Porsche units would lose the Constructors' Championship to Williams.

The final year of the TAG-Porsche engines in Formula One was 1987 as Prost was unable to defend his title and finished 4th in the championship with only 3 victories to his credit. The final win for the TAG engine was at the Portuguese Grand Prix where Prost recorded his 28th career win breaking the record of 27 held by Jackie Stewart since 1973. Overall the TAG engines powered McLaren racked up an impressive 25 Grand Prix wins in five seasons in addition to 7 pole positions, 18 fastest laps and 54 podium finishes in 68 races.