Patrick Tambay

 ( 1949 Births ) 

Patrick Daniel Tambay (; 25 June 1949 – 4 December 2022) was a French racing driver, broadcaster and politician, who competed in Formula One from to . Tambay won two Formula One Grands Prix across nine seasons.

Born and raised in Paris, Tambay gained training as a racing driver at the Winfield Racing School in 1971. Between and , he raced for an assortment of teams including Surtees, Theodore Racing, Ligier and McLaren with mixed results; he additionally won two Can-Am titles under Carl Haas in 1977 and 1980. Tambay was hired by Scuderia Ferrari after the death of Gilles Villeneuve in , taking his maiden victory four races later at the . His second and final victory came the following season in San Marino, finishing the season a career-best fourth in the World Drivers' Championship. In , Tambay moved to Renault, before ending his Formula One career at Haas Lola, having achieved two wins, five pole positions, two fastest laps and 11 podiums.

Tambay competed in various forms of motorsport following his departure from Formula One, including the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the World Sportscar Championship, and the Dakar Rally.

In 1977, winning the Can Am championship with Haas, Tambay debuted in Formula One on a one-off basis with Surtees, driving in only one session at the 1977 French Grand Prix before spending the rest of the season with Theodore Racing. This partnership proved fruitful, and Tambay moved to McLaren to race Formula One full-time for the 1978 and 1979 seasons. In 1980, he returned to Can Am with the Lola Cars team run by Carl Haas, immediately winning early in the season and then winning his second Can-Am championship.

In 1981 he returned to F1, first driving for the Theodore team then finishing the season with Equipe Ligier. In 1982, he was offered a drive with Arrows by team boss Jackie Oliver to replace the injured Marc Surer in the season-opening South African Grand Prix. He arrived at the track and, when faced with the ongoing turmoil and the possibility of a drivers' strike, he soon left and did not take part in the race. Later in 1982 he was offered a place with the Scuderia Ferrari after the death of his close friend Gilles Villeneuve. He won his first Grand Prix at the German Grand Prix that year after Didier Pironi was injured in qualifying, in his fourth race for Ferrari. He took his second and last Grand Prix win in 1983 at Imola; driving with Villeneuve's #27, he won after Riccardo Patrese crashed near the end of the race.

Despite finishing 4th in the World Championship (with team mate René Arnoux finishing 3rd enabling Ferrari to win the Constructors' Championship), Tambay was dropped by the Scuderia at the end of 1983 in favor of Italian Michele Alboreto. Tambay then moved from one factory team to the other in Formula One at the time, Renault who had finished 2nd in the 1983 Constructors' Championship and 2nd in the Drivers' with fellow Frenchman Alain Prost. Unfortunately for Tambay, after 1983 the factory Renault teams fortunes would go on the downslide and he would spend a somewhat fruitless two seasons before Renault pulled the plug on its factory team with his best results over the and seasons being a single pole position and subsequent 2nd place in the 1984 French Grand Prix at Dijon-Prenois.

For what would prove to be his final season in Formula One, Tambay was then reunited with his old boss Carl Haas racing in the Haas Lola F1 team in where he spent an even more fruitless season alongside World Champion, Australians driver Alan Jones despite Haas having exclusive use of the new Cosworth designed and built Ford Cosworth GBA V6 turbo engine. Tambay's best result driving either the underpowered Hart engined Lola THL1 or the Ford powered Lola THL2 (which itself was somewhat underpowered compared to its rivals from BMW, Honda, Renault, Ferrari and TAG-Porsche) was a lone 5th place in the THL2 in the 1986 Austrian Grand Prix at the Österreichring (Jones having an equally hard time of it in 1986, finished 4th). Although he regularly out-qualified his former World Championship winning team mate, his 2 points in Austria would be Tambay's only points of the 1986 season and thus his last scored in Formula One. With the loss of the lucrative sponsorship from American company Beatrice Foods in mid-1986, Carl Haas shut his Formula One team down at the end of the season and Tambay, unable to find a competitive drive to continue in , retired from the sport.

In 1987, Tambay formed his own sports promotion company in Switzerland, but gave this up in 1989 to return to racing. In 1989, he drove a Jaguar in the World Sportscar Championship and went on to finish fourth in the Le Mans 24 Hours. He then took up desert , finishing twice in the top three on the Paris-Dakar. Additionally, he was involved in ice races and the Tour de Corse jet ski race.

Graded drivers not eligible for  European Formula Two Championship points.
     

Graded drivers not eligible for  European Formula Two Championship points