Brabham (1978–1985)
For the last race in 1978, Piquet moved to the Brabham team; he qualified in 14th and finished 11th. Piquet stayed with Brabham until 1985.
In 1979, Piquet competed in his first full season in Formula One. He once again drove for the Brabham team, alongside double world champion, Niki Lauda. The season was difficult for the team, which was accustomed to success. Piquet retired from eleven of the fifteen races in the season. He started off his season being involved in a first-lap pile up and getting injured at the Argentine Grand Prix in Buenos Aires and crashing into Clay Regazzoni's Williams car at the Brazilian Grand Prix at Interlagos. The first points of his career came at the Dutch Grand Prix, where he finished fourth. He had a huge accident at the Italian Grand Prix; the rear section of his BT48 was completely ripped off at Monza's Curva Grande corner after another incident with Regazzoni; Piquet walked away uninjured. But even though the races saw him crash a few times, or retire with a semi-competitive car that had an unreliable engine, in qualifying Piquet performed well, qualifying in the top five several times – often out-qualifying Lauda. Two weeks after the Italian round, Lauda abruptly quit driving before the start of the Canadian Grand Prix, leaving Piquet as the number one driver for Brabham, and leaving him and new recruit Ricardo Zunino to debut the new BT49, which had a Ford-Cosworth DFV engine; Brabham ditched the Alfa Romeo V12's in protest to Alfa Romeo entering as a full works team. In the final race, the United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, Piquet started from the front row and took the fastest lap in the race, clearly showing the new BT49's considerable potential.
In 1980, Piquet finished a hard-fought second in Argentina behind Alan Jones; the race was held in very hot conditions on a disintegrating track. There were doubts about the legality of the car as it was believed to be underweight. Jones went to see the car which gave the suspicion that ballast had been added to bring the car within the regulations to make it legal.
Piquet took his first win at the United States Grand Prix West in Long Beach, California by over 50 seconds from Riccardo Patrese. 5 months later, Piquet scored back to back wins in the Netherlands and Italy. He finished second in the drivers' standings, 13 points behind title winner Alan Jones. In Canada, Piquet and Jones had contact off the start and Piquet's car was damaged and caused a major crash resulting in the race being red flagged. Jones, his Championship rival, continued in the race and joined the restart in the same car. Piquet switched to his qualifying car which had a special engine that was not set up to go the distance, so Piquet retired and Jones won the race and the World Championship from Piquet.
The season began with the revocation of the South African Grand Prix's status as an FIA-sanctioned event due to the ongoing FISA–FOCA war. With the FISA teams boycotting the race, the FOCA teams staged a non-championship race there in South Africa held in wet conditions which was won by Carlos Reutemann with Piquet second. FISA and FOCA reached an agreement banning movable skirts and requiring a minimum ground clearance, excluding the tyres, of 6 cm.
After a third place in the United States Grand Prix West, Piquet qualified on pole position in his home race, the Brazilian Grand Prix in his birth city of Rio de Janeiro, but quickly faded from contention after starting the race on slick tyres on a soaking wet track. At the next race, the Argentine Grand Prix in Buenos Aires, Brabham got around the ground-clearance rule by devising a suspension system that kept the car at the required height during technical inspection but lowered it onto the ground at speed, allowing it to race once again as a wing car. The superiority of the car was such that Piquet easily swept to victory and even his less experienced Mexican teammate Héctor Rebaque, who could usually be found well down the order, managed to retain second place until he was forced to retire. At the San Marino Grand Prix, almost all the teams adopted the innovation brought to Argentina by Brabham. Piquet won the race despite being caught out by rain.
In the Belgian Grand Prix at Zolder, after an initial start which was aborted due to an accident involving Siegfried Stohr, Piquet's teammate Riccardo Patrese and mechanic Dave Luckett who inexplicably remained on the track at the start to restart Patrese's stalled car, Piquet went off again in the lead only to have Jones make contact on lap 10 forcing him to retire, with the race being won by Reutemann. After crashing in Monaco and Spain, Piquet was able to recover at the French Grand Prix at Dijon where he dominated until lap 58, when a sudden storm led to a red flag and the organizers decided to wait until the rain stopped to continue the race. At the restart 45 minutes later, Alain Prost appeared much more competitive after putting on slicks on a drying track, with some mechanical work performed during the break, and won his first Grand Prix with Piquet relegated to third place, behind Prost and McLaren's John Watson. In the next race, the British Grand Prix, Reutemann finished second to open up a seventeen-point lead in the standings while Piquet suffered tyre failure and crashed on the straight between Stowe and Club corners.
Piquet won the championship with a great comeback that began when he won the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim while Reutemann was enduring internal conflict with his teammate Alan Jones. After stringing together a series of decent results (even after losing second in Italy due to engine failure on the last lap) whilst Reutemann only scored a few times, Piquet went into the last race of the season only a point behind Reutemann. At the Caesars Palace Grand Prix in Las Vegas, Piquet finished fifth to clinch the championship as Reutemann finished out of the points. Piquet was so dehydrated from the desert heat and exhausted from the anti-clockwise nature of the track that he vomited on himself during the race and had to be lifted out of his car when he returned to the pits.
The following year, Piquet was fast but his car proved to be unreliable despite Brabham entering into an alliance with BMW to supply the team with turbocharged engines that although were powerful, were also very unreliable and were the main reason why the car retired from so many races. Aside from the first Grand Prix in South Africa Brabham started the season using the Ford-Cosworth engined BT49D. Piquet won the Brazilian Grand Prix in Rio de Janeiro; the extreme heat and immense adhesion of the cars meant that Piquet and other drivers suffered from exhaustion; Piquet fainted while collecting his trophy on the podium. Piquet was later disqualified for his car being underweight from a protest from Renault and Ferrari. Piquet did not drive the BMW-engined BT50 until Belgium, and the low point of the season was Detroit where he failed to qualify due to an engine failure in qualifying. The ruling of Piquet's disqualification led to a political attack on the lowering of the minimum weight against Ferrari and Renault who used turbo engines. Ferrari's changes to the rear wing at the United States Grand Prix West and the disqualification of Gilles Villeneuve after the race caused the FOCA teams to boycott the San Marino Grand Prix.
His only win was in the Canadian Grand Prix which was also BMW's first win in Formula One. In Germany, Piquet arrived to help Didier Pironi after he suffered a career-ending high-speed crash during practice. In the race, Piquet was leading until he collided with Eliseo Salazar whom he physically attacked at the side of the track on live television.
Piquet won the opening race in Brazil in the arrow-shaped BT52 and followed this up with a retirement in the United States West Grand Prix. He scored a second place in France and took another second at Monaco also taking the fastest lap. He was 14 points behind Alain Prost with three races left in the season but took back-to-back victories at Monza and Brands Hatch to close to within two points. At the season-ending South African Grand Prix, Prost retired on lap 35 and Piquet cruised to a third-place finish, winning his second world title. It also was the first time a turbocharged car won the championship, and was BMW's first and only championship in Formula 1.
With the new rule that limited the capacity of the tanks of the cars to 220 liters and forbade race refueling, Piquet started as the title favorite because it was thought that the 4-cylinder BMW would suffer less from the new fuel economy requirement than the 6-cylinder competition. The winter tests seemed to confirm the expectations, and in fact the car showed promise, but the expected results never materialised. The only good thing that came from the tests was the creation of special qualifying engines, which produced more than 900 hp and allowed Piquet to match what was then the record for pole positions in a year: nine, already held by Lauda and Ronnie Peterson.
The season was dominated by the McLaren team who were using TAG-Porsche engines. In Canada, the Brabham team introduced a curious additional radiator on the nose that was mounted on the car that improved reliability. Piquet won the race (after having retired from the previous six races, mostly through engine or turbo failure), but the additional radiator heated to the point that Piquet suffered burns on his right foot when pushing the accelerator pedal down; The heat had actually burnt a hole through his boots and he went to the podium barefoot after receiving first aid. He managed take a back-to-back win at Detroit after driving his backup car due to an accident that occurred at the start of the race. These were his only two victories of the year. In Spielberg he could have won as the car of leading Niki Lauda suffered a loss of gears, but Piquet was unaware and did not attack. Piquet finished in fifth place in the championship.
Prior to the 1985 season, Piquet and Brabham conducted their winter testing at the Kyalami circuit in South Africa, along with the team's new tyre supplier Pirelli. It was through this testing that Pirelli came up with the tyre compounds they would use during the season. Unfortunately, unlike the hot conditions in South Africa, most of the European part of the season took place in unseasonably cold weather. This, and the Brabham BT54's weight distribution towards the back of the car saw the Pirelli tyres (especially the fronts) largely ineffective and left Piquet often fast, but ultimately uncompetitive.
In 1985, Piquet won a single race, the French Grand Prix at the Paul Ricard Circuit with summer conditions similar to those experienced in testing suiting the tyres, and the powerful BMW turbo engine propelling the Brabham BT54 (of teammate Marc Surer) to the then F1 speed record of 338 km/h (210 mph) on the 1.8 km (1.1 mi) long Mistral Straight during qualifying. It was Pirelli's first victory since returning to Formula One.
However, Piquet was becoming frustrated. He felt as if his loyalty to Brabham was being taken advantage of - his salary was lower than other drivers despite his success with the team - and he was not being informed of some team decisions. The switch to Pirelli tyres had been particularly upsetting: he felt it had been done purely for financial reasons and placed inordinate commitments on him for tyre testing. He was also concerned about financial security when he retired, citing the difficulties faced by Brazilian footballers Pelé and Garrincha after their professional careers ended. However, he was well integrated with the team and enjoyed close relationships with Gordon Murray and his mechanics, making him reluctant to leave.
Piquet had been in contact with McLaren, but was discouraged by the PR duties that came with it: "(Ron Dennis) mentioned so many days a year working for Marlboro... I lost interest. I won't waste my life talking to people who don't understand racing." Williams offered him a contract worth three times his Brabham contract, and with the turbocharged Honda engine quickly becoming one of the best on the grid, it was an offer too good to refuse. After some thought, he reluctantly left Brabham after seven seasons and two world championships with Honda agreeing to buy Piquet out of his Brabham contract.
