Touch and go
Dismissed by McLaren in favour of Alain Prost in 1980, Patrick Tambay bounced back, morally and financially, by winning the Can-Am series for Carl Haas, a championship he had already won in 1977, the year of his debut in Grand Prix in an Ensign. After racing in F1 without much success in the modest Theodore in 1981, he was recruited by the Arrows team for the next season, witness this symbolic handshake with Jackie Oliver in Las Vegas end of 1981 (picture above), where the French driver completed an interim drive at Ligier.
Here you have, in January 1982, Patrick Tambay at work, during practice for the South-African Grand Prix, held on the Kyalami circuit, in the Arrows A4 (picture below). But the turmoil provoked by the drivers’ strike convinced Patrick to quit, disgusted by the F1, and return to Can-Am with Team VDS. He was replaced at Kyalami by Brian Henton, where the British driver failed to qualify, just like the other Arrows A4 driven by Mauro Baldi.
A few months later, a tragic destiny would bring Tambay back in F1 at Ferrari to take over from his friend Gilles Villeneuve : two victories in red will relaunch his career in Grand Prix (with two constructors’ world titles for the Scuderia in 1982/83) before two seasons with Renault in 1984/85 and finally a last campaign with the Beatrice Haas team in 1986.