1985 Motori Moderni's power unit debuted at the
1985 San Marino Grand Prix with the newly born Minardi Formula One team. Rookie
Pierluigi Martini qualified the
M185 19th on the grid but was forced to retire after 14 laps. Martini failed to score a point in 1985 with a best finish of 8th and last in the season-ending
Australian Grand Prix. The Motori Moderni engine weighed in at and produced in race trim, with another 100 horsepower possible for qualifying. This compared unfavourably to the approximately of the
Renault,
Honda and
BMW turbo engines, and the of the
TAG-
Porsche and
Ferrari engines. At
Silverstone for the
British Grand Prix, Martini was 8.054 seconds slower than
Keke Rosberg's pole-winning
Williams-
Honda (Rosberg had set the pole at an average of , the fastest ever turbo lap speed). At the
Österreichring in
Austria he was 11.2 seconds slower than
Alain Prost's
McLaren TAG-
Porsche, while at
Monza in
Italy he was 8.8 seconds slower than
Ayrton Senna's
Lotus-
Renault.
1986 In 1986, as the Minardi team expanded to running two cars, Martini was replaced with
Andrea de Cesaris, and paired with F1 rookie
Alessandro Nannini, who showed his class by often outpacing his more experienced countryman. Again, no points were scored with the Motori Moderni engines rated at approximately next to the leading Honda, BMW, Ferrari, Renault and TAG-Porsche units which were producing well over in race trim (the BMW was said to be the most powerful qualifying engine at around ). The AGS team was Motori Moderni's second customer. The team only participated in two races during the 1986 season, with
Ivan Capelli retiring from both the
Italian and
Portuguese Grands Prix.
1987 1987 would be the last season the Motori Moderni engine would be used in Formula One. Minardi, who had retained Nannini after an impressive debut season, replaced de Cesaris (who had moved to
Brabham) with Spanish driver
Adrián Campos. Once more no points were scored throughout the season, despite some spirited drives by Nannini which only resulted in 11th-placed finishes in
Hungary and
Portugal. The engines, now rated at after the introduction of the
FIA's mandatory pop-off valve aimed at limiting the turbos power to 4.0 bar, were often struggling against the
V8 Cosworth DFZ powered cars. At the
1987 Australian Grand Prix in
Adelaide, Nannini qualified an impressive 13th on the grid only 3.434 behind
Gerhard Berger's pole-winning
Ferrari. Unfortunately, his race only lasted a few hundred metres as he was pushed into the fence just out of the chicane after the start. Campos qualified 26th and last (3.42 seconds slower than Nannini), with his race ending with transmission failure after 46 of the scheduled 82 laps. With being the final year for the turbos in Formula One (until ), Motori Moderni pulled out of the sport at the end of 1987 rather than try to adapt the engine for an even lower pop-off valve limit of 2.5 bar and a lower fuel limit of just 150 litres. As a result, Minardi switched to the Cosworth DFZ engine in 1988. ==Subaru==