where, like many others, he retired after hitting a wall. Early in his career, Tambay was a part of
Formula 5000 with the team run by
Carl Haas. 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. 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 team run by
Carl Haas, immediately winning early in the season and then winning his second Can-Am championship. 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 No. 27, he won after
Riccardo Patrese crashed near the end of the race. Despite finishing fourth 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 second in the 1983 Constructors' Championship and second 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 second place in the
1984 French Grand Prix at
Dijon. 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,
Australian driver
Alan Jones despite Haas having exclusive use of the new
Cosworth designed and built
Ford TEC 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 fourth). Although he regularly out-qualified his former World Championship winning team mate, his two 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
rally raiding, 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. ==Later life and death==