Born in Lorette, Loire, Prost discovered karting at age 14 and rapidly ascended through junior formulae. He dominated French Formula Renault in 1976, winning the title and nearly every race, then took the Formula Renault European championship in 1977. After claiming both the French and European Formula Three titles in 1979 with Oreca, he signed with McLaren for 1980 and scored points on his Formula One debut at the Argentine Grand Prix.
Prost moved to Renault in 1981 and took his maiden victory at the French Grand Prix at Dijon, adding wins in the Netherlands and Italy. He finished runner-up to Nelson Piquet in the 1983 championship after retiring from the title-deciding race in South Africa with a turbo failure. Renault sacked him two days later over his post-season comments, and he returned to McLaren for 1984. That year he won seven races but lost the championship to teammate Niki Lauda by a record half-point margin — the closest title race in Formula One history — after the Monaco Grand Prix was controversially stopped at half distance.
In 1985, Prost became the first French Formula One World Champion, winning five races and finishing 20 points clear of Michele Alboreto. He retained the title in 1986 in dramatic fashion, benefiting from Nigel Mansell's tyre failure at the Australian Grand Prix finale. When Honda power arrived at McLaren in 1988 alongside new teammate Ayrton Senna, the team dominated the season — winning 15 of 16 races — but Senna took the title by three points due to a scoring rule that counted only the best 11 results per driver.
The 1988 pairing sparked one of motor sport's defining rivalries. Prost and Senna collided at the title-deciding Japanese Grand Prix in 1989, with Senna subsequently disqualified, handing Prost his third championship. Moving to Ferrari in 1990, the rivalry resumed: Senna intentionally drove into Prost at the first corner of the 1990 Japanese Grand Prix to clinch the title, later admitting the act was deliberate retaliation for 1989. After a winless 1991 at Ferrari, during which he publicly compared the car to a truck, Ferrari dismissed him with one race remaining.
Following a sabbatical year in 1992, Prost joined Williams-Renault for 1993 and won seven of the first ten races to claim his fourth and final title, clinching it in Portugal with two races to spare. He retired at season's end. At his final race in Adelaide, Senna — who had been blocked from joining Williams that year by a contract clause Prost had negotiated — pulled him to the top step of the podium for an embrace that represented a belated reconciliation.
Prost's mantra of "winning as slowly as possible" encapsulated his approach: conserve tyres and brakes in the opening laps, then challenge hard at the end. Honda F1 boss Nobuhiko Kawamoto compared him to a computer, in contrast to Senna's samurai. Jackie Stewart praised his "silkiness," calling it artistry rather than mere smoothness. Despite losing to Senna 26-4 in head-to-head qualifying across their 32 shared races, Prost outscored him 12-6 in fastest laps on race day.
After retirement Prost purchased the Ligier team in 1997, renaming it Prost Grand Prix, but the operation folded in 2002 amid financial difficulties. He subsequently served as an adviser at Renault and Alpine between 2017 and 2022. He co-owned the Renault e.dams Formula E team, which won three consecutive Teams' Championships from 2014-15 to 2016-17. Prost was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1999.
He is tied with Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen for four championship titles, ranking him behind only Lewis Hamilton, Michael Schumacher, and Juan Manuel Fangio on the all-time list.
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