Zakspeed was already a well-established racing and tuning operation before its Formula One venture, having worked closely with Ford in touring car and sportscar competition. The team's ambition was to enter the top flight with a wholly proprietary package — chassis and engine alike — at a time when factory-backed Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, and Renault were the only other outfits doing the same.
The car's designation, 841, reflects its troubled gestation: the number encodes a 1984 intended debut, but a funding shortfall pushed the programme back a full year, meaning the car arrived in 1985 already nominally dated. Two chassis were built across the entire season, with the second not completed until the French Grand Prix, the seventh round. Resource constraints also forced the team to restrict its entries to European races only, foregoing the fly-away rounds in Brazil, Canada, the United States, South Africa, and Australia. This limited Zakspeed to a maximum of eleven of the sixteen championship Grands Prix.
The 841 was a conventional design by the standards of the era, with a clean, tidy package dressed in the red-and-white livery of title sponsor West. The 1,500 cc turbocharged inline-four engine was designed by Norbert Kreyer and reportedly derived from a Ford block. In race trim it produced approximately 820 bhp, with qualifying output rising to around 900 bhp. Those figures placed Zakspeed ahead of the Hart turbo and Motori Moderni units, and roughly on par with the Alfa Romeo V8, but well behind the leading BMW, Ferrari, Renault, Honda, and TAG-Porsche engines, which were capable of exceeding 1,000 bhp in qualifying specification.
Zakspeed made its championship debut at the 1985 Portuguese Grand Prix, the second round of the season, with Jonathan Palmer as lead driver. Palmer qualified twenty-third and was eliminated in a first-lap collision with Keke Rosberg's Williams, which damaged the suspension beyond repair.
At San Marino, Palmer qualified a promising seventeenth but failed to take the start due to an engine misfire. The Monaco Grand Prix provided the team's first race finish — eleventh place — but that would prove to be the only time the 841 saw the chequered flag in 1985. A sequence of mechanical retirements followed across the next five starts.
The team's season was further disrupted when Palmer broke his leg in a sportscar accident at Spa-Francorchamps, forcing him to miss the Italian Grand Prix. Christian Danner, the 1985 Formula 3000 champion, substituted for the final two European rounds. Zakspeed did not travel to the final two flyaway races in Australia and Japan, closing the season with no championship points.
The Zakspeed 841 marked the entry of a notable German racing brand into Formula One, completing an ambition that had been delayed by a year and hampered throughout by the financial realities of a small privateer team operating against well-funded factory programmes. Its significance lies more in the achievement of constructing a complete car from German components than in any competitive result, standing as a statement of engineering intent in an era dominated by the turbo war between major manufacturers. The experience gained with the 841 fed directly into the development of its successor, the Zakspeed 861, which carried the team through the following seasons before the naturally aspirated rules transition.