NIKI LAUDA: 1949-2019
A life less ordinary
Niki Lauda was a world champion driver, team boss, a man who survived against all the odds. His recent death sent shockwaves through Formula 1. Our editor in chief, Andrew van de Burgt, worked alongside Lauda in his days at Jaguar. Here is his personal tribute to a true F1 legend
THIS WAS JUST THE KIND of brief that I’d got into motorsport for. Early on in 2001, Niki Lauda had been parachuted into the underperforming Jaguar Formula 1 set-up as team principal, as tensions mounted between its owners, Ford, and the outfit that had been winning races as Stewart Grand Prix just a season and a half earlier.
Given that I was working for the team, keeping its jaguarracing.com website updated, it was only logical that I would be sent off to speak to the new boss to gather his thoughts and
aspirations for his new role. It was my first job in the sport I’d loved since I was a child, and I’d already had the opportunity to spend time with people like Johnny Herbert (lovely and helpful), Eddie Irvine (difficult) and Sir Jackie Stewart, who’d sold his team to Ford but remained in an advisory role.
But going to interview Lauda was in a different league. This was someone who, when I was growing up, was not just one of the most instantly recognisable drivers on the planet, but in the whole of sport, or in fact, one of the most recognisable people in the world full stop.
Having played a starring role in the globally televised climax to the 1976 F1 season, and with his back story way beyond the wildest dreams of a contemporary Britain’s Got Talent producer, Lauda had transcended stardom in motorsport to attain Hollywood actor or rock star levels of general public awareness.
An old battered copy of Motor Sport from 1977 that lived in the loft above our garage was one of my first contact points with F1. It told the story of Lauda’s triumphant return to Germany a year after his life-threatening crash and I read the ink off the page. My dad’s portmanteau impression, “It’s a piece of shit Murray”, which he would invariably say whenever Lauda appeared on screen for an interview, was guaranteed to make me giggle as we watched Lauda’s successful second Formula 1 career play out before us on Sunday afternoons.
My interview took place at Ford’s Premier Automotive Group’s office on Berkeley Square in Mayfair. Even at the time it felt weird that this meeting wasn’t happening at the Jaguar Racing factory in Milton Keynes. In hindsight, it was symbolic of the disjointed arrangement between the owners and the people on the ground running the race team.
The office was as lavish as you’d expect, but when I was called in to see Lauda he was wearing faded blue jeans, green jumper and the iconic red baseball cap. He stood up to greet me as I entered the room, shook my hand, “so, what do you want?” he asked me, and we were off.
The interview was unmemorable, mainly because I wasn’t after the story behind what he
said to Ron Dennis following his unsentimental sign-off to his former champion in 1985, or Niki’s motivations to get back behind the wheel just weeks after staring death in the eye. Instead I needed some Pr-friendly lines on what great potential the Jaguar team had and how he was going to turn it all around. Anodyne stuff at best.
It did serve a useful purpose, though, as it meant I’d established the tiniest measure of a relationship, which paid off when I was given a much more interesting Lauda assignment, his return to the cockpit as he tested the car…
In the 17 years since Lauda had last raced in F1 the two most significant developments in the sport had been the vast increase in aerodynamic grip, with windtunnel and CFD developments optimising every surface of the car, and electronics, euphemistically labelled ‘driver aids’.
In his previous role as a TV pundit, Lauda had asserted that with semi-automatic gearboxes and traction control, a trained monkey could drive a contemporary F1 car. While the test at Valencia in January 2002 was dressed up as a chance for him to understand the modern cars so that he could help the drivers get more from the latest R3 contender (he couldn’t, but then who could?), in reality it was a jolly for the boys, with Lauda’s boss Wolfgang Reitzle also having a go in the car. Looking back, it really is no surprise the team failed…
In those days of dial-up internet, while Jaguar was struggling on track it was leading the field in terms of its digital presence, and so I went to Valencia with a high-spec video camera to capture behind-the-scenes footage. I then edited that with the track filming created for the TV news release to produce a very unique take on the day.
I’d also been handed my first ever Autosport commission (a precursor of how my career would develop over the coming months), and having had that previous meeting I didn’t have to go through the tedium of explaining who I was and what I was doing and maybe meant I got a slightly deeper insight.
“I think it might be more difficult to be quick in these cars than it was in my era,” Lauda told me after he’d completed his run – which
included a quick spin (“I spun because I braked where Pedro [de la Rosa] told me to brake”) – during which he was roughly 10 seconds off the pace. “Those cars were more physically difficult to drive, in these cars everything is done for you,” he said. “But I would have preferred to race these cars, no question.”
That last statement encapsulated Lauda’s lack of sentimentality for an era venerated more by rose-tinted armchair dwellers than those who put their life on the line. In the last Lauda interview with F1 Racing, which I conducted in Abu Dhabi at the end of the 2017 season, I asked what it was like when the drivers actually socialised with each other.
“Bullshit question!” he fired back immediately. There was a glint of mischief in his eye and it set the scene perfectly. “There was more respect in dangerous situations but we were enemies.”
Of course, the Jaguar project failed and Lauda returned to his role as a pundit, where his unfiltered observations and profound understanding of the life of the racing driver made him a natural draw, even if some of his more unreconstructed opinions left him at odds with the modern world.
Lauda was one of 70 casualties when the axe swung at Jaguar as Ford paid the price for (former CEO and president) Jack Nasser’s overly optimistic expansion into the world of the luxury car market. Quite how much the team’s failure to make a marked improvement was down to Lauda or their unwillingness to give him the support he needed is moot and worthy of a book of its own, but it’s a chapter of his career that is uncharacteristically ill-starred.
The same comment can be levelled at his stint as a consultant at Ferrari, where between 1993 and 1996 he witnessed one of the least successful periods in the team’s illustrious history. Although that has to be qualified against the turmoil that was going on behind the scenes, and a ship that was only steadied once Jean Todt was at the helm and Ross Brawn and Rory Bryne had been conscripted to shore up the design and build process.
But usually Lauda’s was a life of successes, whether it was winning three world titles, setting up three different airlines or assisting Mercedes as it re-wrote the record books. He was born into a wealthy Viennese family, which he famously defied to follow his racing dream. There was little in his early racing results to suggest he was going to be an F1 great, especially compared with the stellar performances of F2 contemporaries such as Ronnie Peterson, but he backed himself and even doubled down on his bank loan to secure himself a place at BRM for 1973.
The gamble paid off. It says a lot about the state of both F1 and Ferrari at the time that the team would take a punt on a driver who at that stage was yet to even score a point in a grand prix. But a dearth of options – following Stewart’s retirement, the only active world champions on the grid in 1974 were Emerson Fittipaldi at Mclaren and the aging Denny Hulme and Graham Hill, who were in the twilight of their careers – added to Ferrari’s terrible form (it scored a miserable 12 points in 1973) meant it was hardly the choice pick for any of the other established superstars.
While the results might not have suggested it, Lauda had already made a reputation for himself as having a strong mechanical understanding, which made him a great development driver. This, combined with his blunt delivery, could
have killed his nascent Ferrari career almost before it started.
A Fiorano test at the end of the 1973 revealed the 312B3 suffered from chronic understeer. “Shit” was Niki’s unequivocal assessment. This was a sentiment Enzo Ferrari was unaccustomed to hearing and Lauda was asked what needed to be done to improve the car and what time benefits this would bring.
When he suggested that “three to five tenths” was feasible, he was instructed that if that target wasn’t achieved at the very next test, he’d be sacked! Working closely with designer Mauro Forghieri they developed a new front suspension in record time and went eighth tenths faster next time out…
That not only secured Lauda his place in the Old Man’s affections (capricious as they were), it built a bond with Forghieri that would underscore one of Ferrari’s most successful periods. Lauda quickly asserted himself over Clay Regazzoni to become the team’s unequivocal number one, even if a poor run of reliability curtailed his title hopes.
There were no such issues in 1975 and Lauda breezed to the championship. He was on course to repeat that in 1976 when that dreadful
accident happened at the Nürburgring.
The scars from the accident – both mental and physical – would have a profound impact.
Autosport’s technical illustrator Giorgio Piola had been a constant presence in the Ferrari pit throughout this time and he noticed how the accident changed Lauda’s character.
“For me Niki had two lives,” he recalls, “Before, as a journalist, it was quite difficult talking to him because he was very technical, nearly a private computer, much more than Michael Schumacher for example. He was very shy, he was talking only about the cars and not giving any concession to the human side.
“After the accident, I found a completely different man. In the beginning the difference was so big. He wanted to live again, so he made this world by himself and he filled his life. He became a real man, very deep, very human, two different people. It was good, because the second person was even better than the first. The first was only a wonderful driver, the second person was still a wonderful driver and a wonderful man.”
But of course the changes were physical too.
The fire that engulfed Lauda left the world with a constant reminder of what he had endured. And this played a significant part in defining his legend.
“Ein ohr,
Ein ohr,
Ein ohr, ein ohr, ein ohr Niki Lauda,
Niki Lauda,
Niki Lauda hat ein ohr!”
At the German GP one year, former F1 Racing head honcho Anthony Rowlinson, future features editor James Roberts and I decided to explore the camp sites in the forests of Hockenheim. It was an eye-opening window into the world of mechanised Michael Schumacher effigies spraying ‘champagne’, pop-up bars and sausage stacked barbeques – and hoards of mulleted fans singing an ode to one of their idols.
Rowlinson recorded a video of it and showed it to Alan Henry, the journalist in the paddock with the closest relationship to Lauda. “Show it to Niki,” he said, “Go on, he’ll find it hilarious.”
Sadly, the opportunity never arose, but how many other drivers have songs about them? None as far as I’m aware. Idolatry doesn’t get any more flattering than that.