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BOOK REVIEW JOCHEN RINDT: A CHAMPION WITH HIDDEN DEPTHS
The name Jochen Rindt is scarcely found without the epithet ‘Formula 1’s only posthumous world champion’. This year marks the 50th anniversary since the German-born racer won the 1970 title despite his demise at the wheel of a Lotus 72C in practice ahead of the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.
To mark the golden jubilee of his tainted coronation, Mcklein has published Jochen Rindt: A Champion with Hidden Depths. Written by Dr Erich Glavitza, who knew Rindt well, the book indeed serves to move beyond that well-worn epithet.
Across 400 pages, readers can expect to learn much about the brusque character. For instance, pedants can take comfort in an immediate clarification that Rindt was in fact a German world champion, with
FIA regulations mandating that a driver’s nationality matches that of their passport. As such, Niki Lauda remains F1’s only Austrian title winner and Rindt was the first German champion, not Michael Schumacher.
Therefore, it’s fitting that each page is split in half between German and a largely well-resolved English translation. It tracks through Rindt’s childhood and the death of his amateur pilot father and tennis player mother in a Hamburg bombing raid when he was only 15 months old. That meant Rindt inherited their Mainz spice mill, which would later come to fund his F2 career, having opted to skip F3 altogether, when he sold his majority stake in the business.
That allowed Rindt to climb his way onto the F1 grid, having been inspired by his travels to the 1961 German GP with pal Helmut Marko in a Volkswagen Beetle. As
Rindt watched Stirling Moss ply his trade at the Nurburgring to score his final F1 victory, his remark was, “I want to do that too!”
Club racing and hillclimb outings in a Simca road car paved the way, before a first single-seater runout in 1963, which was entertainingly met with the words: “Big shit, I can’t see anything!”
Snippets such as these show that Glavitza does well to convey the no-nonsense temperament that Rindt held. Friendships with sponsors, team bosses and fellow drivers are described as perfunctory rather than close.
Likewise, a particular success of this book comes in its account of Rindt’s early impressions of the 72. Now considered one of motorsport’s great gamechangers, Rindt vetoed the car’s use for the 1970 Monaco GP following ignition problems in the preceding Spanish race. All this was set against a background of evergrowing tension between him and Lotus founder
Colin Chapman. Instead opting for the leggy 49C, of course Rindt scored an unlikely and final victory for the machine around the streets of the principality, albeit aided by the heavy rate of attrition for his rivals.
This precedes almost 20 pages dedicated to that ill-fated weekend at Monza 50 years ago, complete with detailed pictorial analysis of the Parabolica crash.
Glavitza’s close relationship with Rindt helps this book to move above and beyond a standard biography. It feels more revealing, a more authentic warts-and-all assessment of a terse but compelling figure.
Beautifully and lavishly illustrated throughout
(whole chapters are dedicated to a wide variety of archive images for each top-flight racing season), and with five pages listing all of Rindt’s amateur, sportscar, Formula Junior, F2 and F1 results, this is an accomplished and complete book. Jochen Rindt: A Champion with Hidden Depth absolutely delivers in its aim to explore the driver behind the tagline.