Niki Lauda: the riddle wrapped in an enigma
In my own words: Nemo1965. Part Four (and last...)
Any F1-fan, even the one that has started watching last week, knows who the somewhat oddly dressed (red racing-cap, colourful sweater, corduroy trousers) pot-bellied man in his sixties is, who is very regularly shown watching proceedings from the Mercedes-garage. Arguably he is shown just as often as Toto Wolff, the teamboss of Mercedes F1 and quite likely more often than Paddy Lowe, the engineer of Mercedes, and even more often than Lewis Hamilton's girlfriend of Nico Rosberg's wife... And that for someone who still bears just those scars that most people can't bear to watch in real-life: scars of third and fourth-degree burns. In the subway or train, if you would meet someone with lesser injuries than him, you would scarcely dare to look. With Lauda you can just stare right at him. You don't see the burns. You see Niki Lauda.
That is to say: the accidental F1-fan knows his name. 'Oy, that is Lauda.' Not that they really know him, he is too complicated character to sum up in one sentence. But if you really try to, you can make a shallow but not altogether incorrect line: 'He almost burned alive in a F1-car. Then he won another two championships.' Those who have followed F1 a little longer - say ten years - will add: 'Dares to speak his mind.' That would also be true. Lauda himself has even said he was hired by Mercedes, as non-executive chairman, for exactly that. To FIA quarterly magazine Auto he said: 'Sometimes management is pissed off with me because I tell them what's going to happen. We had a board meeting in Stuttgart (before Spa 2014, Nemo) with all our bosses there and I said: "They will hit each other". "How can you say this?" they asked. "Because I know." And he added some other things, amongst which a typical Niki-line: 'They find it very hard to convince me of things I don't think are right.'
F1 cognoscenti, guys (usually) who have followed F1 longer than 20 years (we are heading into anorak territory here) prick up their ears right here. 'Things I don't think that are right...' If one has followed Andreas Nikolaus (Niki) Lauda, one knows what that means, when Herr Lauda thinks 'things are not right'. He has often been nicknamed The Rat. 'The Donkey' would also be a good one, in those circumstances when the Austrian feels things are going in the wrong direction. Then he will stop, in the middle of the path taken, plant his feet and refuse to budge an inch. And you can drag, hit and yell, he will only stare at you with his sad but determined eyes. 'No. First change what I want to. Then I'll move.'
There is this terrific story about the 1977 season that.... Before that, a short pre-face. We all know, even the youngsters, how, when Lauda survived his fiery accident at the Nürburgring in 1976, how he came back after just four weeks, grabbed fourth place in the Italian Grand Prix, with wounds that were still bleeding under his helmet. We don't have to tell in detail how the 1976-title fight went to the wire in Fuji, Japan. How James Hunt grabbed the title by a third place and a dramatic late-race pit-stop. How Niki Lauda had gotten out of the car, shortly after the beginning of the race, because he considered the dramatic rain too dangerous to race in.
Already fewer people know that James Hunt, directly interviewed after the race, admitted Lauda had been right. It had been too dangerous to race. Even fewer people know - and again, we are moving into the terrible landscape of elderly men who, eagle-eyed, write down chassis-numbers of old F1 cars at auctions and venues like Goodwood - how that decision by Lauda set up the situation where for once a driver demonstrably won the world-championship of F1 in a car that was not the best of that season, not the second best, not even the third best car of that season. And a situation where a F1 driver won the title despite the machinations against him - by his own team.
We are talking about 1977. The revised Ferrari 312 t2 for that season had been developed further for that season - but in totally the wrong direction. Only later it was found out that in a search for more mechanical grip, partly to keep up with the first generation of groundeffect-cars by Lotus (which principle Lauda nor Mauro Foghieri, the car-designer of Ferrari understood, nor did anyone but Lotus at that time), the geometry overloaded the tyres. The car would be good here, but would be terrible there. More often terrible, than good, by the way. The car would understeer in one corner, and oversteer in another. As the Dutch say: with this car, one could not make chocolate. Gilles Villeneuve - who replaced Lauda at Ferrari and who was not a man who had problems with wrangling bad cars to decent speeds - said later: 'I can't understand how Lauda won the championship in this car. It was terrible.'
Anyway, there is this practice-session. Lauda drives out of the pits. At the end of the pitstrait he notices: 'Oh Scheisse.' He creeps around the track. Foghieri waits for him, with eyes as big as saucers. 'What-a-are-you-doing-ah?' 'I am not driving this piece of ****. It under-steers like crazy.' 'But you need a time! Your team-mate sets time, he is seventh!' 'Why would I set a time that is much too bad? The car should be sorted out first.' And whatever Foghieri did, stamp his feet, threaten with dismissal, Lauda stood in the pits, hands on his hips, watching him coolly. Why would he drive in a slow, understeering car?
In an ideal world, one would hope that the people at Ferrari would admire and respect Lauda's honesty and straightforwardness. But this is not an ideal world, and F1 has never been an ideal world, and the Ferrari-team, it is sad to say, is the least of the ideal world within F1. Ferrari - the man, the team - resented Lauda's decision back then, in Fuji, not to race. Or rather: that he had come back to race in the 1976 season at all. The Old Man said so himself. Once, Lauda showed up in Fiorano to test. Reutemann was there. Lauda got the word that Enzo wanted him to test in Paul Ricard. 'Excuse me?' Lauda called the Old Man. 'From now on, I will take the decisions,' Ferrari told Lauda. 'Really,' Lauda said, 'and why is that?' 'Because of Monza. It was the wrong decision to return after your accident. If you would have sat out the season, we would have lost the title optically in a different way.'
Lauda is not someone who screams easily. But that day he did. He shrieked into the phone: 'Perhaps it is good style for an Italian, to lie in bed and lose there! Optically, excellent! But if I have to fight, then I will fight and not lie in my bed. THEN I WILL FIGHT ON THE TRACK AND TAKE MY RESPONSABILITY! AUF WIEDERSEHEN!' And then he banged the phone on the receiver. It took a while to sooth over the relationship after that, but for Lauda, the bond was broken. He took the decision there and then to leave Ferrari. A man with principles, Lauda. But he could also be political. Because the car was so terrible, because Ferrari - the man, the team - treated him with suspicion, he told Enzo Ferrari a lie in 1977: 'I will never drive for another team than Ferrari.' As Lauda said: 'That was a lie. It was unfair. But I needed to bring calm in the team, to win the world-championship. It was sugar for the emotional lions.'
Lauda won the 1977 F1 worldchampionship. No other driver could have managed to do that with that car. Mario Andretti, the greatest allrounder of all time, had the best car in the first Lotus ground-effect car (the 78), but he made so many mistakes he threw away the title. Jody Scheckter was driving for a new team (Wolf), could have won, but could handle bad results much less than Lauda... Reutemann, Lauda's teammate, never had a chance. When Lauda was asked if he saw Reutemann as a teammate or a rival, he said, deadly: 'Neither.' James Hunt drove excellently, and Lauda afterwards said he could not say why Hunt had not won the title again. The only man who could have scraped results like Lauda had, was Emerson Fittipaldi, who drove for the weak Copersugar F1 team. But it is very questionable if Emerson could have handled the psychological pressure Lauda had been under. Especially when Lauda had told Ferrari he would leave the team after the season, the atmosphere at Ferrari became almost unbearable. Once Lauda described the things that Ferrari did, as thus: 'It is as if someone whispers to you, just before you start a F1-race: your favourite dog is dead.'
The 1977 season ended in a typical, Lauda-kind of way. When he had secured the championship, he sent a telegram to Ferrari. 'I am sick, I am not able to drive the last race of the season. Thank you for the opportunity to win two titles with Ferrari. Arrivederci. Niki Lauda.'
It was sort of similar to how he would end his (first F1 career). In 1979 he drove his second F1 season with Brabham. Bernie Ecclestone (yep, the same) was the owner of Brabham at the time. For months they battled about a new contract. Lauda wanted x million dollars. Ecclestone did not want to pay x million dollars. Ping. Pong. Ping. Pong. Anyone who knows Ecclestone knows trying to win a battle about money has to have more tenacity than a German general who wants to conquer Stalingrad. Bernie should have won, like he always does in money-deals. But now he lost. But when Lauda, happy about his victory, stepped into his Brabham F1 car for the first practice of the 1979 Canadian Grand Prix, he felt...nothing. He did not want to drive any more. He got out of the car and said to Bernie: 'I am quitting.' And Bernard Ecclestone, also typically, said: 'That is an important decision.' He did not try to persuade Lauda to drive on. With 'important' Bernie meant: this was the RIGHT decision.
Of course, everyone knows Lauda came back, in the seasons 1982-1985. He was outshone at McLaren by John Watson in the first two years, outperformed by Alain Prost in both years that they were team-mates, but still beat Prost for the 1984 title. His title-clinching drive from the midfield to 2nd place in the 1984 Portugal Grand Prix was one of the best races in his career. Probably, as he hinted, his best ever, because his car had technical problems as well.
After his F1-career, and outside of his F1-career he took many monumental decisions as well. Lauda took the herculean task on himself to start an airline, Lauda Air - and that in a time when in Europe private entrepreneurship were strangled by state-owned companies. He made Lauda Air a success... but many who followed his career closely, wondered: did the success prove that Lauda took the right decision the first place? Did Lauda Air make him happy? Or was this just a man trying to wrestle with a mountain, taking the challenge because it was there?
The same applies for his job as team-boss for the ill-fated Jaguar F1 team in 2001. He was the right man in the wrong place, and was made redundant at the end of 2003. That he tried the Jaguar F1 car around Barcelona in the vast conviction modern F1 cars could be 'driven by monkeys' and that he could drive it fast around the track as the regular drivers Eddy Irvine and Pedro de La Rosa, showed that, perhaps, Lauda's judgement had taken some rust with the years. He embarrassed himself there, though he denied that, the same way he denied his divorce of Marlene Lauda (mother of his two children) or his fathering an illegitimate child was embarrassing or painful. But of course it was.
It is telling that Lauda is 'non-executive'-chairman of Mercedes F1, which is kind of an oxymoron. But anyone who has followed Lauda's career knows: this was a wise thing to do, the right thing to do. Lauda is an excellent pilot, someone who can navigate dire straits by himself and for himself. But to navigate hot waters for others, to be the captain outside of the cockpit, for that Niki Lauda is just not the right man. He is there to tell the truth, to sometimes confront with nonsense when he thinks that nonsense will work (Lauda has a wicked sense of humour). As he said in the aforementioned interview with
Auto: "And the drivers know that I also defend them. I'm the only one who speaks the same language - being part of them and part of the management. So we have a very good relationship. They find it very hard to convince me of things I don't think are right."
And so he is.
END OF NIKI LAUDA, IN MY OWN WORDS, BY NEMO 1965.
Thanks to all the posters who were so nice to compliment me, on my long ramblings. And oh, as a post-scriptum: in the four parts, I often quoted the book Protocol, by Niki Lauda and Herbert Völker. That books is called on the English market: Niki Lauda, The Ferrari Years.
Edited by Nemo1965, 20 May 2015 - 09:20.
He showed his versatility by finishing 2nd in a Lola T212 in the '71 Martini International for 2 Litre Sports cars at Silverstone, having qualified behind most of the regular quick drivers in that category. His switch to the JPS Lotus team promised a lot and, as in F2, it took a while before he won. I remember the 73 British GP, spectating at Woodcote watching Ronnie oversteering through that corner.....and seeing him lead most of the re-started race only to lose the lead to Revson. After 73, Ronnie never had a WDC winning car until 78, when he played 2nd fiddle to Mario....and you know the rest. I rate Ronnie & Gilles in the same, spectacular to watch, category 
