I'm sure all on here are familiar with the story of Laudas' early career from his various books and interviews, and how he pursued it very much against the wishes of his family, particularly his grandfather etc. But recently a couple of things have made me question whether his parents were perhaps more supportive of their sons racing than he'd led us to believe.
The first example is the forward Lauda wrote, in1999 for Louis Stanleys' book Strictly off the record, where he recounts the story of his first meeting with Stanley at Vienna airport, but in this version he says this "Mr Stanley went off into Vienna while I discussed the details of the contract with my parents"...
The second is a quote from Bernie Ecclestone, in an interesting Youtube documentary called Die Konstruetur- Lucky, about the evolution of FOCA, and he explains how he'd first met Niki, when he signed for March 1972, "he'd managed to charm his dad into giving him enough money, so he could deal with Max Mosley who owned March at the time"...
Given that the first example is from Lauda himself, and the second from the man who arguably knew him better than anyone else in racing, it would appear that they were more involved than we first thought?
