My Travels On Racer Road

CHAPTER 65

NIKI ON THE ’RING

During that Brands Hatch weekend Niki Lauda arranged for me to interview him. We both wanted to discuss his views about the next circuit on our calendar. It was my revered Nürburgring. He wanted us to abandon it. He wanted to tell us why.

Autosport published the piece on July 29, 1976, with this introduction:

This weekend the Grand Prix series moves into the Eifel Mountains in Germany, to the one high-speed classic circuit left in today’s super-sanitized Formula One world. The Nürburgring.

In fact, this year’s German GP very nearly didn’t happen at the ’Ring, because a body of the drivers don’t want to race there. It was a genuine threat and it nearly came off. As recently as Monaco — the other surviving, albeit low-speed, classic circuit — nothing but a three-to-two majority among the five drivers in the Safety Committee of what little remains of the GPDA “saved” the Nürburgring in its present form. And for this year only. For next year, they are all adamant that the forbidding 14.19-mile mountain circuit, already massively rebuilt only a few years ago, must receive further alteration, perhaps even shortening, or they definitely will not go.

The World Champion, holder of the outright Nürburgring lap record at more than 122 mph (6m 58.6s, pole position for last year’s German GP), appears to be the leader of this “anti Nürburgring faction.” It has brought the Austrian much disrepute — particularly among Germans — and in fact this quiet, background-seeking young man has assumed the same mantle of controversy that once hung on the flamboyant Jackie Stewart. But like Stewart, Niki Lauda is perfectly comfortable wearing it. He is as confident of his opinions. He is in fact, in many ways, the very apotheosis of the Modern F1 Driver.

A busy World Champion, seeming usually to be in a rush to go somewhere else, Niki’s press relations have not helped his image in certain quarters. He comes across to some people as entirely too aloof to have won their hearts.

But always there are two sides. “If they know me well, and they think I’m no good, then fair enough. But most of them, they only talk-and-write, they don’t even speak to me, because they are too lazy to do their work. The minimum is, they come and speak, to find out the problems, to come and try to look from different sides, to think in the way the driver is thinking. To understand the problem, and then to take a decision. Afterwards, I don’t know, afterwards write I am the biggest idiot in the world, fair enough, but not if they never speak to me, I think that’s wrong.”

So, all right. Autosport offered space to Lauda to get his ideas across in English. Not the first public figure in the world’s history to become annoyed with the Press, he showed so much concern that he literally jumped at the chance, organised the miniconference himself, and devoted a long hour of a recent race morning to an earnest espousal of his personal points of view.

We began with the (for some people) emotional matter of the Nürburgring.

From the interview itself, where Lauda said:

My personal opinion is that the Nürburgring is too dangerous to drive on nowadays. Because, if I go to Paul Ricard or any other permanent circuit and something breaks on my car, the wing falls off, the suspension fails, I have a 70/30 percent chance that I will be all right or I will be dead. Because of the circumstances of the circuit.

We’re not discussing if I make a mistake. If I make a mistake and I kill myself, then tough shit. If I have been so stupid to make a mistake, to kill myself, this is my risk in motor racing. I have to be fit. I have to be mentally free to drive my car concentrated on not making mistakes.

So. Nürburgring, if you have any failure on the car, hundred percent death.

You had a big accident there three years ago and got out of it OK.

Yes, I was lucky. I was sliding six hundred metres and if they had a brick wall . . . you know what I mean. You can have accidents and the car is just in a thousand pieces and you get out of it, you have nothing, if you are lucky. You know. I can’t rely on luck.

I look at other circuits, where the safety facilities provide a much easier, a much safer driving, and I compare to the Nürburgring with 260 kilometre-an-hour jumping — only God saves you. So therefore I think it is too dangerous. I was against the Nürburgring because I think it should be like any other circuit, up to the standards. Why do they do the work, if the Nürburgring doesn’t? They say, we are 22 kilometres long. But they don’t say, we have 300,000 spectators. You know what I mean. They make more money, they are going to have to spend it.

Don’t you think that motor racing is a very special sport, because it has a sense of danger, and don’t you think this is what captures the imagination of the public, and is there not a danger that if the drivers make racing safe, or look safe, they’ll lose much of the interest from the public?

Depends if the public comes to see blood and death, OK, these people will go. But I think the majority are coming to see good motor racing. This doesn’t mean fire, blood and death, it means fighting, driving, sliding maybe, different cars, different nationalities, racing, challenge, risk.

If we look back in the past, why is the development of safety coming up? Because everybody understands there is no point in just killing people. The sport, it doesn’t get better, it gets worse. If you say the people come to see people dead, I wouldn’t understand them at all. Then I’m completely out of it.

The only thing I want is that the driver is not a dummy, just watching the way the guardrail is going to hit his face. The human driver, as a human being, should always have the possibility until his last second to try to change things, that he doesn’t get killed.

That’s all I want, that I don’t be the dummy.

I’ve shortened the foregoing from the original interview, which appeared in the issue of Autosport dated three days before the Grand Prix of Germany at the Nürburgring. Where Niki nearly died.

As I wrote in my Autosport report, it says something for the character of a man who, after publicly and prominently opposing a circuit because of its excessive danger, goes out and takes fastest time. Niki Lauda did that on the first morning of practice. The next day he drove faster. He qualified for the front row of the starting grid, just a tick of the stopwatch slower than James Hunt — another F1 driver well known for his opposition to racing at the infamous ’Ring.

They’d had their say. While respecting their feelings, I wanted to express mine. Saturday night before raceday, tap-tapping out my preliminary material, I included this:

At mid-morning on Saturday the rain had stopped but down the Foxhole the road was still streaming wet. Shallow sheets of rainwater were rippling down diagonally from kerb to kerb across the zig-zag kinks of the track.

Down here among the dripping firs it was impossible to hear anything of activities at the start/finish, but one could visualize the drivers running round and round the pits loop taking the pulse of their cars and heating themselves up for the plunge out around the mountains. Not a timed session, this, no real necessity for doing a full lap. But not unwise to try one, at least, just to see…

It was many long minutes into the session before an engine could be heard nearing the Fuchsröhre section. It came through thinly at first and intermittently, isolated bursts of power modulated by passage over hill crests and across valleys and filtered through the shaggy limbs of millions of trees, but each time it was nearer and clearer, until with abruptness it was here, just up over the top of the ridge where the fast curve called Schwedenkreuz dipped into a slow one, Aremberg.

The sudden straining of the engine cut off, there were cracklings and blippings. Then from a new direction, around the shoulder of the hill, the car came powersliding out of the Aremberg hairpin. It was little and slithered on its tyres, and spray was rising up behind. The driver’s helmet bobbed as the car lunged over humps and waggled between the kerbs. It hurled itself forward under the road bridge — throwing ahead of it a brief reflection of noise from the concrete surfaces — and dropped down the hill.

But the smoothness of the descent was interrupted as once, twice, three times and more the driver slacked off his foot on the way down to the bottom. The black shape of the car dissolved in the boiling grey water thrown up by the tyres. Then even that vanished, and there was nothing left but the hard horn of the engine: moments of strong driving power, then tentative slackenings and cracklings. Up the swerving hill to Adenauer Forst; away through the gears to Metzgesfeld and down around Kallenhard; the loom of the hills above Wehrseifen cutting off the noise finally almost completely. The moan of full power still came back occasionally, but across miles now.

Minutes passed. The twin paths left by the rain tyres gradually filled in, and the road glistened again. The silence of the forest crept back slowly, like the confidence of a frightened wild animal.

But a new noise was crashing through the wood. Another car, the second, and this was running harder. It cried defiance over the ridgetop and its deceleration into the hairpin was briefer. The car swung around into sight with its wheels running up on the kerbing; then it squatted and burst out under the bridge.

Down the valley a wet metallic blur, the turmoil of vapour streaking along behind. From kerb to kerb, running nearly straight as the road weaved, down to the distant bottom of the dip, and not for an instant did the driver’s foot ease. The strident engine howled unchecked as the car became a comet of water spray up the other side, arcing quickly out of sight under the trees. Hard, long, confident bursts of power through the swerves; hard, sharp deceleration at the next crest; hard, quick, sure acceleration away. The noise hung in the air angrily, abandoned by the speeding machine.

Halfway down the Foxhole, in the long grass behind the guardrail at one side, a pair of rubber-suited marshals moved their shoulders and spoke at once. They used the word König, and laughed. The sense of their remarks was that they guessed they knew now who was the King of the ’Ring.

While writing that I decided against singling out these drivers by name. At the time I thought it might distract from my point. But the faster one was Ronnie “SuperSwede” Peterson. Of course.

My story continued:

The point about the Nürburgring which is missed by many of its critics is that for some people it represents every romantic justification for the endeavour they call motor racing. Yes, it’s too long to be easily managed; sure, much of the safety apparatus is sub-standard; granted, its kind of challenge is increasingly outside the mainstream of modern
short-circuit racing.

The fact remains that hundreds of thousands of people go there every year and further hundreds of thousands wish they could. They sleep on rain-sodden ground and endure grey rainy mornings and they line the 14 miles of fencing on both sides and face the track and pay attention.

“When I was young I used to come every year about 700 kilometres to the Nürburgring and go to my special place, the Flugplatz, and I would look at only three men. When they were coming I would stand up and see them go by, jumping and driving hard. Then I would sit down and I didn’t look at the others. I would wait, I don’t know, eight, nine, ten minutes and then stand up again for my special three drivers. It’s true I had to wait a long time and I would only see them a few times, not sixty times or eighty times. That didn’t matter. Only at the Nürburgring was it possible to see them this way, as I wanted to see them.”

That came from a European at this year’s German Grand Prix, who was no longer quite so young as in the days he described, but who was still coming to the Nürburgring in pursuit of his passion for this kind of motor racing. That passion had led him to take it up himself, and he had so arranged his career that today he was competing in the race, driving a Formula 1 car.

He was not one of those who ranked themselves in favour of cutting this circuit down to a modern size.

The ’Ring is a special place. It is a place that holds our imagination and which, rightly or wrongly, we believe offers the greatest test of those we hold to be heroes. The ’Ring is a place where we can watch and truly understand that we could not do this thing ourselves.

My new friend was the tall, bearded, quietly studious-looking Harald Ertl.

Unfortunately, on Sunday night I was obliged to record that Niki Lauda suffered a horrific crash which enveloped him in fire and red-flagged the race. When it began again, James Hunt drove to a more or less unchallenged victory.

At the time I was writing my stories, it wasn’t known how severely Niki was injured. In fact he came very near death, but recovered in time to race again that year.

By chance, Harald Ertl was one among several other drivers involved in the accident, and who ran into the thicket of flames engulfing the Ferrari to haul Niki out. Another was Brett Lunger, an American racer who was a Marine Corps veteran. In online videos, Brett is the blue-suited figure standing astride the cockpit, trying to lift Lauda free of the fire.