Niki Lauda - Everything You Need To Know | Up to Speed

- It's the 1976 German Grand Prix and the reigning Formula One world champion has just crashed into an embankment at 174 miles per hour. His Ferrari burst into a fireball and he was trapped in the middle of an 800-degree inferno for an agonizing 55 seconds. Burned horribly, his lungs scorched, he has been granted the last rights to him. And 39 days later, he gets back into a racing car. And he almost took the championship, losing by just one point. Who the hell (bleep) is this guy? And how did he come back from what would have been a career-ending accident to win two more world championships and turn Formula One into the sport we

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on Niki Lauda. (video game music) Like many F1 drivers, Niki Lauda was born into extreme wealth, of the Austrian kind. Which involves a knighted great-grandfather and probably some gold of questionable origin. But his luxurious industrial family never agreed with the career he chose. Niki wanted a different life. He wanted

speed

, danger. He wanted glory. He wanted to be a racing driver and was willing to fight for it. That meant cutting ties with his parents, so be it. It's hard I know. But the man was born to drive and he wouldn't let anything get in his way.

Not even his mom and especially not even his dad. However, Niki had a cold relationship with his uncle Heinz. And with monetary help from Heinz, 20-year-old Niki began racing in Formula Vee in 1969. Nice. What is Vee Formula? I'm about to tell you. It's a relatively cheap class of open-wheel racing, basically scaled-down Volkswagen Beetles. Tons of Formula One drivers start in Formula Vee. Now this was a big step in the right direction and Niki was excited. After a success in Formula Vee, he spent $30,000, which is equivalent to about $200,000 in today's money for a race in Formula 2. How did he get that money?

Simple. He borrowed it through his estranged family connections without his permission. Oh, how rebellious. Fuck you mommy! And fuck you too daddy! Like I said, the man wouldn't let anything get in the way of his goals. Paying for a seat on a racing team was quite common at that time. So it wasn't unusual to see some random rich kid on March Racing's F2 roster for the 1972 season. What wasn't so common at the time was finding out that that random rich kid knew how to drive. The March team was surprised, they were so impressed that they brought Niki to their Formula One team.

You guys! Niki came to Formula One surprisingly quickly. And he did pretty well in the first season of it. But he was held back by the small team's uncompetitive cars. It is a story as old as time. Niki then moved on to the legendary British Racing Motors or BRM. Have you ever heard of it? The only problem is that by the time he got there, the legend had dried up. BRM could not compete with the Ford-powered Lotus and Tyrrell of the time. But Niki fought hard behind the wheel. His abilities were obvious, quite obvious, this Italian named Enzo Ferrari took notes.

He said, "Bring me some Capocollo and then find out that young man's name." Niki was signed by none other than Scuderia Ferrari for the 1974 Formula One season. Little Niki Lauda, ​​a boy who grew up watching F1 legends like Juan Manuel Fangio win with Ferrari. Now it was his turn and he didn't have to pay for the trip. He got paid. Niki spent 1974 proving that he was much more than a cash cow. Because cows can't even take fourth place in the drivers' championship. Niki Lauda did it. Cows don't even know how to drive. It is now 1975. Later in his life, Niki would call this the year of his dreams.

Probably because it was the first time he'd won a Formula One championship, which yeah, I mean, it seems like a pretty good year. But suddenly it wasn't easy because he was in a Ferrari. Much of Niki's success came from his dedicated work with Ferrari engineers to improve his car. Now that's quite common in F1, but it didn't really exist in those days. The kids would show up half drunk, smoke some cigarettes, get in the car and drive away. But Niki was made differently. He not only wanted to be on top. He

need

ed to be on top.

And since he had already established it by now, he would fight until he got there. So, when he returned from his first preseason test with the Ferrari 312, he told Enzo Ferrari, a guy famous for not being very calm, that his car was "a piece of (bleep)." He then said that he wanted to work with engineers to turn it into the opposite of a piece of (bleep), you know, hot urine. And the crazy thing is, he actually did it. It was then that Niki Lauda earned the better of the two nicknames from him. They called him The Computer because he was a calculating genius.

Remember, no driver had actually worked with the engineers on the car before. Marginal note. His other nickname was The Rat because he had buck teeth and looked like a rat. "You think this bothers me. You call me The Rat because of my appearance." It's from Drive. The product of The Computer's work with Ferrari engineers was nothing less than the company's return to Formula One glory, after a very disappointing decade. This is the Ferrari 312T. This car and its 500 horsepower, three-liter, naturally aspirated, flat 12 took the prancing horse out of the losers' stable and into the winners' stable.

It was so damn good that it dominated F1 until 1981. Can you imagine a six-year-old car taking F1 by storm today? The 312T is the most successful car in the history of the sport. And it sounds pretty good too. (loud engine noise) The world was Niki Lauda's oyster and the Ferrari 312T was his pearl. Niki won five of 14 races in 1975. And at the end of the season, he was 20 points ahead of the next driver in the paddock. 20 points! As I said before, he got his first world championship title that year. Through sheer force of will, Niki achieved his childhood dream.

Was he excited? Yes. But celebration, sentimentality, laughter, those things were not Niki's style. He told the press that he traded his useless championship trophy for some free car washes, which is pretty funny. He probably didn't even eat a lot of chili, which is definitely one of the first things he would do. But whether he showed it or not, the determined Austrian was on top of the world. But he didn't know that what would happen next season would almost take him out of there. Niki began the 1976 season as the most dominant driver in F1. He was fast, confident and prosperous.

That all changed heading into the tenth race of the season. This race had him scared. It was the German Grand Prix that was going to be held at the Nurburgring, Nordschleife. A track that was literally designed to be as difficult as possible. It was narrower than some city streets, 22 kilometers long. And a large part of its 76 curves carved into thick, eerie German forests in the Eifel mountains. You've heard of the Black Forest. Well, this is the Green Hell. This is such a special song that we made an entire video about it. I'll leave the link below.

Now, if someone crashed in the woods behind the ring, it would take years for doctors to arrive. Not to mention there is basically no exit space. So an exit was an almost guaranteed crash into the guard wall. And because of all those things, plus the lack of fire marshals and the lack of safety equipment, Niki wasn't feeling it today. I mean the track was designed to challenge the racing cars of 1927. Things have gotten a lot faster in the last 49 years. And to be honest, racing F1 on that track at that time was crazy. And Niki, he knew it.

That's why, a week before the race, he called on his fellow drivers to boycott. But it does not work. Most of the drivers wanted to continue with the race. I found a quote from Niki talking about this and she said: "Some of them wanted to look brave. Others were just too stupid to know what they were doing. I plucked up the courage to drive, even though my brain kept telling me it was pure stupidity." Now Niki was a little cold and maybe a little cocky. But the fact that he tried to organize a boycott meant that he cared about his fellow drivers.

I mean, everyone wants a coworker who doesn't want them to die, right? And if he believes that his co-workers want him to die, he should start acting right or get a new job. Then the race begins, in the rain. Here we go. Everyone except Jochen Mass started on wet tyres. And when the race began, the sun came out and dried the track, the parts that weren't shaded by the forest. Mass now took an early lead, prompting the other drivers to pit and change their tires to slicks, including Niki. But he remembers the forests he was talking about.

There were areas of shade everywhere along the tracks, still cold and damp because the sun couldn't reach them. On the second lap of the race, Niki's left rear tire hit the curb at 174 miles per hour, causing him to slide. This must have been a terrifying moment. I mean, Niki was already basically convinced that someone was going to die on that track. And now it's coasting at more than 170 miles per hour. He counterattacked with the wheel instantly, but the cold slicks on a wet track, coupled with all that momentum, I mean, there's not much traction. Niki's car went through a retaining fence, which tore off his helmet and crashed hard into an embankment at more than one hundred kilometers per hour.

The fuel tank ruptured and the car turned into a fireball. Then the burning wreckage rolled onto the narrow runway. The man behind Niki avoided hitting him, but the driver behind him couldn't. He crashed directly into Niki's burning Ferrari, causing a second explosion. As I said before, the emergency response was dangerously slow at the Nurburgring. Things were looking really bad. Fortunately for Niki, his fellow drivers came to the rescue. Brett Lunger, the guy who hit Niki, jumped out of his car and pulled him out of the wreckage. Another driver, Hans Stuck, stopped his car and called an ambulance.

He convinced the emergency team to break protocol and drive against traffic to get to Niki faster, perhaps saving her life. But the horrible truth is that Niki sat directly in the center of a bonfire of 800-degree gasoline for an agonizing 55 seconds. It was a miracle he didn't die instantly. Would he survive his injuries? It really didn't seem likely. But she did it (angels singing), which is amazing. I mean, how does a normal person survive something like this? Niki was airlifted to the hospital, where he was just on the brink of death, wrapped in bandages from head to toe.

He recalled that a Catholic priest gave him his last rights, which angered him and motivated him to fight harder for his life. In the accident, he had inhaled a toxic cocktail of poisonous gases that severely damaged his lungs and he suffered severe burns to his face, head and hands that left him scarred for the rest of his life. He had undergone reconstructive surgery just to get his eyelids working properly again. On the day of the accident, officials resumed the race and Niki's rival James Hunt took the checkered flag. This was the last F1 flag flown at the original Nurburgring, and for good reason.

Officials decided that perhaps that runway was too dangerous after all. A new, shorter and infinitely safer Grand Prix circuit was built in 1983 at the southern end of the old track, but it was not actually used in F1 until the mid-1990s. Now, after being literally scarred for life by his horrific crash at the Nurburgring, you'd think Niki was thinking about retiring. No. He said, "I'm not done yet." He strived to be a racing driver and he achieved it. He fought for his life and succeeded. And he was not yet done fighting for another Formula One championship.

Niki Lauda was determined to be the best or die trying. Just 39 days after his accident, Niki was back on a race track. Which is not only crazy, it seems medically inadvisable. And I'm sure the doctors advised him not to do it. And I'd love to tell you that despite missing two races while he was in the hospital, he scored enough points to win the 1976 Formula One championship. That's not true. Niki lost the '76 championship by a single point. And that was after he withdrew from a third race, the Japanese Grand Prix, due to bad weather. When his team manager asked if he wanted to claim it as a technical glitch to save face, Niki said, "My life is worth more than the title," which is sick.

Now, at this point in his life, one fight wasn't enough for Niki. That accident in the ring could have been avoided. He was now determined to make sure something like this never happened again. He became a strong advocate for safety in Formula One. And in a 1977 interview, Niki said: "Some of the Grand Prix circuits that we drivers are asked to race on do not meet safety requirements. more primitive." He also said that someone besides theRace organizers, who had tons of money at stake, should be in charge of deciding whether to cancel a race. Danger was, still is and always will be a part of racing.

Niki knew it. It's part of what attracted him, but security reform was desperately needed. Now, if the multiple explosions hadn't forced Niki to relax for a month, he would have easily taken that '76 championship. So he easily took the '77 championship. Too easy. The Ferrari 312T was too good. There wasn't enough fighting. Then Niki left Ferrari for Brabham F1. He only asked for two seasons there and decided to suddenly retire during a training session in 1979, stating that he no longer felt like "continuing the nonsense of going around in circles", which is a perfect Niki Lauda way of leaving something.

But he couldn't stay out of the driver's seat. He came out of retirement in 1982 to join McLaren. And in 1984 he won his third championship. The following season was a flop, so Niki decided to hang up his infamous red Marlboro helmet for good, choosing the totally normal second career of running his own airline, Lauda Air. If you think Niki Lauda could stay away from Formula One forever, you're dead wrong, my friend. You (bleep) idiot! Niki returned in 1993. This time in a management position at Ferrari. He didn't know that the following year something terrible would happen that would call him back to a family feud.

Formula One legend Ayrton Senna died tragically in a crash at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. So did rookie Roland Ratzenberger. In response, Niki and several other drivers and officials re-established the long-dormant F1 drivers' union. They fought hard for safety reforms and thanks to them, serious accidents in Formula One steadily decreased. In fact, only one person, Jules Bianchi, has died in the last 27 years of F1. This is the legacy of Niki Lauda. And it's impossible to forget how determined, intense and calculating he was. He has gone down in history as one of the driving greats, but winning simply doesn't compare to saving lives, especially if you trade your useless trophies for car wash tokens.

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