After racing 1986–⁠2019

On 26 May 2013, at Monaco, Niki Lauda raised his red cap to the winner, Nico Rosberg, a driver of the Mercedes team he now chaired; years later Rosberg said the memory still gave him goose bumps. Lauda had come back to Formula One by way of Ferrari, Jaguar and a television studio.

After his last race, the Australian Grand Prix of 1985, and his second retirement, he went back to running Lauda Air, whose story is told in the chapter on the airlines. Formula One called him back in the early 1990s. When Luca di Montezemolo, who had been Scuderia Ferrari’s team manager in Lauda’s first two seasons there, took charge of the company, he brought Lauda in as a consultant, from 1993 by most accounts.¹

What he did at Maranello is thinly recorded. The Austrian press agency APA credited him with helping to bring Michael Schumacher to Ferrari for 1996; beyond that, the sources say little.

His kidneys failed, a late effect of the accident of 1976, the APA said, and on 24 April 1997 his brother Florian gave him one of his own, in a two-hour operation at the Vienna General Hospital, the AKH. In 2010 Lauda told the Süddeutsche Zeitung what his brother had said, and what it did for the two of them.

Als das mit der Niere war, sagte er: Du kriegst sie nur, wenn du sonst stirbst. Danach wurde unser Verhältnis wirklich enger, zwischenzeitlich.

When the thing with the kidney came up, he said: you only get it if you would otherwise die. After that our relationship really did become closer, for a while.

His second kidney came in 2005 from Birgit Wetzinger, then his girlfriend and later his wife, again at the AKH; his marriages and children are in The people around him.

On Tuesday 6 February 2001 Ford confirmed him in London as chief executive of its Premier Performance Division, which ran Jaguar Racing, Cosworth Racing and Pi Research for the group that owned Jaguar, Aston Martin, Volvo, Land Rover and Lincoln. He succeeded Neil Ressler, and Bobby Rahal, still the Jaguar team’s principal, welcomed him. Lauda put it simply: “It is good to be back in racing on a full-time basis. I am looking forward to getting started on the challenge ahead.”

The welcome did not last the summer. In the middle of August 2001, after a showdown with Rahal and with Wolfgang Reitzle, his patron at Ford, Lauda took over the team himself. The car of 2002, the R3, was a disappointment, and early that year Reitzle left Ford. On 26 November 2002 Lauda was dismissed, and Tony Purnell of Pi Research took over the division. He had lasted less than two years in the division, and 15 months at the head of the team; grandprix.com reported that his handling of a deal between Ford and the Jordan team had upset many in Detroit.

Jaguar scored two podium finishes in its five seasons, from 2000 to 2004. In 2017, 15 years after his dismissal, Lauda gave Motor Sport his view of the company, beginning with the rulebook he was handed on joining.

Jaguar had potential, but Ford’s approach was too corporate. When I joined, the main accountant told me that this was a Ford company so I had to read the compliance book. I asked what it said, and he told me that if I took a sparkling mineral water from the hotel minibar I had to pay, but if I took a still water I didn’t. … When they got rid of me – I was told I’d done nothing wrong, but they wanted to install British management – the compliance team asked to check my account.

He had refused to read the book and paid his own hotel bills, so when the compliance team came to check his account there was nothing in it to dispute. He had also introduced Dietrich Mateschitz, the head of Red Bull, to the team as a possible sponsor, and Ford had decided that the two companies were not compatible; he never understood why: “didn’t they want to sell Fords to young people?” Red Bull bought the Jaguar team from Ford at the end of 2004. In 2004 Lauda also sat, briefly, on the supervisory board of the Austrian Federal Railways, the ÖBB.

He wore the red cap from his return to racing at Monza in September 1976, six weeks after the fire at the Nürburgring. How it began, and what the Kapperl, the Austrian word for a cap, meant to his country, belong to the chapter on Lauda and Austria; here the cap is a matter of business.

The sponsors are a history of their own, and it is not complete. By one account the Austrian mineral-water firm Römerquelle came first, and Der Spiegel found it still paying for the space in September 1977; Lauda himself said that the Italian dairy group Parmalat had been there from the start. Parmalat stayed for about 25 years, until 2002. Then came the German heating firm Viessmann, on a five-year contract, and the Swiss technology group Oerlikon, majority-owned through companies of his friend Ronny Pecik, until 2010.

In the autumn of 2010 the cap turned blue for the Money Service Group of Michael Seidl. It defrauded him. In October 2012 he testified against Seidl in a court in Vaduz, Liechtenstein: he had received a single instalment of €400,000 of the fee he had been promised, and lost €500,000 he had invested in Seidl’s funds. He told the court that he had never been so cheated in his life.

When he bared his head in public in 1991 is told with the loss of Lauda Air Flight 004. At home he did not wear it.

For more than two decades RTL’s viewers heard Formula One explained by him. From the mid-1990s, from 1995 or 1996 by different accounts, he was the Formula One expert of the German broadcaster RTL, beside the presenter Florian König.² He said what he thought, not always wisely.

In May 2010, in RTL’s coverage of the Monaco Grand Prix weekend, he referred to Robert Kubica with an ethnic slur for Poles. König objected on air. After RTL asked him to, Lauda went to the Renault motorhome on the morning of the race and waited 15 minutes outside to apologise to Kubica in person.

After he joined Mercedes in 2012 he was criticised for partiality towards the team and its drivers, and from 2015 his appearances were cut to 13 race weekends a season, with Timo Glock standing in at the rest.

He left without warning. On 26 November 2017, live on air after the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, he told the viewers: “I will not be RTL’s expert next year” (attributed). König, beside him, was taken completely by surprise and close to tears. Lauda thanked the audience and said he hoped they had always watched everything critically. RTL’s head of sport, Manfred Loppe, answered in a statement: “We doff our caps to him and thank him for more than two decades of great collaboration” (attributed).

On Friday 28 September 2012 Mercedes announced two things on the same day: that Lewis Hamilton had signed a three-year contract, and that Lauda was the non-executive chairman of its Formula One team. In January 2013 the new structure was confirmed: Daimler held 60 per cent of the team, Toto Wolff 30 per cent and Lauda 10 per cent.

How Hamilton was persuaded has two versions. Lauda’s, told to Motor Sport in 2017, begins at a board meeting in 2012 that he attended as a guest, where he asked who would drive for the team in 2013 and suspected that Michael Schumacher would retire.

I knew Lewis Hamilton was the only big name that might be free, because he had still to commit to McLaren, so I targeted him in Singapore. … Lewis was going to re-sign for McLaren on the Monday after Singapore, but I convinced him – in his hotel room, in the middle of the night – to join Mercedes.

He had told it differently at the time. Two days after the announcement, on BBC Radio 5 Live, he said he had not needed to do much persuading: “I spoke to him a couple of times, but I didn’t have to convince him much … He had a clear plan and I didn’t have to convince him of anything. I can honestly say I was impressed with his approach to things – very pragmatic, no emotions whatsoever.”

Hamilton’s memory, in 2019, began with a telephone call to his home in Monaco from a man he had hardly spoken to; a year later he also remembered the night in Singapore. He gave his first version at Monaco in May 2019, the day he took pole position, five days after Lauda’s death.

I remember getting a call from Niki in 2012 – and we had never really spoken before and he was on the phone saying ‘you should come to Mercedes – this is where you need to be’. … I always said Ross [Brawn] was the convincing element in me coming to the team … but Niki was the one that brought it to me and really got it across the line.

In each of the five seasons from 2014 to 2018, all with him as chairman, Mercedes won both the drivers’ and the constructors’ championships. On 18 April 2016, in Berlin, Laureus honoured him with its award for a lifetime’s achievement in sport.

On 20 February 2017 Wolff and Lauda signed new contracts to the end of 2020. “The last few years have been some of the most enjoyable I have had in Formula One. Toto and I formed a perfect partnership at Mercedes and we have a great team on every level that has delivered results.”

At Monaco in 2018, by Gerhard Berger’s account in Maurice Hamilton’s biography of Lauda, he fell ill with an infection, was treated overnight, and next morning was standing in a shaded corner of the paddock, insisting that he had to work.

In late July 2018 he broke off a family holiday on Ibiza, ill with what was at first called a summer flu. He missed the German Grand Prix on 22 July and the Hungarian on 29 July, and was treated at the AKH in Vienna, for a time in intensive care. On Thursday 2 August 2018 a team under the surgeon Walter Klepetko gave him two new lungs, 42 years and a day after the Nürburgring. The hospital asked for privacy for the family, and Klepetko told ORF’s ZIB 2: “At the moment everything is going very well, and we are very satisfied.”

After intensive rehabilitation he was discharged in the autumn. In January 2019 he was back in hospital with influenza. From March he went to a rehabilitation clinic, Cereneo, near Lucerne in Switzerland; his return to the paddock, planned for the Spanish Grand Prix, was put off again and again. After the Azerbaijan Grand Prix on 28 April 2019, the last time they spoke about racing, Wolff recalled, Lauda told him: “Keep on going, it doesn’t get any better than this” (attributed). About three weeks before his death he was moved to the University Hospital in Zürich for dialysis.

He died there on 20 May 2019, aged 70. The family announced it in an e-⁠mail sent in the night, and on 21 May the news went round the world: “In deep sorrow we announce that our beloved Niki passed away peacefully on Monday, 20 May 2019, surrounded by his family.”

Klepetko told the APA: “There is no cause of death. It was a long process at the end of which the patient went.”

On 21 May, at the end of a story that had begun with a telephone call, Hamilton wrote: “I wouldn’t have even been in this team if it wasn’t for you.” How Monaco said goodbye that week is in Legacy.

On Wednesday 29 May 2019 his widow, Birgit, and his two elder sons placed his helmet on the closed coffin in St Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna. It was the second Requiem held in the cathedral in Lauda’s name: the first, at his own request, had followed the loss of Flight 004 in 1991. The day itself, the queue in the rain and the words spoken at the Requiem are told in the chapter on Lauda and Austria.

The burial was private. The city had offered an honorary grave at the Zentralfriedhof, and the family declined. He was buried in a racing overall in the family grave at the Heiligenstädter Friedhof, in Vienna’s 19th district, near the family’s home; the cathedral’s priest, Toni Faber, described the place a year later. “It’s a beautifully situated cemetery at the beginning of the vineyards, very near where the family lives” (attributed).