Books and films His own books, the books about him, and the screen

Five books with Herbert Völker

At the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 1996 he held up a hardback with his own face on the cover. It was Das dritte Leben (“The third life”), and like every book that carries his name it was written with Herbert Völker, the Austrian motoring journalist who had been his friend since before Formula One and was for many years the editor-in-chief of Autorevue.

The German editions came first. Their titles and years below are those of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek’s catalogue.

• Formel 1 (Orac and Motorbuch; with Fritz Indra and Herbert Völker). The technical book, which Der Spiegel in 1977 called his first: its third edition appeared in 1975 and its fourth in 1976. The year of the first edition, and the title of its English translation, are uncertain.
• Protokoll: Meine Jahre mit Ferrari (Orac, Vienna, and Motorbuch, Stuttgart, 1977), in English For the Record: My Years with Ferrari (William Kimber, London, 1978, translated by Diana Mosley) and, in the United States, My Years with Ferrari (Motorbooks International, 1978).
• Die neue Formel 1: Das Turbo-Zeitalter (“The new Formula One: the turbo age”; Orac and Motorbuch, 1982; with Fritz Indra and Herbert Völker).
• Meine Story (Orac, Vienna, 1985), in English To Hell and Back (Stanley Paul, London, 1986).
• Das dritte Leben (Edition Tau and Heyne, 1996). No English edition has been found.

How they were made

Protokoll told his years with Scuderia Ferrari, and came out in 1977, the year he left the team. Reviewing the English edition in Motor Sport in September 1978, Denis Jenkinson explained its method: “Much of the book was done on a tape recorder and journalist Herbert Volker put it all into words for Lauda.” He found Diana Mosley’s translation so literal that passages read like broken English, and he noted what the book admitted: that Lauda was paid for publicity appearances he hated, and that he had once hit a marshal in Canada with his helmet.

Meine Story came out in 1985, the year of his last season, and its English edition is the one later writers quote for his own account of the comeback with McLaren and of his last year with Alain Prost. Das dritte Leben belongs to the airline years: it tells, among much else, how he once came to the office in the green cap of a brewery that had offered five million schillings for it, and took it off again when his staff at Lauda Air protested.

Völker’s last book about him, Niki – Stories vom Champion, came out after Lauda’s death. Völker died in 2025, aged 81.

Books about him

The fullest record of his racing is Jon Saltinstall’s Niki Lauda: His Competition History (Evro, 2019), which goes through every one of his races, 316 of them by its count, from the hill climbs of 1968 to Adelaide in 1985. In Austria, Heike Kossdorff, Thomas Mudri and Daniel Winkler wrote Niki Lauda – Alles unter einer Kappe (Styria, 2009), “all under one cap”, and Daniel Michel collected Niki Lauda – Kleine Anekdoten aus dem Leben eines großen Rennfahrers (riva, 2019), small stories from the life of a great racing driver.

He appears, too, in the books about the men he raced. Maurice Hamilton’s James Hunt (2016) carries Lauda’s own memory of Monza in 1976.

Rush

In 2013 Ron Howard made a film of the 1976 season from a screenplay by Peter Morgan, in which Daniel Brühl played Lauda and Chris Hemsworth played James Hunt. Before filming, Lauda had Brühl come to Vienna, with hand luggage only, and told him to ask about the delicate subjects, the accident and the fear. In 2016 he gave the finished film his verdict: “So that film, Rush, is good. It’s 80% correct, with a bit of Hollywood.”

He’s very sharp and honest … He never repeats himself like I do. I’m a very redundant talker. Never would there be a word too much with him because that’s a loss of time, a loss of money. … He has a reputation for being cold and strict, but I had a perfect time with him, he supported me with everything I needed.

When he died, ORF counted him among the most famous Austrians anywhere, and said the film had made him more famous still. What the film invented about the two men is set out in Lauda and Hunt.

Some lines of Morgan’s dialogue now circulate as Lauda’s own sayings. They are the screenwriter’s words, spoken by an actor, and they are set out among the misattributed quotations. Nothing in this book is taken from the film; the Nürburgring, Monza and Fuji are told from the reports of the time and from what Lauda said himself.

The documentaries

Two years after Rush, Hannes M. Schalle’s Lauda: The Untold Story, also shown as 33 Days – Born to be Wild, was released in Britain. The Guardian’s reviewer read its title as a dig at the feature film, in which Lauda had served as the sober foil to Hunt.

The others came after his death on 20 May 2019:

• Niki Nationale – Ein Leben in der Pole-Position (“A life in pole position”), by Dieter Derdak for ORF, shown on ORF 1 on the evening of 21 May 2019. Niki Nationale was Austria’s name for him.
• Niki Lauda – Mein Leben am Limit (“My life at the limit”), shown by RTL the same evening, with Rush.
• Summa cum Lauda – der unglaubliche Weg des Niki Nationale (“the incredible road of Niki Nationale”), made for ServusTV and first shown on 24 June 2019. Bernie Ecclestone, Luca di Montezemolo, Hans-⁠Joachim Stuck, Helmut Marko, Gerhard Berger, Ron Dennis and John Watson speak in it, and so do his sons Mathias and Lukas.

The honours, the memorials and the red caps of Monaco in May 2019 are in the chapter on his legacy.