Vienna A grandson of industry, 1949–⁠1967

When it had snowed, the boy would report to his grandfather’s works at five in the morning and drive the snowplough. For a couple of hours, until the factory opened, he cleared the roadways. The workers let him, as he told it, because he was the owner’s grandson. A few years later he wanted the lorries, the big ones with long trailers, and he was told to turn up at four, half an hour before they left. He could drive them only in the dark, when the police would not see him: “As soon as the sun came up, I had to move aside and let the official driver take over.” He was 16 or 17 by then.

That is the boyhood Niki Lauda chose to describe in 2017, over breakfast at the Café Imperial in Vienna: not the villa or the family name, but the machines, in the dark before the working day began.

Andreas Nikolaus Lauda was born on 22 February 1949, in Vienna, into one of Austria’s best-known industrial families; “Niki” is the short form of Nikolaus. His great-grandfather, Ernst Lauda, an engineer and a Sektionschef, a senior official, in the imperial Ministry of Public Works, had been raised to the knightly rank by Emperor Franz Joseph on 28 May 1916, as Ernst Ritter von Lauda. Austria abolished titles of nobility in 1919, and the “von” lapsed with them.

The grandfather

The head of the family was his grandfather, Hans Lauda, born in Vienna in 1896. He was educated at the Theresianum, served as an officer at the front in the First World War and took a doctorate in law at the University of Vienna in 1919. In 1923 he joined the Veitscher Magnesitwerke, the magnesite company, and became its general director in 1937. Removed in 1938, after the Anschluss, he was reinstated in 1945 and led the company until 1963.

His influence went far beyond one company. He helped to found the Federation of Austrian Industry, the Vereinigung Österreichischer Industrieller, and led it as its first president from 1946 to 1960. From 1956 until his death he was president of the Austrian Red Cross. He sat on many supervisory boards, among them that of the Erste Österreichische Spar-Casse, the savings bank that would one day matter a great deal to his grandson.

He kept a flat of 20 rooms on the Schubertring, with a liveried servant. His elder brother, also called Ernst, was a physician who headed the First Medical University Clinic in Vienna from 1946 and wrote a three-volume textbook of internal medicine. What the grandson thought of the grandfather came out later: a 2009 family history reports that, as a double World Champion, he called his late grandfather a “pompous bastard” (attributed) in an interview with Newsweek, though the interview itself has not been traced.

Mir gefiel das Sichtbare an ihm, die grandiose Stadtwohnung mit livriertem Diener, das riesige Bauerngut in Niederösterreich, der phantastische Besitz in St. Moritz.

What I liked about him was what you could see: the grand town flat with a liveried servant, the huge farm in Lower Austria, the fantastic property in St Moritz.

His father, Ernst-Peter Lauda, was a senior executive of the Neusiedler paper mill, founded in 1793: first its Prokurist, an officer with signing powers, and later its general director. His mother, Elisabeth, was born a von Linhart, the middle one of three daughters of Dr Emil von Linhart, who had run the same mill after the First World War. The two had met there. English obituaries would call the Laudas a paper family, and that was true of his father’s side of the business; his grandfather’s power rested on magnesite and on the industrialists’ federation.

The family lived in a villa with a park in Pötzleinsdorf, on Vienna’s north-western edge, and owned property in Lower Austria. Niki’s younger brother, Florian, would give him a kidney in 1997; otherwise he has remained a private person.

A cool house

Lauda remembered an upbringing that was formal and cool. He was made to take riding lessons, as boys of his class were.

Es war logisch und völlig unausweichlich, dass ich reiten lernen musste, obwohl mich alles daran angewidert hat. Jedes Mal, wenn ich in die Reitschule kam, widerte mich schon der Geruch an.

It was logical and completely unavoidable that I had to learn to ride, although everything about it disgusted me. Every time I came to the riding school the smell alone sickened me.

It was his mother, he said in words the 2009 family history quotes, who had formed him; Florian, in the same book, remembered the same childhood more warmly.

Even as a child he did not keep quiet. At about 12 he wrote to his grandfather to protest that the old man, who railed against the Socialists, had accepted a decoration from them. Hans Lauda answered by reading the letter aloud at a large family gathering, as proof that the boy’s parents had failed to bring him up properly.

The grandfather was not without a weakness of his own. Florian recalled that his grandfather, for all his opposition to racing, followed Formula One, went to Grands Prix at the Nürburgring and once to Monte Carlo, and that when he was asked, at a company jubilee, what present he would like, he hinted at a Ferrari. He was given a carved set of the Twelve Apostles instead.

School, and a certificate

At the Gymnasium he was a poor pupil. He repeated the third year and the fifth, and he left at about 18. He began an apprenticeship as a mechanic; where he served it, and whether he finished it, the sources do not settle. Then he went to a private Maturaschule, a crammer for the Matura, the school-leaving examination that opens the way to university.

His grandfather promised him a small car if he passed his English examination there. When the boy called at the Schubertring flat to remind him, Hans Lauda called him a Frechling, an impertinent boy. His father told him not to take it to heart: he too had always been promised a horse, and had never got one. According to Daniel Michel, who collected the stories in 2019, Niki did pass an intermediate English examination, and the family was briefly delighted.

Whether he ever passed the Matura itself is not settled. The City of Vienna’s history wiki and the Austria-Forum both say he took it at the Maturaschule. Lauda told a different story, to ZEITmagazin in 2012 and again in his book of conversations with Conny Bischofberger, Reden wir über Geld, in 2015. A classmate lent him her certificate and had it replaced as lost; another classmate erased her name and wrote in “Andreas N. Lauda”. He showed it to his parents, then tore it up.¹

Ich habe es ihnen nur aus der Ferne gezeigt, weil man oben klar erkennen konnte, dass der Name des wirklichen Besitzers mit Tintentod weggemacht worden war. … Meiner Mutter habe ich das erst Jahre später gebeichtet, da war ich allerdings schon erfolgreich.

I only showed it to them from a distance, because you could clearly see at the top that the real owner’s name had been removed with ink eradicator. … I confessed it to my mother only years later, but by then I was already successful.

He treated it, by Michel’s account of the 2015 book, as no great matter: a certificate for use at home. The reference works and his own story cannot both be right, and his own story is the one he told more than once.

The first machines

The tractors came first. From about the age of 12 he was let loose on them at his grandfather’s works, then on the snowplough and the lorries. At about 15 he bought a car of his own: an old Volkswagen cabriolet, a wreck, bought for next to nothing in Vienna. By his own account he took it to his grandfather’s place and built a ramp, to see how far it would jump. After a few attempts the shock absorbers came up through the tops of their mountings, and that was the end of it. Another account puts the ramp on his parents’ grounds; the age and the car’s year vary from one telling to the next. The Guardian, in its obituary, says that he bought his first cars with money from his mother and his grandmothers.

Then there was an uncle who raced karts, and who found that his nephew could be trusted with a new engine.

I used to watch racing on TV, and one of my uncles did some karting. Whenever he bought a new chassis, he used to take me along and ask me to run it in – I just had to drive around at a constant 3000rpm, no more, no less, and I think he was impressed that I did as I was told. He also took me to the Nürburgring to watch the German Grand Prix.

A family history of 2009 names an uncle, Heinz Lauda, his father’s brother, who was also general director of the Veitscher company and an amateur racing driver. It may be the same man; the sources do not prove it. Heinz’s son Max remembered Niki running in his father’s engines on the old airfields of Kottingbrunn and Aspern without his parents knowing, and thought that this was how his cousin caught the racing bug, and perhaps the flying one too. Max and another cousin, Thomas, raced karts and the junior formulae themselves.

The uncle also took him, in 1966, to the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, a wet race in which the Austrian Jochen Rindt finished 3rd in a Cooper–Maserati. There Lauda was introduced to Kurt Bergmann, who built the Kaimann Formula Vee cars. Three years later he would be racing one.

Against it

Hans Lauda was the family’s head, and its fiercest opponent of racing. The sentence most often put into his mouth exists in many versions and in no contemporary record that has been found: that a Lauda belonged in the business pages of the newspaper, not in the sports pages.² It is best taken as the family’s story of him. Lauda’s own words for it, in 2010, were plainer: “My grandfather simply believed that a Lauda belonged in business and not in a Formula One car. Racing wasn’t a category for him.”

The rest of the family is harder to place. Most accounts say simply that the Laudas opposed his racing. The earliest found, in Der Spiegel in July 1975, says the family had forbidden a racing career on pain of losing any claim to an inheritance. In 2010 Lauda told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that for a long time his contact with his family had been only sporadic, and that he had not had a loving home. Late in his life he drew a sharper line: “My parents were fairly neutral and let me race, but my grandfather was absolutely crazily against it.” Taken together, the grandfather was against it absolutely, the family threatened his inheritance and would not pay, and his parents, by his own late account, did not stand in his way. The film Rush (2013) dramatised the quarrel with his family; nothing here is taken from it.

The final break came in the autumn of 1971, over a bank and a sum of money, and it belongs to the next chapter. The two men did not speak again. Hans Lauda died in Vienna on 21 January 1974, three months before his grandson’s first Grand Prix win, at Jarama in the 1974 season.

Leaving Vienna

At 18 he left Vienna for Salzburg, where he lived alone. He was still living there in 1975, according to Der Spiegel. In April 1968, in a Mini Cooper S on a hill climb near Linz, he entered his first race, and the story of the way up begins.

He had already found a way to answer his family. Every Christmas Day the whole family was expected at lunch at the Hotel Imperial on the Kärntner Ring, the grandest hotel in Vienna, and he stopped going. “As soon as I became a little independent, I took a terrible revenge” (attributed).

Decades later, whenever he was in Vienna, he ate his breakfast every morning at the Café Imperial, and the café named a breakfast after him.