The Austrian A country that called him Niki Nationale, and how it said goodbye

On Sunday 1 August 1976 Austria lost two things at once. In Vienna the Reichsbrücke, the bridge over the Danube, collapsed; at the Nürburgring in Germany Niki Lauda’s Ferrari crashed and caught fire. ORF said in 2019 that many Austrians knew all their lives where they had been that day, and when the cathedral priest of Vienna preached at Lauda’s Requiem 43 years later, he dated the crash the Austrian way: “the day the Reichsbrücke collapsed in Vienna”.

This chapter is about that bond. Lauda was born in Vienna on 22 February 1949 and died in Zürich on 20 May 2019, and for most of the years between he was one of the best-known Austrians in the world. ORF called him so in its obituary, and a favourite of the media for his directness. He was a racing driver in a country of skiers, an airline owner who fought the state airline, a voice on every public question, and in the end the first sportsman to lie in state in St Stephen’s Cathedral.

After Rindt

Jochen Rindt, Austria’s first World Champion, was killed at Monza on 5 September 1970 and became champion after his death. On the same day Lauda, then 21, was caught up in a pile-up in a Formula Three race at Zolder and escaped unhurt. By the account printed in 1977 he decided there that he would not stay in Formula Three: “I no longer wanted to be a madman in a field of two dozen madmen” (attributed).

Rindt’s death, Der Spiegel wrote in 1977, gave the next Austrian a chance in Formula One; of three candidates, Lauda made the leap. The magazine called Rindt probably the last colleague he had admired. Lauda said it plainly in 1975:

Als Rindt verunglückt war, war plötzlich ein riesiges Loch da, indirekt wurde mir dadurch in Österreich sehr geholfen.

When Rindt was killed, there was suddenly a huge gap, and indirectly that helped me a great deal in Austria.

The money for his way up came from Austrian banks, as The way up tells: sponsorship from the Erste Österreichische Spar-Casse for 1971, and for 1972 a five-year, interest-free loan from a Raiffeisenkasse, secured on a life-insurance policy. His grandfather, Hans Lauda, the first president of the Federation of Austrian Industry, sat on the board that had vetoed a larger deal. The Raiffeisen banks explained their part in national terms. Their advertising chief said in 1977 that the bank was counting on goodwill for a firm “that brings an Austrian into Formula One again after Jochen Rindt’s death”.

The home race

He began his World Championship career at home, in the Austrian Grand Prix of 15 August 1971 at the Österreichring, at the wheel of a third works March. He started 21st of the 22 and retired after 20 laps. He took pole position at home in 1974, 1975 and 1977, and by 1977, Der Spiegel noted, he held the lap record there, on what the magazine called his Salzburg doorstep. He did not win there in his Ferrari years.

The circuit also brought him back. Two years after he stopped racing he went to the Austrian Grand Prix of 1981, and found, he told Motor Sport in 2017, that he enjoyed being there; his return began with that visit.

On 19 August 1984 he won it. He started 4th in the McLaren, caught and passed the leader, Nelson Piquet, on lap 40, set the fastest lap, and took the championship lead from his team-⁠mate Alain Prost. No other Austrian driver has won the Austrian Grand Prix of the World Championship. He became champion two months later, by half a point; 1984 tells that year.

The Österreichring was also where he chose to say that he would stop. On the Saturday of the race weekend, 17 August 1985, he told the press that the season would be his last. The next day he was leading when his engine failed on lap 40.

ORF, the press and the nicknames

Five weeks after the fire, on 8 September 1976, the national broadcaster ORF showed his first interview since the crash. ORF’s archive lists the broadcast under a title quoting him, “I’m racing on” (attributed), though no one working on this book has seen the film to confirm the words. On 12 September he was racing again, at Monza.

The Austrian reporters stood close to him. Der Spiegel noted in 1984 that the Austrian journalists who regularly talked with Lauda had a name for his team-⁠mate Prost: “a little gnome, born to lose”. His books were written with one of them, Herbert Völker. From the middle of the 1990s he was also the expert on the Formula One broadcasts of RTL, the main German-language channel for the sport.

Austria gave him a name of its own. Der Spiegel printed Niki Nationale in 1982, of a country that had found a hero again, and the name was in the titles of two television documentaries about him in 2019, one by ORF and one by the private channel ServusTV. ServusTV also called him probably the world’s best-known wearer of a Kapperl, the Austrian word for a cap. As a child, he said in 1977, he had been a Seicherl, a softie. To English writers he was “the Rat”, after his prominent teeth, and an Italian journalist later called his mixture of languages at Ferrari Laudese.

A public man

In 1977, Der Spiegel reported, 31 per cent of Austrians knew his advertisements for the Raiffeisen banks, more than knew those of any other bank, and a mineral-water firm’s sales rose by between 36 and 72 per cent in 1976 after it used his name. The magazine called him the only summer sportsman who put Austria into the world’s headlines and on television. Herbert von Karajan, it added, said he had a pianist’s hands.

He kept away from party politics. In September 1977, at a prize-giving in Burgenland, he found his face on the election posters of the People’s Party and walked out; the party claimed that a helper of the Socialists had carried him off.

He was also the businessman who took on the state. He founded Lauda Air in 1979, and in 1982 Der Spiegel reported that Chancellor Bruno Kreisky liked best to be flown by Lauda Air with Lauda himself at the controls of its Fokker F27, while officials refused the small airline the routes that paid.

When the airline’s Flight 004 came down in Thailand on 26 May 1991, with the loss of all 223 people on board, it was the worst disaster in the history of Austrian aviation, Der Spiegel wrote. Lauda went to the site, and the magazine later printed his words:

223 Tote sind eine schreckliche Bürde

223 dead are a terrible burden.

The investigation, and the dispute that has followed it, are told in The airlines.

Into his last years he spoke on public questions as bluntly as on racing cars. ORF’s obituary recorded that he was sometimes criticised for going too far on social and political subjects, and in January 2011 his remarks about a same-sex couple on ORF’s dance show Dancing Stars brought accusations of homophobia. That year he rejoined the Catholic Church, which he had left in the 1970s over church tax. The cathedral priest Toni Faber, who knew him, later said that some people mocked him for having something to say about everything.

The Kapperl

A cap came before the fire. When John Watson first met him, in 1971, Lauda wore a baseball cap with the name of his bank on it. After the fire the cap also covered the scars and the bandages, and his own two tellings differ on who put it on him. In 2010 he said a doctor had done it so that the bandage would not slip; in 2017 he gave the credit to Willi Dungl, his physiotherapist. A book of 2009 quotes him on why he kept it:

Jedes Mal, wenn ich dann mit der Kappe gekommen bin, haben die Leut’ immer nur auf mein Ohr geschaut. Nie in die Augen. Das war eine Situation, die mich permanent verletzt hat. … Deswegen die Kappe, da fühl’ ich mich wohler.

Every time I then came along with the cap, people only ever looked at my ear. Never in my eyes. That was a situation that hurt me permanently. … That’s why the cap: I feel better in it.

The cap carried sponsors for most of his life, a mineral-water firm by 1977 and a dairy company for many years after. In Austria it became the sign of the man himself. When he died, the Mercedes team wore red caps at Monaco, and in 2022 Toto Wolff hung a red cap on the sign of Lauda Drive, the road into the team’s base at Brackley that had been named after him.

At the Requiem in Vienna, Gerhard Berger began his words with the cap:

Ich ziehe mein imaginäres Kapperl vor dir. … weil du auf den ersten Blick kein wilder Hund warst … viele Leben füllen können

I raise my imaginary cap to you. … because at first sight you weren’t a wild dog … could have filled many lives

The farewell

He had received two new lungs at the Vienna General Hospital in the summer of 2018. He died at the University Hospital in Zürich on Monday 20 May 2019, aged 70, with his family. Their statement went out by e-⁠mail that night, and on 21 May ORF 1 cleared its evening for a documentary, Niki Nationale, and a studio discussion.

On Wednesday 29 May his closed coffin was carried into St Stephen’s Cathedral through the Riesentor shortly before eight in the morning, under the bells, and set in the crossing, with his racing helmet and a laurel wreath on it. The public filed past from eight until noon, entering by the Primtor. By nine o’clock, in heavy rain, the queue reached back to the Riesentor. Mourners signed a book of condolence and were given a memorial card. Some came in clothes that honoured him.

No sportsman had lain in state in the cathedral before him. Those who had included the painter Ernst Fuchs, Cardinal Franz König, Otto Habsburg and the trade-union leader Franz Olah. It was not a state funeral: the Requiem was held at his family’s wish, with about 300 invited guests and the rest of the cathedral open to the public, and no filming or photography. Toni Faber celebrated it; Alain Prost gave a reading from Isaiah; Lewis Hamilton and Toto Wolff came with the Mercedes team. The music included Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”, one of his favourite songs.

At the end the President of Austria, Alexander Van der Bellen, spoke:

Abschied nehmen ist immer schmerzvoll, der Abschied von Niki Lauda tut besonders weh … Wir stehen an der Bahre eines großen Österreichers. Good bye. … Ganz Österreich ist heute bei Ihnen. … ein riesiges Herz mit glasklarem Verstand zu verbinden … Er sah die Dinge so, wie sie waren … Es braucht die ehrliche Analyse von Fehlern, damit wir aus der Vergangenheit lernen können. Niki Lauda hat uns gezeigt, wie das geht und dass es geht. … Good bye bye world champion, bye bye, danke für alles.

Saying goodbye is always painful; saying goodbye to Niki Lauda hurts especially. … We stand at the bier of a great Austrian. Goodbye. … All Austria is with you today. … to combine an enormous heart with a crystal-clear mind … He saw things as they were. … It takes an honest analysis of mistakes for us to learn from the past. Niki Lauda showed us how it is done, and that it can be done. … Goodbye, goodbye world champion, goodbye, thank you for everything.

Arnold Schwarzenegger told the cathedral that when he was weighing whether to run for governor, Lauda had cut him short and told him to do it. Sebastian Kurz, who had left the chancellor’s office the day before, said that however early he came to the Café Imperial, Lauda was always there first. Then the coffin was carried out through the Riesentor, and Lauda was buried privately, in a racing overall, in the cemetery at Heiligenstadt in Vienna.

That October the trophy given each year to Austria’s best sportsman and sportswoman was renamed “Niki”. A road at Vienna Airport was named the Niki-Lauda-Allee. And the card that mourners carried out of the cathedral into the rain bore a saying his family had chosen:

Fang nie an aufzuhören, hör nie auf anzufangen

Never start stopping, never stop starting.