Legacy A trophy, two roads, a car, an aircraft, and the drivers who came after

Monaco, 26 May 2019

Before the start of the Monaco Grand Prix the drivers stood in a circle on the start-finish straight, round one of his helmets on a black plinth.

He had died six days earlier, on Monday 20 May, at the University Hospital in Zürich, aged 70. For one minute the circuit was silent. Then the yachts in the harbour sounded their horns. The Mercedes team, of which he had been non-executive chairman since 2012, wore red caps, and in the drivers’ parade the drivers wore red caps with “Niki” on them in white.

The team had worn black armbands since the Thursday. Its cars carried “Danke Niki” and his signature on their noses, and one of the stars on their engine covers had been painted red; Toto Wolff, the team’s executive director and, like Lauda, an Austrian, said it would stay red. Other teams, Ferrari among them, carried messages of their own. Earlier in the week Mercedes had asked for Lewis Hamilton to be excused from the drivers’ press conference, and Wolff put back his own. When he did speak, on the Thursday, he said of Hamilton, who had lost a friend: “Lewis and Niki are bound together by being multiple world champions.”

Hamilton, and Sebastian Vettel too, raced in helmets painted in Lauda’s design; Hamilton’s was red, with Lauda’s name on the back. Hamilton won, and dedicated the win to him:

When I was driving I thought: ‘What would Niki do?’ So I just kept going … I definitely felt like he was with me racing today. It was just incredible to see how much support there has been for Niki from across the world, how much respect and appreciation there is for him. As a driver my goal is to be one day as respected as he was. He left a great example and was a real hero to so many.

Formula One’s own statement said: “Formula 1 has lost not only one of the truly great exponents of the sport but also one of its heroes.” Ferrari, for whom he won 15 Grands Prix, put it in a sentence: he had won two of his three titles with them. McLaren, with whom he won the third, called him its friend and colleague.

Three days after Monaco his closed coffin lay in St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna with his racing helmet on it, and he was buried privately in a racing overall. How Austria said goodbye is told in The Austrian; his last years, in After racing.

What the drivers say

The drivers who raced against him remember a fighter who did not complain, and the ones who came later remember a man who told them the truth. When he died, Alain Prost, his team-⁠mate in 1984 and 1985 and the man he beat to the title by half a point, spoke of him to the French news agency: “we lose a gentleman who has never complained about anything in his life, his condition, his accident, and who has always won” (attributed).

Sir Jackie Stewart remembered watching him put on his helmet at Monza, six weeks after the fire, with the wounds still showing, and spoke of a bravery he had never seen before. John Watson, his team-⁠mate at Brabham and at McLaren, came to admire the operator in him as much as the driver.

Of the drivers who knew him only as an older man in a red cap, Vettel spoke at Monaco that week: “He was very outspoken, a true character, a true racer”. Nico Rosberg wrote that he had learned a great deal from him, and Damon Hill told Sky Sports what the paddock had known:

Everyone who was in Formula One knew Niki’s personality as one of the most potent individuals in the sport … He was highly intellectual, stoic, someone who didn’t have time for any of the BS in the business at all. He was eminently quotable all the time. It’s very sad to hear that we’ve lost Niki, but so many people have been affected positively by having known him.

Hamilton’s debt was the most direct: Lauda brought him to Mercedes in 2012, as After racing tells, with what Hamilton wrote the day after he died.

Prost had said in 2014 that he was not sad when he lost the title to a team-⁠mate who had come back from retirement, and that he was proud to be part of that story. What he took from it was a way of racing. He saw that Lauda, slower over one lap, set his car up for the race and was always there at the end; the next year Prost was champion himself.

The record

His World Championship career ran from 1971 to 1985: 176 entries, 171 starts and 420.5 points, every one of them counted. He was World Champion three times, in 1975 and 1977 with Ferrari and in 1984 with McLaren, and second in 1976 by a single point. Counting the hill climbs, Formula Vee, Formula Three and Two, the touring cars, the sports cars and the races outside the championship, he took part in 316 races from 1968 to 1985, by the count of his chronicler Jon Saltinstall.

In October 2026 two of his records still stood. His third title, decided by half a point, 72 points to 71.5, is the closest finish the championship has had, as Motor Sport calls it; the half points that decided it came from the Monaco Grand Prix of that year, stopped early, which gave Prost 4.5 points for his win instead of 9. And his win at the Österreichring in August 1984 had not been matched: no other Austrian driver has won his home round of the World Championship.

The obituaries did not agree on how to count his career. The Guardian gave 171 races; the Monaco Tribune printed 180 Grands Prix, a figure that matches no database. This book counts his starts and his entries: 171 starts from 176 entries, with Montreal 1979, where he drove only in practice, not among them. The records set out the rest.

Honours

ORF records that Austria’s sports journalists voted him Sportsman of the Year in 1977, the year of his second title. In 2006 the same journalists gave him a special award for a unique career.

The International Motorsports Hall of Fame at Talladega took him in with its class of 1993. In February 2013 he entered the Motor Sport Hall of Fame at the same ceremony as Graham and Damon Hill, Colin Chapman and Tom Kristensen, and said that he was delighted. On 18 April 2016, at the Messe Berlin, Lewis Hamilton handed him the Laureus World Sports Award for Lifetime Achievement.

The honours that carry his name came after his death. On 16 October 2019 Sports Media Austria announced that the trophies for Austria’s Sportsman and Sportswoman of the Year would from then on be called “Niki”. The trophy itself, the work of the metal artist Stefan Gahr, stayed as it was; only its name was new. The president of the association, ORF’s head of sport Hans Peter Trost, explained the choice:

Damit möchten wir Niki Lauda postum die größte Ehre zukommen lassen, die wir ihm geben können.

With this we want to give Niki Lauda posthumously the greatest honour we can give him.

The first “Niki” trophies were presented on 31 October 2019, at the Sporthilfe gala in the Marx-Halle in Vienna. The same year a road leading to Vienna Airport was named the Niki-Lauda-Allee.

Lauda Drive

The road into the Mercedes team’s technology campus at Brackley, in England, used to be called Reynard Park. With the permission of his family and of the local authority it was renamed, and on Tuesday 29 November 2022 Wolff unveiled the new sign, Lauda Drive, before a crowd of the team’s staff. Then he hung a red cap on the signpost.

He would not have wanted a fuss, Wolff said that day, but he would have been proud to have the road named after him.

The cap he left there had become the sport’s picture of him; The Austrian tells how it began. When he died, the red cap became the way to remember him: the Mercedes team wore it at Monaco, Gerhard Berger raised an imaginary one to him in St Stephen’s, and Wolff left one at Brackley.

A Bell helmet of his was on show in the Museo Ferrari at Maranello in 2013, and The machines shows it.

On screen and on the page

A film brought him to a new audience. Ron Howard’s Rush, the story of the 1976 season, written by Peter Morgan, came out in September 2013, with Daniel Brühl as Lauda and Chris Hemsworth as James Hunt. Lauda helped Brühl to prepare, and went to the London premiere with his wife, Birgit. By Brühl’s account, a screening for the drivers at the Nürburgring ended in a standing ovation. By ORF’s reckoning it made him more famous abroad than he had ever been.

What the film changed is in Lauda and Hunt; his five books with Herbert Völker and the documentaries made after his death are in Books and films.

The legend and the record

A life told so often gathers stories, and some of his did not survive a look at the sources. He did not take to the cap only to hide his scars, as The Austrian tells. The claim that he was Austria’s Sportsman of the Year again and again finds no support: ORF names 1977 alone. He did not call Rush very accurate, as is sometimes said; the words of his that were printed give the film a share of truth and a share of Hollywood. He did not race a Porsche 917, and no single man pulled him from the burning Ferrari at the Nürburgring: several drivers who had stopped, with a marshal, pulled him out, and Arturo Merzario released his harness.

Some of the sayings most often quoted as his are not his at all. Lines written by Peter Morgan for the film, spoken by an actor, now travel the internet under his name, beside others that no printed source supports. In his words sets them apart from what he said. Where the accounts of his life still differ, as on the money that bought his first drives or on the day at Fiorano, this book gives each version and says where they part.

His name

On 22 February 2021, the day he would have turned 72, Gordon Murray, who had designed his Brabhams of 1978 and 1979, the fan car among them, launched a track car named after him: the T.50s Niki Lauda, to be built in a run of 25.

His last airline outlived him too. He had bought back the remains of his airline Niki in 2018 and run them as Laudamotion; after his death Ryanair, which by then owned it, closed Laudamotion on 19 October 2020, and its Maltese subsidiary Lauda Europe carried on the flying. The airlines tell the story of all three. The aircraft still carried his name along the fuselage.