The Nürburgring 1 August 1976

A lap of the Nürburgring Nordschleife ran for 22.8 kilometres (14.2 miles), round some 170 corners. In practice for the German Grand Prix of 1975 Niki Lauda had lapped it in 6:58.6, the only lap under seven minutes. A year later, as World Champion and leader of the 1976 championship, he was at the head of the drivers who wanted Formula One to stop racing there.

He knew what the circuit could do. In 1973, in a BRM, he had crashed at Kesselchen on lap 2 and broken his wrist; in 1974 he had started from pole and crashed on the opening lap after trying to outbrake Jody Scheckter; in 1975 a puncture cost him the lead, and he finished 3rd. He came to the Nordschleife in 1976 leading the championship, with four wins from the first nine races, in Brazil, South Africa, Belgium and Monaco. A fifth, at Brands Hatch, would be awarded to him in September, when James Hunt was disqualified from that race.

The drivers had forced the German Grand Prix away from the circuit once before, in 1970, and its operators had spent about 20 million marks on safety work in the years that followed. As Jochen Rindt had done before him, Der Spiegel wrote, the champion demanded that the race move to Hockenheim. The arguments were the length of the lap, which no number of marshals or fire crews could cover; the crests where the cars left the ground; and barriers that had grown old. The magazine counted more than 300 people killed on the circuit since 1927, 10 of them Grand Prix drivers.

Not everyone agreed. Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport, who loved the Nordschleife, conceded none of the drivers’ case, and thought that Lauda’s attitude to the place kept him slower there than Hans-⁠Joachim Stuck or Jochen Mass would have been. Yet he also wrote that Lauda set his feelings aside in practice and did a typical, workmanlike job. Some of the 150,000 spectators (151,876 paid, the magazine counted the following January) threw bottles at the champion they called a coward, Der Spiegel reported, and one banner told him in rhyme to go home.

Der Ring ist gut, Lauda nimm deinen Hut.

The Ring is good, Lauda, take your hat [and go].

Later accounts say that Lauda proposed a boycott at a meeting of the drivers and that the vote went against him. None of the reports written at the time and read for this book mentions such a vote, and when it was held, and by what margin, is not known. The version in which he lost by a single vote on the morning of the race belongs to later retellings and to the film Rush; no source read here supports it.

Nor was the decision the drivers’ alone. According to Der Spiegel, the organisers and the constructors ordered Lauda and 25 other drivers to start, and the transport ministry of Rhineland-Palatinate said that closing the circuit was out of the question.

Practice and the start

He drove his newest car, the Ferrari 312T2 with chassis number 028, carrying the No. 1 of the champion; chassis 026 was the spare and was not used. On Friday 30 July he was fastest in the morning session, in 7:08.2. In the afternoon Hunt lapped in 7:06.5 and Lauda in 7:07.4. Saturday was wet, the Friday times stood, and Hunt took pole position with Lauda beside him, 0.9 seconds slower. Jenkinson, watching the Ferrari among the trees, found his driving remarkably neat and tidy.

I have some memories of that day. I recall walking to the funny old paddock and a German guy approaching for an autograph.

On Sunday the start was put back while debris from a saloon-car race was cleared, and then rain was reported on the far side of the circuit. The stewards declared a “wet race”, and every driver but Mass changed to rain tyres; Mass and Ford’s Mike Kranefuss had been studying the wind and the clouds. By Jenkinson’s account the field got away at about 2.05 pm.

Lauda made an unusually poor start. Clay Regazzoni led at first in the other Ferrari, then spun. By the end of the first lap the track was dry, and most of the field, Lauda among them, came into the pits for slick tyres. Mass, who had started on slicks, was leading by half a minute when the race was stopped.

The days in hospital

What he remembered of those days he told Hans Halter of Der Spiegel at Monza in September 1977. Of the helicopter flight he remembered a feeling of sinking.

Mir war, als wenn ich immer tiefer in einen dunklen Brunnen sinke.

It was as if I were sinking deeper and deeper into a dark well.

Halter wrote that Lauda had not asked for the last rites, and that when he understood what they meant he was not depressed, only annoyed. In 2013 Lauda gave Nigel Roebuck a fuller version, in which the priest gave him the last rites and left without a word to him. That annoyed him, he said, and he told himself: “Now I’m really going to fight for my life”.

Willi Dungl, the Viennese masseur and trainer who had worked with him since a tractor accident that spring, guided his recovery. Dungl’s daughters said later that conventional medicine had little to offer him, and that motivation, nutrition and conditioning counted for more.

He missed two races, in Austria and the Netherlands.

The restart

The race was restarted shortly after 3 pm, with gaps on the grid where Lauda, Lunger and Ertl should have been. Chris Amon would not take the restart. The Guardian reported him saying he had seen too many accidents in which a driver was alone and help came too late; Der Spiegel reported that his team, Ensign, dismissed him for it. At the restart the word was that Lauda was talking and had only minor burns; Amon, as he later told Nigel Roebuck, did not believe it.

Hunt’s position was not an easy one. He too had called the circuit dangerous, and by one later account he admitted after taking pole that he was frightened there and glad to see the finishing line every lap.

Hunt led every lap of the 14 and won by 27.7 seconds from Scheckter, with Mass 3rd. Jenkinson ended his report by observing that it was not the way Hunt would have wanted to win, with his only serious rival in hospital. That evening the paddock learned that Lauda had been flown to Mannheim.

Within days Enzo Ferrari announced that his team was withdrawing from Formula One for the rest of the season. When the public prosecutor wanted to secure the wreck, Der Spiegel wrote, Ferrari had already taken it back to Italy.

The cause

The official explanation was a broken link in the rear suspension. Jenkinson inspected the wreck. Both left-hand wheels and their suspension had been torn away, the left side of the monocoque was split open and the fuel cell on that side was gone; the right side was relatively undamaged, and the fire had done less harm than he had expected. A clockwise spin on a left-hand curve, he reasoned, fitted a breakage: a driver’s error would have spun the car the other way, or sent it ploughing straight on. The rumour that a wheel had come off he called demonstrably untrue.

Sieben Kilometer aus diesem Rennen fehlen mir, sie kommen in meiner Erinnerung nicht vor.

Seven kilometres of that race are missing for me; they don’t exist in my memory.

Yet in his essay on Ferrari in the same issue he found the crash hard to explain either way, since Ferraris did not usually break their suspension and Lauda did not usually make mistakes. The Guardian reported that even drivers 50 yards behind could not agree whether a wheel had come off, something had broken, or Lauda had lost control in trying to catch the leaders.

Lauda himself remembered nothing of the crash, and never claimed to know its cause. A year later Der Spiegel reported that he believed he had made no mistake, and that what had happened remained a great riddle to him. The cause was never established.

How it was told in 1976

The first reports were angry about the rescue as much as the crash. The Guardian quoted Jean-⁠Pierre Jarier calling the rescue services amateurs. Der Spiegel claimed that the Ferrari’s side tanks were only bolted on and that its extinguisher system had no release triggered by heat; these were the magazine’s claims. The Hamburg Morgenpost asked whether it had been sabotage. There was no evidence that it was.

The crash was also consumed. Der Spiegel ran an essay that set the fire beside the deaths of charioteers in Greek myth, and a few weeks later reported that firms using Lauda’s name were selling more since the accident, one importer having sold 150 Lauda-branded clocks.

What later accounts changed

The story of 1 August 1976 has been told for half a century, by Lauda more than anyone, and it has shifted in the telling. In the later versions the rescue narrows to one man. In 2006 Lauda named only Merzario, the driver who was there to get him out: “Another 10 seconds in there and I would have been dead.” Edwards and Lunger, for their part, both said that Merzario’s opening of the harness was what made the difference. Edwards was awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal and received it from the Queen.

The rescuers’ own accounts are plainer than the later retellings. Edwards, interviewed long afterwards, put it simply: “It was just a natural response. I was there, and there was no-one else there initially except a few marshals…” He went on to name Lunger, Ertl and Merzario as the men who joined him. Lunger, by one report, climbed onto the car and pulled Lauda by the shoulders. Merzario knew the Ferrari’s harness from his own years at Maranello. Laffite is in The Guardian’s report of 2 August among the drivers who set out to help, and Jenkinson has him stopping his Ligier at the scene and failing to restart it; he does not appear in the later accounts of Edwards, Lunger or Lauda. John Watson, arriving just after, remembered kneeling beside him. No single account holds the whole rescue.

Gratitude, too, is remembered differently. Lunger’s account has Lauda seeking him out at Monza to thank him; Merzario said in 2019 that Lauda afterwards walked past him at the circuit as if nothing had happened, without a word of thanks.

In 1976 at the Nürburgring I arrived just after the accident. Niki was out of the cockpit and close to the scene where the Ferrari was still smouldering, so we walked him away from that and laid him down and I knelt down and put his head in my lap so I could see his face. He was lucid and talking – my concern was to keep him stable and keep him talking.

Other details grew. Pirelli wrote in 2019 that he was given the last rites twice in three days, for which no source read here gives any support. Lauda said more than once that he missed three races after the crash; he missed two, Austria and the Netherlands. Der Spiegel’s first report had him tear off his own helmet; a year later the magazine said that the force of the impact had torn it from his head, and Lauda that it had flown off, nobody quite knew why. He changed to another make.

The film Rush (2013) put its own scenes into the story, the meeting on race morning and the single vote among them, and they are often repeated as history. Lauda’s own verdict on the film, in 2016, was mild: mostly correct, he said, with a little Hollywood, as Books and films tells. Nothing on this page is taken from it.

The helmet he wore that day survived, burnt. It was later auctioned by Bonhams for UNICEF, with the family’s agreement.

The last Grand Prix on the Nordschleife

On the day itself The Guardian suggested that this might be the last major race on the Nürburgring, and Patrick Depailler was reported as saying that they would not race on the Nürburgring again. Formula One never raced on the Nordschleife again. The CSI judged the circuit unsafe for Formula One, and the German Grand Prix of 1977 went to Hockenheim, whose operators paid the fee that Bernie Ecclestone’s constructors’ association asked, and when Formula One came back to the Nürburgring in 1984 it raced on a new, shorter circuit.

The argument outlived the crash. In 1977 the Nürburgring’s Huschke von Hanstein called Lauda a coward for refusing to race there any more, and said he had raced there himself without complaining. Lauda answered that von Hanstein had needed 15 minutes for a lap, and the Formula One cars far less; that, he said, made it a different matter.

In Austria, that Sunday is remembered for a second reason, a coincidence the chapter on Lauda and his country begins with.

Lauda had come back long before, at Monza, 42 days after the crash; that return, and the race in the rain at Fuji that followed, are the subject of the next chapter. At Hockenheim on 31 July 1977, a year less a day after the fire, he won the German Grand Prix, on his way to his second title in the 1977 season.