In his words Plain answers in German and English, and a little Italian

At Monza in September 1977, before the Italian Grand Prix, Hans Halter of Der Spiegel found Niki Lauda lying on a steel shelf in the Ferrari transporter, an aluminium box under his head. The magazine printed Halter’s report beside its title story on 25 September, and between them the two pieces hold many of the German sentences on this page.

Lauda spoke German, in its Viennese form, to the Austrian and German press, and English to the British and the rest of the world. At Ferrari he spoke a mixture of German, English and Italian that an Italian journalist later called Laudese. His German is printed here as the papers printed it, the old spelling included, with our English beneath. A line that rests on a single later retelling is marked “attributed”.

His own books, written with the Austrian journalist Herbert Völker, are quoted only where others printed them. The film Rush (2013) and the quotation websites have added lines he never said; they are gathered at the end, under Lines he never said.

Danger

In 1977, at 28 and about to become champion for the second time, he would not treat the danger of his work as anything special. He compared it with other people’s:

Die Gefahr ist nicht größer als in vielen anderen Berufen; Taxifahrer, Polizisten, Flieger sind eher schlimmer dran.

The danger is no greater than in many other jobs; taxi drivers, policemen, pilots are rather worse off.

Nor would he admit to a fear of speed. If he had one, he said, “then I would have lied to myself when I chose my profession”. After a spin in practice at Monza that September he put the lesson in one line:

Wer zu oft eine Blödheit macht, ist bald tot

Whoever does something stupid too often is soon dead.

To Halter, at Monza, he explained why he did not dwell on the drivers who had died there:

Sonst müßte doch der Punkt kommen, an dem einer sagt: Ist doch alles Wahnsinn. Man muß ja nicht Rennfahrer sein, es muß auch gar keine Rennen geben.

Otherwise the point would have to come where you say: it’s all madness. Nobody has to be a racing driver; there don’t have to be any races at all.

He said it a year after he had been given the last rites himself. Five years later, back in a Formula One car, he spoke of accidents as part of the trade:

Daß Unfälle zum Rennsport gehören wie das Amen zum Gebet, ist doch logisch.

It’s only logical that accidents belong to motor racing like the amen to the prayer.

In 1984, the year of his third title, he described the safety of the day as a matter of degree:

Im Moment ist nur der Extra-Wahnsinn gut kontrolliert, die oberste Spitze des Extra-Wahnsinns ist abgeschnitten. Deshalb fahren wir jetzt nur mit dem normalen Wahnsinn durch die Gegend.

At the moment only the extra madness is well controlled; the very tip of the extra madness has been cut off. So now we’re only driving round with the normal madness.

The fire and the face

He had argued against racing on the Nürburgring Nordschleife. A week after the German Grand Prix of 1976, Der Spiegel printed what he had said before it:

Wer hier verunglückt, hat keine Chance.

Whoever crashes here has no chance.

On 1 August, on the second lap, his Ferrari crashed at the fast left kink after the Adenau bridge and caught fire. Drivers who had stopped got him out of the car with a marshal, and Arturo Merzario undid his harness. The whole story is told in The Nürburgring. A year later he could not remember part of that race:

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.

He was given the last rites, and told that part more than once; The Nürburgring sets the tellings side by side. In 2013 he told Nigel Roebuck:

I was asked if I wanted the Last Rites, and I nodded – I couldn’t talk or see. The priest came, gave me the Last Rites – and then left, without speaking to me. I’d expected him to say, ‘God will help you’ or something, so that really annoyed me, and I said to myself, ‘Now I’m really going to fight for my life…’

On 8 September ORF broadcast his first interview since the crash. The broadcaster’s archive keeps the film under a title quoting him, “I’m racing on” (attributed), but the film itself has not been checked for those words. Four days later, 42 days after the crash, he finished 4th at Monza, as Monza and Fuji tells. By his account of 2016, fear got the better of him on the first day there:

On the Friday I could not drive. I got out of the car because I was frightened … I went to the hotel and thought about it, took it easy on Saturday and then finally got going again.

To questions about the burns to his head he gave answers that left no room for pity. Late in 1976 an American journalist asked him, with Roebuck listening, whether it was a problem to face the world as he now looked:

For me, no… For you maybe it’s a problem – you can see me…

At Monza a year later he told Halter:

Manche … sind häßlicher geboren, als ich jetzt aussehe. … Es ist doch nicht mein Problem, ob mich jemand wegen der Narbe nicht mehr mag. Das ist doch seine Sache.

Some people … are born uglier than I look now. … It’s not my problem if someone doesn’t like me any more because of the scar. That’s his business.

And in 1982 Halter collected two more of his answers, one of them about his injured ear: “Without an ear I can telephone better.” The other follows.

Fuji: four tellings

The championship of 1976 was decided at Fuji on 24 October, in torrential rain. Lauda stopped at the end of lap 2; James Hunt finished 3rd and was champion by 1 point, 69 to 68. Lauda told the story for 40 years. The tellings agree on the rain and on his own choice, and differ on the details. In 1998 he told Alan Henry:

Then came that soaking Japanese Grand Prix at Mount Fuji when I pulled out on the second lap, convinced that driving in those conditions of torrential rain was absolute lunacy.

In 2006 it was one lap:

It had been raining that week like you couldn’t believe and, in my opinion, it was too dangerous to drive. So I pulled out after one lap. James finished third and won the title by one point, which was good for him. I was lucky to have survived that far and I had the choice not to risk my life again.

In 2016 he remembered the drivers’ meeting before the start, where the organisers, pressed by television, would not wait any longer:

Are you guys fucking crazy? The rain has not stopped. It’s got worse. You cannot do this.

In that telling he had told Ferrari before the start that he would do one lap; in the 1976 race report, as in the Italian accounts, he announces it at the pit. In 2013 he answered the question that had followed him since:

I stopped because of the conditions – nothing to do with after-effects from the accident. Half an hour later the rain stopped, and if I’d stayed in the race it would have been easy to get the points I needed, but I know that – for me – I did the right thing…

Ferrari and the Old Man

Scuderia Ferrari signed him from BRM for 1974, and at the end of 1973 he tested the car at Fiorano. Enzo Ferrari’s son Piero translated. In 2005 Lauda told Alan Henry what he said and what followed:

the car was shit. … Mr Ferrari told me that I had a week in which to lap one second faster round Fiorano, otherwise I was out.

In that telling the car was changed and he found the time; his later tellings of what followed differ. He came to understand the team’s way of doing things, without sharing it:

I suppose, as a pragmatic Austrian, that the whole sense of drama was difficult for me to understand. But I like to think that I was pragmatic enough to play the game the way they wanted me to.

In an interview of 2015 he said what the Old Man had valued in him:

He liked my straightforward manner. He was more emotional with other drivers – celebrated them when they won, destroyed them when they didn’t.

The money was argued over each year. In one contract talk, as an Italian journalist told it in 2023, Enzo Ferrari answered Lauda’s demand with an antisemitic insult. Lauda replied in Italian:

Lei paga. Lei dice quello che vuole.

You pay. You say what you like.

He won the title for Ferrari in 1975 and again in 1977, and left before the last two races of that season, for Brabham. In 2017 he gave his verdict on the move in eight words: “It was definitely the wrong thing to do.”

James Hunt

The friendship began in the junior formulas, in 1971 or 1972: his own accounts place it in Formula Three or in Formula Two. In 2005 he said:

James was my kind of guy. We would become cast as rivals but we’d been close friends ever since we’d been in F2 together in 1972 and I’d come over to live in London for the first time.

He left Fuji before the race was over. At the airport, by his telling in 2016, a Ferrari man came up to say goodbye, and he knew the result from the man’s face. In 2013 he told Roebuck what he felt:

I could tell by his face that I hadn’t won, but I didn’t mind, actually – the only one who should beat me was James, because I liked the guy. All the differences between McLaren and Ferrari never made any difference to us personally.

At Fuji, Hunt had said he wished the two of them could have shared the championship. Forty years later Lauda called that the nicest thing he had ever heard said, and gave his opinion of the film made about the two of them:

So that film, Rush, is good. It’s 80% correct, with a bit of Hollywood.

Alain Prost

His team-⁠mate at McLaren in 1984 was Alain Prost, six years younger and faster over one lap. A week before the last race, Der Spiegel reported a suspicion of sabotage in the team. He played it down, and when a car pushed by the crew rolled over his foot, he took the blame himself:

Ich nehme beim Training den Fuß immer eine halbe Sekunde früher vom Gas, Prost hingegen zieht durch. … Ich habe mich halt saublöd verhalten.

In practice I always lift off half a second earlier; Prost, on the other hand, keeps his foot down. … I just behaved bloody stupidly.

Thirty years later he described what he had done about the half second:

I worked only for the races, and not for qualifying, because I couldn’t beat him there.

The title was his by half a point, with 72 to Prost’s 71.5. Of his second retirement, at the end of 1985, he later said, in words McLaren printed in 2019: “there was another guy in the car who was quicker than me, so it was time to go” (attributed).

The employee

He spoke of racing as a job with a division of labour, and of himself as the man paid to do one part of it:

Der Schlosser soll schrauben, der Ingenieur zeichnen, und ich soll fahren. … muß jedes Kilo beschleunigt und abgebremst werden … Wenn ich mich wegen irgendeines Volltrottels aufregen würde … fahr’ ich vielleicht nicht mehr optimal.

The mechanic should turn the spanners, the engineer draw, and I should drive. … every kilo has to be accelerated and braked … If I got worked up about some complete idiot … maybe I wouldn’t drive at my best any more.

He did not pretend to modesty. In the same year he described what he could do, and how hard he could be:

Ich kann ungeheuren Egoismus entwickeln, sogar Brutalität. … Ich überblicke mich. … Ich kann ein Auto auf den Kurs absolut sicher einstellen.

I can develop tremendous egoism, even brutality. … I keep myself in view. … I can set a car up for the track with absolute certainty.

In 1982 he described the ideal racing driver to Der Spiegel in four short phrases:

Kleiner Wuchs, so wie ein Jockey. Sensibler Hintern. Im richtigen Auto sitzen. Körperlich topfit sein.

Small build, like a jockey. A sensitive backside. Sitting in the right car. Physically in top shape.

A win did not satisfy him for long. In 2017 he told Simon Arron of Motor Sport:

I only worried if I didn’t deliver. I didn’t waste time thinking about how well I’d driven – even on the podium I’d be thinking, ‘Shit, what could I have done better today.’

Walking away, and coming back

In 1977 he had said that he would stop when he wanted to. On Friday 28 September 1979, after about 10 laps of practice for the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal, he did. The retirements tells the day. In 2017 he described the moment:

I went to the circuit, got in the car and there was a real tickle in my back – I hated the vibration you got from the Cosworth. I started practice, went through the gears and then thought, ‘What’s happening here? I’ve had enough of this.’ It was like a curtain coming down…

The best-known line about that day was first printed by Halter in 1982; no record from 1979 of his words has been found:

Warum soll ich wie ein Trottel mit den anderen im Kreis fahren?

Why should I drive round in circles with the others like an idiot?

Two years later he came back, with McLaren, for 1982. At the launch, as McLaren later printed it, he called himself a pensioner:

I’m not a racing driver at present, I’m a pensioner coming back! … People say that comebacks never work out. Well, that’s another reason why I want to come back – to prove them wrong.

In August 1982 Der Spiegel asked him how much longer he would drive round in circles:

Bis es mir nicht mehr paßt. Den Termin laß ich offen. Es ist eine rein emotionelle Entscheidung.

Until it no longer suits me. I’m leaving the date open. It’s a purely emotional decision.

The opposite of racing

He founded Lauda Air in 1979 and flew its aircraft himself. In 1982 he drew a line between the two jobs:

totale Präzision, hundertprozentige Gesetzmäßigkeit … Im Rennwagen geht man übers Limit. Man muß ständig Kompromisse schließen, Regeln verletzen, um das Chaos ins Gute zu wenden. Im Flugzeug gilt das Gegenteil.

total precision, one hundred per cent conformity to rules … In a racing car you go over the limit. You constantly have to compromise, break rules, to turn chaos into good. In an aeroplane the opposite holds.

By his account, the Austrian authorities were slow to give a private airline its rights, and he made a joke of it: “it is easier to win three world championships than to get traffic rights to Australia”.

On 26 May 1991 Lauda Air Flight 004, a Boeing 767, was lost over Thailand, and all 223 people on board were killed. A week later Der Spiegel printed his words:

223 Tote sind eine schreckliche Bürde

223 dead are a terrible burden.

In an interview published in 2009 he set the loss beside his own risks on the track:

if I want to kill myself driving a racing car that’s entirely my business, but if more than 200 people buy a ticket on my airline and don’t come back, then that is totally unacceptable.

By his own account he flew the simulator himself and pressed Boeing to say publicly what had happened:

Listen, this was my aeroplane, my name, my damage … so let me do it.

What the investigation found is told in The airlines.

The cap

He wore a sponsor’s cap before the fire; after it, the cap also covered the scars, and it stayed for the rest of his life. He told the story of how it began in two ways. In 2010 it was a doctor who put the cap on him:

Ja, Parmalat war 25 Jahre drauf. Auch das hat mit dem Unfall angefangen: Als ich aus dem Krankenhaus entlassen wurde, war mein Kopf komplett einbandagiert. Der Arzt hat mir eine Kappe aufgesetzt, damit der Verband nicht verrutscht. Und dann fragte Parmalat, ob ich ihren Schriftzug tragen würde.

Yes, Parmalat was on it for 25 years. That too started with the accident: when I was let out of hospital my head was completely bandaged. The doctor put a cap on me so the bandage wouldn’t slip. And then Parmalat asked whether I would wear their name.

In 2017 it was his physiotherapist, Willi Dungl, and the reason he kept it was other people’s eyes:

Damit der blutverschmierte Verband nicht verrutschte, wenn ich den Helm abnahm, hat mir mein Physio Willi Dungl die Kappe aufgesetzt. … Jeder hat gedacht: ‚Was ist jetzt mit dem seinen Kopf passiert?‘ Als ich das gemerkt habe, habe ich mir gesagt: ‚Jetzt setzt du immer die Kappe auf.‘ So wurde die Kappe mein Schutz gegen diese gemeinen Blicke.

So that the bloodstained bandage didn’t slip when I took off my helmet, my physio Willi Dungl put the cap on me. … Everyone thought: ‘What’s happened to his head?’ When I noticed that, I said to myself: ‘From now on you always wear the cap.’ So the cap became my protection against those nasty looks.

What the cap came to mean to Austria is told in The Austrian.

Lines he never said

Some of the lines most often given to him are not his. The film Rush (2013), written by Peter Morgan, gave its Lauda character dialogue that now circulates as his own words. No source before the film has him say this:

Happiness is the enemy. It weakens you … Suddenly you have something to lose.

Two more travel with stills from the film. One is an old proverb, usually given to the Spanish writer Baltasar Gracián: “A wise man can learn more from his enemies than a fool from his friends” (doubtful). No interview or book with the other has been found: “I’m prepared to take 20 per cent risk, not more” (doubtful).

Other lines have no source at all. “From success you learn absolutely nothing. From failure and defeat you learn a lot” (doubtful) is found only on quotation websites, with no date or occasion, although it is close in spirit to what he told Arron about the podium. No source of 1976 has been found that has him say at Fuji “My life is worth more than a world title” (doubtful); his own words on that day are under Fuji: four tellings. The English sentence “I’m tired of driving round in circles” (doubtful) is a paraphrase of the German line about Montreal that Halter printed in 1982.

Some lines are his own story stretched. “The car is shit” (doubtful) became a catchphrase built on his account of the first Ferrari test, and was then given to other occasions. One maxim, “The secret is to win going as slowly as possible” (doubtful), rests on a single ear-witness: the writer Clive James wrote it down at a press conference at Estoril in 1984, and noted that the same line is given to Juan Manuel Fangio. As something Lauda said once, it is attributed; as a maxim of his own, it is doubtful.

A harder case concerns a driver in a burning car whom he did not stop to help. The remark is generally linked to the death of Roger Williamson at Zandvoort in 1973, and two wordings circulate. Der Spiegel printed one in 1982 without naming the race: “I’m paid to drive, not to park.” The other, “I’m a racing driver, not a fireman” (doubtful), has no source. Der Spiegel had also reported, in 1977, that after his own fire he said he would now stop and help.

An Italian line about his face, “Better my face burnt than my backside” (doubtful), is attributed to him on the Italian Wikiquote, through the engineer Claudio Lombardi, with no source. On Ayrton Senna in 1994, the words “He was the best driver who ever lived” (doubtful) are given to an article in Sports Illustrated of 9 May 1994 that could not be opened. And the saying on the cards handed to mourners in St Stephen’s Cathedral in 2019, “Never start stopping, never stop starting”, is an old German saying, chosen by his family, not a line of his.

Words given to the people around him circulate in the same way. On the Italian Wikiquote, citing only a book of sporting aphorisms of 1992, Enzo Ferrari calls him “Lauda is worse than Judas. He sold himself to the competition for thirty salamis” (doubtful), and the Formula One website’s Hall of Fame paraphrases James Hunt: “Niki’s withdrawal was an act of bravery” (doubtful). What his rivals and friends can be shown to have said is in What they said. The words he can be shown to have said are plainer than the ones written for him.