1972 A season bought on credit

In pouring rain at Oulton Park on Good Friday, 31 March 1972, Niki Lauda won a Formula Two race in the works March 722. It was the only Formula Two win of his career, and it came in the one part of his season that went right. In Formula One that year, in the same team and beside the same team-⁠mate, Ronnie Peterson, he started 12 Grands Prix and scored nothing. He had paid for both seasons with money he did not have, and when the year ended the team that had taken it had no car for him.

Borrowed money

The season was paid for before it began, with money that was not his. In the autumn of 1971 March had offered him Formula One and Formula Two in its works team for 1972, at a price of 2.5 million schillings, and he had signed on the word of a bank director. The bank’s board, his grandfather Hans Lauda among its members, then refused, and Lauda never spoke to his grandfather again. A Raiffeisenkasse lent him the sum instead, for five years and free of interest, with a policy on his life as security. Der Spiegel, telling the story in 1975, put the credit at 350,000 marks, about the same amount. How the money was found is told in full in The way up; Lauda told it that way in 2009 and in 2017, and differently in 2000.¹

It was a debt he could not repay without success. He worked out what an ordinary job would have meant: “I sat down and calculated that if I got an office job, it was going to take me about 50 years to pay back the money.” For March the money mattered too. The company built more than 80 racing cars in 1972, 12 of them for Formula One, and was still close to collapse; Motor Sport judged in 2009 that without Lauda’s schillings it might not have survived the winter before.

The 721X

The season began in the March 721, an update of the 1971 car, while Robin Herd, March’s designer and one of its founders, finished something more radical. In Argentina, at Buenos Aires, Lauda started 22nd and finished 11th in his first race as a full-time works driver. At Kyalami on 4 March, where both works cars were still 721s because the new design was not ready, he sat on the tail of Graham Hill’s Brabham for much of the race and finished 7th, a lap down: his best result of the year. Motor Sport wrote that the former champion had given him some good lessons in racecraft.

The March 721X had its Alfa Romeo sports-car gearbox mounted between monocoque and engine, in front of the rear axle, so that the car’s mass sat closer to its middle. Herd believed in it, and so did Peterson, 2nd in the championship of 1971; when the two drivers disagreed, the team listened to Peterson. Lauda first drove it at Silverstone and, by his account, found it had no downforce, understeered and oversteered, was slow on the straight and had an awful gearchange. Of the gearbox he said that changing from fifth to fourth could give second or first: “It was just pure luck if you got the right gear.”

In 2000, in a first-person account of the 721X for Motor Sport, he put the money and the timing first: “It was the one time I needed not to get into a bad car.” He had borrowed to drive it, and it was bad.

Its first race was the Spanish Grand Prix at Jarama on 1 May. Lauda was last on the grid, 25th, and gave up after 7 laps with the differential misbehaving and the throttle sticking. Motor Sport said the limited-slip differential could not decide when to slip and when to hold. At Monaco on 14 May, in heavy rain, he finished 16th, 6 laps down and 2 laps behind Mike Beuttler, a privateer, in a car March had built for him in nine days from a Formula Two chassis. At Nivelles on 4 June he started 25th again and finished 12th, 3 laps down. It was the 721X’s last race.

Ronnie and I had built ourselves up into this untouchable team, and we were blind to the 721X’s problems. Niki wasn’t. He sussed it straight away. He came in after two or three laps, said it was bloody rubbish and went off in a huff. And he was right.

Herd, in 2009, named the faults himself: a slow, baulky gearchange, a single set of ratios, and a tiny differential that was permanently locked. He said he had known Lauda was good, but that he could not bring himself to listen to a driver who had paid for his seat, and he remembered how Lauda had looked to him then: “Niki looked like a little rat, with that buck-toothed smile.” Herd’s image, recalled in 2009, is the one that later became his nickname.

Both men told the story of the oil additive: Herd once suggested pouring STP, the sponsor’s product, into the differential. Lauda took it as proof that the team did not understand the car, and was never sure whether Herd was joking; Herd said he had been trying, honestly, to free a differential that was locked.

Lauda’s own counter was the stopwatch. In testing, he said, his times were close to Peterson’s and sometimes quicker. In the races Peterson finished ahead of him 10 times in 12.

The 721G

After Nivelles Herd gave up on the X. In its place March raced the 721G, the car first built for Beuttler on the monocoque of the Formula Two 722: G for the Guinness Book of Records, for the nine days it had taken. It was better, and still no points came. At Clermont-⁠Ferrand on 2 July, in his first race in a 721G, Lauda was nearly 5 seconds slower than Peterson in qualifying, and out after 4 laps with a driveshaft failure.

For the British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch he was given a new car, 721G/4, but it was not finished until the end of Thursday practice, and until then he did his laps in Beuttler’s. He started 19th, his best grid of the year (equalled at Mosport), and finished 9th, 3 laps down. At the Nürburgring Nordschleife a blocked fuel system cost him the last practice session, and he started 24th, more than 20 seconds slower than Peterson in qualifying; a split oil tank put him out after 4 laps.

His home Grand Prix was on 13 August at the Österreichring. On the day before official practice, Matra lent him its spare car while Chris Amon had not yet arrived; Lauda blew up its engine and left it out on the circuit. In the race he started 22nd, passed Jacky Ickx’s failing Ferrari, harried François Cevert, and finished 10th, a lap down.

At Monza his 721G ran with twin radiators in a full-width nose, where Peterson kept his radiators at the sides. On the first lap dust and stones jammed the throttle; 3 laps went in the pits, and he finished 13th, 5 laps down. At Mosport in September he spun, was push-started and lost 15 laps, and was disqualified for receiving outside assistance. At Watkins Glen, the last race of the season, he started 25th, stopped twice with the fuel-metering unit and spun with Beuttler 3 laps from the end. He was still running at the flag, 10 laps behind, and was not classified.²

So the Formula One season closed: 12 starts, no points and no place in the championship, which Emerson Fittipaldi won for Lotus with 61 points. Peterson, in the same cars, was 9th with 12. March was 6th among the constructors with 15 points, every one of them scored by Peterson or by the Williams-entered cars.

The title that kept him going

In Formula Two the March 722 was competitive, and so was he. The works cars ran Ford BDA engines prepared by Race Engine Services and, at some meetings, Cosworth BDFs. The season opened at Mallory Park on 12 March, where he was 2nd on aggregate to David Morgan over two heats. Then came Oulton Park and the rain: he won the 40 laps in 1h 12m 34.0s, at an average of 91.31 mph (146.95 km/⁠h). At Thruxton on 3 April he won one heat and Peterson the other, and Lauda was 3rd in the final; at Hockenheim on 16 April he was fastest in practice and did not finish.

Then the failures began, most of them in the engine. He retired at Pau; at Hockenheim in June he started from pole and was out with the ignition; he retired again at Rouen, at the Österreichring and at Mantorp Park, and at Crystal Palace an engine failure kept him out of the final. OldRacingCars, summing up his year, puts it down to engine trouble in the works March. He was 3rd at Imola in July and 6th at the Salzburgring in September.

The British Formula Two Championship was decided at Oulton Park on 16 September. Peterson won and Lauda was 2nd; by Lauda’s account, James Hunt, in a year-old March, led the two of them for a while. With 31 points to Peterson’s 27 he was the British champion. In the European championship he was 5th, with 24 points.

He raced saloons too. In the Alpina team’s BMW 2800 CS he retired at Brno in May with a broken gearbox, and was 3rd at Zandvoort in August, sharing the car with Toine Hezemans and Gerold Pankl. In November, after the Formula One season, he and Jody Scheckter shared a BMW-engined March sports car in the Kyalami Nine Hours, and were 4th. A non-⁠championship Formula One race at Vallelunga in June found him on the entry and not on the grid; accounts differ on what happened in practice.

Away from the circuits he and Peterson shared a flat and drove out to March at Bicester together; by Lauda’s account Peterson was a supportive team-⁠mate. In 2005 Lauda dated his friendship with Hunt, who was also racing a March in Formula Two, to this year and to his first time living in London; in 1998 he had put their first meeting in 1971.

No car for 1973

Late in the season March floated a line-up for 1973 of Chris Amon and Lauda, and this time without payment. Then, in November, Max Mosley told him that the company was in trouble and that there would be no Formula One car for him. He had nothing to drive, and he still had the loan.

The poor sod, we almost destroyed him. And Niki takes some destroying. He was as quick as Ronnie. At the Rouen F2 race we had to slow him down and let Ronnie past.

Driving away from the factory into Bicester, he said in 2000, he had for a moment the thought of ending his life, and put it aside at once.

What Lauda did next was another gamble. He telephoned Louis Stanley of BRM and offered himself, with a sponsor he did not yet have. That negotiation, and what came of it at Monaco, belong to 1973.