1973 Running third at Monaco, and a call from Maranello

On 3 June 1973, from the third row of the grid at Monaco, Niki Lauda’s BRM ran 3rd, behind Jackie Stewart and Emerson Fittipaldi and ahead of Jacky Ickx’s Ferrari, until its gearbox broke on lap 25. He did not finish, and he had no money to pay for the drive. By that evening, as he told it, BRM had waived the payment; the next morning Ferrari telephoned. No race of his early years changed more for him.

A drive on a promise

The year began with nothing. In November 1972 March had told him that it had no Formula One drive for him in 1973, and he still owed the bank for the 1972 season. He telephoned Louis Stanley, the head of BRM, whose wife Jean was its part-owner, and offered his services, with a sponsor he had not yet found.

To the meeting he took a man presented as being from his bank: its financial director, in his accounts of 2009 and 2017; a friend posing as one, in the version he told in 2019. Accounts differ on who he was, and on whether they met in Vienna or at an airport. As he told it, Lauda translated both ways for two hours. He steered the result: he would race, and the first instalment of his sponsorship would be due at Monaco. He knew, he said, that he had no money.

The bank manager did not speak any English and Stanley did not speak any German, so I could control the conversation. So, I signed my contract.

He asked to race from the first round, and he did, as BRM’s third driver beside Clay Regazzoni and Jean-⁠Pierre Beltoise, in the BRM P160 with its V12 engine. The car changed through the year, from the P160C of the first two races to the P160D at Kyalami and the P160E from Spain on, and so did his number: 34 in Argentina, then 16, 17 and 16 again, and 21 from Zolder to the end. By his account, in testing at Kyalami he was quicker than both, so Regazzoni asked to try his car. They swapped, Lauda set up Regazzoni’s car his own way, and he was still the quicker of the two.

BRM’s team manager, Tim Parnell, later remembered: “You could see straight off that he had that little bit extra; up to that point I had never seen such dedication” (attributed). The contemporary press was cooler. At Zolder Motor Sport thought he tried hard, if untidily. The results bore that out: over the season Regazzoni finished ahead of him 8 times to 5 and Beltoise 8 times to 6, and in qualifying Regazzoni was the quicker 8 times to 5 and Beltoise 10 times to 4.

The first points

The BRM rarely lasted. At Buenos Aires in January he started 13th and was out after 66 laps with falling oil pressure. At Interlagos his engine died on the circuit and he revived it himself, then stopped to have his seat belts tightened, and finished 8th, 2 laps down. At Kyalami he had climbed to 7th from 10th on the grid when the engine failed after 26 laps.

In the spring there were two races outside the championship. At Brands Hatch on 18 March, in the Race of Champions, he retired after 29 laps, but shared the new lap record, 1:23.0, with Beltoise and Ronnie Peterson. At Silverstone in April he was 5th in the BRDC International Trophy. At Montjuïc on 29 April he ran 6th early from 11th on the grid, then stopped with overheating tyres, as Regazzoni had, and was out after 28 laps.

At Zolder on 20 May he started 14th and ran 4th until, 2 laps from the end, he had to stop for fuel. He rejoined 5th and just failed to retake de Adamich: 5th place, 2 points, his first in the World Championship. They were the only points of his year.

Monaco, 3 June

At Monaco he qualified 6th. Once the queue of the first laps had sorted itself out he was 3rd, behind Stewart and Fittipaldi, with Ickx’s Ferrari and Wilson Fittipaldi behind him, and there he stayed until the gearbox broke on lap 25.

The instalment was due. That evening, as Lauda told it in 2009 and again in 2017, Stanley invited him and his girlfriend to dinner at the Hôtel de Paris, and Lauda confessed that he could not pay. Stanley’s answer, as Lauda recalled it 36 years later: “No matter. If you can sign this three-year contract with BRM, you won’t have to pay” (attributed). In the 2009 telling the new contract was worth £30,000 a year for three years; in 2005 Lauda said Stanley had signed him for 1974 and 1975 when his sponsorship ran out: “It was one hell of a gamble but I had no other choice.”

The next morning he was back at his small office in Salzburg, which he shared with a cousin and a secretary. He used to tell her, as a joke, to let him know wherever he was if Ferrari called. Now she told him Ferrari had called, and he did not believe her. He rang Luca di Montezemolo, went to Maranello and met Enzo Ferrari. He told Ferrari about the new BRM contract. As Lauda remembered Ferrari’s answer: “I saw you at Monaco driving ahead of our fabulous Ferrari. I want you to drive for us. … It doesn’t matter, we will fix it. We just want you to sign for us” (attributed). Lauda signed.

Ferrari’s own account puts the decision later. In his own writing, as Motor Sport quoted it in 2005, he said Regazzoni had encouraged the choice: “It was he [Regazzoni] who encouraged me in my choice of the racer I had been considering since the British Grand Prix to fill a gap in the team for 1974” (attributed). Ferrari did not go to races; he watched them on television. The two versions can stand together, a call after Monaco and a decision after Silverstone, but they are not the same story, and the date of the contract has not been found. Der Spiegel, in 1975, told the Monaco version.

Signing for Ferrari, he said in 2005, was a risk, because he expected to have to fend off legal action from BRM. BRM’s threatened action never came. In November Motor Sport reported him threatening to leave the team; in February 1974 it reported that he and Regazzoni had decided not to stay at Bourne.

Silverstone, Kesselchen and Mosport

At Anderstorp a faulty tank breather let fuel escape, and a stop for more left him 13th. At Paul Ricard all three BRMs ran without stopping; Lauda was 9th, on the lead lap.

In Ferrari’s own account, the British Grand Prix was the race that caught his eye. Lauda qualified 9th, ahead of Regazzoni. His driveshaft broke at the first start; Jody Scheckter’s first-lap accident stopped the race, and in the pause the BRM was repaired. At the restart he used the empty grid place in front of him and came through from the fourth row to 2nd, behind Peterson’s Lotus. A stop for tyres dropped him to 12th.

At Zandvoort he was fastest of all in a wet Friday session, a result Motor Sport called a freak. At the start of the race Ganley nudged him into the dirt at the first hairpin; he climbed back through the field until the fuel pump failed. Roger Williamson was killed in that race.

At the Nürburgring Nordschleife on 5 August he qualified 5th, his best grid of the year.

The performance by Lauda was particularly courageous, making the other BRM performers look a bit hopeless, but it was achieved more by enthusiasm than skill, for the young Austrian continues to arrive at corners too fast and leave them too slowly, instead of the reverse, which produces smoother, cleaner and faster driving.

The race lasted a lap. On the second, after Bergwerk, he sensed something wrong with the car; at the flat-out swerves of Kesselchen it left the road and was destroyed, and he broke his wrist. Denis Jenkinson suspected a deflating rear tyre. At the Österreichring two weeks later, at his home Grand Prix, he found in practice that the wrist would not let him race, and his car became Regazzoni’s spare.

He was back at Monza in September, 15th on the grid, and out after 33 laps when a tyre failed and he crashed. Then came Mosport, on 23 September, in the rain. From 8th on the grid he was 3rd after a fast start and took the lead on lap 3: the first time he had led a World Championship race. He led for 17 laps, until the track began to dry and he stopped for tyres on lap 20; the transmission failed later. In Canada, where Regazzoni did not race, Peter Gethin drove the third BRM.

At Watkins Glen, his last race for BRM, a faulty fuel pump cost him 20 laps in the pits. The databases record him retired after 35 laps; Motor Sport reported that he rejoined and was among the cars still running at the end. Stewart was champion with 71 points, ahead of Fittipaldi with 55 and Peterson with 52. Lauda, with 2, was 17th.

The Alpina saloons

Beside the BRM season he raced the BMW 3.0 CSL for Alpina, and there he won. The season of the European Touring Car Championship opened at Monza on 25 March with a race of four hours, and Lauda and Brian Muir won it: 142 laps, 816.5 kilometres, at an average of 202.862 km/⁠h (126.05 mph). At Spa-⁠Francorchamps in May he shared a car with Hans-⁠Joachim Stuck in the 1000 km, 7th overall and first of the touring cars. At the Nürburgring 1000 km three weeks later his car did not start, after an accident in practice.

On 23 and 24 June, at the Nürburgring, he and Hans-⁠Peter Joisten won the 24 Hours. Two weeks later the pair were 3rd in the Six Hours there. In July he retired at Diepholz with rear-axle failure.

For the Spa 24 Hours of 21 and 22 July Lauda was entered in Alpina’s car No. 21 but did not drive. Joisten was killed in that car in the race.

In February 1974 Motor Sport reported that Lauda, who had driven for Alpina’s BMWs the season before, was joining Ford’s team of Capris.

Fiorano

At the end of the year Lauda drove a Ferrari for the first time, the Ferrari 312B3, at the team’s test track at Fiorano. Every version he told begins with his verdict on the car; in 2009 it was this: “To be honest, the Ferrari was awful.” In 2005 and 2009 he told it through Piero Lardi, Ferrari’s son, who was translating: he asked Piero to tell his father so in the plainest words; Piero would not pass them on, and Lauda said instead that the car had too much understeer.

What followed he told three ways. In 2005 Ferrari had given him a week to lap Fiorano a second faster or be out; in 2009 he and Mauro Forghieri reckoned a change at the front was worth half a second, and he found it; in 2017 he had promised half a second and found eight tenths after Forghieri revised the front suspension. The verdict on the car, the understeer and the fix with Forghieri are the same each time. The numbers are not.

The place itself astonished him. Ferrari, he said, was then a bit of a disaster; yet at Fiorano, with its circuit and its technology, “I couldn’t believe that they weren’t winning.” In the constructors’ table of 1973 Ferrari had scored 12 points, the same as BRM. A year earlier he had been a paying driver with no car. He went into 1974 as a Ferrari driver, with Regazzoni beside him again.