1977 Fewer wins, more finishes, a second title, and a walk-out before the end

A cold start

He came back to a team that had rearranged itself while he was away. Carlos Reutemann, signed while Lauda was recovering from the Nürburgring in 1976, was now his team-⁠mate, and Clay Regazzoni had gone. Lauda had spent part of the winter on another skin-graft operation to his face. The car was the Ferrari 312T2 of the year before, now carrying No. 11.¹

In January Luca di Montezemolo, by then working in the Fiat group, spoke publicly of a Ferrari team pulling together with Lauda fully recovered, and the journalist Jeremy Walton called him Lauda’s strongest supporter inside the group. The first races were less united. At Buenos Aires on 9 January Lauda half-spun in practice and seemed, to Alan Henry of Motor Sport, very confused about the car; Henry took it as a sign that little real development had been done while Lauda was having his operation. He started 4th, the engine misfired from the early laps, and the fuel-metering unit failed on lap 20.

At Interlagos a fortnight later he and Mauro Forghieri argued over the springs. Henry watched the engineer insist on how the car ought to behave on a particular setting, and the Austrian quietly insist that, whatever the engineer thought, it did not. Lauda started 13th and finished 3rd. Reutemann, the man hired in his absence, won the race: Ferrari’s first win of the year.

Second, and second again

At Long Beach on 3 April he took pole with a last, all-out lap at the end of practice and the race’s fastest lap was his, but Mario Andretti passed him late on to win by 0.773 seconds. At Jarama on 8 May he qualified 3rd, then felt a sharp pain in his side during the morning warm-up; at the hospital a cracked rib was found, which Jenkinson thought might come from last year’s injuries mending slowly. He did not start, and his place on the grid was left empty.

For Monaco his seat was remoulded to hold him better. Der Spiegel reported that a horsehair, caught somewhere in the cockpit and fluttering in the wind, upset him there, and that the mechanics heard about it. He started 6th, inherited 2nd when John Watson’s brakes failed, and closed on Scheckter’s Wolf at the end, to finish 0.889 seconds behind.

At Zolder on 5 June he started 11th, and a quick stop for slicks put him in the lead until Nilsson’s Lotus caught and passed him: 2nd again. At Anderstorp he started 15th, could not get past Oliver’s Shadow, stopped to change tyres and wings, and gave up after 47 laps with the car handling badly. He was 5th at Dijon-⁠Prenois after a long fight in the midfield with Jacques Laffite and Nilsson. At Silverstone on 16 July he ran 2nd behind Watson early on, was passed by Hunt on lap 23, lost faith in his brakes, and held off Nilsson by 1.3 seconds to finish 2nd to Hunt.

It was not the dominance of 1975. Der Spiegel observed in September that he finished more often than his rivals, and that he preferred to drive to finish, as he put it, because his team wanted to keep the car in one piece as much as it wanted to be champion.

The points piled up from second places. At the end of the season the count was six second places, a third and three wins: 10 podiums from 14 starts.

Hockenheim and Zandvoort

The German Grand Prix had left the Nürburgring Nordschleife. At Hockenheim on 31 July, a year less a day after his crash, Lauda started 3rd, set the fastest lap and won by 14.3 seconds from Scheckter; Motor Sport’s caption made it a year to the day. Ferrari tried streamlined fairings behind the rear wheels there, and left them off.

At home at the Österreichring on 14 August he took pole, but was uneasy in the wet early laps and slipped to 10th before recovering to finish 2nd, 20.1 seconds behind Alan Jones’s Shadow. Jenkinson thought he had given up when Arturo Merzario went past him, and found little in the result to be proud of; that autumn he noted that he and Henry differed in their views of Lauda.

A fortnight later at Zandvoort he started 4th, passed Laffite’s Ligier on lap 20, and then had to work hard to keep it behind him for the rest of the race. The fastest lap, on lap 72, was his, and he won by 1.9 seconds. It was his third win of the year; Ferrari had won 15 races with him, and this was the last. At Monza a fortnight later he and Hunt went together to see Andretti, to complain about Andretti’s driving at Zandvoort, where Andretti had tried to pass him round the outside at Tarzan.

Notice to Ferrari

Before the Italian Grand Prix, of all races, Lauda gave Ferrari notice on his yearly contract, and signed to drive for Brabham, with Alfa Romeo engines, in 1978. Der Spiegel put the Brabham fee at a record 1.4 million marks, twice the 700,000 that Ferrari had paid him for the year, and reported that the Italian dairy firm Parmalat would follow him to Brabham and fund its budget of 3 million marks. Motor Sport said he could afford to turn down £200,000 to stay. The figures are the papers’ reports, not a contract’s. Lauda put the principle in one line: “There’s no limit to performance and pay”.

Money was not the only reason the magazine gave. At Brabham he would lead a team run by Bernie Ecclestone, head of the constructors’ association, while he chaired the drivers’ safety body himself, and he would have more influence over the sport. Der Spiegel also counted his other income: about 150,000 marks a year from the Raiffeisen banks, which had backed his move into Formula One, and about 180,000 from the mineral-water firm Römerquelle for the space on his cap.

At Monza on the Friday he spun into the barrier coming out of the Parabolica on special Goodyear tyres and walked back to the pits; a brain fault, he told Hans Halter of Der Spiegel, the kind he made once a year and only in practice. In the grandstands at least one banner begged him not to leave Maranello for Brabham. He started 5th and drove a steady race to 2nd behind Andretti.

On 25 September Der Spiegel put him on its cover, a point short of the title. The same magazine reported that once his departure was known, Enzo Ferrari sneered that there were Laudas by the dozen.

Watkins Glen, and the last two races

By Watkins Glen he was plainly out of favour in the team. Ferrari suspended his mechanic, Ermanno Cuoghi, from working on his car from the Sunday morning, because Cuoghi too had decided to leave and follow him to Brabham; Alan Henry thought the management had gone a little too far. On 2 October Lauda started 7th and drove a cautious race to 4th, 1 minute 40.6 seconds behind the winner. It was enough: he was World Champion for the second time, with two rounds to spare, and it was his last race for Ferrari.

At Mosport a week later Ferrari entered a third car, for Gilles Villeneuve. Lauda was very cool about the idea, and after a row over Cuoghi’s departure he told the team manager, Roberto Nosetto, that he would not take part. Villeneuve drove for Ferrari in Canada and in Japan; at Fuji, Henry put Lauda’s absence down to personal whim. Jenkinson, who had found little to admire in his drive at the Österreichring, wrote in November:

The title was won with 72 points, all of them counted, to Scheckter’s 55, Andretti’s 47 and Reutemann’s 42.

That autumn Halter wrote that Lauda’s real passion was flying: he had already flown a small jet from Salzburg to California, by way of Iceland and Greenland. In 1978 he drove for Brabham; in 1979 he founded an airline.