The retirements Montreal 1979, the return, and Adelaide 1985

On 28 September 1979, in Friday practice at Montreal for the Canadian Grand Prix, Niki Lauda drove about 10 laps in a new Brabham, came into the pits and stopped. By the end of the day he had retired from racing, at 30, a two-time World Champion with 17 Grand Prix wins.

The 1979 season had been a bad one. It was his second year with Brabham and its Alfa Romeo engines, and the Brabham BT48–⁠Alfa Romeo broke again and again: he finished two of his 13 races, 6th at Kyalami and 4th at Monza, and scored 4 points. Over the summer, Denis Jenkinson noted in Motor Sport, he announced his departure and then changed his mind. His autobiography, as quoted by The Race, says that he had agreed terms for 1980 with Bernie Ecclestone worth US$2 million.

I had a lousy season behind me and was slowly losing interest in the game… Beating down the financial wizard was a damn sight more fun than driving.

A week after Monza he won at Imola in the BT48, in the Dino Ferrari Grand Prix, a race outside the championship; and at Monza itself he had won the first BMW M1 Procar Championship. For the last two races of the season Brabham changed to Cosworth engines and built three new cars, the BT49. Lauda, Jenkinson wrote, had not seen them built and had not even sat in one; his team-⁠mate, Nelson Piquet, had done all the testing. Jenkinson saw one driver on the way down and the other on the way up.

What happened on the Friday is best told by Jenkinson, who was there. Lauda drove about 10 laps in BT49/03 and then went to his hotel, “… leaving Bernie Ecclestone to circulate a bare-faced lie that the Austrian was unwell.” Only in the afternoon did the team admit officially that he had retired from Formula One and had broken his contract with it. The car went to Ricardo Zunino, who was in Montreal by chance; the entry for No. 5 was changed with difficulty, and Zunino, not ready for it, drove on Friday in Lauda’s helmet and overalls, which confused a good many people. He finished 7th in the race, 4 laps down. The mechanics had spent days and nights building the new cars, and Jenkinson reported that they were not amused.

His own account

Lauda told it as a matter of feeling. In his autobiography, as quoted much later, he described the Cosworth V8, after a career of twelve-cylinder engines, as flatter and more muted, slower and somehow boring, and then: “I have only one thought: you don’t belong here, you don’t belong here at all… Go and do something else. Now” (attributed). He did a few laps, asked for changes, went out again, and decided that Formula One was finished for him. In 2017 he described the vibration of the engine in his back, and a curtain coming down.

Ecclestone told it in 2019, and as a story of management. Lauda, he said in a television interview reported through a Slovenian website, wanted to stop at the end of the year; Ecclestone told him to stop at once, in case he had an accident that day, and when Lauda asked what he should do, gave him an answer: “Take off your overalls, get in the car and disappear” (attributed). The wording has come back into English through a Slovenian report. It differs from Jenkinson’s report in tone, not in substance: both have Ecclestone managing the exit.

The words most often put in Lauda’s mouth, that he was tired of driving round in circles, have no contemporary record. Jenkinson quotes nothing he said, and no printing of 1979 has been found. The earliest version found is the one Der Spiegel printed in January 1982, more than two years later, in a scene its writer may not have witnessed.

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?

The idea was his, all the same. To an American news agency in 1985 he gave his own version, in English: “I was just fed up after 10 years of racing, driving around in circles” (attributed). The exact words of Montreal are not known.

Jenkinson likened the exit to James Hunt’s, and reflected that the sport Lauda was leaving had given him a good living and had once nearly killed him; his words close the 1979 season.

The race went on without him. Montreal 1979 is not one of his 176 World Championship entries: he drove the car only in practice, and the entry was Zunino’s.¹ Jenkinson ended his report on the day by remarking that some had almost forgotten, by evening, that Lauda had ever led the Brabham team.

He left, by Jenkinson’s account, for the other side of America, to get away from it all.

Two years away

Lauda Air, the airline he had started in 1979, was his work for two years. It was not easy. By early 1982, Der Spiegel reported, it had two Fokker F27s and was struggling: the officials of the state carriers had kept him from the profitable landing rights. In March 1982 the magazine wrote that he had flown into losses with the airline and hoped to repair them in Formula One. The Austrian chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, liked to fly with Lauda Air, with Lauda at the controls of the Fokker.

He also commentated on the races for ORF, Austrian television. And one man kept in touch with him. Ron Dennis, whose Project Four team had run Lauda’s BMW M1 in the Procar races of 1979, rang him from time to time.

Ron would call me every few months, just for a chat, and in 1981 I attended the Austrian GP and found I quite enjoyed it.

At the Austrian Grand Prix of August 1981 he was in the commentary box. He watched a crash at the start and, he said in 2019, was shocked by his own reaction: “Everything came back: instinct; fearlessness, all at once – and it shocked me” (attributed). A few weeks later, at Monza, he saw John Watson crash heavily, and felt it again. He asked Dennis for a test.

First he went to Willi Dungl, the trainer who had guided his recovery in 1976. Dungl told him he was overweight and unfit, and he began training before he talked seriously to anyone.

Donington, 16 September 1981

Dennis chose Donington Park for the test because Formula One did not go there, and secrecy mattered. Guards kept the press out; that week Autosport reported, wrongly, that Lauda was testing a Brabham. Watson, three days after his crash at Monza, set the McLaren MP4 up for him.

The accounts of the day do not agree. In his autobiography, as quoted by McLaren, Lauda wrote that at first he did not have the strength to drive 3 laps in a row, and that by the afternoon he was a tenth of a second off Watson’s best. John Barnard, McLaren’s designer, remembered him doing about 3 laps, sweating and exhausted, and saying that he knew what he needed to do. McLaren’s own history gives 48 laps for the day. Barnard may have meant the first run.

That week he talked to the Italian journalist Pino Allievi. “After two years, you know, it was very nice to be back in a racing car… I enjoyed it, and actually felt quite emotional about it” (attributed). He also told Allievi that he could be as competitive as before he retired, but that for the moment it was fifty-fifty. Others wanted him: Frank Williams, who was losing Alan Jones, approached him, and Brabham and Arrows were named too. Dennis, for his part, also talked to Gilles Villeneuve.

On 12 November 1981 McLaren announced Lauda as Watson’s team-⁠mate for 1982, and on the same day the agreement with Porsche to build a turbo engine. At the launch Lauda called himself a pensioner coming back, and said that the saying that comebacks never work was one more reason to try. Dennis told Autosport what he expected: if the car could finish second, Lauda would finish second rather than crash trying to win, and that, he thought, was where his strength lay.

Bissl schon … Was mache ich, wenn ein paar Hirnverbrannte dabei sind?

A bit, yes … What do I do if there are a few lunatics out there?

Asked by Der Spiegel in January 1982 whether he was afraid, he admitted to a little. Testing that winter, at Clermont-⁠Ferrand and Paul Ricard, was not without risk: at Ricard a rear-suspension failure caused a big accident.

In January 1982 Hans Halter of Der Spiegel gave three reasons for the return and called them all true: the airline’s difficulties; a Formula One that had never had so many races, so much money and so many sponsors; and the wish to show the pale imitators once more, to see how he would manage.

The money

He negotiated his 1982 pay directly with the team’s sponsor, and argued that his value to them in publicity outweighed any doubt about his form. What he was paid is told in several ways that cannot all be right. Der Spiegel wrote in January 1982 that the comeback earned him more than 12 of his rivals put together, and that his personal sponsors shared his overalls and car for US$1.15 million. Formula One’s own history speaks of a reported US$5 million, the most lucrative contract in the sport’s history; later retellings have him charging one dollar for his driving and the rest for his personality, a line with no contemporary source. The figures may measure different things: a sponsors’ package, a team salary, a total.²

What is clear is that he was paid far more than any rival, that the team’s sponsor met much of it, and that McLaren kept an option to end the contract early in the season if it did not work. Barnard thought him very expensive at the time, but a World Champion, who knew how to win.

In 2019 Lauda denied that he had come back for the money: you cannot race for money, he said, only make money by racing well. “You race because you like to race, or you need to race” (attributed). In 1985 he told an American agency that he had come back “to see what had changed in two years, whether I could compete” (attributed). The motives sit side by side, and none of the sources chooses between them.

The second career

His first race back, the South African Grand Prix at Kyalami in January 1982, began with a strike. The drivers refused to practise on the Thursday over the terms of the new super-licence, spent the night together in Johannesburg and then gave way; Lauda, at the head of the protest with Didier Pironi, went on South African television the evening before the race to apologise to the public. In the race he started 13th, paced himself, and finished 4th, fit and fresh, Motor Sport noted, with his car in perfect condition.

In his third race back, at Long Beach on 4 April 1982, he won, in the McLaren MP4/1B, with the fastest lap. The 1982 season brought a second win, at Brands Hatch, and 5th place in the championship. Two years later, with the TAG Porsche engine and Alain Prost as his team-⁠mate, he won the title of the 1984 season by the narrowest margin there had ever been, half a point: 72 to Prost’s 71.5. It was his third title.

The Österreichring, 17 August 1985

He began 1985 as champion, with the No. 1 on a McLaren MP4/2B–⁠TAG, and the car broke under him again and again: of his 14 starts that year he finished only three, and of the 11 retirements only one, a spin at Monaco, was plainly his own doing. When he came to his home race in August he had 5 points; Michele Alboreto had 46 and Prost 41. His relations with Dennis had soured since the pay negotiations of 1984 and his talks with Renault; when those talks failed he had signed again for a third less.

On the Saturday of the Österreichring weekend, 17 August, before the morning test session, he told the press that this season would be his last. David Tremayne, drawing on Lauda’s own book, tells how Dennis took the microphone at the press conference and upstaged him, which Lauda took as an insult. By McLaren’s own account Dennis had wanted to keep him for one more year at least, and the decision went very much against his wishes.

…everyone was very appreciative of the straight forward way he did it this time, unlike the underhand way he had retired in 1979.

In the race he led after Prost’s stop, until his engine failed on lap 40. Prost won.

His reasons, as he gave them later, were simple: Prost was the next generation, and quicker in the same car, and it was time to go. In 2014 he told Adam Cooper of Motor Sport that without Prost he would have stopped perhaps two years later. Tremayne adds that he was thinking more about danger after Piquet had told him that he expected to die in a racing car. The announcement set the drivers’ market moving: Keke Rosberg would go to McLaren for 1986, and Piquet to Williams.

Zandvoort and Adelaide

A week later, at Zandvoort on 25 August, he started 10th, stopped early for tyres, led when Prost made his own stop, and kept the quicker McLaren behind him through the closing laps, to cross the line 0.232 seconds ahead: the only win of his 1985 season, and the 25th and last of his career. Jenkinson called it vintage Lauda, and wrote that nobody had more track-craft. Tremayne, drawing again on Lauda’s book, tells of Dennis saying afterwards how pleased he was for him, and of Lauda’s answer, which the 1985 season quotes: he did not believe it, and did not care whether Dennis was pleased or not.

The rest of the season gave him little. His transmission failed at Monza. In Friday practice at Spa a sticking throttle sent him into the barrier and hurt his wrist, and he missed the Belgian Grand Prix and the European Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, where Watson drove his car. At Kyalami his turbo failed.

His last race was run through the streets of Adelaide on 3 November 1985, the first Australian Grand Prix to count for the World Championship. He started 16th and worked his way forward; on lap 56 he passed Ayrton Senna for the lead. Two laps later, with his brakes fading, he locked a rear wheel and hit the concrete wall.

In his second career he had started 58 Grands Prix and won eight of them, and the title of 1984; in all he had won 25 of the 171 he started.

Retirement. It was logical. You have to finish eventually. It was just the right time for me. I retired because Prost was clearly the next generation. I was World Champion back when he first got a driving licence… My time had arrived: there was another guy in the car who was quicker than me, so it was time to go. … It was the second time I’d retired so I knew what I was doing! It was a good decision. I drove in good spirits after that. I didn’t win in Austria but I won at Zandvoort in the next race. I think I finished my driving career correctly.

The first time, he had slipped away in the middle of practice and left the team to announce it. The second time he announced it himself, in public, and kept to it.