The way up From a hill climb to Formula One, 1968–⁠1971

On Easter Monday, 15 April 1968, a driver entered as “A N Lauder” took a Mini Cooper S up the hill climb at Bad Mühllacken, near Linz. It was the first race of Niki Lauda’s life, and he was 19.

The Mini had been a racing car before it was his. By the Austria-Forum’s account he got it from Fritz Baumgartner, one of the country’s best touring-car drivers, in exchange for a car he had repaired after an accident; by Motor Sport’s, the price included a few laps of the Semperit tyre company’s test track at Kottingbrunn, where he found the right line at once. Baumgartner gave the novice one instruction: the engine would rev to 9,000, but he was to use no more than 8,000.

Lauda kept to it on his first run and was 3rd-quickest. On the second he allowed himself another 500 and was the fastest in his class. He finished 2nd in class, 1.5 seconds behind the winner, and without the damage he could not have paid for. The boy who had run in his uncle’s kart engines at exactly the revolutions he was given, as the first chapter tells, had not changed.

The rest of 1968 was a season of odd jobs at the wheel. In July he shared a Mini with Fritz Hofer in the Nürburgring Six Hours, for the Bosch Racing Team of Vienna, and retired. On 4 August he took a Porsche 911S up the Tauplitz hill climb, 9.8 kilometres of Alpine toll road in Styria, won his class, finished 7th overall and was quicker than the winners of the bigger GT and sports-car classes. Another driver, Kary Seitz, was killed at the same meeting. He raced a Porsche 911 in Austrian touring-car events as well; for Brno, later that month, he was entered and did not arrive.

Formula Vee, 1969

For 1969 Kurt Bergmann, whom he had met at the Nürburgring three years before, gave him a works Kaimann. He was not paid; Helmut Marko, meanwhile, was being paid to drive for McNamara. Lauda’s own summary, nearly half a century later, took one sentence: “I renewed my association with Mr Bergmann in 1969, driving in Formula Vee, then tried F3 with a McNamara, though that was a disaster.”

Bergmann also found him a touring car. On 13 July, at the airfield circuit of Tulln-Langenlebarn, he drove the Opel Rekord 1900 known as the “Black Widow”, an aluminium-bodied former works car that had come to Bergmann without its engine. From 11th on the grid he was the fastest man on the track until the engine failed at half distance. The car never won a race.

His best-documented Formula Vee race came three weeks later, on the Nürburgring Nordschleife, in the support race to the German Grand Prix on 3 August. In practice he became the first driver to lap the circuit in a Formula Vee in under 10 minutes, and he started from the front row of a field of 50. In the race he and Marko ran together for 6 laps, both under the old record and nearly a minute clear of the 48 cars behind them. On the last run down the Döttinger Höhe, Marko forced him onto the grass and won. Lauda was 2nd, and the atmosphere on the podium, by one account, was icy. The two made it up the following year, at the Norisring, when Marko asked Lauda’s opinion of his Formula Vee car and won the next day.

A week after the Nürburgring he drove his first World Championship sports-car race, the 1000 km at the Österreichring on 10 August 1969, the circuit’s first international meeting. He shared Otto Stuppacher’s Porsche 910, entered by the Bosch Racing Team, and finished 21st, the last car classified, 37 laps behind the winning Porsche 917 of Jo Siffert and his co-driver, Ahrens. It was the 917’s first win.

The rest of his Formula Vee season is not recorded race by race, and the wins that some reference works credit to him that year have not been confirmed.

Formula Three and the Porsche, 1970

In 1970 he paid his way into Formula Three, in a McNamara Mk3B. The team was Francis McNamara’s, based at Lenggries in Bavaria; the Austria-Forum has him buying the entry in England. He travelled Europe alone, with the car on a trailer behind him, and the season was a run of accidents. By the account of The Guardian’s obituary he destroyed a car within the first five minutes of his first practice session. In July he crashed heavily at Brands Hatch, and the McNamara was rebuilt with pale-blue bodywork. At the Kanonloppet at Karlskoga, on 9 August, he was 3rd in his heat with the fastest lap and 5th in the final.

The previous year after a few Formula 3 races I had decided I was wasting my time because the guys were all too crazy and there were too many accidents. So my solution had been to move straight to Formula 2.

In the same year he raced sports cars. A Swiss businessman who wanted an introduction to Lauda’s father helped to pay for a second-hand Porsche 908/2, a three-litre open sports car; Niki agreed to speak for him, and his father knew nothing of it. The Bosch Racing Team ran the car, and for the rest of the year it took him round the Interserie and the sports-car races of Germany and beyond.

His first race in it was the Interserie round at the end of June, at the Norisring, where he was 5th on aggregate and 3rd in the three-litre class. A week later he was 12th at Hockenheim. On 12 July he chose a paid drive over the Interserie round at Croft the same weekend: a BMW 1602 for Alpina in the Nürburgring Six Hours, with René Herzog, his first race for the team. The distributor failed. A week later, on 19 July, he won the airfield race at Diepholz in the Porsche.

The 908/2 stayed with him into the autumn. He was 5th in the Imola 500 km on 13 September with Kottulinsky, at Imola, and 5th again in the Interserie at Thruxton a week later. At the Österreichring 1000 km on 11 October, with Peter Peter, he was 6th, and on 18 October he was 3rd in a sports-car race at the Nürburgring. Jon Saltinstall, who chronicled every race of his career, calls the 908/2 the car that impressed Lauda most in his early years.

For 1971 he wanted Formula Two, and for that he needed money he did not have.

March, 1971

The money for 1971 came from the Erste Österreichische Spar-Casse, the savings bank on whose supervisory board his grandfather sat. Its sponsorship, about 500,000 schillings, which Lauda later put at about £8,500, bought him a place in the works March team in European Formula Two, beside Ronnie Peterson. The car was the March 712M–⁠Cosworth FVA.

He moved to London, renting a flat from Max Mosley, one of the founders of March, close to Victoria Station. By his own account it was that year that he first met James Hunt,¹ who was racing a March in Formula Three: “He was living in Fulham, I think, so we knocked around together socially and became good friends”.

The Formula Two season was hard going. Of his first seven meetings he finished three: 10th at Thruxton, 6th in the Eifelrennen at the Nürburgring and 7th at Jarama. He retired in both heats at Mallory Park, a clutch put him out at Hockenheim and a gearbox bearing at Monza, and at Crystal Palace he failed to qualify from his heat. His best result came at Rouen on 27 June: 2nd to Peterson in his heat, 4th in the final. In the second half of the year he finished in the top 10 only at Kinnekulle, Brands Hatch, Albi and Vallelunga, never higher than 6th, and he did not go to the last two rounds. The table below gives every race.

Away from Formula Two he won. On 23 May, at the Salzburgring, he drove a Chevron B19 in the European two-litre sports-car championship and beat Helmut Marko’s Lola. For Alpina he shared a BMW 2800 CS with Gérard Larrousse in the Spa 24 Hours, at Spa-⁠Francorchamps, and retired, and he was 3rd with Günther Huber in a long-distance race at the Nürburgring in July, a Six Hours by one record and a 24 Hours by another.

The Österreichring, 15 August 1971

His first World Championship Grand Prix was his home race. For the Austrian Grand Prix the STP March Racing Team ran a third works car, a March 711–⁠Ford, No. 26, beside those of Peterson and Nanni Galli, and Lauda drove it. By his own account the drive was arranged and paid for by the organisers.

That was a one-off because the organisers wanted an Austrian in the race. They organised everything, but the result didn’t deter me because I knew it was a shit car.

He qualified 21st, in 1:43.68, next to last of the 22 starters and more than 6 seconds off the pace. He retired after 20 laps with handling trouble. Jo Siffert won for BRM; Peterson finished 8th. Helmut Marko, also given an early start that year, was 11th. Lauda would win his home Grand Prix once, in 1984, at his 11th entry there, and no other Austrian has won a World Championship Austrian Grand Prix.

For 1972 what he needed was a full season, and the price of that was higher still.

The veto

In the autumn of 1971 Max Mosley offered him a full season with March for 1972, in Formula One and Formula Two, for 2.5 million schillings.² One of the directors of the Erste gave him the all-clear, and Lauda signed with Mosley and Robin Herd. Back in Vienna the director told him that a sum of that size had to go before the bank’s supervisory board, and then came back with its answer: no.

One of its members was his grandfather, Hans Lauda, and he vetoed the money. In 2009 Lauda called him a member of the board; in 2010 he called him its chairman, and the records consulted do not settle which. The family history of 2009 says the old man intervened to bring the boy to his senses. Lauda’s own judgement, in 2010, was brief: “He was a very, let’s say, despotic grandfather.”

He rang the old man himself: “I telephoned my grandfather and asked him if he could please f*** off interfering in my business.” Hans Lauda refused, and told him that no Lauda would ever be a racing driver. Lauda never spoke to him again. Asked in 2017 whether they had ever been reconciled, he answered: “I ignored him after he stopped that bank loan and unfortunately he died before I became world champion.”

He was furious with the bank, and he felt bound to his contract all the same: breaking it, he said, was not the way he had been brought up. Hans Lauda died in January 1974, as the first chapter records.

The security

He went to a rival bank, a Raiffeisenkasse, and explained that he had a chance to enter Formula One. As he told it in 2009: “Then the manager asked what would happen if I killed myself. I thought ‘shit, I hadn’t thought of that.’” The solution was life insurance. With the policy as security, the Raiffeisenkasse made him a five-year loan without interest, in return for the bank’s name on the car and on his helmet.

The earliest record of the deal is Der Spiegel’s, in July 1975, in the summer of his first title: a credit of 350,000 marks, roughly the same sum, with his life insurance pledged to the bank, and his own four-word summary, the words above this chapter. Two years later the magazine quoted the bank’s advertising chief, Karl-Heinz Oertel, who had been counting on goodwill for the bank that brought an Austrian back into Formula One after Jochen Rindt’s death, as The Austrian tells.

He paid the loan back in full. In later retellings the two years have often been run together, the sponsorship of 1971 and the loan of 1972 made into a single loan, its sum converted into one currency or another. His own accounts, and two German-language books about him, keep them apart: in 1971 a bank paid for a season of Formula Two; in 1972, with his grandfather against him, another bank lent him the price of a season in Formula One and Formula Two, and the only security he could offer was himself.

He was 22, with one Grand Prix behind him, a contract with March for 1972 and a debt that only success could repay.