First he cheated death in a horrific crash. Then he lost his beloved airline. Now Niki Lauda is back in the sport which made him a legend. And, as Adam Sweeting reports, he’s not just along for the ride
Part of the allure of Formula One (F1) motor racing is the way its history has been shaped by extraordinary individuals, from Enzo Ferrari, the Don Corleone-ish team owner, to Bernie Ecclestone, super-entrepreneur. And up there with the sport’s greatest names is Niki Lauda, three-times world champion driver and, until recently, boss of his own airline.
In 1985, after 25 grand prix victories, he climbed out of the cockpit for good and threw all his energies into being chairman of Lauda Air. But last November he was ousted in a tumultuous boardroom clash with Austrian Airlines, which had taken a major shareholding in his company. A shaken Lauda was delighted to grab the opportunity to return to F1. Since March, he has been ensconced in the Berkeley Square headquarters of Ford’s luxury cars division, as chairman of its motor racing arm.
It’s the latest instalment in a career which has been a saga of mind over matter, most memorably his comeback from the near-dead after he crashed at the Nrburgring and suffered critical burns in 1976. The story of how he was racing again six weeks later, losing that season’s championship to James Hunt by a single point, is part of F1 folklore. Somewhat eccentrically, the diminutive 52-year-old still wears his trademark red Parmalat baseball cap over his scarred scalp, and has never bothered to give his face and mauled right ear a cosmetic makeover. Lauda is like a phantom of the opera who has come back to scare some hard-boiled pragmatism into the megabucks, body-beautiful world of F1.
He was once described as being “pathologically decisive”, and he appears to thrive on crisis, which is just as well because he has had to confront several ghastly ones. In 1991, one of Lauda Air’s Boeing 767 aircraft crashed in Thailand, killing 233 passengers and crew. Immediately, he flew out to the Thai jungle to hunt for clues. “To be responsible for [the death of] 233 people was the worst thing in my life,” he says, his functional English filtered through a thick Austrian accent.
An experienced pilot who regularly flew his company’s airliners, Lauda planned to quit the aviation industry if Lauda Air was found culpable (it wasn’t; mechanical failure was later blamed). “I didn’t care about me or the company, we just pushed and pushed until we knew what happened. Everybody was speculating about bombs and whatever. It was a real hard time. But thank God it was not us.”
Almost as gruelling was his forced resignation from the Lauda Air chair. He founded the airline following his temporary retirement from F1 in 1979, and ran it as a lean and profitable company, in marked contrast to his state-owned rival, Austrian Airlines. But when his previous operating partner, Lufthansa, sold their shareholding to Austrian, Niki had problems.
“Unfortunately the two guys running Austrian were government people who think only of unions and bureaucracy. They forced us to operate their way, which meant our cost advantage disappeared. I couldn’t stop it so I resigned. But those two guys got sacked two weeks ago, so now my war is over.”
Business deals seem to excite him even more than his three driver’s championships. For instance, he is one of the few people who can claim to have got the better of Ecclestone, a feat he accomplished when he was driving for his Brabham team in the late 70s.
“I woke up one morning and I don’t know why, but I said I want to earn $2-million, and I think Bernie was paying me $600 000. Bernie fainted. He said, ‘There’s no way I’m paying that.’ Then he went to all the other team managers and said, ‘Listen, that idiot Lauda wants $2-million don’t you guys ever give him this amount of money because we’re the team owners and we’ll be screwed.'”
Then the wily Lauda told Parmalat, who sponsored both himself and the team, that he would no longer drive for Brabham if they continued to sponsor it. “They said OK, we won’t sponsor them. We went to a meeting with Bernie and, to cut a long story short, Bernie gave me a really nasty look and signed my $2-million contract. But from that moment on he was completely friendly again. Bernie is the type of man who when you shake hands with him, it’s a deal. He’s not at all what people sometimes think.”
The two men remain close. “When Niki was at Ferrari he more or less ran Ferrari,” Ecclestone says. “Even though Mr Ferrari was alive, Niki was still the superstar. When he came to us, I said to Niki, ‘There’s only one superstar at Brabham and that’s me, and you’re a race driver. You deliver.’ We got on like a house on fire always.”
Lauda was born into a wealthy family of Viennese industrialists who owned a string of paper factories, but he gives them no credit for his business acumen. “They didn’t teach me about business, but I learned to hold a knife and fork properly,” he says. But he probably inherited some bloody-minded toughness from his grandfather, who promised to buy Niki a car if he passed his school exams. Lauda cribbed the answers from the girl sitting next to him, then proudly presented his certificate to his grandfather and asked politely about the car.
“He said. ‘The car? Are you nuts? Forget it.’ I was pissed off and I went home to my father. My father said, ‘He promised me a horse when I got my first degree, and I never got it,’ so then I said fuck him and went into racing.”
He lost touch with his parents, who had pressured him to join the family business, and only his horrific crash in 1976 prompted a thawing of the frostiness between them. With no sponsorship of his own, Lauda had to struggle hard to raise money to buy himself an F1 drive. Again, he experienced the malign influence of his grandfather, who was a board member of an Austrian bank and vetoed a proposed loan to his grandson. But eventually, Lauda’s talent impressed Enzo Ferrari enough to earn him a drive, and he won championships with Ferrari in 1975 and 1977. The following year Ferrari’s political intrigues drove him to Brabham.
“Enzo Ferrari was the most charismatic individual I’ve ever met, an unbelievable personality,” he says. “But when I went to drive for Bernie, he was pissed off like you cannot believe.” Every Christmas I’d get a Christmas card with ‘Enzo Ferrari’ written in blue ink, but after that, nothing.”
He didn’t speak to Enzo for four years, until he saw him at the race-track at Imola. “He opened the window of his car and said, ‘Come here.’ He looked in my eyes, smiled and kissed my cheek, and the peace was back on. Then he wrote me letters again.”
Today Lauda’s task is to apply his no-nonsense attitude to propelling Jaguar Racing, Ford’s F1 team, to the front of the pack. “We’re starting from 10th or 12th position on the grid,” he says. “What we have to do now is quickly catch up with Ferrari, McLaren and Williams.”
By 2003 he wants to see Jaguar’s “leaping cat” springing regularly on to the winner’s podium. But despite Eddie Irvine’s recent third place in Monaco a big confidence booster after last year when Jaguar finished ninth out of 11 teams it’s a huge task.
“The big advantage I have now is that I’ve been away from F1 for 15 years, so I didn’t come from being a spoilt driver into a management position. I don’t think that works, because you expect an easy life and to be treated like the king. I came out of the more difficult world of the aviation business, and I was trained to run a big group of people with all the union restrictions and so forth.”
Despite his dislike of the current fashion for electronic driver aids, would he want to be a driver today? “Sure!” he declares. “In America I could sue my mother for giving birth too early and causing me loss of income, because I could earn 10 times more money today. The other advantage is the cars are not dangerous any more, so I would stay alive and I wouldn’t burn my ear off.” Watch out, Eddie Irvine, or he’ll steal your car.