Posted on 08/01/2025 11:09:02 AM PDT by nickcarraway
The F1 champion Niki Lauda had a horrifying accident in Germany in August 1976, 49 years ago this week. He was not expected to live, let alone race again. After defying all expectations, he told the BBC in 1977 how he willed himself to stay alive.
When Formula 1 racing driver Niki Lauda spoke to the BBC in 1977, his face bore testimony to the trauma he had endured during the German Grand Prix. Trapped inside the burning wreckage of his smashed Ferrari on the Nürburgring circuit, Lauda had been badly scarred and had lost part of his ear to the flames. But the Austrian driver confessed to having no recollection of the crash that almost cost him his life on 1 August 1976. "When I had the accident, I must have got a big bang on my head, and I lost the memory for I don't know, the last three minutes. And the following 20 minutes after the accident," he told the BBC just a year later.
When Lauda took part in the race, he was the reigning F1 world champion, having won his first title the year before. The 1976 season was shaping up to be a dramatic one, as Lauda and his rival, British driver James Hunt, battled it out for the top spot. (Their friendship and rivalry would become the subject of the Ron Howard film Rush in 2013, starring Daniel Brühl as Lauda and Chris Hemsworth as Hunt.) Lauda had already secured five wins going into the German Grand Prix, and was on course to clinch the world champion title again. But the sport was shockingly dangerous. By 1976, 63 drivers had been killed in Grand Prix motor racing, and on average one to two drivers were dying every season.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
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‘When he died at the age of 70 in May 2019, his former teammate at McLaren, John Watson, who had also taken part in that fateful German Grand Prix, told the BBC: “Racing 40 days after that accident was the most courageous act of any sportsman I’ve ever seen in my life.”’
I didn’t remember this. Nor having a double lung transplant at age 69 a year before his death.
John Watson of Team Penske (He was, indeed, Penske material, and also may have been “Watson from Accounting”) speaks highly of Lauda. Not sure if he let Lauda take his nickname “T-Bone” away, though. (I just made that part up).
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/may/21/niki-lauda-f1-motor-racing
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