- It's the 1976 German Grand Prix
and Formula One's reigning world champion
just slammed into an embankment at 174 miles per hour.
His Ferrari burst into a fireball and he's trapped
in the middle of an 800 degree hellfire
for an agonizing 55 seconds.
Burnt horribly, lungs scorched, he's given his last rights.
And 39 days later, he's back in a race car.
And nearly clenches the championship,
losing by just one point.
Who the (beep) is this guy?
And how did he come back
from what would have been a career ending crash
to win two more world championships
and change Formula One into the sport that we know today.
This is everything you need to know to get up to speed
on Niki Lauda.
(video game music)
Like a lot of F1 drivers,
Niki Lauda was born into extreme wealth, the Austrian kind.
Which involves a knighted great grandfather
and probably some gold of questionable origin.
But his ritzy industrialist family was never on board
with his chosen career.
Niki wanted a different life.
He wanted speed, danger. He wanted glory.
He wanted to be a race car driver,
and he was willing to fight for it.
Now that meant cutting off ties with his parents, so be it.
It's harsh, I know.
But the man was born to drive
and he would let nothing get in his way.
Not even his mommy and especially not even his dad.
Niki had a chill relationship with his uncle Heinz though.
And with Heinz's monetary assistance,
20 year old, Niki started racing in Formula Vee in 1969.
Nice.
What's Formula Vee?
I'm about to tell you.
It's a relatively cheap, open wheel racing class,
basically whittled down Volkswagen Beetles.
Tons of Formula One drivers get their start in Formula Vee.
Now this was a big step in the right direction
and Niki, he was stoked.
After a success in Formula Vee, he coughed up $30,000,
which is about $200,000 in today's money
for a drive in Formula 2.
How did he get this money?
Simple.
He borrowed it through his estranged family's connections
without their permission.
Ooh, what a rebel.
Screw you mommy!
And screw you too daddy!
Like I said,
the man wouldn't let anything get in the way of his goals.
Paying for a seat on a race team
was pretty common back in the day.
So it wasn't weird to see some random rich kid
on March Racing's F2 roster for the 1972 season.
What wasn't as common back in the day
was finding out that that random rich kid could drive.
The March team was surprised,
they have been so impressed that they bumped Niki up
to their Formula One team.
You guys!
Niki made it to Formula One astonishingly quickly.
And he did pretty good in his first season.
But he was held back by the small team's
less than competitive cars.
It's a story as old as time.
So Niki moved on to the legendary British Racing Motors
or BRM.
You ever heard of it?
The only problem is by the time that he got there,
the legend had sort of dried up.
BRM couldn't compete with
the Ford powered Lotuses and Tyrrells of the day.
But Niki fought hard behind the wheel.
His skills were obvious, obvious enough,
this one Italian guy named Enzo Ferrari took notes.
He was like,
"Get to me some Capocollo
and then find out that young man's name."
Niki was scooped up by none other than Scuderia Ferrari
for the 1974 Formula One season.
Little Niki Lauda, a boy who grew up watching F1 legends
like Juan Manuel Fangio win for Ferrari.
Now it was his turn and he didn't have to pay for the drive.
They paid him.
Niki spent 1974 proving, he was much more than a cash cow.
Because cows can't even take fourth place
in the Driver's Championship.
Niki Lauda did.
Cows don't even know how to drive.
So now we're in 1975.
Later in life, Niki would call this his dream year.
Probably because it was the first time that he won
a Formula One Championship, which yeah, I mean,
that seems like a pretty good year.
But it wasn't suddenly easy because he was in a Ferrari.
Much of Niki's success came from his dedicated work
with Ferrari engineers to improve his car.
Now that's pretty common in F1 now,
but it really wasn't a thing in those days.
Guys would show up half drunk, smoke some cigarettes,
hop in the car and go.
But Niki was cut from a different cloth.
He didn't just want to be on top. He needed to be on top.
And as he'd already established by this point,
he'd fight until he got there.
So when he got back from his first pre-season test
in the Ferrari 312, he told Enzo Ferrari,
a famously not very chill dude,
that his car was "a piece of (beep)".
Then he said that he wanted to work with engineers
to make it the opposite of a piece of (beep),
you know, hot piss.
And the crazy thing is that he actually did it.
This is when Niki Lauda earned
the nicer of his two nicknames.
They called him The Computer
because he was a calculating genius.
Remember, no driver had really worked
with the engineers on the car before.
Side-note.
His other nickname was The Rat because he had buck teeth
and he looked like a rat. "You think this bothers me.
You call me The Rat because of the way I look."
It's from Drive.
The product of The Computer's work with Ferrari engineers
was nothing less than the company's return
to Formula One glory, after a very disappointing decade.
This is the Ferrari 312T.
This car and it's 500 horsepower, three liter,
naturally aspirated, flat-12
busted the prancing horse out of the loser's stable
and into the winners stable.
It was so fricking good
that it dominated F1 until like 1981.
Can you imagine a six year old car,
busting it up in F1 today?
The 312T is the single most successful car
in the history of the sport.
And it sounds pretty good too.
(heavy engine noise)
The world was Niki Lauda's oyster
and the Ferrari 312T was it's pearl.
Niki won five out of 14 races in 1975.
And by the end of the season,
he was 20 points ahead of the next driver in the paddock.
20 points!
So like I said earlier,
he nabbed his first world championship title that year.
Through sheer force of will,
Niki achieved his boyhood dream.
Was he stoked?
Yeah.
But celebration, sentimentality, laughing,
those things weren't Niki's style.
He told the press he traded is useless championship trophy
for some free car washes, which is hilarious.
He probably didn't even eat a bunch of chili out of it,
which is definitely one of the first things that I would do.
But whether he showed it or not,
the determined Austrian was on top of the world.
But little did he know, what happened next season
would almost take him out of it.
Niki started the 1976 season as F1's most dominant driver.
He was fast, confident, thriving.
That all changed going into the 10th race of the season.
This race had him spooked.
It was the German Grand Prix
set to run on the Nurburgring, Nordschleife.
A track that was literally designed
to be as difficult as possible.
It was narrower than some city streets, 14 miles long.
And a huge portion of its 76 curves carved through thick,
spooky German woods in the Eifel mountains.
You've heard of the Black Forest.
Well, this is the Green Hell.
This is a track so special
that we made an entire video about it.
I'll put the link down below.
Now, if someone were to crash in the back woods of the ring,
it would take ages for medics to arrive.
Not to mention that there's basically zero run-off space.
So an off was an almost guaranteed crash into the guard wall
And because of all those things,
plus the lack of fire marshals
and a lack of safety equipment,
Niki wasn't feeling it today.
I mean the track was designed to challenge
the race cars of 1927.
Things got a lot faster in the past 49 years.
And to be honest,
running F1 on that track at that time was insane.
And Niki, he knew that. So a week before the race,
he called on his fellow drivers to boycott.
But it didn't work.
The majority of the drivers wanted to go ahead
with the race.
I found a quote from Niki talking about this and he said,
"Some of them wanted to seem brave.
Others were simply too stupid to know
that what they were doing.
I steeled myself to drive
although my brain kept telling me, it was sheer stupidity."
Now Niki was a bit cold and maybe a bit full of himself.
But the fact that he tried to organize a boycott
meant that he cared about his fellow drivers.
I mean, everyone wants a coworker
that doesn't want them to die, right?
And if you think that your coworkers want you to die,
you either need to start acting right,
or you need to get a new job.
So the race starts, in the rain.
Here we go.
Everybody, except for one dude Jochen Mass,
started on rain tires.
And as the race began,
the sun came up and dried up the track,
the parts not shaded by the forest.
Now Mass took an early lead,
which motivated the other drivers to pit
and swap their tires back to slicks, including Niki.
But remember the woods I was talking about.
There were shaded spots all over the tracks,
still cold and damp because the sun didn't reach them.
On the second lap of the race, Niki's left rear tire
clipped the curbing at 174 miles per hour,
sending him into a slide.
Now this must have been a terrifying moment.
I mean, Niki was already basically convinced
that someone was gonna die on that track.
And now he's sliding at over 170 miles per hour.
He countered steered instantly,
but cold slicks on a damp track plus all that momentum,
I mean, there's not a lot of traction going on.
Niki's car ran through a restraining fence,
which tore off his helmet and slammed hard into
an embankment at more than a hundred miles per hour.
The fuel tank ruptured and the car turned into a fireball.
Then, the flaming wreckage rolled back onto the narrow track
The guy behind Niki avoided hitting him,
but the driver behind him, couldn't.
He careened directly into Niki's burning Ferrari,
which triggered a second explosion.
Like I said before,
emergency response was dangerously slow at the Nurburgring.
Things were looking really bad.
Now fortunately for Niki,
his fellow drivers came to the rescue.
Brett Lunger, the guy who hit Niki,
leaped out of his car and pulled him from the wreckage.
Another driver Hans Stuck,
stopped his car, flagged down an ambulance.
He convinced the emergency crew to break protocol
and drive against traffic to get to Niki quicker,
maybe saving his life.
But the horrifying truth is that Niki sat directly
in the center of an 800 degree gasoline fuel bonfire
for an agonizing 55 seconds.
It was a miracle that he didn't die instantly.
Would he survive his injuries?
It really did not seem likely.
But he did, (angels singing)
which is unbelievable.
I mean, how does a regular person survive
something like this?
Niki was flown to the hospital where he hovered just above
the brink of death, wrapped in bandages from head to toe.
He remembered a Catholic priest giving him his last rights,
which made him angry and motivated him
to fight harder for his life.
In the wreck, he had inhaled a toxic cocktail
of poisonous gases that greatly damaged his lungs
and sustained severe burns on his face, head and hands
that scarred him for the rest of his life.
He had had reconstructive surgery
just to get his eyelids to work properly again.
Back on the day of the wreck, officials resumed the race
and Niki's rival, James Hunt took the checkered flag.
This was the last F1 flag flown on the original Nurburgring,
and for good reason.
Officials decided that maybe that track
was a bit too dangerous after all.
A new, shorter, infinitely safer Grand Prix circuit
was built on the south end of the old track in 1983,
but really wasn't used in F1 until the mid-nineties.
Now, after literally being scarred for life
by his horrific wreck at the Nurburgring,
you might think retirement was on Niki's mind.
Nope.
He was like, "I'm not done yet."
He fought to be a race car driver and he made it.
He fought for his life and he made it.
And he wasn't done fighting
for another Formula One Championship.
Niki Lauda was determined to be the best or die trying.
So just 39 days after his wreck,
Niki was back on a racetrack.
Which isn't just insane, it seems medically inadvisable
And I'm sure he was advised by medicals not to do it.
And I'd love to tell you that despite missing two races
while he was in the hospital,
that he scored enough points
to win the 1976 Formula One championship.
That's not true.
Niki lost the '76 championship
by a single point.
And that's after he bowed out of a third race,
the Japanese Grand Prix because of bad weather.
When his team manager asked if he wanted to claim it
as a technical failure to save face, Niki said,
"My life is worth more than the title", which is sick.
Now at this point in his life,
one fight wasn't enough for Niki.
That wreck at the ring could have been avoided.
Now he was determined to make sure something like that
would never happen again.
He became an outspoken advocate for safety in Formula One.
And in a 1977 interview,
Niki said, "Some of the Grand Prix circuits,
we drivers are asked to race on
do not fulfill the most primitive safety requirements."
He also said someone besides race organizers
who had tons of money in the game should be in charge
of deciding whether to call off a race.
Danger was, still is and will always be a part of racing.
Niki knew that.
It's part of what attracted it to him,
but safety reform was desperately needed.
Now if multiple explosions hadn't forced Niki to chill for
a month, he would have easily taken that '76 championship.
So instead, he easily took the '77 championship.
Too easy.
The Ferrari 312T was too good. There wasn't enough fight.
So Niki left Ferrari for Brabham F1.
He only asked two seasons there and decided
to retire suddenly during a practice session in 1979,
stating that he had no more desire to
"continue the silliness of driving around in circles",
which is a perfectly Niki Lauda way to quit something.
But he couldn't stay out of the driver's seat.
He came out of retirement in 1982 to join McLaren.
And in 1984, he won his third championship.
The following season was kind of a bust,
so Niki decided to hang up his infamous red Marlboro helmet
for good, choosing the totally normal second career
of running his own airline, Lauda Air.
If you think that Niki Lauda could stay away
from Formula One forever, you're dead wrong pal.
You (beep) idiot!
Niki returned in 1993.
This time in a managerial position at Ferrari.
Little did he know that the next year
something terrible would happen,
calling him back to a familiar fight.
Formula One legend Ayrton Senna died tragically
in a wreck at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix.
So did rookie Roland Ratzenberger.
In response, Niki and a number of other drivers
and officials reestablished F1's long dormant drivers union.
They fought hard for safety reforms and thanks to them,
major accidents in Formula One steadily declined.
In fact, only one person Jules Bianchi,
has died in the last 27 years of F1.
This is Niki Lauda's legacy.
And it's impossible to forget what a determined,
intense, calculating driver he was.
He's gone down in history
as one of the greats behind the wheel,
but winning simply doesn't compare to saving lives,
especially if you're trading your useless trophies
for carwash tokens.
Hey doc, stop wearing layers upon layers
of Yota's Tacos T-shirts this winter.
Just by the all new Yota's Tacos hoodie and sweat pants.
They're exactly like the shirt except thicker
and with the hood and a fun draw string and pants.
Get yours today at www.donutmedia.com
Don't be a chilly Billy, be a warm Norm.
(music)
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