Rush to Glory: FORMULA 1 Racing's Greatest Rivalry (28 page)

On September 6, exactly 38 days after the accident, he reported to the Ferrari factory at Maranello and told Daniele Audetto he was fit again and would be able to race at Monza.

Audetto and Enzo Ferrari were shocked to see Lauda. They did not believe he would be returning in 1976 and did not think he would race for Ferrari again. In his absence they had hired Carlos Reutemann as his replacement. Reutemann had fallen out with Bernie Ecclestone and had abruptly left the Brabham team, probably sensing that a more competitive Ferrari drive might be available after Lauda’s accident.

It was the news of Reutemann’s appointment that inspired Lauda to return quickly. Lauda did not like Reutemann; as he confessed, “We never could stand each other, and instead of taking pressure off me, they put on even more by bringing Carlos Reutemann into the team.”

Reutemann’s premature signing had been fueled by all the hysteria in the Italian press. Its timing was a huge error and caused immediate problems in the team.

Audetto, who couldn’t believe Lauda was fit enough to race, ordered him to test the Ferrari at nearby Fiorano to see if he could drive competitively. Lauda was as fast as he had ever been. With that, Audetto had no choice under the terms of his contract but to make a car available for him and to enter a third car for Reutemann at Monza.

But it was not as easy as that for Audetto. Entering a third car breached Lauda’s new contract, and as a result, Audetto had to ask Lauda to waive the clause for Monza. Lauda agreed, but only for one race, believing he would soon see the back of Reutemann. Inwardly Lauda was furious with both Enzo Ferrari and Audetto. As he said later, “To the outside world, Enzo Ferrari and his company were standing by their slightly singed world champion, but from the inside, the pitiful insecurity of each and every one of them was palpable. Tactics took precedence over trust. Ferrari kept telling the world how solidly they were behind me, but in private they were at sixes and sevens.”

It was clear that the Ferrari team didn’t want Lauda back. They thought he was finished and wanted him gone. As Lauda recalled: “They didn’t know what to make of a defending champion with a disfigured face who carried on as if everything was quite normal.”

The fact that Lauda had signed a new contract for 1977 before his accident put him in a much stronger position than he might have been otherwise. As he admitted: “If I hadn’t had that contract, they could have ground me down mentally and turned me out to pasture. It was my one piece of good fortune that [Enzo] Ferrari had been so anxious to get me under contract for the following season.”

After the test, Lauda departed from Maranello that night and returned to Austria, leaving a stunned Daniele Audetto and Enzo Ferrari behind him. That evening, as soon as his plans were confirmed, Lauda called up his trusted friend, the motoring editor of the
Daily Express,
David Benson. He told Benson he had an exclusive for him. And what an exclusive that was.

On Wednesday September 8, Benson flew into Salzburg airport to meet up with Lauda. From Salzburg he flew with him on Lauda’s private plane to Milan airport and on to the Monza circuit for the Italian Grand Prix. Also on the plane were Willie Dungl and Marlene.

Lauda had chosen Benson to tell his story to the world, and the writer got an exclusive interview with Lauda on the flight and scooped the rest of the world’s press. It was an amazing coup for the
Daily Express
newspaper, and it became the first and last time Lauda ever talked intimately about the accident and his recovery.

He told Benson during that flight: “A lot of people have said that they think I am crazy to go back to racing so quickly. They say that a man with a face that is not like that of a human being but like a dead man’s skull should want to give up immediately. People who think like that are those who would probably be very happy to be ill and stay at home and not have to go out to work. This is not my attitude to life.

“I do not enjoy life unless I am active and have something to do and look forward to. I must work. If I have an accident in my work, then my aim must be to recover as soon as possible with all the help of modern medicine. Once I had decided to go on, then I had to make a comeback as quickly as possible. That is why I am here at Monza.

“I have not raced for over a month, and when I climb into my car, there will be enormous pressure on me because it is Italy, and Ferrari is the ‘king,’ and we have three cars entered for the race. But I will not let this pressure affect me. I may only finish in 15th place, but now I know that I am ahead of my programs, and when we go to Canada and North America, I’ll be in a position to win and to keep my world championship.”

The interview appeared almost verbatim in the
Daily Express
of Friday, September 10, the day Niki Lauda reappeared at the Monza track; it had been less than six weeks since he had crashed out of the German Grand Prix and been airlifted to the hospital. His return to the paddock at Monza was only 41 days after the accident. He had missed two races and ceded 21 world championship points of his lead over Hunt.

Statistically, the two rivals were now even, as both drivers had now completed exactly the same number of races during the season. Lauda and Hunt were within two points of each other in the championship table.

Lauda’s arrival in Monza was greeted with pure amazement by the rest of the Formula One fraternity. As for James Hunt, he was just as stunned as everyone else at Lauda’s quick return to racing. In fact, when he analyzed it, he found Lauda’s story of his recovery all rather unconvincing, saying, “I know that little fucker. Only Niki could take the last rites and come back at the Italian Grand Prix.” John Hogan, who sponsored both Hunt and Lauda and was very close to both of them, agreed: “Niki, who’d never been to a church in his life, wouldn’t know what the last rites were if they hit him in the head.”

Hogan now believes that Lauda overstated his injuries in order to get a psychological advantage over Hunt and to lull him into false sense of security. Whether that was true or not, no one will ever know, but the fact was that Lauda was there and he was going to race.

When he finally emerged, it was clear that Lauda was making a supreme effort. He was obviously very frail and weak, and it was clear he should not have been there. In today’s strict medical environment, he would not have been allowed to race. Although hidden by bandages, his face and head were still noticeably disfigured. He kept his cap firmly planted on his face, but the disguise wasn’t enough to allay the serious doubts about his fitness to race—doubts being expressed even within his own team. Hogan said, “He looked horrible: blood and pus all over him.”

It could not have been lost on Lauda that donning a racing helmet so soon after the accident would make the scars on his face ultimately much worse and more visible for the rest of his life. Lauda admitted: “My matter-of-factness in automatically resuming my career as soon as all systems were go was disconcerting. Some thought it betrayed a lack of dignity; others found it downright unappetizing.”

In the pits, Lauda’s wife, Marlene, kept attending to her husband’s face and stroking it to give him reassurance. She had her sewing kit and was constantly modifying Lauda’s new flameproof balaclava for maximum comfort. She wanted to be certain that there was no irritation to the sensitive new skin grafted around his eyes. Everyone was deeply impressed by Marlene’s devotion. David Benson wrote in Saturday’s
Daily Express:
“I am conquered by her courage. Here is a woman truly worthy of a very great sportsman.” He added: “Marlene is a delightfully warm person. Her handshake is firm. Her eyes are steady and constant. They are the eyes of a woman who could inspire a man to great things.”

And that is exactly what she did that weekend.

Besides worrying about Lauda’s return, the McLaren team had problems of its own to worry about. At Monza, McLaren was not only fighting Ferrari for the world title but was battling the entire Italian nation. In a fair fight, there was no doubt that Hunt could beat Lauda. But Teddy Mayer knew that the Italian Grand Prix was unlikely to be a fair fight. He knew the Italians would try do anything they could to handicap the team. The fuel octane scare stories in the press had been an early warning.

It started almost immediately. As the McLaren team’s trucks reached the Italian border, the Italian border guards decided to take a long time signing off on the customs paperwork. There was nothing wrong with the paperwork or the trucks, but the trucks were effectively detained for a day and a half. The time that was lost at the border ate into precious time at the track to prepare the cars.

When the McLaren trucks finally did pull into the Monza paddock, they found a hostile reception. As they entered Monza park, they saw fans holding up banners that read “
Basta con la Mafia Inglese
.” Translated, they said “Away with the English Mafia.” And whenever James Hunt appeared in public, he was loudly booed.

But all this was nothing compared to what would happen in scrutineering, which was outright Italian chicanery. The CSI officials present seemed powerless to intervene as the Italian scrutineers pored over Hunt’s car. It seemed they had already decided how to hinder him. But even they had no idea how effective they were to be as the rains fell on the track, rather conveniently for Ferrari.

The first qualifying session on Friday was wet, and Hunt spun off and damaged the nose of his car. When he walked back to the pits, the Italian fans erupted in the grandstands with joy. It was unseemly as they spat on him from the stands. He had to put his helmet back on to avoid being soaked in saliva.

Meanwhile, Niki Lauda, with the Italian crowd right behind him and willing him on, got back into a car for the first time since his accident. On Friday he had employed his normal mental preparation tactics, which included an objective review of his emotions to ensure he was mentally “well primed” before going out to qualify.

But then it all changed. As Lauda recalled: “When I climbed into the cockpit at Monza, fear hit me so hard that all self-motivation theories flew out the window.” Lauda’s lap times were poor, and he admitted later that he had lied to journalists, including David Benson, whose interview had been published only that morning, about his state of mind. Truthfully, he had been “rigid with fear” during qualifying, and in particular he found the rain had been “terrifying.”

Lauda explained later: “I had to play the hero to buy myself enough time to sort things out. The fact is you have to play the hard man on occasions, whether you actually feel like one or not. It is really all a game of mental hide-and-seek; you would never be forgiven if you blurted out the truth at an inopportune moment. You would be finished.”

That night, alone in the quiet cocoon of his hotel room, Lauda reviewed his performance and tried to identify what had gone wrong. He had been trying to drive as he had before the accident, and it wasn’t working. Feeling insecure, he said, “I had got myself into a stupid tangle.”

His overnight analysis helped him, as he put it, “reprogram his brain for the following day” and to eliminate all the pressure he felt. Managing to repress his anxiety somehow, Lauda told himself to “drive more slowly.” He said later: “And that’s what I did. I started slowly, then gradually built up speed until, suddenly, I was the fastest of the Ferraris—faster than Regazzoni and the newcomer Reutemann. I had managed to prove in practice what I knew in theory: I could drive as well now as before the accident.”

Lauda was fifth fastest by the end of the session. For some reason, both the Ferraris and the McLarens had been slow, but Lauda was fastest of the five. He had outqualified both his Ferrari teammates, causing Reutemann and Clay Regazzoni considerable embarrassment, not to mention James Hunt, who could only manage ninth place on the grid. There was also no excuse for Hunt, as Monza was a fast circuit that suited the characteristics of his car. Lauda’s returning performance simply stunned everyone. Psychologically, he had struck an enormous blow on his rivals, including those in his own team.

Jacques Laffite put his Ligier on pole, followed by Jody Scheckter’s Tyrrell-Ford, Carlos Pace’s Brabham-Alfa Romeo, and Patrick Depailler’s Tyrrell-Ford.

During the Saturday session, fuel checks were made by the scrutineers in the pits. Forewarned, Texaco had made absolutely certain that the McLaren’s fuel was legal, measuring at 101.2 octane. But overnight the Italian stewards analyzed the McLaren’s fuel and found it was 101.6 octane, not 101.2, but they seemed to confirm it was within the allowed limits. Then, feigning ignorance of the rules, the Italians telexed the CSI, the FIA’s sporting division in Paris, and asked the governing body for clarification of its own ruling. The message in the telex was vague in the sending, which was deliberate, and even vaguer in the reply. The secretary of the CSI replied and said the maximum allowed was 101.

So on Sunday morning, the Italian stewards announced that Hunt’s and his teammate Jochen Mass’ fuel was illegal and that their Saturday times would be disallowed. Only their Friday qualifying times, run in the wet, would count. The cars were sent to the back of the grid. They also disqualified Saturday times for John Watson’s Penske car. The Penske team had no argument, as their fuel was almost certainly over the allowed maximum. They had pushed the rules to the limit and imported special fuel from the United States.

The organizers’ clear intention had been to put the McLaren cars out of the race completely, thereby thwarting Hunt. The disallowed times effectively meant that Hunt, Mass, and Watson would not be allowed to start; their sub-two-minute, rain-affected qualifying times on Friday were not fast enough to get in the race.