For those of you who may not know, Niki Lauda was a badass. You may have seen Ron Howard's movie about the 1976 F1 season, Rush, but if you haven't, here's the short version (uh, spoilers, I guess):

In 1975, Lauda won his first F1 World Championship, driving for Ferrari. The following year, he was on course for what looked to be an easy repeat, despite the efforts of his closest rival, British driver James Hunt, to catch up in mid-season... until the German Grand Prix. That race was held at the Nürburgring that year, and despite holding the track record, Lauda didn't want to race there. He didn't think the track was safe, even by the breathtakingly liberal standards of Formula 1 in the 1970s. The weather was lousy, track conditions were poor, and he was particularly concerned that the facility had basically no firefighting equipment.

At a pre-race meeting, he proposed that the drivers boycott the German Grand Prix over the safety situation, but they voted to go ahead with it, so Lauda raced.

And crashed.

And was trapped in his burning car.

He didn't die, obviously, but his head and hands were badly burned and he suffered from severe smoke inhalation, which both damaged his lungs and poisoned him. Although he walked away from the crash when he was finally extricated from the car, he lapsed into a coma shortly thereafter. For a while, he wasn't expected to survive, and even if he did, no one expected him to ever race again.

He missed two races.

Six weeks after the crash, he was back for the Italian GP at Monza, covered in bandages, unable to blink because he didn't have any eyelids. (That was fixed later.) People who saw him after the race remember blood running out of his helmet. He finished fourth.

At the end of that season, the man no one thought would ever race again, or possibly even survive, had lost the World Championship title to Hunt... by one point.

He reclaimed the title the following year. In 1979, he retired from racing to start an airline (in which he was also one of the pilots)... then returned in 1982 and won a third world title in 1984, retiring again the next year.

If all that wasn't epic enough for one man's lifetime, in 1991, Lauda also got involved personally in the investigation when one of his airline's 767s crashed in Thailand. Not many airline CEOs show up in person at Boeing HQ to insist that he be allowed to test possible crash scenarios in their simulator—himself—then browbeat the company into acknowledging that a major commercial air crash was the result of a design fault. Niki Lauda did that.

I'm not out to canonize Lauda; he was, by many contemporary accounts, prickly, intolerant of foible, easily made an enemy of, and a bit of a dick. (Or, as James Hunt liked to summarize him, "that bloody Austrian." :) He once called Polish F1 driver Robert Kubicka a "Polack" on international television. But the man was a force of nature. Sort of the Muhammad Ali of motorsportsball, and my reaction to learning of his death is similar to how I felt when Ali died: Wait, that could happen? That's allowed?

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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