26 May 2020 www.bahrainthismonth.com August 1, 1976. By all accounts, this was the date on which the creator deemed Niki Lauda was to die. Racing for Ferrari in the German Grand Prix held at Nürburgring on that day, Niki’s race got off to a bad start. Rain showers led him to select rain tyres, as opposed to slicks. Stopping to change them and a blocked pit lane not only left him needing to make up ground, his still cold tyres provided scant grip on the damp track. Niki subsequently lost control of the car and hit the bank at the side of the track at Bergwerk. The rest of that horrific crash is well documented. The car caught fire as fuel leaked out and Niki was trapped in the burning cockpit with his helmet ripped off. Several drivers stopped to help pull him from the burning vehicle. One of those drivers later claimed that “nobody realised the actual damage to Niki. The real danger he was in was not from the superficial injuries that we could see but from the deeper injury which was that to his lungs”. Damage to his lungs, of course, was caused by inhalation of toxic fumes from the burning fibreglass. Indeed we didn’t appreciate the severity of the injury that he’d suffered. Niki recalled a decade later that he had been sitting in the car – in a temperature of about 800 degrees – for around 50 seconds. It emerged after two or three days of his hospitalisation, that it was undeniably the lung damage that was the injury putting his life in danger. Miraculously, Niki not only evaded the creator’s plans for him, but recovered from the crash; he resumed racing 40 days later and only missed out on the title by a single point, to James Hunt. Born on February 22, 1949, the scion of a wealthy Viennese industrial family that opposed his daredevil driving career, Nikolaus Andreas Lauda was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps into the paper-manufacturing industry. Niki, as he became known, had other ideas however. He wanted to become a racing driver. Lauda financed his early career with the help of a string of loans, working Dick Potter pays homage to a racing great on the first anniversary of his death. NIKOLAUS ANDREAS LAUDA A tribute MY LIFE IN CARS motoring news
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