'You just fight with your brain': How F1 driver Niki Lauda survived a devastating Grand Prix crash

BBC News

2 days ago

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.
Warning: This article contains injury details that some may find disturbing or upsetting.
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.
"The circuits were not safe, that's undeniable now," American F1 driver Brett Lunger, who also took part in the 1976 German Grand Prix, told BBC's Sporting Witness in 2016. "In the '70s, the money was going into cars to make them go faster. The money was not going into safety, either in the car construction or the race circuit construction. And yet in those days that was the reality, we never even questioned it."
The Nürburgring circuit was particularly notorious. The long narrow track, which wound through the Eifel Mountains in Germany, was nicknamed "The Green Hell" by a British racing icon, Sir Jackie Stewart. "It was 14.2 miles to the lap," said Lunger. "Some 177 turns per lap, and with a course of that length you cannot have an adequate number of fire marshals, [and] there are many sections where there are no guard rails, so it was in an unsafe condition in and of itself." There were also rain showers forecast on the day of the race and, because of the circuit's length, parts of the track would be wet and parts of it dry, adding to the danger.
Indeed, Lauda had already questioned the Nürburgring circuit's lack of safety support staff, and he had gathered his competitors to talk through the possibility that they might boycott the race. "On the Sunday morning, Niki Lauda called the drivers together and we took a vote on whether or not we wanted to race, and I was one of those who said, yes, let's go ahead and race," said Lunger.
The German Grand Prix started as normal, but on the second lap, before a corner called Bergwerk, Lauda's Ferrari suddenly veered off the track, hitting the embankment at a speed of 190kmh (120mph). The impact ruptured its fuel tank, causing it to burst into flames, and the car spun back into the path of the oncoming cars. British driver Guy Edwards managed to avoid striking its fiery wreckage, but Lunger, who was in a Surtees-Ford, was not so lucky.
"As I committed to the turn, I saw some dirt going up in the air and I knew something was wrong, and, sure enough, I came around, exited the turn, and he was sideways on fire in the middle of the track," Lunger told the BBC. "I slowed, but my car still went into his and impacted his." Harald Ertl, an Austrian driver who was following, then hit Lunger's car. Despite the danger, Ertl, Lunger and Edwards got out of their vehicles to try to pull Lauda out of his. But they could not get him free of the cockpit's harness.
How Lauda recovered in hospital
Italian Arturo Merzario, who had driven for Ferrari before, also stopped to help, and reached into the burning wreck. "Because he knew the seatbelts, [he] was able to reach and unfasten them and that probably made all the difference in the world," said Lunger. "I was standing on top of the car at that point, and I just grabbed Niki's shoulders and kind of fell off to the side and pulled him out as I fell off to the side of the car."
Merzario tried to keep the flames at bay with a fire extinguisher, while the other three men helped Lauda to the grass at the side of the track. Lauda's helmet had flown off when the car had hit the embankment, leaving his face exposed to the fire. His wrists were burnt, and he had several broken bones. But unbeknownst to the other drivers, a deeper danger lay in the toxic fumes from burning fibreglass and fuel that Lauda had inhaled.
He was rushed to hospital by helicopter, but he soon lapsed into a coma. "When I came to the hospital… you are very tired, and you would like to go and sleep. But you know it is not just going sleeping, it's something else," Lauda told the BBC in 1977.
Lauda was so badly burnt that in the days following the crash he wasn't expected to survive. While in hospital, he was given the last rites by a priest. "My lungs nearly gave up after the accident and the doctors just gave me life because I had a lung collapse… and I just made it, and the burns and the other problems we could fix. But the lungs were my life danger," Lauda told the BBC podcast I Was There in 2015.
The scarring to his head was so extensive that he needed skin grafts. His eyelids were rebuilt using skin from his ears. Yet despite the pain he was in, and the damage to his lungs, Lauda willed himself to stay alive.
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"And then you just fight with your brain," he told the BBC in 1977. You hear noises, you hear voices, and you just try to listen to what they are saying, and you try to keep your brain working and to get the body to fight against the illness. And I think that it was very good that I did that because in that way I survived."
Despite the nature of his injuries and his brush with death, Lauda was still desperate to win the World Championship. He had only missed two races while recovering from the crash and, although he was terrified of driving again, he believed that sitting behind the wheel would be the best thing for his mental wellbeing and recovery. Just six weeks after his horrific crash, he stunned everyone by turning up, still bandaged, at the press conference in Monza for the Italian Grand Prix.
Back behind the wheel
"I said then and later that I had conquered my fear quickly and cleanly," Lauda wrote in his autobiography To Hell and Back. "That was a lie. But it would have been foolish to play into the hands of my rivals by confirming my weakness. At Monza, I was rigid with fear."
In his first race back, on 12 September 1976, Lauda needed to wear a specially adapted helmet so he wouldn't be in too much pain as he drove. His vision was affected by his eyes watering excessively due to his fire-damaged tear ducts. Blood from his head wounds seeped through their bandages, sticking them to his fireproof balaclava. But despite everything, he still finished fourth in the Italian Grand Prix. As he got out of the car's cockpit at the end of the race and tried to remove his balaclava, his skin grafts were ripped off, opening his wounds again.
Three-time world champion Stewart, who was doing the racing commentary for the Italian Grand Prix, told the BBC in 2019: "I will never forget him putting his helmet on and he was suffering so much pain. When he came out from driving at the end, I was there, and the blood was running down out of his helmet."
Lauda would ultimately lose the 1976 world champion title to Hunt by just one point. In the final race in Japan, although he was ahead in points, he pulled out after two laps because he was unable to see properly in the torrential rain. He would win the world title back the following year.
The injuries that he sustained in 1976 would continue to contribute to health problems, leading to a double lung transplant in July 2018. But Lauda won 25 Grand Prix over the course of his career and is renowned as one of the most remarkable drivers F1 has ever seen. 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."
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