Niki Lauda

Biography

Andreas Nikolaus Lauda was born in Vienna on 22 February 1949. He made his Formula One debut with March at the 1971 Austrian Grand Prix and drove for BRM in 1973. Ferrari signed him for 1974, and the next year he won his first world championship.

On 1 August 1976, on the second lap of the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, he crashed at Bergwerk and suffered severe burns and lung damage. Six weeks later he was back in the car at Monza and finished fourth. In heavy rain at the Japanese Grand Prix at Fuji he pulled out after two laps, citing unsafe conditions and his eye injuries, and James Hunt won the title by a single point. Lauda regained it in 1977, sealing it at the United States Grand Prix, and then joined Brabham, winning the Swedish and Italian rounds in 1978.

During practice for the 1979 Canadian Grand Prix he quit racing to run his airline, Lauda Air, full-time. He returned with McLaren in 1982 and in 1984 beat team-mate Alain Prost to the championship by half a point. After the 1985 season he retired for good, with 25 wins from 171 starts. He was later a Ferrari consultant from 1993, Jaguar team principal in 2001–2002 and, from September 2012, non-executive chairman of the Mercedes Formula One team. A year after a double lung transplant, Lauda died at the University Hospital of Zürich on 20 May 2019, aged 70.