SIX WEEKS, ONE POINT

Before the 1976 German Grand Prix, the reigning champion Niki Lauda stood up in the drivers’ meeting and urged a boycott of the Nürburgring’s old Nordschleife — too long, too poorly marshalled, too dangerous to police. The other drivers voted him down, and the race went ahead.[116]

On lap two, near Bergwerk, Lauda’s Ferrari speared off the road and caught fire, the cause put down to a suspected suspension failure that was never confirmed.[116] He was trapped in the flames.

There were no marshals close enough and the circuit’s only helicopter was minutes away. Four drivers stopped their own races and ran to him — Guy Edwards, Brett Lunger, Harald Ertl and Arturo Merzario.[116] Lauda always credited Merzario with jumping into the fire to haul him from the wreck, and later gave him his gold Rolex in thanks.[175] In hospital, lungs scorched by the toxic smoke he had breathed, Lauda was given the last rites — yet he refused to surrender, and chose only limited reconstructive surgery.[39]

He missed only two races. Six weeks after very nearly dying, Lauda was back at Monza, bandages still showing, and finished fourth.[39] It is among the bravest things the sport has seen. It set up a finale no script would dare. At a flooded, fog-bound Fuji, Lauda completed two laps, decided the conditions were not worth his life, and withdrew — saying simply that his life was worth more than a title.[117]

The championship had already been fought as much in tribunals as on track. At the British Grand Prix the crowd had chanted for James Hunt to be allowed to race after a first-corner shunt; he won — only for a Ferrari protest to send the case to a Paris tribunal that disqualified him for receiving outside assistance.[176] In Spain his McLaren had been thrown out for being 1.5 cm too wide, then reinstated two months later when a tribunal ruled the difference minimal.[177] After Lauda parked at Fuji, Hunt nursed a punctured car home to third — and took the title by a single point, 69 to 68, the closest margin in eight years.[117]

For all the ferocity, Lauda and Hunt were genuine friends; Lauda called Hunt an open, honest pal and sometimes stayed at his flat.[118] Hunt played the part the seventies wanted — the playboy who claimed, by his own unverifiable telling, to have slept with thousands of women.[118] Around them the sport was being rewired by a quieter operator: Bernie Ecclestone had bought the Brabham team in 1972 and co-founded the constructors’ association FOCA in 1974, building the commercial machine that would one day own the sport.[178] Even the reigning order wobbled — Emerson Fittipaldi, a champion at his peak, stunned everyone by leaving McLaren to race for his brother’s underfunded Copersucar team.[179]

Lauda’s fire had one permanent consequence: the 1976 race was the last Formula One Grand Prix ever held on the old Nordschleife, the German Grand Prix moving to Hockenheim the next year.[116] Lauda would win two more titles. But 1976 belongs to both of them — the man who came back from the dead, and the man who held on by a single point.