- It's the 1976 German Grand Prix and Formula One's reigning world champion just slammed into an embankment
at 174 miles per hour. His Ferrari burst into a
fireball and he's trapped in the middle of an 800 degree hellfire for an agonizing 55 seconds. Burnt horribly, lungs scorched,
he's given his last rights. And 39 days later, he's
back in a race car. And nearly clenches the championship, losing by just one point. Who the (beep) is this guy? And how did he come back from what would have been
a career ending crash to win two more world championships and change Formula One into
the sport that we know today. This is everything you need
to know to get up to speed on Niki Lauda. (video game music) Like a lot of F1 drivers, Niki Lauda was born into extreme
wealth, the Austrian kind. Which involves a knighted
great grandfather and probably some gold
of questionable origin. But his ritzy industrialist
family was never on board with his chosen career. Niki wanted a different life. He wanted speed, danger. He wanted glory. He wanted to be a race car driver, and he was willing to fight for it. Now that meant cutting off ties
with his parents, so be it. It's harsh, I know. But the man was born to drive and he would let nothing get in his way. Not even his mommy and
especially not even his dad. Niki had a chill relationship
with his uncle Heinz though. And with Heinz's monetary assistance, 20 year old, Niki started
racing in Formula Vee in 1969. Nice. What's Formula Vee? I'm about to tell you. It's a relatively cheap,
open wheel racing class, basically whittled down
Volkswagen Beetles. Tons of Formula One drivers
get their start in Formula Vee. Now this was a big step
in the right direction and Niki, he was stoked. After a success in Formula
Vee, he coughed up $30,000, which is about $200,000 in today's money for a drive in Formula 2. How did he get this money? Simple. He borrowed it through his
estranged family's connections without their permission. Ooh, what a rebel. Screw you mommy! And screw you too daddy! Like I said, the man wouldn't let anything
get in the way of his goals. Paying for a seat on a race team was pretty common back in the day. So it wasn't weird to
see some random rich kid on March Racing's F2
roster for the 1972 season. What wasn't as common back in the day was finding out that that
random rich kid could drive. The March team was surprised, they have been so impressed
that they bumped Niki up to their Formula One team. You guys! Niki made it to Formula
One astonishingly quickly. And he did pretty good
in his first season. But he was held back by the small team's less than competitive cars. It's a story as old as time. So Niki moved on to the
legendary British Racing Motors or BRM. You ever heard of it? The only problem is by the
time that he got there, the legend had sort of dried up. BRM couldn't compete with the Ford powered Lotuses
and Tyrrells of the day. But Niki fought hard behind the wheel. His skills were obvious, obvious enough, this one Italian guy named
Enzo Ferrari took notes. He was like, "Get to me some Capocollo and then find out that young man's name." Niki was scooped up by none
other than Scuderia Ferrari for the 1974 Formula One season. Little Niki Lauda, a boy who
grew up watching F1 legends like Juan Manuel Fangio win for Ferrari. Now it was his turn and he
didn't have to pay for the drive. They paid him. Niki spent 1974 proving, he
was much more than a cash cow. Because cows can't even take fourth place in the Driver's Championship. Niki Lauda did. Cows don't even know how to drive. So now we're in 1975. Later in life, Niki would
call this his dream year. Probably because it was
the first time that he won a Formula One Championship,
which yeah, I mean, that seems like a pretty good year. But it wasn't suddenly easy
because he was in a Ferrari. Much of Niki's success came
from his dedicated work with Ferrari engineers to improve his car. Now that's pretty common in F1 now, but it really wasn't
a thing in those days. Guys would show up half
drunk, smoke some cigarettes, hop in the car and go. But Niki was cut from a different cloth. He didn't just want to be on
top. He needed to be on top. And as he'd already
established by this point, he'd fight until he got there. So when he got back from
his first pre-season test in the Ferrari 312, he told Enzo Ferrari, a famously not very chill dude, that his car was "a piece of (beep)". Then he said that he wanted
to work with engineers to make it the opposite
of a piece of (beep), you know, hot piss. And the crazy thing is
that he actually did it. This is when Niki Lauda earned the nicer of his two nicknames. They called him The Computer because he was a calculating genius. Remember, no driver had really worked with the engineers on the car before. Side-note. His other nickname was The
Rat because he had buck teeth and he looked like a rat.
"You think this bothers me. You call me The Rat
because of the way I look." It's from Drive. The product of The Computer's
work with Ferrari engineers was nothing less than the company's return to Formula One glory, after
a very disappointing decade. This is the Ferrari 312T. This car and it's 500
horsepower, three liter, naturally aspirated, flat-12 busted the prancing horse
out of the loser's stable and into the winners stable. It was so fricking good that it dominated F1 until like 1981. Can you imagine a six year old car, busting it up in F1 today? The 312T is the single most successful car in the history of the sport. And it sounds pretty good too. (heavy engine noise) The world was Niki Lauda's oyster and the Ferrari 312T was it's pearl. Niki won five out of 14 races in 1975. And by the end of the season, he was 20 points ahead of the
next driver in the paddock. 20 points! So like I said earlier, he nabbed his first world
championship title that year. Through sheer force of will, Niki achieved his boyhood dream. Was he stoked? Yeah. But celebration, sentimentality, laughing, those things weren't Niki's style. He told the press he traded
is useless championship trophy for some free car washes,
which is hilarious. He probably didn't even eat
a bunch of chili out of it, which is definitely one of the
first things that I would do. But whether he showed it or not, the determined Austrian
was on top of the world. But little did he know,
what happened next season would almost take him out of it. Niki started the 1976 season
as F1's most dominant driver. He was fast, confident, thriving. That all changed going into
the 10th race of the season. This race had him spooked. It was the German Grand Prix set to run on the
Nurburgring, Nordschleife. A track that was literally designed to be as difficult as possible. It was narrower than some
city streets, 14 miles long. And a huge portion of its 76
curves carved through thick, spooky German woods in
the Eifel mountains. You've heard of the Black Forest. Well, this is the Green Hell. This is a track so special that we made an entire video about it. I'll put the link down below. Now, if someone were to crash
in the back woods of the ring, it would take ages for medics to arrive. Not to mention that there's
basically zero run-off space. So an off was an almost guaranteed
crash into the guard wall And because of all those things, plus the lack of fire marshals and a lack of safety equipment, Niki wasn't feeling it today. I mean the track was designed to challenge the race cars of 1927. Things got a lot faster
in the past 49 years. And to be honest, running F1 on that track
at that time was insane. And Niki, he knew that.
So a week before the race, he called on his fellow
drivers to boycott. But it didn't work. The majority of the
drivers wanted to go ahead with the race. I found a quote from Niki
talking about this and he said, "Some of them wanted to seem brave. Others were simply too stupid to know that what they were doing. I steeled myself to drive although my brain kept telling
me, it was sheer stupidity." Now Niki was a bit cold and
maybe a bit full of himself. But the fact that he tried
to organize a boycott meant that he cared
about his fellow drivers. I mean, everyone wants a coworker that doesn't want them to die, right? And if you think that your
coworkers want you to die, you either need to start acting right, or you need to get a new job. So the race starts, in the rain. Here we go. Everybody, except for
one dude Jochen Mass, started on rain tires. And as the race began, the sun came up and dried up the track, the parts not shaded by the forest. Now Mass took an early lead, which motivated the other drivers to pit and swap their tires back
to slicks, including Niki. But remember the woods
I was talking about. There were shaded spots
all over the tracks, still cold and damp because
the sun didn't reach them. On the second lap of the
race, Niki's left rear tire clipped the curbing at 174 miles per hour, sending him into a slide. Now this must have been
a terrifying moment. I mean, Niki was already
basically convinced that someone was gonna die on that track. And now he's sliding at
over 170 miles per hour. He countered steered instantly, but cold slicks on a damp
track plus all that momentum, I mean, there's not a
lot of traction going on. Niki's car ran through
a restraining fence, which tore off his helmet
and slammed hard into an embankment at more than
a hundred miles per hour. The fuel tank ruptured and the
car turned into a fireball. Then, the flaming wreckage
rolled back onto the narrow track The guy behind Niki avoided hitting him, but the driver behind him, couldn't. He careened directly into
Niki's burning Ferrari, which triggered a second explosion. Like I said before, emergency response was dangerously
slow at the Nurburgring. Things were looking really bad. Now fortunately for Niki, his fellow drivers came to the rescue. Brett Lunger, the guy who hit Niki, leaped out of his car and
pulled him from the wreckage. Another driver Hans Stuck, stopped his car, flagged
down an ambulance. He convinced the emergency
crew to break protocol and drive against traffic
to get to Niki quicker, maybe saving his life. But the horrifying truth
is that Niki sat directly in the center of an 800
degree gasoline fuel bonfire for an agonizing 55 seconds. It was a miracle that
he didn't die instantly. Would he survive his injuries? It really did not seem likely. But he did, (angels singing) which is unbelievable. I mean, how does a regular person survive something like this? Niki was flown to the hospital
where he hovered just above the brink of death, wrapped
in bandages from head to toe. He remembered a Catholic priest
giving him his last rights, which made him angry and motivated him to fight harder for his life. In the wreck, he had
inhaled a toxic cocktail of poisonous gases that
greatly damaged his lungs and sustained severe burns
on his face, head and hands that scarred him for the rest of his life. He had had reconstructive surgery just to get his eyelids
to work properly again. Back on the day of the wreck,
officials resumed the race and Niki's rival, James Hunt
took the checkered flag. This was the last F1 flag flown
on the original Nurburgring, and for good reason. Officials decided that maybe that track was a bit too dangerous after all. A new, shorter, infinitely
safer Grand Prix circuit was built on the south end
of the old track in 1983, but really wasn't used in
F1 until the mid-nineties. Now, after literally
being scarred for life by his horrific wreck at the Nurburgring, you might think retirement
was on Niki's mind. Nope. He was like, "I'm not done yet." He fought to be a race
car driver and he made it. He fought for his life and he made it. And he wasn't done fighting for another Formula One Championship. Niki Lauda was determined to
be the best or die trying. So just 39 days after his wreck, Niki was back on a racetrack. Which isn't just insane, it
seems medically inadvisable And I'm sure he was advised
by medicals not to do it. And I'd love to tell you that
despite missing two races while he was in the hospital, that he scored enough points to win the 1976 Formula One championship. That's not true. Niki lost the '76 championship by a single point. And that's after he bowed
out of a third race, the Japanese Grand Prix
because of bad weather. When his team manager asked
if he wanted to claim it as a technical failure
to save face, Niki said, "My life is worth more than
the title", which is sick. Now at this point in his life, one fight wasn't enough for Niki. That wreck at the ring
could have been avoided. Now he was determined to
make sure something like that would never happen again. He became an outspoken advocate
for safety in Formula One. And in a 1977 interview, Niki said, "Some of the
Grand Prix circuits, we drivers are asked to race on do not fulfill the most
primitive safety requirements." He also said someone
besides race organizers who had tons of money in
the game should be in charge of deciding whether to call off a race. Danger was, still is and will
always be a part of racing. Niki knew that. It's part of what attracted it to him, but safety reform was desperately needed. Now if multiple explosions
hadn't forced Niki to chill for a month, he would have easily
taken that '76 championship. So instead, he easily
took the '77 championship. Too easy. The Ferrari 312T was too good.
There wasn't enough fight. So Niki left Ferrari for Brabham F1. He only asked two
seasons there and decided to retire suddenly during
a practice session in 1979, stating that he had no more desire to "continue the silliness of
driving around in circles", which is a perfectly Niki
Lauda way to quit something. But he couldn't stay out
of the driver's seat. He came out of retirement
in 1982 to join McLaren. And in 1984, he won
his third championship. The following season was kind of a bust, so Niki decided to hang up his
infamous red Marlboro helmet for good, choosing the
totally normal second career of running his own airline, Lauda Air. If you think that Niki
Lauda could stay away from Formula One forever,
you're dead wrong pal. You (beep) idiot! Niki returned in 1993. This time in a managerial
position at Ferrari. Little did he know that the next year something terrible would happen, calling him back to a familiar fight. Formula One legend Ayrton
Senna died tragically in a wreck at the 1994
San Marino Grand Prix. So did rookie Roland Ratzenberger. In response, Niki and a
number of other drivers and officials reestablished
F1's long dormant drivers union. They fought hard for safety
reforms and thanks to them, major accidents in Formula
One steadily declined. In fact, only one person Jules Bianchi, has died in the last 27 years of F1. This is Niki Lauda's legacy. And it's impossible to
forget what a determined, intense, calculating driver he was. He's gone down in history as one of the greats behind the wheel, but winning simply doesn't
compare to saving lives, especially if you're trading
your useless trophies for carwash tokens. Hey doc, stop wearing layers upon layers of Yota's Tacos T-shirts this winter. Just by the all new Yota's
Tacos hoodie and sweat pants. They're exactly like
the shirt except thicker and with the hood and a
fun draw string and pants. Get yours today at www.donutmedia.com Don't be a chilly Billy, be a warm Norm. (music) Thank you guys so much
for watching this video and everything else on Donut media. I really love this story. There's a really good movie
about, it's called Rush. You've probably seen it
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