VIENNA - Austrian motor racing great Niki Lauda, whose comeback from a near-fatal crash made him a global symbol of resilience and determination, has died at the age of 70.
His Ferrari had slammed into a barrier and then burst into flames as it spun back onto the track, where an oncoming car hit it again. By the time he was pulled from the wreckage, his face, scalp and right ear were severely burned and his lungs scorched. But he would rarely indulge in such sentiment, even long after a racing career in which he won three world championship titles, as many as Brazil’s Ayrton Senna or Briton Jackie Stewart.
“Sure, people change their tits and ass and whatever. In my case there could be something done but I wouldn’t. Because this is a fact of life and that’s it,” he said. He overcame internal injuries, too. After two kidney transplants in 1997 and 2009, he underwent a lung transplant in 2018, 42 years almost to the day after the crash at the Nuerburgring in which he inhaled hot toxic gases.Born to a wealthy Vienna family, he defied its wishes to pursue a racing career. Lauda’s grandfather, who was on the supervisory board of an Austrian bank, even blocked his own firm’s sponsorship deal with his grandson. The family rebel took out loans to fund his early years.
“People always think that the worst time of my life must have been after the German Grand Prix crash ... But it wasn’t,” he told the Observer newspaper in 2006. “When you run an airline and more than 200 people want to go from A to B and they don’t arrive — that’s a different responsibility.”
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