The F1 greats who lost their mojo

Picture the scene: a gala dinner in Buenos Aires with hundreds of dignitaries present, honouring the five-time world champion Juan Manuel Fangio. But this is a solemn rather than a joyous gathering.

It is October 1958 and Argentina’s sporting hero has a message: “I will never race again in the rest of my years. Champions, actors and dictators should always retire when they are at the top.”

Fangio’s retirement shocked the racing firmament because his speed, commitment and ruthless determination to occupy the best machinery departed so abruptly. From Alfa Romeo to Maserati, Mercedes, Ferrari, then back to Maserati again, he’d always ensured he had the fastest cars to maximise his phenomenal gifts behind the wheel.

And then, having won his fifth world title in 1957, he announced that he would not be signing a contract for the following year and would simply pick and choose which races he entered. This arrangement did not last long.

Fourth place, 53s down, in a privately entered Maserati 250F in the 1958 season-opening Argentine Grand Prix – otherwise more notable for Stirling Moss claiming the first world championship victory for a rear-engined car – signified the beginning of the end. Fangio won a non-championship race at the same venue three weeks later but only contested one more points-paying Formula 1 race, failing to qualify for the Indy 500 and retiring from the 500-mile ‘Monzanapolis’ event in between.

At the French Grand Prix at Reims, Fangio was tempted to try Maserati’s new ‘Piccolo’ 250F, lighter and shorter and now endowed with modern telescopic dampers. As Mike Hawthorn streaked to victory, Fangio spent the last 35 laps without a functioning clutch and inherited fourth place on the final lap, two and a half minutes behind the winning Ferrari.

Parking outside his pit box, Fangio told his mechanic: “It is finished.” He was 47 years old.

Granted, there was much else going on in Fangio’s life. In February he had listened to, rather than competing in, the Havana Grand Prix sportscar race after being kidnapped by Cuban revolutionaries. At home, his business empire faced headwinds in the turmoil following the deposition of President Juan Peron, the consequences of which had also tipped Maserati into bankruptcy.

“The exhilaration of racing a smooth-running car and the challenge of keeping in the lead had become drudgery, a constant effort and worry to give people who entrusted me with their cars and money the returns they expected,” he told Time magazine upon his return to Argentina. “The joy of the first years became mere fatigue.

“Not only my body is tired but my spirit as well. They were the most exciting years of my life. I never considered a car as an instrument to achieve an end, but as part of myself or better. I was a part of the car, like a piston or shifting gear. At Reims in 1948, when I had to quit because my gas tank was ripped, I felt as if my own flesh were wounded.

“If I could offer the younger generation any advice, I would say: Never think of your car as a cold engine but as a hot-blooded horse, racing together with the rider like one beautiful harmonious unit. As for me, the rider has grown older and more blasé than the horse.

“All the greats are gone, one way or another. It is my turn. To come in second behind an Ascari or a Fangio is still a triumph, but to come in second behind an unknown beginner because his young reflexes are quicker or his inexperience pushes him to take unnecessary risks can be tough for an ageing champ. It will not happen to me.”

In later interviews, when asked about his retirement, Fangio would cite his early days racing in Europe, seeing the once-great Tazio Nuvolari a spent force, struggling to hold his own against younger rivals.

It is vanishingly rare for top-level racing drivers to open up about the effects of ageing and the moment when they realise their magic is going – or, indeed, gone. If you’re lucky they save it for their memoirs.

Juan Manuel Fangio, Mercedes, congratulates Stirling Moss, Mercedes

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Generally, retirement is a destination that drivers do not seek voluntarily but to which they are delivered with a great wailing and gnashing of teeth, unable to find anyone willing to run them in a competitive car. A quieter life is simply thrust upon them.

In the first three-quarters of a century of motor racing, of course, there was a secondary rate of attrition in the form of fatal accidents: many racers never reached an age where they had to consider retirement.

Nevertheless, there are outliers who picked their own time of departure. Sir Jack Brabham, famously, mocked commentators who said he was ‘past it’ at the age of 40 by arriving on the grid of the 1966 Dutch Grand Prix in a luxuriant false beard and pretending to limp to his car with the aid of a walking stick. He won his third world championship that season and, having planned to retire at the end of ’69, was forced back into the cockpit when Jochen Rindt decided to remain with Lotus.

Brabham’s car was good in 1970 and, had the competitive winds blown differently (if, for instance, mechanic Nick Goozee had remembered to readjust the fuel mixture ahead of the British GP), he might have taken a fourth world championship. Certainly, this season convinced him, at the age of 44, that he could still cut it at the top – but, as he would later reveal to biographer Doug Nye, accidents and fatalities that season magnified the pressure on him from his family to hang up his helmet.

Brabham sold his shares in his team to business partner Ron Tauranac, who in turn sold out to Bernie Ecclestone, Rindt’s manager – small world, motor racing – and, in 1979, Bernie was the receiver rather than the giver of bad news when Niki Lauda decided to retire without warning. Lauda, then a double world champion, and with a fresh contract in his pocket for the following season, departed his BT49 after practice for the Canadian Grand Prix and didn’t race an F1 car again until McLaren’s Ron Dennis waved a sufficiently large cheque under his nose three years later.

“I’m not getting back in the car – you know that, don’t you?” Lauda told team manager Herbie Blash as they walked back to the Brabham motorhome. “I’m going to buy that plane…”

Before the Long Beach Grand Prix, Lauda had visited the McDonnell Douglas plant on Lakeview Boulevard and tried the DC-9 cockpit simulator. It ignited a passion for aviation which led him to found his own airline.

Niki Lauda, Brabham Ford BT49

Photo by: Sutton Images

At the time, Lauda gave an interview to his long-time confidant Heinz Pruller, saying, “I suddenly realised that I didn’t enjoy racing anymore, that I was more interested in other things in life than driving around in circles with my racing car.

“I’ve already felt in recent months that this day will soon come. You can only drive race cars with your heart and brain. Heart is the most important thing, because the joy of driving overcomes the risk. But if this joy is no longer there, then why? You really have to be able to look forward to every race, every practice. And this year I’ve felt it sometimes: It’s wearing off.

“If you analyse what happened in Canada today: I had a brand new car, which went well, a contract for 1980 – but if that’s not enough motivation to convince me to put the pedal to the metal anymore, then it’s time to say ‘Now I’ll stop’.

“I got in the car, drove away normally, and suddenly I thought to myself, ‘What are you actually doing there, why are you driving around in circles with everyone here?’ I suddenly recognized the senselessness of racing – please, just for me personally, I don’t want to doubt or condemn racing. Only: I’ve had enough, I’ve had enough.

“I think such a decision can only come suddenly. If you suddenly have no joy, no fun anymore, if you only feel that racing is work, then you have to stop.

“The stupidest thing to say would be, ‘I’ll drive until the end of the year or another race’ – maybe because the money is more important or the statistics. When the decision comes you have to make it, and for me, it came between two practice sessions.”

Lauda was but 30 at the time and he would be lured back to the cockpit. Money, of course, was a factor, but he would later say that during a TV commentary stint at his home grand prix in 1981 he began to feel an ache to test himself in a racing environment once again. Dennis was already in touch about a possible comeback but, Lauda being Lauda, he wouldn’t consider it without undergoing a full fitness programme devised by his trainer, Willy Dungl, to ensure his body could function under the greater g-forces produced by contemporary F1 cars.

McLaren team-mates Alain Prost and Niki Lauda, pose for a team shot

Photo by: Sutton Images

He was conscious, too, of the required mindset.

“If I could click back a little switch in my brain enabling me to change to a different level of consciousness,” he wrote in his autobiography To Hell And Back. “I knew that, if I could reach that frame of mind, there was no reason to be intimidated by the new drivers who had made their mark in the interim – Pironi, Prost, Villeneuve, Rosberg, Piquet, the ‘young lions,’ as they were known by the media.

“They would not have the edge over me.”

As it turned out, Prost did have an edge on Lauda on pace, but not enough to prevent Lauda from winning a third world championship in 1984, albeit by half a point. The following season, well beaten by Prost, he decided to retire again.

“If he [Prost] hadn’t been my team-mate in 1984 and 1985, I might have raced for a couple more years,” Lauda told the media in 2010. The subject, coincidentally, was Michael Schumacher’s faltering comeback with Mercedes. “But I realised the performances he was putting up, especially in qualifying, were too good for me and I couldn’t beat him for some reason.

“Maybe it was age; maybe he’d always been quicker than me, I don’t know. But the difference in performance affected me, because if you are a straightforward racing driver you should always see your limits.

“In my time the problem was that the risk level was much higher than today. You have a brake in your brain that stops you doing stupid things. The older you are, the earlier that brake comes on.

Pole sitter Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes-AMG F1 celebrates in parc ferme with Niki Lauda, Mercedes AMG F1 Non-Executive Chairman

Photo by: Sutton Images

“What I cannot tell you, because it’s difficult for me to judge, is what happened when you lose the edge. Driving these cars right on the edge requires something else, it’s not just risk management. It probably requires a happy, crazy, young brain that gives you the pleasure to push the car right up to the edge… if you lose it, you need to think a bit more about what you’re doing and if things don’t come naturally to you, then you aren’t going to be as quick as what you used to be.”

Notoriously and egregiously, in 1985 Dennis contrived to make the press conference announcing Lauda’s retirement all about himself – which demonstrates another truism ageing drivers are wont to overlook: no matter how great you are, there’s always somebody else waiting to take your spot. Lauda himself would have known this after announcing his first retirement to Ecclestone on that misty September day in Montreal.

Cool as you like, Bernie had said, “Leave your helmet and overalls – I need to find another driver for the rest of the weekend.”

Lewis Hamilton’s declaration that he’s “definitely not fast anymore” could be a signal that his mental brake is undergoing a recalibration. Or it could be a typically Lewis heart-on-sleeve piece of self-examination after one of his occasional failures to live up to his own high standards.

Either way, it is of more concern to Ferrari than it is to Mercedes. For Toto Wolff, Andrea Kimi Antonelli is a more fitting and rigorously planned replacement than Ricardo Zuninho, who found himself unexpectedly slipping into Lauda’s overalls after planning to attend the 1979 Canadian GP as a spectator.

Then again, who would bet against Lewis flicking that mental switch Lauda spoke of all those years ago – after all, he managed it last weekend in Las Vegas…