1,000 Greatest Drivers: Niki Lauda

One of the best examples of how ride-buyers are not always bad.

I intended to release this two days ago on his birthday but I got pretty sick. I think I caught another virus for the second time in two months after visiting my mom in the rehab center last Friday. She was just transitioned into long-term care that day and the phone in her room doesn’t work yet and I haven’t figured out how to get it working. I had a 100° fever last night, so I was honestly barely able to pay attention to this weekend’s races and complete my RotoBaller columns over the weekend, but I still got them done. I called some people at Caring Transitions to try to organize a partial estate sale at my house since I think my mom does want to go home and do in-home hospice but I still need to clear it out and she seems to have entirely lost interest in most of the possessions she hoarded previously. However, some of the people over there were also sick so I had to reschedule my initial assessment from tomorrow (Tuesday) to Thursday, which I also don’t mind since I was sick. I wanted to visit Mom today but I couldn’t risk infecting her. I did feel a little better today than I did the day before, so I was able to write this.

Obviously, Lauda is one of the drivers I have to be most sensitive about given the nature of his story and his recovery and it took me a while to write this, but I got it done. The era in which he competed had such ridiculous parity that to be honest very few of the ‘70s champions except for Jochen Rindt and Jackie Stewart do very well in my open wheel model and I weirdly think his early Ferrari performance is a little inflated actually as he only beat Clay Regazzoni 17-11 in their head-to-head and Regazzoni is actually rated as a below-average driver in my model. However, I think that is probably more of a criticism of his 1973-75 seasons than his 1976-77 seasons as he definitely seemed to level up in 1976 and maintained that into 1977, which was the one season he led my teammate model thanks to dunking on Carlos Reutemann 9-1. I still expected a bit more from Lauda than being in the same range as drivers like Rinus VeeKay, Robin Frijns, Eddie Irvine, Carlos Sainz, Jr., and Thierry Boutsen in my open wheel model. Don’t get me wrong - I know he’s much better than all those guys and I still gave him two #1 seasons and certainly none of those guys ever have earned or ever will earn a #1 season, but it does still take him out of “greatest of all time” conversations for me, except for greatest comebacks obviously. I still think I did him justice.