{"id":461079,"date":"2007-02-01T16:00:08","date_gmt":"2007-02-01T16:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sportscardigest.com\/\/?p=67324"},"modified":"2024-12-27T03:06:02","modified_gmt":"2024-12-27T03:06:02","slug":"niki-lauda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.supercars.net\/blog\/niki-lauda\/","title":{"rendered":"Niki Lauda"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Niki Lauda Biography<\/span><\/span><\/h2>\n

Andreas Nikolaus Lauda was born to a well-to-do Vienna family on February\u00a022, 1949. His family’s social status proved both nuisance and good\u00a0fortune. Although he was later to become successful in business on his\u00a0own, it was obvious early on that he was not cut to fit the conventional\u00a0Lauda mold, much to his family’s consternation. He did, however, find a\u00a0mansion bet sign up offer<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0family connections to be useful when it later became necessary for him to\u00a0borrow to support his racing. Lauda became interested in motor racing not from attendance at events or\u00a0boyhood idolization of racing heroes, but rather from an innate interest\u00a0in automobiles dating to a young age. When he was twelve, visiting\u00a0relatives were letting him park their cars. He got hold of, in his early\u00a0teens, a 1949 Volkswagen Beetle convertible in which he would ride\u00a0roughshod over a relative’s estate. He entered his first race, a hill\u00a0climb, in a Cooper in 1968 taking second in class. Thereafter, despite\u00a0his father’s insistence that he stay away from racing, he competed in\u00a0hill climbs and later Formula Vee. He did his stint hauling a Formula 3\u00a0car on a trailer to races around Europe. In the course of this he scared\u00a0himself into a certain amount of sanity, and, in 1971,\u00a0abandoned the wildness of Formula 3 to take the plunge on his own in\u00a0Formula 2.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Niki<\/a>By virtue of his family’s business reputation he was able to secure loans\u00a0that would not otherwise have been available. He used these to buy an F2\u00a0seat at March for ’71 partnering\u00a0Ronnie Peterson<\/a>\u00a0(who was getting paid\u00a0for his driving), and the next season an F1\/F2 combination. When March\u00a0fizzled he persuaded Louis Stanley at BRM to sell him a seat. In the\u00a0course of all this he ran up debts that would have balked a small banana\u00a0republic. Due dates on notes had an unfortunate tendency not to coincide\u00a0with the availability of starting money from touring car races. But his\u00a0abilities got him noticed. In true fairy tail fashion first Stanley began\u00a0paying him, then the call from Ferrari’s Luca Montezemolo came before the\u00a0financial house of cards collapsed (his devil-may-care approach didn’t\u00a0seem to worry him at the time, although in his mature years he would say\u00a0that it had been crazy).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n