Nurburgring in 1976<\/a>).<\/p>\nHe kept pondering a conversation with his pal Nelson Piquet, who had told him he actually expected to die in a racing car. Niki wondered: could he really believe that and still push so hard?<\/p>\n
It transpired that this time in Qualifying he had been blocked on one lap by Teo Fabi, and that his engine later lost a cylinder. He had also been asked to give Alain his intended Qualifying car, leaving him in the spare. He was quite happy to do that.<\/p>\n
But there was a bright spot on raceday, when he set the fastest time in the morning warm-up. So despite starting so far back, that imbued him with the belief that he could win. He had to seize this final Big Chance.<\/p>\n
The start was a mess. Piquet stalled on pole, and Thierry Boutsen was also very slow away, but Keke Rosberg and Fabi made great starts to sandwich Ayrton Senna at the end of the opening lap. Alain was fourth, the canny Niki already up to fifth. Maybe things were looking up?<\/p>\n
But when his car started to oversteer, he knew he had made a poor choice of tyres: softs on the right-hand side and the left front, a hard on the left rear. He had an arrangement with the mechanics: an early stop meant give me more hard tyres, a later stop meant softs all round, boys.<\/p>\n
But he found that he needed to pit well before the halfway mark, and eventually did so on the 21st of the 70 laps, dropping from third behind Alain and Ayrton to eighth. But to his consternation, the oversteer was still there. Niki believed that Ron told the mechanics to mount another hard left rear, whereas he knew that Alain would get four soft Goodyears.<\/p>\n
But soon he found the track ahead clearing. Rosberg had already retired from the lead with engine failure. Senna had pitted on Lap 27, and was now struggling with a misfiring engine; Michele Alboreto had pitted on Lap 32; and Prost from the lead on 34. Now Niki was in the lead! And Alain, delayed by a tardy 18s stop, had to fight past Senna. But Niki knew his team mate had the tyre advantage\u2026<\/p>\n
Initially the delayed Piquet ran ahead of Niki, who was thus running in his dirty air before the Brazilian realised, sped up and started towing the number 1 McLaren along.<\/p>\n
With six laps to go, Prost \u2013 his car oversteering less on its full set of soft tyres \u2013 was on him. All Niki could see in his mirrors was the word Marlboro. But Zandvoort is Zandvoort, and the only real passing places were the chicane and the entry to the Tarzan hairpin in the fast corner, and that relied on a good slipstreaming run out of the final corner, Bos Uit.<\/p>\n
But Niki was not a World Champion for nothing. He took canny lines into the chicane, discouraging Alain whom he knew could not risk a DNF in his quest for his first World Championship, even though a win would earn three points more than second.<\/p>\n
Niki always played it fair, but wasn\u2019t going to hand a win over since he figured his team mate, whom he liked, would do just fine in his MP4\/2B against the fading Ferraris in the remaining five races.<\/p>\n
He let Alain put two wheels on the grass as he tried an impossible move into the chicane on the final lap, and had enough in reserve to beat him through Bos Uit and to reach the finish line 0.232s to the good. It was a breathtaking performance.<\/p>\n
\u201cI drove just as hard as I needed to keep the other guy behind me,\u201d Niki grinned toothily. \u201cI had to work bloody hard over the last three or four laps, I can tell you that for sure!\u201d<\/p>\n
But we had to wait a long time for his version of the full story. On the face of it he had driven a perfect race just to remind everyone that he could still turn it on. He had avenged that 1975 defeat there, and in the process had equalled the great Jim Clark\u2019s tally of 25 victories.<\/p>\n
But the Austrian warrior\u2019s weekend also wore another face, and it had an angry mien that had matured further at the previous race.<\/p>\n
According to Niki in his biography To Hell and Back, published the following year in the UK, the relationship with Ron had deteriorated when he had made a heavy pay increase demand for 1984 and \u201985.<\/p>\n
Ron never felt that the drivers contributed anything like as much to what McLaren created as the people who toiled full-time behind the scenes in the factory, among them himself and designer John Barnard. He had a point.<\/p>\n
And when Niki had called a Marlboro press conference in Austria the previous week, to announce his retirement, Ron had taken the microphone in a move condemned by many as graceless, and had said as much as he hijacked what had been intended as Niki\u2019s event.<\/p>\n
Niki had already gone so far as to try and join Renault for 1985 as he planned his final season (as it turned out he missed a bullet there), such was the depth of their rift. Being upstaged by Ron in Austria was what he regarded as the insult.<\/p>\n
He told Alain after that Zandvoort race that he would support his championship quest for the rest of the year, which cheered the Frenchman up.<\/p>\n
But when he recalled how Ron had congratulated him and said how pleased he was that he won, Niki was his usual candid self as he concluded in the relevant chapter in the book.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t believe him for one minute,\u201d he remembered in print. \u201cAnyway, I couldn\u2019t care less whether he\u2019s pleased or not.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Having been beaten there 10 years earlier by his pal James Hunt in his first World Championship-winning season,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":387314,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4103],"tags":[4199,707,4200,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-387313","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-f1","8":"tag-f1","9":"tag-formula-1","10":"tag-formula1","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115123983741638915","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}