In 1974, Clay Regazzoni recommended a young Austrian driver to Ferrari. The recommendation itself is a single line in most accounts of Niki Lauda’s career, the kind of detail that gets mentioned and moved past on the way to the parts of the story with fire and championships in them. It is worth stopping on, because the relationship between Clay Regazzoni and Niki Lauda that followed was neither the mentor arrangement the word ‘recommended’ implies, nor the rivalry two teammates usually become. It was closer to something rarer: two drivers who raced each other properly and stayed friends regardless.
Teammates, not exactly equals
Lauda arrived at Ferrari for 1974 on Regazzoni’s word and immediately started racing him for real. They were teammates through 1974 and into 1975, the season Lauda won his first World Championship, with Regazzoni adding the Italian Grand Prix at Monza to his own tally that same year. Neither man appears to have treated the other gently for it.
Long Beach, five months before everything changed
The clearest evidence of that is a race most retellings of the Lauda story skip. On 28 March 1976, at the United States Grand Prix West on the Long Beach street circuit, Regazzoni won in a Ferrari 312T — by 42 seconds over Lauda, his own teammate, who came into that weekend leading the championship. It is not a story about a number two driver making way. Regazzoni beat the best driver in the world that year, in the same car, on merit.
What happened five months later
On 1 August 1976, on the second lap of the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, Lauda’s Ferrari left the track at a fast left-hand kink before Bergwerk, struck an embankment and caught fire after a collision with Brett Lunger’s car. He suffered severe burns and inhaled hot toxic gases that damaged his lungs and blood; he lost most of his right ear and the hair, eyebrows and eyelids on the right side of his head.
He missed two races. Ferrari brought in Carlos Reutemann as a third driver to cover the gap while Regazzoni continued to race. Six weeks after the crash, Lauda returned at Monza and finished fourth — by his own account, terrified throughout. He lost the championship to James Hunt by a single point at the final race in Japan, where he withdrew after two laps in heavy rain, citing concern that his fire-damaged tear ducts were affecting his vision. Hunt finished third and took the title.
Thirty years later
Regazzoni’s own career ended in 1980, at Long Beach again, in the crash that left him paralysed. That afternoon, and the wins either side of it, are told in full here. He died on 15 December 2006. Niki Lauda was among those who came to his funeral in Lugano, alongside Jackie Stewart, Emerson Fittipaldi, Arturo Merzario and Peter Sauber — a gathering of people whose careers had mostly finished decades earlier, for a teammate whose recommendation had started one of theirs.
The version most people have actually seen
Most of what a general audience knows about 1976 comes from Ron Howard’s Rush, built around the Hunt-Lauda rivalry that season. Regazzoni is in it — played by Pierfrancesco Favino, alongside Daniel Brühl as Lauda — a reminder that the year the film tells as a two-man story had a third driver in the same garage the whole time, one who had put the second man there in the first place.
The Clay Regazzoni and Niki Lauda print, and what it can honestly say
Our Regazzoni print shows him in Scuderia Ferrari red, mid-race, and names nothing more specific than that — no year, no Grand Prix, because none is recorded for this photograph. It could belong to any of his six seasons in the colours, including the two spent alongside Lauda. That is a genuine limit on what we can say about the picture, not a limit on what is known about the man in it, which this piece has tried to set out in full.
For the driver on the other side of Ferrari’s story in the following decade, Schumacher’s own eleven seasons with the team pick the thread back up. And for how the cars of Regazzoni and Lauda’s era compare to what came before and after, the shape of the car dates it.
Every print is made to order on 200 gsm archival matte paper, pigment giclée at 300 dpi, on the press within 72 hours and shipped tracked and free worldwide.
Common questions
Did Clay Regazzoni recommend Niki Lauda to Ferrari?
Yes. Regazzoni recommended Lauda to Ferrari in 1974, and the two drove together as teammates through 1974 and 1975 — Lauda's first world title year — and into 1976, when Regazzoni was still on the team as Lauda recovered from his Nürburgring crash.
Were Clay Regazzoni and Niki Lauda friends?
By all accounts, yes, and it outlasted their racing careers. Lauda was among those who attended Regazzoni's funeral in Lugano in December 2006, alongside Jackie Stewart and Emerson Fittipaldi, more than three decades after the two had raced each other hard as Ferrari teammates.
Did Regazzoni beat Lauda in a race?
Yes, several times as teammates, most notably at the 1976 United States Grand Prix West at Long Beach, where Regazzoni won by 42 seconds over Lauda, then the championship leader — five months before Lauda's near-fatal crash at the Nürburgring.
Is Clay Regazzoni a character in the film Rush?
Yes. Ron Howard's 2013 film, built around the 1976 rivalry between James Hunt and Niki Lauda, casts Pierfrancesco Favino as Regazzoni, alongside Daniel Brühl as Lauda and Chris Hemsworth as Hunt — a reminder that a third driver shared their Ferrari garage that season.
