On September 11, 1976, Niki Lauda raced at the Italian Grand Prix having been involved in a hideous fiery crash just 40 days earlier.
Lauda was left permanently scarred by the smash at the Nurburgring, but his remarkable fighting spirit saw him return to Formula One, and later become world champion twice more.
The Daily Mail's Ian Wooldridge was at Monza to watch Lauda's return to the track. Following the great Austrian's death at the age of 70, here is how our writer described the extraordinary events...
Three time Formula One world champion Niki Lauda has died at the age of 70
Original publication date: September 11, 1976
Headline: COURAGE OR MERE MADNESS - Ian Wooldridge watching the incredible man back from the dead at Monza
The rain was smashing vertically into the Monza circuit as the third car out in practice threw up a fantail of solid water, slewed sideways, spun twice and hit the fence.
Watching unblinkingly from the Ferrari pits not 100 yards distant was Niki Lauda. We expect him, as world motor racing champion, to remain emotionally unmoved by a minor spill, but there was another reason for his gaunt, unblinking stare. He has virtually no eyelids. They were scorched off 40 days ago.
So was much of his left ear, the top layers of skin on his upper face and all the skin around the right wrist left unprotected by fireproof covering when his last car exploded in a sheet of flame on the sadistic German track at Nurburgring.
They got him out in 43 seconds. Had they been 20, even 15, seconds slower we would be requested to stand here tomorrow afternoon in the brief traditional tribute to a dead motor sports hero.
Instead, if his Formula One engine can match his nerveless ambition, we shall witness him gearing down from around 190 mph on the Monza straights to something like 85 on the most treacherous bends. He will once again be sitting astride what amounts to an incendiary bomb, and changing gear between 1,300 and 1,500 times with a right hand which could easily have been amputated as recently as the same day that the Olympic Games ended in Montreal.
In September 1976, Niki Lauda raced at the Italian Grand Prix after suffering a hideous crash
Is it courage, or madness? Is it bravery, or obsession? Is it one man, aged 27, so unwilling to concede an earthly title that he is prepared to wager life against death when most men would be hiding their desperate injuries in a darkened room in a clinic? And, if so, what is the psychologist's definition for that?
Perhaps our own James Hunt, the driver closest to wresting the world title from Lauda, comes nearest with the explanation. 'Niki', he said, not permitting the close camaraderie of the Grand Prix circuit to cloud reality, 'is a single-minded chap. If he found you lying on the ground, he would sooner walk over than round you'.
This is the man who will drive the Italian Grand Prix in a flame red Ferrari emitting a sound like a tearing calico. Someone once called him the Red Baron, equating him in outlook with Baron Manfred von Richthofen the First World War air ace who refused to camouflage his starlet fighter, so that his mortal-combat opponents should always know who they were up against.
The allusion was very perceptive. Lauda, proud, abrupt, formal and scrupulously polite, strikes you as more Prussian than Austrian. Even to the point where he fixes your eyes with his, challenging you to allow
