Originally published in the Ferrari Magazine.

My father more than once said to me: “Don’t ever become friends with the drivers, because sooner or later they leave you: either they change team or, unfortunately, they die.”

I don’t know how much even he believed that, because I’m certain that he liked some drivers more as people than as sportsmen. But I myself have certainly never believed it, since a lot of them I’ve come to consider as lifelong friends. Amongst them, Niki Lauda.

Niki arrived at Maranello for the 1974 World Championship. My father had already hired Clay Regazzoni and it was Clay who suggested that the young Austrian, who’d been his teammate at BRM, was a great talent and possessed a racing sensitivity that was beyond the norm. Just that Lauda was almost unknown to most people and we were about to close negotiations with Peter Revson, who was racing at the time for McLaren. But then came the Monaco GP, which, as usual, my father followed from the little house at the track at Fiorano, and Lauda was the star of what was a great race in a single-seater that couldn’t really compete with the likes of Tyrrell, Lotus, or McLaren, the English teams who were dominant at the time. That’s how the decision came about to bet on him. Looking back on it today, in this ultra-technological era, it almost makes me laugh: Clay’s advice and watching a race on tv were enough for my father’s instinct to hire one of the ‘piloti’ who would go on to make Formula One history.

As soon as Niki arrived he showed how good he was as an exceptional test driver. The 312 B3 had some problems with the understeering, that wasn’t suitable to his driving style, and he was able to gradually sort it out. He had a unique ability to remember everything that happened out on the track: he was able to tell you that on such-and-such a lap on a particular bend he’d made a mistake with the choice of gear, and he’d even recall where individual advertising hoardings were displayed on the circuit walls, and when.

He was a real human computer. But that human computer, once he had taken off his helmet and racing suit, became something else. We were almost the same age, and in the evenings we often went out for dinner, mostly at Fini in the centre of Modena. Niki was funny, he loved to laugh and joke around, he was able to put aside the stress of the race to become simply a lad in his early twenties out with his friends. We used to like to bet each other on the results of the Grands Prix and whoever lost paid dinner for everyone.

I was at Monza on 7 September 1975, when Regazzoni won the race and Lauda, placing third, had the mathematical certainty of winning the world title. I don’t remember the exact words that we said to each other after the prize-giving, but I remember we had an embrace that I never wanted to end.

Amongst various other memories there is, naturally, that of the terrible accident on the first of August at Nürburgring in 1976. I went to visit him at home, in Salzburg, the following week. As I approached the table where he was sitting I heard his voice, the same as usual, light-hearted and ironic, but when I saw him it was a shock. He was unrecognisable with that disfigured face and the open wounds.

He was back on the track, at Fiorano, the week before Monza. They had made a helmet for him with special padding, to reduce the friction on his wounds. He got aboard the single-seater and set off. Just as he picked up speed, on the first lap, he went into a tailspin that left us all with our hearts in our throats. But then he went back out on the track and set about lapping with the same timings as always.