PARA DESCARGAR TENSIONES : CURIOSIDADES F1 Opciones

[Ayrton]

Y ahí la segunda:

¿IAME, DAP, ITALSISTEM, Ayrton Senna?



"...CUANDO TODO PASE, SER�S OTRO, PERTENECER�S A UNA CLASE DIFERENTE E INCOMPRENSIBLE DE HOMBRES, LA DE LOS QUE HAN CONDUCIDO UN FORMULA UNO..."

GRACIAS A TODOS LOS FORISTAS POR HACER DE ESTO ALGO TAN GRANDE.
GRACIAS A PEDRO POR EL PASADO Y EL FUTURO.

[XPG]

No sabía ninguna, pero con ayuda de Forix algunas se hacen fáciles.

El equipo que nunca se clasificó fue Life, ¿el peor equipo de la historia de la F1?

Y el circuito japonés donde se corrió en el 76 y 77 fue Mount Fuji. Precisamente ahí fue cuando Lauda se retiró de la carrera por las malas condiciones climáticas unos meses después de su terrible accidente. Eso permitió a Hunt ganar el campeonato.


_________________________________

El artículo sobre Guy Edwards está muy chulo, así que lo copio para aquí:

Fire at the Ring article taken from Autosport magazine dated December 3 1998

BADGE OF COURAGE

Guy Edwards won the Queen's Gallantry Medal for pulling Niki Lauda from his blazing Ferrari at the Nurburgring in 1976. He has never been back to the infamous track - until now. By Tim Collings

Life was cheap in the good old days. Those sepia-printed afternoons of golden memories and scarlet bloodshed when Guy Edwards drove with James Hunt, Niki Lauda and the rest. Season after season they died at the wheel. Whole lists of them. Fatalities were so commonplace in Formula One of the 1960s and '70s that debates on driver safety were dismissed as a waste of energy.

Then along came Jackie Stewart and the whole thing changed. Life was worth something, after all. He injected ideas and standards which revolutionised the sport, turning it from a risky high-speed route to the graveyard into the modern, hi-tech, media-massaged coliseum it is today. Not completely safe, perhaps, but a lot more so.

Edwards, his trademark mane of fair hair still catching the wind, is a survivor. Like many who have earned from Bernie Ecclestone's circus, he lives in Monte Carlo. He has a good sponsorship business and is called in frequently as a consultant. He is known, liked and respected on both sides of the Atlantic. He is famous too. Not for his racing, nor for his undoubted business acumen. In the summer of 1976 he did something so brave and selfless that his actions were forever burned into the memories of those who witnessed them. For his courage he was awarded the Queen's Gallantry Medal, presented in 1977 by Queen Elizabeth II.

What Edwards did was to save the life of Niki Lauda. With the help of Brett Lunger, Harald Ertl, who was Edwards' partner in the Hesketh team, and Arturo Merzario, he succeeded in hauling the Austrian world champion out of his blazing Ferrari at the Nurburgring. The film of the crash, the pictures of Lauda's flaming balaclava, the latter shots of his scarred face, his burnt head (always thereafter to be covered in a sponsored baseball cap), the story of him receiving the last rites in hospital and then recovering and racing again, all were secondary to the Edwards-inspired actions which captured the imagination.

Modestly, the Briton these days makes little show of his deeds that day, Sunday August 1, 1976, at the German Grand Prix. He carries memories, some scary and some satisfying, but rarely relives them. It happened in an age of brave men and bloody machines, when it was not correct to do anything other than retain a stiff upper lip.

To this day, the Austrian has not thanked his saviour personally for his assistance on that horrifying afternoon. Edwards is not bothered. They lived in a different way then. Lauda was a racer, not a man of feelings. Not a modern man. He was only interested in winning.

Earlier this autumn, however, when the modern F1 industry set up camp in the concrete-and-tarmac, wiremesh-fenced paddock of the modern Nurburgring, the Briton went back. It was his first return to the place where Adolf Hitler had wanted to demonstrate German supremacy in GP racing, his first revisiting of that corner of the Eifel mountains in which he had emerged from the pack of men in pursuit of fleeting glory to inspire a sense of pride in humanity that was shared everywhere.

Predictably he was unimpressed, at first, and largely unmoved. Then, on the empty Monday following the 1998 Luxembourg GP, he took his modest Ford hire car and his 14-year-old son, Sean, back up the road nearby, away from the current track which barely deserves association with its predecessor, to take another look at the Nordschleife, the remnants of the old, 14.19 mile Nurburgring. They did eight laps. It is no longer kept as it was in its pomp. Now, it is used to entertain and scare corporate parties, to enlighten visiting journalists and to give the paying public an insight into the kind of racing which existed before some of our contemporary heroes were born. Edwards could remember it all, but he wanted to take another look. He drove to the entrance with a mixture of curiosity and pride. There, as everywhere, an efficient jobsworth turned him away. The circuit was closed. The man had no idea who Edwards was.

"We hung around for a while and then an Austrian journalist who was there came along and talked to this chap. He said something which obviously worked and we were allowed in," said Edwards.

Recalling that late September day over lunch in London just a few weeks later, he moved through a whole range of emotions. As a father, he wanted his son to go there and see where it all happened. He wanted to go back, also, and touch his past, check again his memory, rediscover his feelings on the mortality of racing drivers in an age when most F1 followers refer to Imola '94 as the blackest weekend they can recall.

"It was," he said "a very quiet day. Very quiet indeed. And that was the first thing I felt. In 1976, it was a noisy, hot and terrible day." The small inferno of heat and sound from which Lauda was dragged could never be erased from his mind. "We drove in and went over Adenau Bridge, and up the hill towards Bergwerk to the place where it happened."

His voice remained calm and measured. His eyes flickered from distant stabs of old feelings, perhaps hidden for all of 22 years, back to the controlled, concentrated blue of an intelligent man talking and listening. Sean, too, he said, was quiet. "I remembered the place perfectly easily," said Edwards. "I remembered other things, too. The sheer unpredictability of racing there, at the 'Ring. And the tightening of the stomach."

A few days before the German GP of '76, Lauda had spoken out about the circuit. Criticising it for being dangerous and anachronistic, he said it was an outmoded death trap. "He wasn't wrong," said Edwards, whose own racing baptism there had been one of fire, and the death, just in front, of another driver.

He recalled his Hesketh being well of the pace set by Hunt and Lauda that summer. "He [Lauda] had done the only sub-seven-minute lap there in an F1 car," said Edwards. "Most of us were going round half a minute slower than that! It was such a long circuit."

There are other issues that have lived in his mind. "If it had not been a world champion in that car, would there have been such a fuss made afterwards?" he said. It is a question that has echoed down the years. The same was said after Imola '94, where Roland Ratzenberger died on Saturday and Ayrton Senna on Sunday. Senna, the brilliant driver who captured the dreams of a generation, would have been the first to understand, and agree, with those who have often since said that it is a shame so few memories of Ratzenberger are kept alive as fiercely as his.

Edwards talked too, of the agonies of David Purley as he "went bananas" trying to get Roger Williamson's car turned upright after his big blazing fatal accident at Zandvoort where "no one else stopped at all, they just kept on lapping. It took such a long time. Five, six, seven or eight minutes. I talked to David and he wasn't surprised. That's the way of it".

Why then, in this sport of dead emotions and win-or-bust, cold and ruthless pragmatism, did Edwards pull up and save Lauda's life? A man he barley knew who, even now, barely acknowledges his existence? "My first reaction was 'Oh, Shit!' That kind of thing. I thought he was going to take me with him. His car clipped mine and I just missed an impact. I got through the whole thing and went off the track on to the grass. Then, when I stopped , I looked back and saw his Ferrari burning, about 100 metres back. He had gone into the curve, a left kink on the way up towards Bergwerk, but not gone through it. Instead, he had gone off, out of control, through the catch fencing and bounced off an earth bank and back on to the track.

"There he was. I could see him. I had time to get out of my car and run back and save him. It was a very difficult thing. Like the first time off a high diving board. Petrol fires are such awful things. This was a big one. The heat and the noise were incredible. It was not a pretty sight at all. I was running towards this fire and I was thinking - do I really want to be involved in this?

"The honest answer was 'no way'. But what could I do? Stop, and walk back? Holy hell, it was a mess. Then, for me, it was all action. There were so many things to be done. I was aware of others around me. But the flames were so thick, I couldn't see the little bastard. But I dived in and it was so hot and there was choking dust everywhere. I knew it was now or never and, with a desperate sense of urgency, and with help from some more drivers, feeling quite desperate, we tried again. We were banging against on another, pulling, cursing and just struggling. His shoulder straps pulled away in my hand and it was incredibly frustrating and the heat was just so physical. I got hold of an arm and a good grip on his body and the little sod came out with us all falling in a heap. We pulled him out like a cork from a bottle."

Edwards' actions, it must be remembered, came at a time when F1 cars were almost literally mobile death traps. The fuel tanks were alongside the driver, the men sitting, as if in a bath, surrounded by petrol. Edwards described the monocoque as "nothing more than an aluminium death tube". In Lauda's accident, on the apex of the 'kink', both tanks ruptured and one was ripped out.

Luck was with him, however. He was saved by a combination of events: Edwards' bravery, Lunger's collision with the Ferrari, and the actions of a marshal, with an extinguisher, and Merzario and Ertl, in fighting the fire. Without the extinguishers, Edwards, Lunger and Merzario might not have hauled Lauda clear.

If Lauda owed his life to any one single factor, it was the two hand held extinguishers", said Edwards. He stressed, too, that it needed four people to pull him free, not one or two, and that, without all four men and the two extinguishers, it would all have been in vain. "I could see the fire was blackening his balaclava and burning his face and I remember thinking that we had only a few more seconds or it would be too late for him," he explained. They pulled him down the track. Then, the car was enveloped in flames. The Briton, in another moment of mad or inspired courage, ran and hauled the errant tank of petrol away from the blaze.

"As I stood there afterwards, others arrived. Chris Amon came and stopped and looked at it all and retired on the spot. Hunt and Clay Regazzoni, in a fiercely animated conversation, were there. Life went on. The normality of it jarred on me. No one understood how close Lauda had come to death. There and then, I lost my commitment to GP racing. It wasn't worth it. I determined to see the season out and, after strapping up my right wrist which was sprained when my car hit Lauda's, took part in the restarted race. I finished."

At the time, 138 drivers had died racing at the Nurburgring. It was the last GP on the old circuit. Scarred, but alive, Lauda returned to fight for the title. At the final race in Japan, he retired because of the atrocious conditions. Hunt was champion. Edwards won a medal.

"Now, the Nurburgring is a very peaceful kind of place," said Edwards, "We made a day of it. It was closed to the public and very quiet. It makes you think of the risks. The risk is part of the game. It is the same for a matador. The same for everyone in racing, whatever they think. For me it is about risk management now. It was then really. Look at Jackie [Stewart] and Alain Prost. I am a great fan of safe racing and reducing the risks.

"On that day, really, I had no choice. I was in the middle of it. But going back to the 'Ring this year, I felt most emotional when I remembered the first crash I saw there: a big Porsche, and the driver - Hans Lyno - being killed in the fire. I was right there and I sat in shock by the side of the track. I was younger. That upset me more, I think, when I went back, than it did to remember the Lauda accident."