Otto Stuppacher, laughing stock? Why one of F1's slowest drivers deserved better

Fifty years and three days after the 1976 Italian Grand Prix was run, it strikes me that it deserves to be remembered not only as the race in which Niki Lauda came back from the dead after his gruesomely fiery Nürburgring accident, nor merely as Ronnie Peterson’s sole Formula 1 grand prix victory for March, nor even as the occasion of Jacques Laffite’s and Ligier’s first F1 pole positions – although it was all those things – but also as one of those gloriously untidy F1 races in which almost every corner of the paddock seemed to generate a story of its own.

Jacques Laffite had won the pole for Ligier by just 0.03sec from Jody Scheckter’s six-wheeled Tyrrell, and Carlos Pace’s Brabham was just 0.15sec farther in arrears: the three fastest cars were therefore propelled by three entirely different conceptions of how a naturally aspirated 3.0-litre grand prix engine ought to be configured, for the Ligier was powered by a Matra V12, the Tyrrell by a Cosworth V8, and the Brabham by an Alfa Romeo flat-12.

Those three cars must have made a truly intoxicating sight – and sound – as they stormed off towards the first chicane from the sharp end of the Monza grid on race day afternoon. By the end of lap one Scheckter was leading, from Laffite and a fast-starting Patrick Depailler in the other Tyrrell, followed closely by Peterson and Carlos Reutemann, who was making his Ferrari debut, while Clay Regazzoni was sixth, also in a Ferrari. On the third lap Depailler and Peterson both passed Laffite, and on lap four SuperSwede dispatched Depailler: he was now second behind Scheckter.

Peterson’s March had been fragile all year – he would finish just six grands prix in the entirety of the 1976 season and he would score points only twice – and, even when it had not DNF’d, too often it had chewed up its front Goodyears. But at Monza that day he was helped by a few light smatterings of rain that mitigated that tyre-wear problem, and he had always been brilliant on the kind of slippery, greasy track surfaces that late-summer showers in northern Italy might serve up. So it was that on lap 11, braking later than late for the Variante Goodyear, he passed Scheckter to take a lead he would never lose. Forty-one laps later he, Scheckter, and Laffite took the chequered flag separated by just 3.0sec.

Then there was Lauda. On August 1 he had crashed at Nürburgring, he had been trapped for too long in his flaming Ferrari, and he had therefore suffered horrible burns, serious lung damage, and other injuries so severe that a priest had visited him in hospital to administer the last rites. Yet just six weeks later he walked into the Monza paddock, his face badly scarred, his body nowhere near recovered, and his mind wrestling with the frightening prospect of racing an F1 car on the fastest grand prix circuit in the world.

I think we sometimes do Lauda an injustice by describing his Monza comeback as simply heroic. Heroism suggests a clean, noble act, whereas what Lauda did was messier and more complex than that. Apart from any physical challenge, he was terrified. On the Friday he found himself unable to drive at anywhere near the limit – his ‘best’ lap in practice that rainy day was 24.40sec slower than Regazzoni’s and 20.66sec slower than Reutemann’s – and he later described the abject panic that he had experienced when he had first climbed back into the cockpit of his Ferrari. He nonetheless went back out on the Saturday and qualified it fifth, ahead of both Reutemann and Regazzoni, then he raced it to the bravest fourth place in F1 history. When he took off his helmet afterwards, his balaclava was soaked in blood where the wounds from his burns had opened up.

Oh and if you are interested in what I like to term ‘anorak facts’, here’s a nice one for you: Monza 1976 remains the last occasion on which Ferrari fielded more than two cars in a world championship-status F1 grand prix. Is one anorak fact not enough for you? OK, here comes another. James Hunt (McLaren), Jochen Mass (also McLaren), and John Watson (Penske) all had their Saturday qualifying times disallowed after their fuel samples had been found to be outside the permitted specification, with the result that only their Friday qualifying times would count. The trouble was, it had rained heavily on the Friday, their lap times had therefore been slower than everyone had managed on the Saturday, and they were thereby unceremoniously rendered non-qualifiers. On Saturday evening the resulting reshuffle consequently promoted three drivers who had thought that they had failed to qualify, an administrative complication that became even more risible when it was found that one of them had already gone home.

Which brings me, inevitably, to Otto Stuppacher, for it was he, and no account of the 1976 Italian Grand Prix is complete without him. Or, to put it another way, if Lauda’s presence at Monza 50 years ago represented one of the most astonishing feats of courage in F1 history, Stuppacher’s appearance there was one of F1’s most eccentric acts of overoptimism. Here’s a bit of background: a month earlier he had attempted to enter his home F1 grand prix, at Österreichring, but the Austrian organisers had rejected both his and Karl Oppitzhauser’s entries, decreeing that neither local hopeful possessed anything like enough single-seater experience. The Monza authorities were more accommodating, and Stuppacher duly arrived with an ex-works Tyrrell 007 that had been raced in F1 the previous year by Scheckter.

Ever since, the received-wisdom joke among F1 cognoscenti has always been that Stuppacher was hopelessly slow, and there is certainly ammo to support such a view. At Monza his best qualifying lap was 1min 55.22sec, 13.87sec slower than Laffite’s pole time, and he duly failed to qualify. When Hunt, Mass, and Watson were demoted, Stuppacher was already back home in Austria. Had mobile phones existed back then, he could have been summoned back to Monza to make his F1 grand prix debut. But exist they did not, and Stuppacher could not be contacted, so he missed his golden opportunity.

By the standards of Stuppacher’s lamentable F1 career, that 13.87sec deficit was not unusual. At Mosport three weeks later his best qualifying lap would be 12.70sec slower than the pole time, and the following weekend at Watkins Glen he was a gargantuan 27.45sec off the pace. Stuppacher was not simply slow at the Glen that year: he was operating in another temporal dimension.

Yet the curious thing about him is that he was not actually an utterly hopeless race driver. No, he just had absolutely no idea how to qualify an F1 car, and no-one had ever shown him. Again, here’s a bit of background. His mother, Helene Stuppacher, was extremely wealthy, having inherited one of Austria’s largest real estate companies, and in 1968 she bought him a Porsche 906, in which her 21-year-old son made his racing debut at the bumpy and abrasive Aspern airfield circuit near Vienna. He finished 12th in a field of 15, which is hardly the stuff of legend, but it was a start.

Then came 1969, and suddenly the Stuppacher story began to look rather more promising. In the first race ever run at the fast and intimidating Österreichring, the non-championship Eröffnungsrennen for sports cars in July of that year, he drove his Porsche 906 to third place behind two experienced sports car aces, Andrea de Adamich (Alfa Romeo R33; first) and Jo Bonnier (Lola T70; second). Granted, the result flattered him – retirements and disqualifications had thinned the field – but a podium was, is, and always will be a podium. Two weeks later, in the Zeltweg 1000km, an official round of the 1969 World Sports Car Championship no less, he shared a Porsche 910, also acquired with his mother’s money, with a 20-year-old greenhorn by the name of Andreas Nikolaus ‘Niki’ Lauda, and the two young Austrians finished 21st of 22. It is one of those arcane historical juxtapositions that becomes more irresistible the longer you ponder it, for one of them would become a three-time F1 world champion and the other an F1 laughing stock. Moreover, Monza 1976 was the crucible in which both their reputations were most indelibly forged.

Stuppacher then went hillclimbing – and in 1971 he won the Austrian Hillclimb Championship in an ex-Lauda Porsche 908. He raced that 908 in a few major sports car events, too, including the 1972 Brands Hatch 1000km, in which he and Kurt Rieder finished ninth, and even the 1972 Le Mans 24 Hours, but he crashed out after just 11 laps, before his hapless team-mate Walter Roser had as much as sat in the car.

Then, unfortunately, came F1, which changed the way in which posterity will always view him, for his reasonable sports car results and even his hillclimb championship disappeared beneath three grotesquely slow F1 qualifying performances. It is said that he hit the bottle in a big way after that, and I for one cannot blame him. Even so, he made a few more appearances in European hillclimbing in the late 1970s, at the wheel of a GRD-BMW 274, then he entered a handful of Alfa Romeo Alfasud European Cup races in the early 1980s, but after that he vanished from motor sport. The racing world moved on, as it always does, and he soon became known – if he was known at all – only as the man who had once been 27 seconds slower than James Hunt in qualifying at Watkins Glen.

Stuppacher’s struggles with alcohol eventually led to oesophageal cancer, his attempts to establish himself in business came to nothing, and in 1985 he sold his ex-Scheckter Tyrrell 007. In August 2001, aged 54, he was found dead in his Vienna apartment. Was he simply overcome by his illness, or was his demise facilitated by an intentional, lonely, and despairing act? We will surely never know, and I think we should resist the temptation to manufacture certainty where the historical record offers none.