There are some drivers whose careers can be measured easily in statistics, their achievements neatly catalogued in tables of wins and championships. There are others whose contribution to motor sport stretches so far beyond the cockpit that any attempt to define them solely by their race results feels hopelessly inadequate. Alex Wurz belongs emphatically in the latter category. He was and/or is: a BMX champion at 12; a Le Mans winner at 22; a Formula 1 podium finisher for Benetton, McLaren and Williams; one of the most respected test and development drivers of his generation; a businessman; a circuit designer; a road safety pioneer; a TV commentator; a chairman of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association; a team management consultant; and a driver mentor. He is now 52, and over the past four decades he has immersed himself in every conceivable facet of the sport.

He has always possessed an unusually restless intelligence, coupled with an infectious enthusiasm for understanding not only what makes race cars work but also why teams succeed, how drivers can improve, how safety must evolve and why leadership matters. Even in his teens he was forever analysing, questioning and observing, storing away lessons that would later underpin an astonishingly diverse career.

His journey began a long way from the glamour of F1. “I grew up in rural north-east Austria, which is an undulating highland of dense forests and granite rock formations, and is the coldest region of the country. My family comes from milling – making flour – and I’m of the first generation that didn’t do that. It was a fantastic part of the world to grow up in – sparsely populated but wonderful countryside near the Czech border – and I remember that as a five-year-old I used to ride my bike to the border and watch the Czech soldiers patrolling the other side.

“Soon we moved to Vienna because, although our part of rural north-east Austria was a beautiful wilderness, it began to face economic difficulties and my father [Franz Wurz, European Rallycross champion in 1974, 1976 and 1982], who had retired from motor sport competition, had to find a way to earn more money. So he started a driver training and road safety business in Vienna, which he and my mother [Berta] ran together. Their company [Test & Training International] is a big business today, which my dad and I run together. As a kid I helped out, doing odd-jobs, but also watching, listening and learning. I also began to drive cars and ride motorcycles – on private property because I was too young for public roads – on dry asphalt, on wet gravel, on mud and on snow, and that taught me a lot early on, and what it taught me was different from what my future rivals were learning in karts at the same stage of their driving education.”

That final observation is typical Wurz. Where others might remember only the romance of childhood, he instinctively identifies the formative lesson concealed within it. Long before telemetry, simulators and engineering debriefs became integral to elite motor sport, he was compiling a remarkably broad understanding of vehicle dynamics, savouring grip levels on every imaginable surface and absorbing the practical realities of controlling machinery in constantly changing conditions. However, his competitive instincts surfaced on two wheels rather than four. “One of my cousins came to stay with us when I was 11, and he had a BMX bike which he offered me the chance to have a go on. I was used to riding my shitty old bike, so of course I said yes. I was immediately quick so straight away I entered a BMX Austrian championship race, without knowing anything about how to ride a BMX bike properly, and I finished second. So after that I started taking it seriously, training hard and working on my technique, and the following year, when I was 12, I entered my first international BMX race, in Riccione, Italy, which was the 1986 BMX World Championship, and I won it.

“And here’s a funny story. The day before, I asked my dad, ‘What will you do if I win the championship?’ He said, ‘If you win the championship, I’ll give you 15,000 Austrian schillings [£650 in 1986].’ When I won it, he went to the bank and withdrew 15,000 one-schilling coins in a big sack that weighed 63kg, which was too heavy for me to carry.” Franz Wurz had every reason to be proud of his precociously gifted son, but he also understood the value of ensuring that success never became detached from humour or perspective. Alex recounts the episode with delight, as though the enormous sack of coins somehow symbolised not merely victory but the family ethos that surrounded it: hard work rewarded generously but never solemnly.

“I managed to do well in karting whenever it was wet. Ever since then I’ve loved racing in the rain”

“As my father’s business developed, we became comfortably wealthy, but certainly not seriously rich. So my dad had to work very hard to raise extra money via sponsorship, which he was good at doing, and, in the end, he had to risk his own money, too. I quickly became too tall [Alex is now 6ft 2in] and too heavy for karting, so I didn’t do a lot of it, but I still learned from it and I managed to do quite well whenever it was wet. Ever since then I’ve always loved racing in the rain. But, after karting, the junior series went well for me. First I did Formula Ford, financed half by my father’s sponsorship-acquisition success and half by [Interserie and Group C racer, sports car team boss and driver mentor] Walter Lechner Sr, and I had a really good time there – 26 race wins, 28 pole positions and 40-odd podiums out of 50-odd races.

“Next up was F3, as a result of [sports car ace turned driver management svengali] Helmut Marko giving me a funded seat in his team. The next year [with another team] I was second in the German championship [scoring three wins, all of them at Hockenheim]. That was when I had my first big accident, at the Wunstorf airfield circuit, with Norberto Fontana, which ended my chances of beating [eventual champion] Jörg Müller to the title. My car went under the guardrail; the guardrail missed my head by 10cm, instead hitting the roll hoop and swiping it clean off; and my car and I ended up in a spectator area. It turned out that the guardrail had been incorrectly assembled, and from then on I decided that I was going to start taking safety seriously.”

Most young drivers emerge from frightening accidents simply grateful to have survived unscathed. Wurz did that, certainly, but he also began asking deeper questions. Why had the barrier failed? How could circuits be made safer? What responsibility did competitors themselves bear for improving standards? Those questions have remained with him for the rest of his life, eventually becoming every bit as important to him as lap times and trophies.

The middle years of his career are remembered principally through the prism of F1, but that perspective does him a disservice. Even before he reached grand prix racing, he had already established himself as one of Europe’s most versatile young drivers, equally capable of adapting to touring cars, sports prototypes and single-seaters. It was an adaptability born not merely of talent but of an unusual willingness to embrace opportunity wherever it appeared. Where some young drivers regarded anything other than formula cars as a distraction, Wurz saw every new discipline as another chance to learn. “I’d convinced [sports car ace and team owner] Reinhold Joest that I was crazy about Le Mans, so he gave me a test in his Porsche WSC-95 Le Mans car at Paul Ricard.”

“When I look back on those Benetton years, I’d say I lacked backing from within the team”

Despite Wurz’s late arrival and his having never driven either the car or the circuit before, he jumped in at midnight and went faster than the team’s regular drivers after just three laps. “That’s right – the team even examined the data to check whether I’d cut the corners! I still have no idea how I managed it, but I knew straight away that I just loved being at the wheel of a sports car. Reinhold gave me another test and that went well too, so he said, ‘OK, I want you to race for me at Le Mans.’

“Just before that I’d had a meeting with Flavio Briatore [the Benetton F1 team principal] and he’d said, ‘If you win Le Mans I’ll give you an F1 test.’ Well, I won Le Mans, so I received a fax from Briatore’s office saying that at the end of the year I’d be invited to test the Benetton F1 car in a shootout against Giancarlo Fisichella and Jarno Trulli.” It is worth pausing to appreciate the magnitude of that Le Mans victory. To win the world’s greatest endurance race outright at the age of just 22 – still a record 30 years later – remains a truly remarkable accomplishment. Just as important, it reminded an F1 grandee that an exceptional talent was waiting to be trialled.

“The test was at Estoril, in November [1996], and I knew that I had to find a way to prepare myself because I’d never driven a seriously fast single-seater before [whereas one of his shootout rivals, Fisichella, had already raced half a season in an F1 Minardi]. So I spoke to [Formula 3000 team owner] David Sears and he offered me the chance to test his Reynard F3000 car at Estoril the day before my Benetton test, at low cost. That was very valuable because in those days the best F3000 cars were just about as quick as the worst F1 cars, and the next day I was immediately only a quarter of a second off the best times set by Benetton’s race drivers, Gerhard Berger and Jean Alesi. When I got out of the car Pat Symonds [Benetton’s most senior race engineer] asked me, ‘Is this really your first time in an F1 car?’ I was able to reply, honestly, ‘Yes, it is.’ And he said, ‘OK, you’ve got the test and reserve driver job for 1997.’”

Then, in 1997, Berger fell ill, and Wurz was given the chance to make his F1 debut, in Montreal. He did well there, although he DNF’d in the race with transmission failure. He outqualified Jean Alesi in his second race, at Magny-Cours, but he spun off after 60 laps. Then, at Silverstone, his third grand prix, he outqualified Alesi again, he finished an excellent third, and, I suggest with a wink, he just might have won. “Maybe. I qualified eighth, we’d opted for a one-stop strategy, I’d never driven the car with so much fuel [90kg], and Pat Symonds and Nick Wirth [technical director] told me before the race, ‘It’ll feel like a big school bus at first, but by the end of the race it’ll feel good.’ They were right – but, before that, when we came to the pitstops, I should have got the undercut, because I was the faster driver that weekend, but instead they gave it to Alesi because he was the regular race driver. As a result, after the pitstops I came out just behind Jean. Jacques Villeneuve [Williams] won, Jean was second and I was third – but, yes, if I’d got the undercut, Pat told me that I might well have won.”

“I guess I wanted a change – and it happened thanks to a surprise phone call from Frank Williams”

Berger and Alesi both departed Benetton at the end of 1997, to be replaced by Wurz and Fisichella. “I started 1998 very well – beating Giancarlo, who was seen as the next F1 superstar at that time – then in the middle of the season I started to experiment a little bit too much with set-ups, but I recovered, and by the end of the season I’d scored more points than him [17 versus 16]. We were pushing each other, but getting on well, and everyone in the team was happy.

“Then our 1999 car was very heavy – and, because I was taller [by 14cm] and heavier [by 12kg] than Giancarlo, I was disadvantaged by about half a second a lap. If you factor that into my lap times, I was just as quick as he was, but the team didn’t want us to tell anyone that the car was so overweight, so no one knew, and I looked slow. As the season went on, the team managed to make the car lighter, but it took time and it damaged my reputation.

“In 2000 I injured my knee in a motocross accident. I had two operations on it in the middle of the season but I didn’t tell anyone because I knew that the team would disapprove of me doing motocross. Then I had a jet-ski accident and broke a rib, which I also kept quiet about for the same reason, and I did five races with that broken rib, with [FIA medical delegate] Sid Watkins secretly injecting me for those five races so as to numb the pain. The 2000 car was OK, but the season was difficult for me as you can imagine, and I broke up with my girlfriend [Karin Michal], so I had a lot going on.

“As a result of all that, even though I wasn’t much slower than Giancarlo even with all my injuries and so on, he became very much the number one and I became very much the number two. We had a qualifying car in those days, which was lighter than the race cars, which meant that you could place ballast in it so as to lower its centre of gravity, and he always got it. Then, as my injuries healed, I began to qualify on a par with him or maybe even a little faster, he got a bit angry about it, and he told the team that the qualifying car must be shit. So, in the last race of the season, in Malaysia, the team let me have a go in the qualifying car for the first time – and I qualified fifth and Giancarlo qualified 13th [0.743sec slower than Wurz]. By that time I’d lost my Benetton drive for 2001, but at least I’d proved to myself that I was still proper quick.

“I just wanted to go back to racing a cool-looking car in which I could compete for wins”

“When I look back on those Benetton years, I suppose I’d say that I lacked enough of that all-important backing from within the team. All sports players need that – footballers, ski-jumpers, tennis players, everyone – and nowadays F1 teams are much better at providing it than they used to be when I was racing, at which time things were much more cut-throat.”

There speaks a man who has long since exchanged bitterness for perspective. Lesser competitors might dwell on perceived injustices, but Wurz neither rewrites history nor indulges in grievance. Instead, he analyses events with the detachment of someone who has spent decades studying how elite organisations function. His observations about confidence, support and culture would later prove invaluable in his own leadership roles away from the cockpit. The same balance is evident when discussing one of the more extraordinary anecdotes from his F1 career. “Nick Wirth created a spreadsheet on which he costed an operation to shorten both my femurs, to make me shorter and lighter. When he put it to me, I replied with two words: one began with an ‘f’ and the other began with an ‘o’. I mean: I was committed to my racing career, but there are limits, and I wasn’t prepared to allow my team to break my legs to make me shorter.” Wurz’s height and weight were indeed engineering inconveniences in a sport in which every kilogramme mattered, but his earthy response to Wirth’s macabre proposal ensured that one particular optimisation exercise progressed no farther than a spreadsheet.

Wurz’s Benetton chapter had come to an end. Ahead lay another, at one of F1’s most celebrated teams, where opportunity, frustration and loyalty would become inextricably intertwined. The move to McLaren might at first glance have appeared to represent a backward step. After all, he was exchanging a race seat for the role of test driver. However, F1 at the beginning of the 21st century was a very different beast from today’s tightly regulated championship, and unlimited testing meant that test drivers were very important people. They accumulated thousands upon thousands of testing miles, they worked hand in glove with engineers, they refined new components, they developed simulators and they often became indispensable to an F1 team’s competitive fortunes. Few fulfilled the role with greater diligence or technical insight than Wurz. “I had no good options for 2001 so I decided to try to do what Olivier Panis had just done, which was to test for McLaren for a year, impress people and thereby get an F1 race drive [which Panis succeeded in doing with BAR in 2001 after having tested for McLaren in 2000]. At the end of 2001, when Mika Häkkinen retired, I was expecting to race for McLaren alongside David Coulthard in 2002 because I’d been told that that was the case by Martin Whitmarsh [managing director] and Adrian Newey [technical director]. But what they didn’t know was that Ron Dennis [team principal] had set on the idea of poaching Kimi Räikkönen from Sauber. Don’t get me wrong: I like Kimi, and he was a great driver, but obviously it was unfortunate for me that he came onto the driver market at exactly the time when I thought – because I’d been told – that I was going to get my big chance with McLaren. Then I got a race drive offer for 2004 from Jaguar, when Tony Purnell was in charge there, and that was going to go through, but at the last minute Ron blocked it because he said I was too important an asset to McLaren.”

The irony was unmistakeable: Wurz’s work behind the scenes strengthened McLaren enormously, yet the very excellence with which he fulfilled that role reduced his chances of escaping it. But perhaps nothing encapsulates those contradictions better than the remarkable sequence of events that unfolded in 2005. “Because it had been assumed at one point that I was going to leave McLaren to race for Jaguar the following year, 2005 [which did not happen because Jaguar’s F1 team was sold to Red Bull for 2005], Ron told the McLaren designers that they didn’t have to design the cockpit of the 2005 McLaren so that it could accommodate someone whose legs and arms were as long as mine. And when my 2005 Jaguar deal fell through, Ron didn’t tell them that they needed to alter the design, so I didn’t fit the 2005 car. For that reason [fellow McLaren test driver] Pedro de la Rosa, who is a dear friend of mine now, got the first chance to deputise for Juan Pablo Montoya when he was injured. I did the Friday running for that race [Bahrain 2005] but I had so little room in the cockpit that I had to steer one-handed, so Pedro qualified and raced the car. After that, for the next race, which was at Imola, McLaren spent a hell of a lot of money to adapt the car so that I could drive it properly, and I qualified seventh and ended up third in the race. That was cool but after that I was back to testing. I guess I wanted a change by then – and it happened thanks to a surprise phone call from Frank Williams, asking me if I could come to see him, because he said he wanted a top-class test driver, so I flew to England and we did a deal.

“Then, when Mark Webber left Williams at the end of 2006 to go to Red Bull, Frank Williams and Patrick Head [Williams’ technical director] decided that, because my testing lap times had been strong and I’d made very few mistakes in 2006, they’d give me a race drive for 2007 alongside Nico Rosberg. But the 2007 Bridgestones were quite spongy, I couldn’t get a good feel for how to lean on them, and it took me a really long time to get back to any sort of good lap times in qualifying. In the races I was fine but I struggled in qualifying – usually two-and-a-half tenths off Rosberg, who was admittedly a great qualifier as he later showed at Mercedes against Lewis Hamilton. But in the few races in 2007 in which there was changeable weather – like Montreal [where Wurz finished third] and Nürburgring [where he finished fourth] – I was able to race cleverly and fast to recover from comparatively poor grid positions.

“All in all, I guess my F1 career can be seen as a bit frustrating in some ways, but I’m not upset about it because, when I step back and look at it now, I’m able to say that I was fighting against the absolute best drivers in the world, in three legendary F1 teams, Benetton, McLaren and Williams.”

If F1 had provided Wurz with some of the greatest challenges of his career, endurance racing would ultimately restore something equally precious: uncomplicated joy. “I’d been at an FIA Institute road safety conference at Paul Ricard, and I’d seen the Peugeot WEC car testing there. It looked so cool, so I said to my manager at the time, Didier Coton, ‘Get me a test in that car.’ So he did. We did a deal, the pay was low, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to go back to racing a cool-looking car in which I could compete for wins, at Le Mans and other great circuits, on tyres I could get on with [Michelins]. It worked. I loved it because I’d had a reset: it was a non-political environment where the only requirement was to drive a great car fast, which I did, and I loved having team-mates and racing the same car together.”

The result was another Le Mans triumph, this time with Peugeot in 2009, together with a succession of WEC victories, first with Peugeot then with Toyota, that reaffirmed what shrewd insiders had never doubted: Wurz remained one of the world’s best drivers. Nonetheless, as he moved into his forties, management roles began to tempt him. “I was always very analytical, and I was always busy observing my environment, so, after I’d decided to hang up my helmet, Toyota offered me a chance to stay on, to help develop the team, and to ensure that the culture we’d built would continue. That culture was that, although the drivers are all alpha animals, they should always be treated the same, pull together as a team, respect one another and work collaboratively. And I’m still doing it. We won Le Mans outright this year, and that culture was part of what won it. I did a similar but different role for Williams, during which years we were quite successful, including Pastor Maldonado’s win in Barcelona in 2012, and I’m proud of the work I did with him at that time, and with the Williams engineers, particularly around Pirelli tyre management, which he responded to really well.”