Jochen Mass resisted F1's 'curse'. That's why we miss him so much

Mass’s first full F1 season, 1974, was compromised by the dreadful unreliability of the Surtees TS16, and he and the authoritarian Surtees fell out halfway through the year, but there was enough in his performances to persuade McLaren’s Teddy Mayer to give him his Yardley-sponsored third McLaren M23 for the final two races of the year, Mosport and Watkins Glen, where he finished 16th and seventh. That seventh place led to the opportunity of a lifetime: when Denny Hulme retired at the end of the 1974 season, Mass became a McLaren works driver for 1975 alongside reigning F1 world champion Emerson Fittipaldi.

Received wisdom has it that Mass was not Fittipaldi’s equal in 1975, nor James Hunt’s equal in 1976 and 1977 when Hunt replaced Fittipaldi at McLaren, and to be frank anyone pretending otherwise would be gilding the lily, for those three years proved that, supremely capable though he was, Jochen’s racing persona lacked the self-centred and diamond-hard edge with which all F1 world champions are blessed or, if you prefer, cursed. Nor was he possessed of the ferocious appetite for political gameplay that a driver requires to gain serious influence within F1 teams.

Nonetheless, alongside Fittipaldi in 1975, and partnering Hunt in 1976 and 1977, Mass repeatedly produced drives of considerable quality, and he stood on eight F1 podiums in those years – nine if you include his third place in the non-championship F1 Swiss Grand Prix at Dijon in 1975. If he lacked a tenth or two in qualifying compared with his superfast all-time-great team-mates, whose many pole laps constituted a formidably exacting barometer, he was a fast and solid racer, he was mechanically sympathetic, and he was a congenial and dependable team player.

One of his McLaren podiums was a win – but, sadly for Jochen, it is almost impossible to discuss the achievement without the terrible qualification that has followed it through history. The 1975 Spanish Grand Prix was stopped after just 29 of its scheduled 75 laps when Rolf Stommelen’s Hill flew over a barrier, killing four spectators. Mass had been leading at the time, so he was declared the winner. His one F1 grand prix victory consequently lives in a strange annal of motor sport’s moral geography: a commendable achievement permanently entangled with an awful tragedy.

Similarly, at Nürburgring in 1976, the last German Grand Prix to be run on the mighty Nordschleife, rain began to fall in the half-hour before the race was due to start. Mass, drawing on his extensive experience of racing on the daunting 14.19 miles (22.84km) of the infamous ‘green hell’, was the only driver to pull up to his grid slot on slick tyres. As the rain abated and the circuit dried, every other driver stopped for slicks – and Jochen duly inherited a half-minute lead that he would surely have protected successfully until flag-fall. To win a grand prix at Nürburgring had always been a glittering jewel in any race driver’s crown, but for a German it was a crowning glory. Indeed, no German driver had ever won a grand prix at Nürburgring in the F1 era, and in Auto Union’s and Mercedes-Benz’s pre-WWII glory days only Rudolf Caracciola, Otto Merz, Christian Werner, Hans Stuck, and Bernd Rosemeyer had ever done so. So when Niki Lauda crashed his Ferrari in the 1976 German Grand Prix, triggering a restart in which the restarting drivers would start from their original grid positions rather than from their positions on the lap before the race had been stopped, Mass was horrendously and perhaps unfairly disadvantaged. He raced well to finish third, but he must have found it difficult to congratulate the winner, his team-mate Hunt.

After McLaren came less comfortable F1 years for Jochen. ATS in 1978 was a horrible disappointment – his best result was seventh at Jacarepaguá and he DNQ’d three times – while Arrows in 1979 and 1980 was better but still no great shakes. Having said that, he drove an ageing Arrows A1 superbly at Monaco in 1979, for he was running third, behind only the Ferraris of Jody Scheckter and Gilles Villeneuve, when his brakes began to overheat, eventually dropping him to sixth after a pitstop. The following year, in the troublesome bullet-shaped Arrows A3, he drove another excellent race at Monaco, finishing an impressive fourth, beaten only by three of the season’s front-runners, Carlos Reutemann (Williams), Jacques Laffite (Ligier), and Nelson Piquet (Brabham).

Two accidents sit like dark brackets around the end of Mass’s F1 career. The first came at Zolder in 1982, during qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix. He was driving a March 821 – not a great car – and Gilles Villeneuve was catching him rapidly in a Ferrari 126 C2. Mass moved to the right, believing that Villeneuve would pass on the left, but Villeneuve, attempting to go around the outside, moved towards the patch of tarmac that Mass was now occupying. The Ferrari clipped the March’s rear wheel, it was launched into the air, and it crashed heavily. Villeneuve died from his injuries. The precise allocation of responsibility has been argued over ever since, but Jochen never got over it.

He raced in but scored no points in the next four grands prix, then, 11 weeks after the tragedy of Zolder, the F1 circus arrived at Paul Ricard. Still unable to shake off his upset, as perhaps less generous-spirited men might have been able to do after nearly three months, he qualified his March 26th and last. He made a good start, moving up to P19 by the end of lap nine. During lap 10, while dicing with Mauro Baldi, Mass’s March made contact with Baldi’s Arrows on the entry to Signes, the superfast right-hander at the end of the long back straight. Both cars would have been travelling at about 200mph (322km/h). Baldi’s Arrows went into a vicious spin – and Mass’s March was launched into the air, over the barrier, and into a spectator area. Miraculously no-one was killed, but the March caught fire and 12 spectators were burned, although none of them seriously. Mass suffered nasty burns to both hands. There and then he decided that he had had enough, and he walked away from F1 that day, never to return. What had happened at Zolder, followed by what had happened at Paul Ricard, was enough.

Later, Mass embraced historic racing with infectious enthusiasm. As a Mercedes-Benz ambassador he became a much-loved custodian of the company’s motor sport history, demo-driving legendary old race cars with great finesse and visible enjoyment. Perhaps enjoyment is what I will remember most about him. He was, and I use the cliché unapologetically, one of nature’s gentlemen. I liked him, and I admired him, too.

That distinction matters – because admiration in motor sport should not be reserved solely for champions. Some drivers leave behind statistics; others leave behind stories. Mass left behind both, but his stories are the more revealing. He was rarely the fastest man on the track, and he was never the most ruthless. He was not therefore F1 world champion material, at least not in the brutal sense in which that phrase is most often used. But racing is bigger than F1, and a motor sport career is greater than the sum of its championship points. That is why Mass’s 80th birthday is worth marking, for he was one of the good guys, a description that sounds trite until you have spent enough time around racing to understand how important it is. So let’s stop for a moment to remember Jochen Richard Mass chatting next to a glorious old race car, open-face helmet and goggles at the ready, eyes bright, that familiar half-smile playing around a happy face, looking forward to letting it hum its way out of the pits and onto the track.