Badass Brambilla: the day F1's 'Monza Gorilla' won at deadly Österreichring

The semi-centenary of a bitter-sweet Formula 1 race is fast approaching, for the 1975 Austrian Grand Prix took place on August 17 of that year. It was won by a driver whom few now remember, Vittorio Brambilla, aka the Monza Gorilla, which nickname he earned and deserved on two counts. He was born in Monza; he was raised there; he lived there all his life; he was nearly killed there, in 1978, in the lap-one pile-up in which Ronnie Peterson was fatally injured; and, 23 years later, he died there. So that’s the ‘Monza’ bit explained. And the ‘Gorilla’ bit? Well, he was short but stocky, he was not averse to the occasional punch-up, and he drove like an ape, too: fast, rough, aggressive, leaving no margin, and giving no quarter.

The original Österreichring was a mighty circuit, incomparably better than today’s 10-turn 2.688-mile (4.326km) Red Bull Ring, which sits among the rolling hills whose serpentine contours once delineated the previous layout. The old place was extremely fast, seriously challenging, and very dangerous. In 1975, when Brambilla won there, its 3.673 miles (5.911km) consisted of just six corners worth the name, linked by three straights, of which only one was actually straight.

If the banked 200mph (322km/h) Bosch Kurve at the back of the circuit was Österreichring’s most (in)famous turn, the Vost-Hugel Kurve, Turn 1, which was later downgraded to a chicane and renamed Hella-Licht, was just as fast and almost as formidable. There it was that, in the Brambilla year, 1975, during the race-morning warm-up, Mark Donohue’s Penske-run March suffered a left-front tyre failure, and the result was one of the most violent accidents ever to have scarred an F1 weekend. His car barrelled through multiple rows of catch fencing, then it mowed down a couple of wooden stanchions, which became lodged underneath it as it continued to speed on its way, raising it up so that when it slammed into a steel barrier it was launched clean over it and into a marshals’ post, where it smote the two marshals in attendance, injuring one and killing the other, 21-year-old Manfred Schaller.

There were therefore no marshals around to help poor Donohue, so, as was the way of things in those days, three other drivers, Emerson Fittipaldi (McLaren), Hans-Joachim Stuck (March), and Bob Evans (BRM), all stopped to do what they could. Fittipaldi remembers that, when he had climbed out of his McLaren and had begun to run to the wreck of Donohue’s March, a marshal jogged towards him from another post and tried to restrain him, casually informing him that there was no urgency because Donohue was dead.

Astonishingly, he was not, and Emerson says that when he reached him he found him in one piece, that he was conscious, that he could move his arms and legs, and that he managed to say a few words of the “I think I’m OK but what the hell happened?” variety. He was taken to hospital nonetheless.

The day before, Niki Lauda (Ferrari) had driven a beautiful qualifying lap, so he would be starting the afternoon’s race from pole position – which, despite the eerie atmosphere engendered by Donohue’s enormous accident, at least gave the patriotic Austrian crowd something to look forward to.

As the scheduled race start time approached, a rainy squall moved in over the Styrian hills, and soon Österreichring’s daunting asphalt was soaking-wet. Lauda took the lead on lap one, followed by James Hunt (Hesketh), Patrick Depailler (Tyrrell), Hans-Joachim Stuck (March), Emerson Fittipaldi (McLaren), and Vittorio Brambilla (March), who now re-enters our story. As so often in the rain, even when visibility was as appalling as it was at Österreichring that day, the Monza Gorilla was flat-out, everywhere, straight away. On lap two he passed Fittipaldi; on lap five he overtook Stuck; on lap six he dispatched Depailler; on lap 15 Hunt and he both swooped past Lauda, demoting the local hero from first to third at a stroke. On lap 19, as the rain began to fall ever more heavily, the two leaders, Hunt and Brambilla, came up to lap Hunt’s Hesketh team-mate, Brett Lunger. As the three cars approached the Bosch Kurve – a scary corner in the dry and terrifying in the wet – Brambilla hurled his March past both Heskeths into the lead.

Now the rain became truly torrential, and Denny Hulme, who had retired as an F1 driver the previous year but was still a director of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, demanded of the organisers that the race be stopped for safety reasons. That it was, on lap 29 out of a scheduled 54, and, when Brambilla slithered his March out of the Jochen Rindt Kurve onto the start-finish straight, he saw an official waving a chequered flag at him. Realising that the race had been stopped while he had been in the lead, so overjoyed was he that, as he punched the air in triumph, he lost control and slid the March into a guardrail. Nonetheless he embarked on and managed to complete a ragged victory lap, by the end of which his winning car’s mangled nose-cone was flapping wildly. But it remained attached – just!

And here is an anorak fact, as I like to call them, that even the most knowledgeable F1 historians among you may have forgotten. The rain then suddenly stopped – and some team principals, eager to see their drivers have a go at wresting victory from Brambilla, whose car would clearly require repairs, began lobbying for a restart. But the boss of the March team was a man every bit as pugnacious as was his fiery driver, although, unlike the Gorilla, he always kept his iron fist firmly sheathed in a velvet glove: Max Mosley.

“I don’t believe we can restart the race,” Mosley said, opening the FIA rule book, “because it says here in the regulations, by which we’re all bound to abide, that we may restart the race only when it has been stopped by the use of a chequered flag in conjunction with a black flag. Did anyone see a black flag?” No one had. So that was that. Brambilla had won. He was 37. It would be his only grand prix victory in a 74-race F1 career, and indeed his only grand prix podium.

Two days later came the news that Donohue, 38, had died in hospital. Österreichring 1975 was bitter-sweet, as I say.

Three weeks after that, Brambilla rode his Moto Guzzi the short distance from his home to the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza for the Italian Grand Prix. He qualified his March ninth, then on race day, disconsolate, he climbed out of it after a single lap when its clutch failed. A month later, at Watkins Glen, he was fighting Lauda for the pole. First he was quickest, then Lauda beat him, then he beat Lauda, then Lauda beat him again. Now we saw a typical Gorilla moment, for, refusing to be bested even by the fastest car-driver combo of the season, Brambilla overcooked it where François Cevert had been killed two years before, smashing his March to smithereens. He was unhurt – but distraught.

The March mechanics set to, although almost everything on the car was broken, improvising their way to a fix of sorts throughout the night. New bulkheads had to be hewn from raw, they borrowed bits from the other British garagiste teams, and by race morning the car was once again in one piece, albeit held together with rivets. The mechanics from the other teams stood and clapped as Brambilla, his eyes filled with tears, climbed into it. Despite the car’s four corners all pointing in different directions, he then managed to nurse it home in seventh place: one of his finest drives. The following weekend he guest-drove a Formula 2 March in an F2 race at Vallelunga – and he won it.