Jochen Rindt: Live fast die young

The sixties were one big full-throttle run. “Live fast, die young!” the motto seemed to be. Mick Jagger shouted, “I can’t get no satisfaction!” Who cared about the lukewarm Beatles lyrics: “Will you still feed me when I’m sixty-four?” Nobody at the time wanted to be sixty-four, walk with a cane or – “losing my hair” – go bald, especially as shoulder-length manes had only just been invented. The sixties were a decade of rebellion – and you sometimes had the impression that the young savages were even rebelling against rebellion.

And in this era, when Jimi Hendrix refused to play bass for rock ’n’ roller Little Richard because he considered him to be too conservative, a young man who had been born in Mainz in Germany refused to respect the racing establishment by bursting past the competition in a well-used Cooper Formula Junior racing car in Cesenatico, Italy, in order to take the win. For the record: there had been a serious accident at the front, the ambulance was on its way with flashing lights and siren . . . and the angry young man simply drove through the chaos at full throttle, even overtaking the ambulance. “I didn't see them,” he later claimed. Why he didn’t have his racing license revoked right then and there? No one exactly recalls. Today he would have been banished forever to the Siberian swamps to chop wood.

Kurt Ahrens, at the time already one of the fastest Germans, asked his Viennese colleague Curd Bardi-Barry, “Say, who is this crazy guy anyway?” Barry, a scion of Vienna’s moneyed aristocracy and a playboy par excellence, answered curtly: “Some daft Styrian.”

Karl Jochen Rindt was born in April 1942 in Mainz, Germany, where his father, Karl Ludwig Rindt, owned a spice mill. His mother, Ilse Martinowitz, was an exceptionally pretty and fun-loving girl from Graz, the capital of the Austrian state of Styria. So why this silly argument about his origins? After Karl Jochen’s parents were killed in a bombing raid in Hamburg in 1943, he was raised by his grandparents in Graz until he passed his school-leaving exams. His grandfather, a highly respected lawyer with a thriving law firm, employed a clever “trick” to secure the mill in Mainz for his grandson as sole heir: twice a year he would travel to Mainz with little Karl Jochen, who then reached into the milled spices with his hands and said “yes yes” – thus fulfilling the minimum activity as heir, and leaving his aunt empty-handed.

When Rindt needed money to finance his costly career as a racing driver, he quickly sold the family business including the premises and invested the money in a Brabham Formula 2 car and transporter. From then on, he only hung around at the racetrack or at parties “chasing skirts”. The desperate grandfather turned to Jochen’s half-brother Uwe (from Ilse’s first marriage) in tears because he could no longer cope with the “little brat”. He died before his grandson’s meteoric rise into the racing world class.

Karl Jochen’s career was like a song by the Rolling Stones. Snotty, loutish and not concerned with the social norms, he raced through life like some rogue comet. He had no friends – although half of Austria described themselves as “his only true friend” after his death. Jochen kept everyone at arm’s length – unless they served him and his career. Then he could suddenly be “friendly as all shit”, as they say in Vienna.

He actually hated Vienna. Especially because before his victories he had always been disparagingly called “G’scherter” (“hick”) by the Viennese – and the moneyed aristocracy had not even deigned to despise him. But with his wins, he quickly mutated into a “Viennese son”, and when word of his achievements had spread into the lonely mountain valleys, he was celebrated as an “Austrian hero”. Such things happen quickly in a small country.

With his enormous driving talent, why didn’t he become world champion sooner? And why did his career almost come to a precipitous end in 1968? There are many reasons for this. Firstly, his stubborn reluctance to learn about the technology and the physical principles of driving dynamics. Secondly, his refusal for years to accept mechanics and their work as an important component for success. Ron Dennis, his mechanic at Cooper and Brabham, still complains about Rindt today: “That arrogant asshole.”

Jochen was a rebel, like most of the men of his generation back then. If he were racing today, perhaps he would subordinate himself to the complex technology of modern racing cars. But the drivers’ ludicrous babbling would be more than just annoying for him. Being a rebel, he would brusquely push aside any reporter’s microphone if asked one of their typically insipid questions. And if some bloated marketing type from one of his sponsors ever warned him to behave, he would explode, telling them to stick their products where the sun don’t shine, simply leaving them standing there without even turning around.

Twenty-four hours later everything was forgotten, and twenty cars hit the circuit in Monza for the Italian Grand Prix. When Clay Regazzoni won with his Ferrari, the enthusiastic Italians stormed the track and cheered. The champion is dead – long live the champion!

The public prosecutor’s office seized the destroyed Lotus – and actually the race should never have taken place. According to Italian law, the racetrack ( … )

→ Read the full article in ramp #50.