Otto the Slow

The man was in his mid-forties and, with his somewhat bluish nose and glassy eyes – there’s no other way to put it – looked drunk. He held a whisky glass in his hand and spoke of his past career as a racing driver. He made it sound as if he had invented motorsport and as if he had won everything from Le Mans to Indianapolis to the Monaco Grand Prix. We were sitting at a table in a large group at the trendy Viennese nightclub Take Five, a little away from the dance floor. I didn’t know Mister Triple Crown personally and I don’t think he took any notice of me either, because I was the youngest and most insignificant person there and was sitting at the very edge of the group, but of course I knew who he was: Otto Stuppacher, the slowest Formula 1 driver of all time. On October 9, 1976, he clocked in at 27.4 seconds behind pole setter James Hunt in the final qualifying for the starting grid at the USA East Grand Prix in Watkins Glen. A world record! The pinnacle of racing had never seen a slowpoke like that before. Ten years after that evening at Take Five, Stuppacher was no longer with us. On a hot August day in 2001, he was found dead in his apartment. His life and his death – a true tragicomedy.

The Nierscher wine tavern on Pötzleinsdorferstraße in Vienna’s 19th district: In July 1976, Otto Stuppacher held a large press conference here. Under a tree in the beer garden stood his pride and joy, a two-year-old Tyrrell 007 Cosworth. He would race it, he announced, for the remaining Formula 1 season, a total of six entries: Zeltweg, Zandvoort, Monza, Mosport, Watkins Glen, Fuji. (Tyrrell was selling its old 007 chassis to privateers at the time. Another customer was, for example, the South African driver Ian Scheckter, brother of later world champion Jody Scheckter.) But the Stuppacher 007 was somehow not quite ready, or whatever you wanted to call it. My father was present at the press conference as a photographer. When he took a closer look at the blue car, he couldn’t believe his eyes: “The suspension consisted of wooden rods that had been painted black. James Bond would have laughed his head off at a 007 like that.”

In the late sixties Otto was in his early twenties, and he revealed to her his racing ambitions. Not a bad idea, she thought, that might keep the boy from growing too bored, and then he wouldn’t spend as much time with his drinking buddies (though she was sorely mistaken on that point). Nothing less than a Porsche would do, he told his mother, and even then, one wouldn’t be enough, because, you never know, one minute you’re going along and the next, wham!, you’re in an accident and left with nothing. That made sense to Helene Stuppacher, and because she wanted to be a good mother, she ordered a 906 and, to be on the safe side, a 910, both designed by a certain Ferdinand Piëch. The cars were entrusted to the Bosch Racing Team. Everything seemed set for a future champion, Otto the First.

In 1968, now twenty-one years old, “Stuppi” made his debut in the Porsche 906 at the Aspern airfield race north of Vienna. He came in twelfth. Fifteen cars finished the race. Not a particularly impressive result, but not too bad either, since he could just as easily have come in last. He also entered the 1968 Preis von Tirol, another airfield race in Innsbruck, but had to withdraw before he could ­finish.

July 27, 1969, the inaugural race of the Österreichring – not a championship race, but the line-up of masters and grandmasters of motor racing that made their way to the circuit was enough to strike fear into the heart of any newcomer. To name just a few: Le Mans winner Masten Gregory (Porsche 908), the Swedish dynamite duo Jo Bonnier and Ronnie Peterson with the ear-splitting Lola T70, the Alfa Romeo works team with Italian stars Andrea de Adamich, Ignazio Giunti and the Tipo 33/3 in tow. And in the thick of it all: “Stuppi”. How did he do? Fantastic! The novice driver put his Porsche 910 in sixth place on the grid and finished the horsepower battle in third place behind de Adamich and Bonnier! The fact that Peterson crashed and the actual winner, Masten Gregory, was disqualified after the race should not detract from this achievement. But it would remain Stuppacher’s only moment of glory on the international stage. Two weeks later, he competed in the 1,000-km race at the Österreichring, part of the World Sportscar Championship series. (Today it would be unthinkable for someone to be allowed to drive an endurance world championship race after only one year of motorsport experience.) He shared the cockpit of his 910 with the twenty-year-old Niki Lauda. The two of them came in twenty-first, which was second-to-last. Two greenhorns, united in failure. One of them then rises to great heights like a phoenix from the ashes, achieving legendary status during his lifetime. The other one only makes a fool of himself in front of the whole world and ends tragically. What a bitter twist of fate. But we’re not there yet. Incidentally, 1969 also saw a twelfth-place finish for Stuppacher in the 1,000-km race at Monza, otherwise only in …

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→ Read the full story in ramp #66 “Drive My Car”.