It’s not often that a Formula One driver can turn his hand to World Championship rallying. Look at 2007 F1 world champion Kimi Raikkonen. He cut his Grand Prix career short in 2010 to join Citroën, but could only turn in mediocre results, before returning in 2012 to what he did best, F1.
Carlos Reutemann? Now that’s a different—if not very long—story. He did two World Championship rallies in Argentina for Fiat and Peugeot and came 3rd twice—not bad, when you consider he was up against a pack of established World Rally Champions.
Carlos, the grandson of a Swiss German, had an Argentine father and an Italian mother, which is why he spoke Italian so immaculately when he got to Europe after competing in touring car and Formula Two championships in Argentina. Throughout his career, he was a rather enigmatic individual, single-minded at the racetrack, head down and with little time for anyone. Away from it he was charming in a reserved sort of way.
Photo: Dennis Gray
Reutemann joined the Formula One circus when he signed for Bernie Ecclestone in 1972 to take the second seat at Brabham as number two to double World Champion, Graham Hill.
His first race for Bernie was at home at the old Argentina Autodrome, where Carlos drove the BT34 to a sensational pole position with a 1 minute 12.46 second lap in the last 15 minutes of qualifying, with Graham way down at 16th. For seven glorious laps, Reutemann was in 2nd place, hacking away at Jackie Stewart’s lead in the Tyrrell-Ford, but the local boy had chosen tires that were too soft and started dropping back. He tried to put matters right on lap 45 by changing to a harder compound, but the tire change was a disaster, ate up too much time and cost him 10 places. Even so, by race’s end he had worked himself up to 7th, but that wasn’t much of a consolation. Unfortunately, that turned out to be a sign of things to come, because afterward he had an abysmal season, with three retirements on the trot in the BT37, although he did win the non-championship Interlagos Grand Prix.
Poor machinery brought equally poor results in the BT37, but Gordon Murray had designed the new BT42 and, although Carlos had to take three more stinging retirements to begin with, the new car started to come good by mid-1973 with a couple of 3rds and 4ths to give Reutemann 16 championship points. In 1974 along came the BT44, which was head and shoulders above its predecessors, taking Reutemann to victory in that season’s GPs of South Africa, Austria and Watkins Glen. Carlos should have won four times that year, but with his home crowd looking on, the Brabham mechanics failed to squirt enough fuel into his car. Carlos was firmly in the lead when the Brabham ran out of gas with a couple of laps to go. He was, understandably, fuming.
The following year, Reutemann came 3rd in the F1 drivers championship with a win at the old Nürburgring and podium finishes in Argentina, South Africa, Belgium and Spain. Brabham switched to Alfa Romeo flat-12 engines for 1976, but the Italian power units were incredibly unreliable, meaning the Argentinean had to retire from no fewer than nine of the season’s Grands Prix and only scored five paltry points from a 4th place in Spain. Carlos was fed up with what he saw as the team’s inadequacies, so he worked his way out of his Brabham contract. Meanwhile, Ferrari was looking for a temporary replacement to take over from Niki Lauda after his almost fatal crash at the Nürburgring. Reutemann got the job and signed on the dotted line, secretly hoping for much more than temporary status in the future. Happily, the courageous Austrian recovered quicker than expected and made an outstanding comeback at Monza, blood seeping from wounds beneath his helmet, as he took 4th place. To meet their obligation to Carlos, Ferrari entered a third car for the Argentinean for that Italian GP—the second car was driven by Ferrari regular Clay Regazzoni—who didn’t endear himself to the red cars’ adoring fans by coming a lowly 9th. Reutemann was not a happy camper, because he didn’t have a ride for the rest of 1976.
Photo: Roger Dixon
Biting the bullet as he sat out the last three 1976 Grands Prix paid off, though, because Ferrari decided to drop Regazzoni, who went off to Ensign. Reutemann was invited to take over the Swiss driver’s seat for 1977. Sparks flew on occasion between the two Ferrari works drivers, Lauda with his rather Teutonic attitude, and Reutemann’s enigmatic, sometimes inflexible one. Niki was not well pleased when his new teammate beat him twice in the Ferrari 312 T2 during the first two races of the ’77 season, by taking 3rd at home in Argentina and winning next door in Brazil. Niki soon took the whip hand, however, and hit back with wins in South Africa, Germany and Holland, taking six 2nds and a 3rd on the way to scoring 72 points and winning his second World Championship.
Lauda moved on to Brabham for 1978 and, among others, drove the controversial mini-skirted, Gordon Murray-designed fan car that extracted air from underneath its sealed edges to generate an incredible amount of downforce—before it was outlawed.
Carlos took over the number one spot at Ferrari for ’78 and was joined by a baby-faced kid called Gilles Villeneuve, who Enzo Ferrari and Mauro Forghieri had to spend hours with, turning the Canadian’s raw talent into F1 competitiveness at Ferrari’s own test track, Fiorano. Reutemann’s first couple of races were in the 312T2 while Forghieri’s new T3 was being refined. Even so, he won convincingly in Brazil and then took the new car to glory at Long Beach, Britain and Watkins Glen, but that still wasn’t enough to withstand a blast of power and talent from Colin Chapman’s magical Lotus 79-Cosworth, in which Mario Andretti and Ronnie Peterson dominated the season. The best Carlos could do was to come 3rd in the drivers championship.
Ferrari may well be the pinnacle of Formula One, but the Lotus 79 was the car of the moment. So after Ronnie died following a big accident at Monza, Carlos took over his seat for 1979. That wasn’t a great move, though, because nothing stands still in F1 and that became clear as the 79 struggled to be competitive. Carlos managed 2nds in Argentina and Spain, but he was hit by no fewer than five soul-destroying retirements and results that were just about good enough to take equal 6th with René Arnoux in the World Championship. To cap it all, South African Jody Scheckter won that year’s drivers title—in a Ferrari!
Photo: Williams F1
Carlos weighed up the odds and decided the Williams FW07B-Ford and its successor looked like the coming cars of 1980, so he moved to Frank Williams’ domain. That year, he won his tenth F1 race, the 38th Grand Prix of Monaco, with a massive 1 minute 13 seconds over 2nd- placed Jacques Laffite’s Ligier. And that put Williams atop the Constructors World Championship table, where it stayed for the rest of the season. That was the year when Derek Daly’s Tyrrell clouted Bruno Giacomelli’s Alfa Romeo 179 so that the Irishman’s car literally took off, went flying through the air over the top of the Alfa and thumped down on the track again between Jean-Pierre Jarier’s similar car and Alain Prost’s McLaren M29. Amazingly, not one of the drivers was injured in one of the most frightening F1 accidents I have ever seen.
Reutemann continued to do well for Williams-Ford, taking a couple of season’s end 2nds and four 3rds, but that was only enough to take him to 3rd in the World Championship standings again. The drivers title went to Reutemann’s teammate, tell-it-like-it-is Australian Alan Jones, making it a clean sweep for Williams. Drivers and constructors titles, all in the same year.
Jones, the tough reigning World Champion, stayed with Williams for 1981, but there was a new kid on the block called Nelson Piquet in a Brabham-BMW. Nelson took the drivers title with 50 points to Carlos’ 49! It was a close-run thing in which the Argentinean was a consistent high points scorer with victories in Brazil and Belgium and 2nds at Long Beach, at home in Argentina and in Britain. Before the circus got to Las Vegas for the last race of the season, Jones had sworn hand-on-heart that he would help Carlos win the title if he could, but when the race started, the Australian shot into the lead and eventually won the race. Reutemann couldn’t believe it and was beyond himself, but he did beat Alan in the championship standings as Jones could only manage 46 points for 3rd place to Reutemann’s 49. Not much of a consolation, though.
Come the 1982 season, the Falklands War was raging. With Carlos from Argentina driving for a British team, something had to give. It was Reutemann, who felt he had to leave Williams under the circumstances, which he did. He also announced his retirement from motor racing. However, some thought this was a publicity ploy to announce his new career in politics. Ploy or not, Carlos never went back on his decision, but has admitted that he probably retired too soon.
Regardless, Carlos Reutemann has become one of Argentina’s top politicians, who was a long standing governor of the country’s Santa Fe province and later became a senator.
