Andreas Nikolaus Lauda was born to a well-to-do Vienna family on February 22, 1949. His family’s social status proved both nuisance and good fortune. Although he was later to become successful in business on his own, it was obvious early on that he was not cut to fit the conventional Lauda mold, much to his family’s consternation. He did, however, find a mansion bet sign up offer and the family connections to be useful when it later became necessary for him to borrow to support his racing. Lauda became interested in motor racing not from attendance at events or boyhood idolization of racing heroes, but rather from an innate interest in automobiles dating to a young age. When he was twelve, visiting relatives were letting him park their cars. He got hold of, in his early teens, a 1949 Volkswagen Beetle convertible in which he would ride roughshod over a relative’s estate. He entered his first race, a hill climb, in a Cooper in 1968 taking second in class. Thereafter, despite his father’s insistence that he stay away from racing, he competed in hill climbs and later Formula Vee. He did his stint hauling a Formula 3 car on a trailer to races around Europe. In the course of this he scared himself into a certain amount of sanity, and, in 1971, abandoned the wildness of Formula 3 to take the plunge on his own in Formula 2.
By virtue of his family’s business reputation he was able to secure loans that would not otherwise have been available. He used these to buy an F2 seat at March for ’71 partnering Ronnie Peterson (who was getting paid for his driving), and the next season an F1/F2 combination. When March fizzled he persuaded Louis Stanley at BRM to sell him a seat. In the course of all this he ran up debts that would have balked a small banana republic. Due dates on notes had an unfortunate tendency not to coincide with the availability of starting money from touring car races. But his abilities got him noticed. In true fairy tail fashion first Stanley began paying him, then the call from Ferrari’s Luca Montezemolo came before the financial house of cards collapsed (his devil-may-care approach didn’t seem to worry him at the time, although in his mature years he would say that it had been crazy).
