American Formula 1 driver Brett Lunger was at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.

“My crew chief and I were in the pits discussing gear ratios or something. This guy taps me on the on the shoulder. I turned around. He said, ‘Thank you.’ And he walked away. That was pure Niki Lauda.

This was in 1976. It was the year Lunger helped save the life of the three-time Formula 1 champion, pulling him from his burning Ferrari. If you saw the movie Rush, Ron Howard’s chronicle of the ’76 Formula 1 season and the championship battle between the bitterly serious Lauda and playboy James Hunt, you know the story.

Part of it, anyway.

Lunger knows all of it, as the only regular American F1 driver then besides Italian-born Mario Andretti. At a time when the F1 world presently clamors for an American driver, be aware that we had some. Including one you probably never heard of.

An American in F1

The list of men and women that Brett Lunger raced against, and for, is extraordinary. He was hand-picked by Dan Gurney to drive the Gurney Eagle Chevrolet in Formula 5000, finishing in the top five in points behind Brian Redman, Mario Andretti, David Hobbs and Eppie Wietzes, who were all racing much faster Lolas.

He raced in F1 for John Surtees, as a teammate to Alan Jones. As a teammate to Hunt, he drove for Lord Hesketh, the ascot-wearing Champagne-sipper as portrayed in Rush who insisted that the sides of his cars not be sullied by sponsors. Lunger shared the grid with Emerson Fittipaldi, Jody Scheckter, Ronnie Peterson, John Watson, Jochen Mass, Chris Amon, Hans Stuck, Carlos Reutemann, Gilles Villenueve, Clay Regazzoni, Mark Donohue, Lella Lombard, Nelson Piquet, Derek Daly, Jacky Ickx, Bobby Rahal and Patrick Tambay. Haven’t heard of them? Look them up. There’s a lot of human horsepower there.

Lunger did not arrive at racing in a conventional way. As the New York Times put it in a January 20, 1974 piece titled Brett Lunger Story: From Rich Kid to Formula 5000 Driver, Lunger was indeed from money—most of it tied to his mother, who was a du Pont—but he would take exception to the story’s title.

“The rumor was that I came from a rich family—and I did come from wealth—but I had no access to the money for racing.” At the end of some seasons, he says, “I was stone cold broke.” In a later story, the New York Times cattily referred to him as the “self-styled poor cousin of the du Pont family.”

Again, from the New York Times in 1975: “Lunger’s English wife, Jo. Is the daughter of Sir Leonard Crossland, former chairman of Ford of England and now an executive with Lotus. Using his wife’s thatched cottage in England as a base, Lunger made the rounds of Formula 1 teams this year.”

Formula 5000 was a class jointly sanctioned by the SCCA and USAC, and was essentially the American answer to Formula 1, with a lot of cross-pollination between the two series. Gurney, former F1 champion and a consummate car builder, put Lunger in his car for the 1974 season.

Formula 1, we should mention, was different then. There were championship races and non-championship races. Now there are 10 teams with two drivers apiece that run every race; then, privateers could enter one or two races a season, usually in or near their home market, where it would be easier to find sponsorship.

As fast as F5000 cars were, Lunger would be among the first to say he lacked the typical amount of experience it would take to drive in that class. “But I didn’t know any better,” he says, “so I did it.”

The 1976 German Grand Prix at Nürburgring

It happened on August 1, 1976, at the Nürburgring, the absurdly long, fearsome track in Germany. As the film Rush portrayed, Lauda came into the race with a big points lead over James Hunt, and a second consecutive championship seemed a foregone conclusion.

Lauda didn’t want to race at Nürburgring; he argued, before his fellow drivers, that it was too dangerous, in large part because its length made it impossible to properly staff the track with adequate safety personnel. He called for a vote: The majority of drivers wanted to race, Lunger among them. The margin was a single vote.

As you likely know, Lauda’s Ferrari 312T2 crashed, and four drivers—Lunger, Guy Edwards, Harald Ertl, and Arturo Merzario—saved his life.

“It was unfortunate on so many levels,” Lunger said. “I didn’t want to be known as a race car driver who was involved in a crash. I wanted to be known as a race car driver who won races.”

The Nürburgring “was a special place in those days. It was a phenomenal circuit, more than 14 miles long.” It was announced before the race that the 1976 German Grand Prix would be the last run on the track; it was simply too dangerous.

One of the central problems with a 14.2-mile track, Lunger said, was the weather.

“We started with intermittent rain—it would be raining on some parts of the circuit, and some parts would be dry, but the whole field except for one car started on wet tires. Sure enough the track began to dry out, so we were on wet-weather tires on a dry track.”

The treaded wet-weather tires wear quickly and overheat when driven on dry pavement.

At the end of the first lap, “The lead drivers made it into the pits and got dry tires, but I stayed out. They started passing me. Niki Lauda was in that group. There’s a turn just after the Adenau Bridge; it’s a fast left-hander. On a dry track it’s flat-out. Niki passed me right about the bridge and went into that turn just ahead of me.”

No one knows for sure what caused Lauda to lose control—he may have clipped the curbing; one driver said Lauda’s dry-weather tires found a puddle. Regardless, his car’s rear slid to the right, and he over-corrected, striking a dirt embankment and a guardrail, burst into flames—the car was nearly full of fuel—and spun back onto the pavement.

“Suddenly I saw some dirt and debris flying up in the air. I had committed to the turn at that point, but Niki’s car was sideways in the middle of the track, on fire. I had nowhere to go. I tried to decelerate, to brake, but my car went into his.” Harald Ertl’s Hesketh then struck Lunger’s Surtees. “The impact set off my fire extinguisher, which was probably fortunate.” Apparently Lauda’s onboard extinguisher never activated.

First on the Scene

Exactly what happened next depends on whom you ask. This passage from Maurice Hamilton’s 2020 book Niki Lauda: The Biography provides perhaps the most widely accepted version:

“With just one hopelessly equipped and inadequately dressed marshal on hand, the drivers knew they had to act quickly,” Hamilton wrote. “Ertl found an extinguisher, thumped it into life and began spraying the cockpit area. Lunger, a veteran of the Vietnam War, straddled the middle of the car, but it was impossible to make progress until Merzario, a former Ferrari driver and thus familiar with the seat belts, dived into the intense heat and released the buckle on Lauda’s six-point harness.

CLICK HERE TO SEE RAW VIDEO FOOTAGE OF THE CRASH

“‘It wasn’t easy,’ recalled the little Italian. ‘Niki was obviously in agony, straining hard against the belts, trying to get away from the flames. Thank God he eventually lost consciousness; it was only when he relaxed that I could free the buckle.’ The release of body weight caused Lunger to topple over, taking Lauda with him.”

In later years, Merzario took full credit for freeing Lauda and carrying him to safety. In a published interview, Merzario said, “I threw myself into the fire and did two miracles. One, I managed to unfasten his belt. Then I, who weighed 55 kilos (121 pounds), managed to pull out by myself a man who weighed more than me, taking him by the crotch of the suit and the collar behind the neck. I still wonder how I did it.” Yes, well. Others may wonder how he did it, and they were there that day.

What Lunger did “wasn’t a conscious effort,” Lunger said. “It was a situation where something had gone wrong and you react and do what you have to do. What really made a difference was Merzario, who reached in and undid the seat belt. If he hadn’t done that we would have still been struggling.”

Lauda inhaled gases that damaged his lungs, and his face and head were burned severely. His helmet had come off, possibly because the manufacturer of his helmet had only one size shell, and added padding for smaller sizes, which Lauda required. The theory is the impact compressed the padding, and the helmet popped off.

Spectacularly, 41 days later Lauda was back in a Ferrari, finishing fourth. By the end of the season, after missing three races, he lost the championship to Hunt by one point. It may have been the most dramatic championship battle in Formula 1 history. And it likely wouldn’t have happened without Lunger.

From Boarding School to Formula 1

Before he became Hero Brett Lunger, the Formula 1 driver, the Delaware native received a proper education at the Holderness School, a private boarding school in New Hampshire. Prominent graduates listed in Wikipedia include Lunger; Army General Montgomery Miegs, Chicago Cubs manager Jed Hoyer, and rapper Homeboy Sandman. Current tuition is $71,000.

Lunger moved on to Princeton University but dropped out a year short of graduation to join the U.S. Marines, which, after a year, promoted him to Second Lieutenant Lunger and shipped him off to Vietnam for 13 months. While he was serving in the states, Lunger managed to race in a handful of Formula 5000 races thanks to a camp commander who liked motorsports, but, he observed, “There was no racing in Viet Nam.”

When Lunger left the service, he completed his studies at Princeton and dove into motorsports with a newfound passion. He liked Formula 5000, but with a seven-race season, he knew he couldn’t get the experience he needed. “If you read the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, you’ll remember that he wrote that you need to spend 10,000 hours at your craft before you can be good at it.

“So I did 15 Formula 2 races in Europe and the Formula 5000 races here in the states. I had to go to Europe every couple of weeks, get in a Formula 2 car, go to a track I’d never seen before, and race against some of the best drivers in the world, because in those days, Formula 1 guys often dropped down and raced Formula 2. That was a real learning curve, and I knew it was going to make me or break me, but luckily it worked out well.

“That first Formula 2 season was instrumental in getting my skill level up because I was driving for Carl Hogan and my teammate was David Hobbs. Carl ran a spectacular operation, professional in every regard, the cars were equal. And David went out of his way to teach me how to drive the car, and we had a good relationship. I’m friends with David to this day.”

Wealthy he may have been, “but I couldn’t afford to fly back and forth to all the races. I had a van with the sponsor’s logo on the side and he paid me 20 cents a mile—I drove a lot more miles in that van than I did the race car.”

Lunger had a knack for selling himself and his sport. He’d show up in a city well before the race was held there, and “call the local newspaper, the local radio and TV stations, and tell them I’m in town for the race. I had some 35 mm film that I could let them use. So that really put me on the map from a PR standpoint.”

One man who read that map was Rod Campbell, the PR executive for Liggett & Myers, the tobacco company, sponsor of the L&M Formula 5000 championship series, “which was the series I was competing in, and he recognized that I had some PR value, so he helped negotiate my Formula 2 contract with March Engineering. That relationship with March went sideways and it was almost ridiculous how little I was racing for,” but his friendship with Campbell, who went on to oversee Ford racing’s public relations for 17 years, lasted until Campbell died two years ago.

Final F1 Race and Beyond

Lunger’s last F1 race was at Watkins Glen, driving an Ensign, in 1978. He finished 13th. “I knew the sport was evolving. I had good sponsorship from Ligget & Myers, and we ran a first-class operation. But we were spending about $850,000, and the top teams were spending $3 to $5 million.”

For comparison, Ferrari’s 2018 F1 budget was revealed to be over $570 million.

Even then, “It was simply out of reach,” Lunger said. “We weren’t able to compete in terms of lap times, but we were respectable, we were reliable. But I saw the sport changing, and I knew the dollars and cents were going to work against me. I didn’t want to just hang on and drive other cars in other venues just to be a driver. I knew I wasn’t going to achieve my goal, which was to be world champion. That wasn’t going to happen, and I didn’t want to be there just for the sake of being there. It hurt. It was a difficult decision, but it was a decision that had to be made.”

In the end, Lunger had participated in 43 F1 races from 1975 to 1978. He qualified for 35 of them—it wasn’t like it is today, when every driver is guaranteed a starting spot—and he scored eight top-10 finishes. Lunger was almost always in equipment that was at least a year old, with power from the venerable Ford Cosworth DFV, the most easily available engine. He won or podiumed in practically every other series he participated in, but victory in a Formula 1 car was just unobtainable for a privateer, especially one who was running his own team.

After F1, he raced sports cars sparingly, which he had done at the start of his career. In 1979, he and teammates Derek Bell and George Follmer finished third in the Los Angeles Times Grand Prix six-hour endurance race in a Porsche 935.

Did he realize just how elite Formula 1 was, and is? “The funny thing is I didn’t understand that. I was absolutely clueless. I grew up playing baseball, ice hockey, football—I was always competitive, but I had no knowledge of motorsports. I was naïve, and that probably prevented me from thinking, ‘I can’t do that.’ I didn’t know that I didn’t belong on the same track with some of those guys.

“That worked to my advantage, and it was only later that I realized how special it was. When you’re competing, you are focused on one thing and one thing only, and that is driving the car. You don’t think about how magical it is, or that this guy one grid spot up from me is a superstar. You put your helmet on, you get in the car and you try to drive it the best you can. I think that attitude served me well.”

But sports cars weren’t F1. “The first couple of years I struggled. I didn’t realize how special motor racing was. And how important it had become in my life.”

Lunger went on to various professions, settling on money management. He became an air transport pilot, and today flies for Angel Flight, taking seriously ill patients to medical appointments in distant cities free of charge.

And he began writing for a variety of outlets, including the New York Times. He wrote a series of workbooks that trumpet the need to take responsibility for your own actions, congregated under a website, www.ResponsibilityToday.com, with a mission statement that says, “The goal of the I Am Responsible movement is to spur discussion, to promote action and to generate dialogue. All focused on creating a renewed sense of personal responsibility.”

“When I did it, I was pretty blessed, I happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

Since he quit racing, he has been back to an F1 race only once. “When I retired, I pretty much shut the book. I’m not the kind of guy who likes to just hang around. When I did it, I was pretty blessed, I happened to be in the right place at the right time. But I basically walked away, didn’t want to hang on, didn’t want to be part of the ‘used to be’ racing crowd. So I just went on with my life, did other things.

“But eight or nine years ago, Rod Campbell contacted me and said, ‘Why don’t you come back and look at this thing they’re calling Formula 1 now?’ He talked me into coming to Montreal, and it was just spectacular.

“I couldn’t believe how excited I was just to walk into the paddock and see some of my old friends,” said Lunger, who is now 76. “Emerson Fittipaldi was there, Niki Lauda was there. And I started following it again. The drivers are still the best in the world.”

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