Alexander Wurz

Bio by Stephen Latham

Alex Wurz was born on the 15th February 1974 in Waidhofen an der Thaya, Austria and competed in Formula One from 1997 until 2007 though excelled in sports cars and was a two-time winner at Le Mans, becoming the event’s youngest ever winner on his debut victory in 1996. Besides his racing he had links with F1 as a consultant and did TV and media work plus was Williams F1 team’s driver coach. There were also roles as a member of the FIA Institute safety group, as an FIA road safety ambassador, a chairman of the GPDA and he undertook occasional F1 driver steward duties. In 2006 he and his father established Test & Training International, a leading driver training and road safety expert group. A keen fan of extreme sports, he enjoys kite surfing, white water rafting, rock climbing, canyoning and mountain biking and during his time at McLaren he set up a professional mountain bike team, which became the world’s best.

As a child Alex was into every type of sport and at the age of nine would drive an old Beetle through the forests, sitting on a pile of cushions in order to see over the dashboard. His father Franz was a three time European Rallycross Champion and he followed him into motorsport through karting but before this he began in the BMX World Championship. When he was 12 he entered the World Championship, a three-day shootout in Italy, and “had a real trainer, and a sponsor who paid for everything, and my school was very supportive and gave me time off. But basically we were just a gang of kids travelling all over the world, hanging out, having fun, eating ice-cream. And at the end of it all I was the winner, I was World Champion.” He said the physical aspect of racing bikes helped prepare him for motorsports as “with any type of racing you can only win if you’re really fit: I basically got my first Formula One contract because I was able to drive 80 laps for two days running!” After competing in karts he made his debut in Formula Ford in 1991 and excelled in the European and Austrian championships, taking second in both during his rookie season. During this period he also travelled to New Zealand with two other FF racers to do the Peter Jackson Series but had a lot of crashes. The three used the prize money from each event to pay for meals and hotels but he crashed in the last round and earned nothing. Unable to pay the final bill, the hotel manager threw them out and with not having eaten they were starving by the time they reached Christchurch Airport for the flight home and pooled their small change to buy one Big Mac, which was divided equally into three between them.The following year saw him take Europe’s FFord series by storm and he snatched titles in the European Cup and the Austrian Championship and with 26 poles and 21 wins won the German Championship with three races to run. There were also a number of Opel Lotus events and he raced as part of a two car Porsche team in the Nurburgring 24 Hours. It was wet, windy and foggy conditions but he stated he “still had a sprint race mentality so I crashed the first car in the race. Then I switched to the team’s other car-Hermann Tilke, the circuit designer, was one of my team-mates-and we won the class.”

Then came Formula 3 with RSM Marko with his best results being fourth and sixth with the Dallara F393 at Diepholz and Hockenheim. Switching to G+M Escom Motorsport for 1994 he took three victories with their Dallara F394 at Hockenheim plus nine podiums at Nurburgring, Singen, Norisring, Avus, Diepholz, to finish second in the German Championship. The following season would prove disappointing though, with his best results being three podiums at Hockenheim and Magny Cours, plus two fourth places at Hockenheim.

Contesting the DTM in 1996 with Joest Racing’s Opel Calibra his best result was a fourth place at Silverstone though the year saw a key career moment with his debut at Le Mans. Short of a driver for their two-car team of Porsche WSC95s, he was invited to Paul Ricard for a test and despite only getting on track at midnight, on a track he had never seen before, by his third lap he was quicker than the others drivers’ testing. After a further test, it was decided to put him in the number one car with Manuel Reuter and Davy Jones at Le Mans. In the race, despite the WSC95 not being the fastest car on track, they hit the front in the first hour and aside from several pit-stop overlaps, were never headed as other teams hit mechanical troubles. Alex’s only problem came when he suffered bad leg cramps, due to being too tall for the cockpit so he came in and handed over to Manuel Reuter as “I didn’t want to try to be a hero and make a mistake. Having had crashes and lost championships before, at the grand old age of 22 I’d learned the importance of driving to finish.” Their car came home ahead of the two Porsche GT1s and at 22 years and 91 days of age Alex became the youngest ever Le Mans winner. Several weeks before the 24 Hours, a sponsor had arranged a meeting with Benetton F1 team boss Flavio Briatore but he showed no interest in Alex upon meeting him. Alex told how Briatore simply stated “‘Who the f*** are you?’ I said I was an F3 and touring car driver, and I was about to do Le Mans. So he shrugged and said, ‘If you win Le Mans, I’ll give you a test.’ I suppose he thought he was pretty safe saying that. But then when I won the race, I called him. He kept his promise and offered me a two-day test at Estoril”, where he tested alongside Giancarlo Fisichella, Jarno Trulli, Vincenzo Sospiri, American Paul Tracy. Race team driver Jean Alesi was also there and after he left Alex finished third quickest, behind Mika Hakkinen’s McLaren and Eddie Irvine’s Ferrari and he was later offered a testing contract with the team plus around the same time, Mercedes offered a contract to race their CLK for 1997.

Moving into the FIA GT Championship with AMG Mercedes, races alongside Bernd Scheider with the CLK GTR produced second at Silverstone and Spa plus victory at Donington. Then, after Gerhard Berger fell ill mid-season, Alex was promoted to Benetton’s race team for three GPs. After receiving a late minute call from the team, there followed a frantic transatlantic flight, with him purchasing a copy of Autosport at Heathrow, “which had a Canadian GP preview with a circuit diagram showing gearchange points, and I memorised that on the Concorde flight to New York. Then I flew on to Montreal, and got there on the Thursday.” He qualified eleventh and during the race was in fifth place by lap 15, then briefly ran third before a pitstop dropped him to sixth but his race ended when a driveshaft broke. In the French GP he qualified seventh, faster than Alesi, though spun off when when the rain came but then finished in an impressive third place (behind Jacques Villeneuve and Jean Alesi) to take his first F1 podium at Silverstone. Though he did not race again for them that year he was rewarded with a full-time drive for 1998 with Benetton and spent three more seasons there, partnered each year by Giancarlo Fisichella. 1998 was a McLaren-Ferrari-dominated year but after scoring seventh in Australia he went on to score six top-six finishes, with fourth in Brazil, Argentina (plus fastest lap), Spain, Canada, Great Britain and fifth in France in the following eight races. After a coming together with Michael Schumacher at Monaco, the Ferrari pitted for repairs but though the Benetton seemed unaffected, on lap 43 his suspension broke and he had a big accident coming out of the tunnel. His fourth place in Canada came despite the car somersaulting and ending in the gravel trap into the first turn but the red flag meant Alex was able to return to the pits to take the restart in the spare car. The latter part of the season was not as successful and his highest finishes were two ninth places in Austria and Japan plus seventh at the Luxembourg GP at Nurburgring. Unfortunately the next two seasons were not so kind as the team struggled, with the uncompetitive B199 producing fifth and sixth in Australia and Monaco plus sevenths at Brazil, Germany and Hungary. In 2000 he only took points with fifth in Italy and his season was bookended by seventh place at the opening race in Australia and the final round at Malaysia. Flavio Briatore was now back at Benetton and eventually replaced Alex with Jenson Button.

Without a drive for 2001, he began a five-year association with McLaren as its test driver and when Mika Hakkinen announced he would take a sabbatical it appeared he would have a race seat with the team. Alex had been told he would replace him and while testing at Monza he received a phone call from Martin Whitmarsh, who told him “Congratulations, I thought I’d interrupt the test, because you’ll race for us next year.” However, Ron Dennis was also negotiating with Sauber to get Kimi Raikkonen and Alex, feeling something was not right as time passed, had a meeting with him. Despite the news not being positive, he said “I was grown-up enough even back then to realise that they did not do it to hurt me, they did it because they thought it was the better option for the team. The choices I had were to be like a spoiled kid and walk away, or to be a man and just continue to try to convince them by doing a good job for them.” He described the McLaren MP4-17D as “a really cool race car. Feel-wise, it was an extension of me, actually. You sat in it and it felt like your most comfortable pair of jeans or running shoes. It did what you wanted it to do.” But his time with the MP4-18 would prove a nerve wracking period in view of the problems and failures they experienced. At a one day test at Silverstone, after a big impact which left the car in two pieces again, he said “I walked back to the garage, took my mobile phone, called the team boss and said, “I’m sorry I don’t want to drive this car any more…By that time no race driver wanted to drive the car. And that was the last metre the 18 ever drove.” The test programme was incredibly exhausting, with him doing up to 20,000 track miles a year “and I was in an aeroplane constantly (reckoning on average he had boarded an aircraft every 32 hours), going from test to promotion (including going to the Himalayas filming for a sponsor) to simulator and back to test. It was very, very hard work and in the end I was totally finished. When I went down with a virus they realised they had nobody else to stand in for me, so at my suggestion they hired Pedro de la Rosa to work alongside me.” However, despite all his time with the team, his first and only race for for them came in 2005 at San Marino, replacing an injured Juan Pablo Montoya. Alex recalled they were at a promotion appearance in Russia and at dinner Montoya could hardly bend his arm to hold his fork. Alex eventually drove the car on the Friday in Bahrain (and was quickest in the session) but “it was physically impossible. I had to drive several corners with one hand, because I could not keep both hands on the wheel going to full lock. So Pedro drove it in the race. McLaren set about making a longer cockpit for me, and it was ready three weeks later for Imola.” He qualified seventh and handled the challenge superbly to finish fourth, a drive made particularly impressive by the fact his tall frame did not comfortably fit into the car and at times had to drive with one hand. The race eventually went to Alonso, followed by Schumacher and Button but BAR-Honda were later disqualified and Alex was promoted to third. After seeing the restrictions Montoya’s shoulder injury had placed on him, Alex had felt sure he would be required for further races and turned down a CART drive with Newman-Haas. But then Montoya returned and he only contested this one race for McLaren. During this time he decided to rebel a bit and grow his hair long, which Ron Dennis did not take kindly to. A few days before the GP at Imola Dennis told him “If I were you I’d prepare everything perfectly, my ear plugs, my helmet, shave, haircut trimmed to perfection.” He worked up to it. The next day he said, “Hey Alex, I spoke to Lisa (his then wife), and she says you look way better with short hair. I can get a hairdresser here no problem.” Every day he took one step more to be direct and on Friday he said, “Alex, you have to cut your hair.” I said, “No, Ron, I like my hair, it’s me.” He got a bit angry, and on Saturday he said, “Your hair has to go, it bothers me!” By then the rebel in me was saying I am definitely not cutting my hair, I will put even more gel in it and make it more spiky. On Sunday on the grid he came to me and said, “Leave your helmet on, I don’t want to see your hair!” During time at McLaren he set up a professional mountain bike team, which achieved a lot of success and became the world’s best, and after running it for four years he sold it on.

At the end of 2005 he considered various options, including the DTM, though after being contacted by Williams became their reserve and test driver. He succeeded Mark Webber in a race seat alongside Nico Rosberg for 2007 and in pre-season testing at Jerez he was second fastest of the sixteen cars there and during the season the Toyota powered FW29 proved a consistent challenger for points. A superb drive saw him finish fourth at the Nurburgring plus he took points with seventh in Monaco and after qualifying twentieth in Canada a determined drive on soft rubber saw him drive through the field to finish third (taking one pitstop plus struggling with a damaged rear wing caused by a collision). However, Alex was becoming dissatisfied with his performances and eventually decided to retire from F1 before the season’s final race, with Kazuki Nakajima stepping in as his replacement. Recalling his time there, he stated that “inside Williams the driver had more input than any other team I’d worked with. You’d suggest, say, some radical suspension rethink, and they wouldn’t say much, but a week later there it’d be, ready for you to try. I enjoyed every second of my work with Williams.” After his time with Williams he stayed involved in Formula 1 as a test driver for Honda and then Brawn GP in 2008 and 2009 while in 2012 acted as a tutor to Williams’ young drivers Bruno Senna and Pastor Maldonado.

Moving from F1 into sports cars he went on to thrive as a member of Peugeot’s team until 2011. Regarding his testing for Honda and Peugeot, a “typical week would be a two-day endurance test for Peugeot at Ricard, then a friend would drive me to Barcelona while I slept in the back of his car, then a three-day test for Honda, race distance each day, then back to Ricard for another two-day endurance test.” In September 2008, he drove the medical car at Singapore and was called out on lap 12 after a message that Nelson Piquet Jr had crashed. The incident sounded quite bad so they had to get the medical car to the scene quickly but Piquet had got out of the car and walked away. They then had to return to their start position just as quickly, but in pushing quite hard the local doctor in the back of the car began to vomit.

In 2009, in their third participation at Le Mans, Peugeot managed to maintain a very high pace in order to beat Audi. After a trouble-free run, the end result saw two of their three works cars in the top two places, with Alex, Marc Gene and David Brabham a lap ahead of Sebastien Bourdais, Franck Montagny & Stephane Sarrazin’s car. During the year Alex was involved with an attempt by Superfund (who had briefly sponsored Minardi) to enter a team in the 2010 F1 season but it never materialised. Continuing with the 908 the following season, he, Anthony Davidson and Marc Gene won the 12 Hour Sebring, were fourth at the Spa 1000km and second in October’s Petit Le Mans. Unfortunately, at Le Mans, Alex was running in second place at 11am but minutes later, after over 3000 miles’ racing, the engine failed. In 2011 the trio took eighth at Sebring and fourth at Le Mans plus victory at Spa and he had a further victory in Road Atlanta’s Petit le Mans when teamed with Franck Montagny and Stephane Sarrazin. In November, Toyota confirmed Alex as one of their drivers for the company’s planned return to Le Mans in 2012, driving their LMP1 Hybrid Prototype alongside Nicolas Lapierre and Kazuki Nakajima. He helped develop the TS030 into a race winner and began reaping the benefits and although the trio retired at Le Mans, they won and were second at the 6 Hour Fuji and Silverstone races and he and Lapierre took victories in the 6 Hour races at Sao Paulo and Shanghai.

2013 started with fourth at Silverstone with Lapierre and they went on to finish fourth at Le Mans (joined by Nakajima) and second in Shanghai. Racing a TS040 the following year in the 6 Hour races he, Sarrazin and Nakajima took second place at Silverstone, Fuji and Shanghai plus third at Spa then teamed with Sarrazin and Mike Conway they were sixth and fourth at Austin and Interlagos plus had victory at Bahrain. The following year was not as successful with the TS040 and drives with Sarrazin and Conway brought fourth at Silverstone, fifth at Spa and Shanghai and sixth at Le Mans, Nurburgring and Fuji. The best result came in the season’s final round with third at Bahrain but before the race Alex had announced he would retire from professional race driving after that event. Prior to Bahrain, he had contested 27 WEC races for Toyota, winning five and finishing on the podium 11 times. During this period he had been running a restaurant business, called Piccini, but sold 75% of it plus was kept busy with his road safety company.

However, despite retirement he would be seen back in the cockpit a number of times over the coming years and 2016 saw outings with a Toyota TS050 at the Le Mans Test while he drove Chip Ganassi Racing’s Riley Mk XXV1 at the Daytona 24 Hours and was fifth alongside Lance Stroll, Brendon Hartley and Andy Priaulx. Alex stated that Daytona was a race he always wanted to do but never had the chance due to always involved in testing for the factory teams each January but the drive was about personal enjoyment rather than a reversal of his retirement plans and he had no plans to return full-time racing. He was also selected as the Grand Marshal of that year’s Le Mans 24 Hours and had the privilege of driving the pace car. The year also saw him and his father race against each other in an event at the Wachauring in Austria, Alex racing a Toyota GT 86 CS R3 with 69 year old Franz using his Lancia Stratos. Franz won the family duel with Alex saying “I have no problem with this defeat, just hope (irony!) that I won’t be fired from Toyota now.” Later in the year they would both be with the Stratos at Goodwood’s Festival of Speed. In 2018 he was part of Toyota Gazoo Racing’s squad at the Paul Ricard test and in May made his competitive Rallycross debut at the FIA World Rallycross Championship’s World RX of Norway at Lankebanen with MJP Racing Team Austria’s Ford Fiesta Supercar.

For much of his career Alex was noted for wearing different coloured race boots and this all stemmed from his Formula Ford trip to New Zealand when he was 17. After one of his team-mates hid one of his shoes as a joke, he had to borrow one but went on to win the race and he carried on racing with one red and one blue boot. He continued until he went to McLaren, who would not allow it, as “different coloured boots certainly didn’t fit in with the McLaren image. They even wrote it into my contract that my boots had to be the same colour.” In 2009 his children a found photo of him wearing the odd coloured boots, and so to please them he resumed the habit. His race helmets had long featured an intricate design but due to his own high standards of perfection he had been painting his own helmet designs since 2000 though admitted “It’s kind of a love-hate relationship. I love to paint, but the preparation of each step is very, very long. It took me over two months to finish the last two helmets.”

Alex’s retirement announcement before the Bahrain race in 2015 neatly summed up his racing career, telling how “I’ve enjoyed half of my lifetime competing at the top of motorsport and another quarter of it working my way up there, so I feel the time is right to call it a day and bring my career as a professional racing driver to a close. I’ve a lot to be grateful for and a lot I’m proud of. In F1, I feel hugely privileged to have driven for top F1 teams like Benetton, McLaren and Williams and added a bit of silverware to their trophy cabinets. I loved the testing and development work, collaborating with the engineers to find ever more performance. Endurance racing, especially Le Mans, has to be one of the harshest sports. I’ve lead most of the Le Mans 24h races I have raced in. But it was our 15 hour lead in last year’s race that ended with retirement that had to be the hardest. I’d put so much effort into 2014 and into the race preparation that I found it very difficult to move on after the DNF. In previous years, such a defeat made me come back stronger, ready to launch into the fight again, but not that time. This was the moment I knew that my time at the sharp end was coming to a natural end..So a big thanks to the racing community for the challenges, the battles and the victories, and to the fans, the teams, the competitors, the organisers, the volunteers and especially to my family! You will still see me around, just without the overalls.”