Jochen Rindt – 20 years on

It was very hot as they inched along. As usual, the police had lost control, and horns blared in constant discord. An overheating Alfa pulled off, steaming, to the side of the road, the driver loudly at odds with his sweating passengers. In the bedlam, though, the general timbre was good-natured. These people were going to Monza.

The Fiat I have never forgotten. Covering its entire rear window, stuck there with respectful black tape, was a message: Jochen - non ti dimenticare.

There were others, lots of them, in cars and vans and coaches, wherever you looked, but nothing sticks so vividly in the mind as that simple and moving message. Jochen, you will not be forgotten.

Twenty years ago this weekend, it is, and hard to believe so. It was my first time at Monza, and I saw this little Fiat near the traffic lights by the Hotel de la Ville, where I have stayed for virtually every Italian Grand Prix since. And always, as I arrive there from the airport, the image comes back. Oddly, it was some years before I discovered that Jochen had been staying there that last weekend of his life.

I went to Monza only for race day in 1970, and with very mixed feelings. In my flat, late the previous afternoon, there had been some mention of his name on a faint radio in another room, and I thought only that he must have taken pole position, as he usually did that summer. Then, an hour or so later, outside Baker Street station I saw an Evening Standard hoarding: 'World's leading race ace dies in crash'.

Monza the following day chased every emotion of which Grand Prix racing is capable. From my seat in the stand, I looked over towards the archway into the paddock. Only a few hours earlier I had seen it on the TV news, a truck driving slowly through, Jochen's broken Lotus 72 dangling from its crane.

There were no chicanes at the proud Autodromo then, and the Italian Grand Prix was always a flat-out slip-streamer, so that cars tended to come by the pits in swarms. Clay Regazzoni won the race that afternoon in the only surviving Ferrari, and the orgy of celebration afterwards was in poignant contrast to how things must have been 24 hours earlier, when that still, so incongruous and eerie at a race track, settled over the place.

I have no personal tales of Jochen Rindt to tell, because I never knew him. At the time of his accident I was on the point of going into journalism, months away from covering my first Grand Prix.

When Gilles Villeneuve was killed, a lot of people wrote to me in their sorrow, knowing he had been a friend, offering sympathy. Some said their lives had been touched by him - they hadn't known him, but their lives had been touched by him. I could understand them readily, because I had known exactly the same feelings of remote loss when Rindt died.

Probably they have their roots, these feelings, in selfishness. Jochen Rindt put all manner of things in my life that I couldn't put there myself, and now they were gone. My friends and I spent hours in reminiscence of him; whole days spent in freezing April at Silverstone, simply for those sublime moments when Jochen would teeter through Woodcote in the Lotus 49.

Wings on Formula 1 cars were around for the last three years of Rindt's life, and it should be no surprise that he hated them. For one thing, he considered them dangerous (which, in their infancy, indubitably they were); more to the point, though, they made racing cars easier to drive. Manna for the journeyman, certainly, but necessarily distasteful to an artist.

Curiously, I would not immediately think of Rindt when compiling a list of the best drivers in Grand Prix history, but his name would come up instantly when contemplating the greatest.

I thought of him, too, when last year I listened to Senna speak of the trance-like state he can induce for a qualifying lap. "I am somehow able," Ayrton said, "to get to a level where I am ahead of myself - maybe a fifth of a second, who knows? When my car goes into a corner, I am already at the apex, and so on. In effect, I'm predicting what I'm going to face, so I can correct it before it actually happens. In race conditions, though, you can't keep to that level - there's too much stress, both mental and physical..."

When the talk is of Rindt, most people instinctively remember Monaco in 1970. That day, I would suggest, he drove much of the race in the sort of altered state Senna attempted to describe. It was a victory by a driver, in spite of his car, yes, but so much more than that. One had the impression of a man leading his car, dragging it behind him at a speed it did not care to go.

Jochen was peeved at Monaco that year: the new Lotus 72, for which there had been so much optimism, wasn't working, so out came the old 49. There seemed little realistic hope of success, and Rindt qualified the car only eighth, his time of lm25.90s almost 2 seconds away from Jackie Stewart's pole lap. He wasn't much interested, in truth, and drove in the same fashion for the first half of the race, picking up places only when such as Stewart, Ickx and Beltoise retired. By 40 laps - half-distance - he was fourth, 15 seconds behind Brabham, the leader. Then he passed Denny Hulme for third, and suddenly his lap times came alive.

It was an incredibly fast race, one way and another, with Brabham lapping consistently under his qualifying time, Amon a couple of seconds behind in the March, and Jochen 12 seconds behind Chris.

Twenty laps left, and Amon retired with broken suspension, so that now Rindt had that vital whiff of the leader's scent. Fourteen seconds to make up, and Jochen began to whittle it away, albeit not by enough to catch Brabham. All he could do was maintain the pressure, hope that Jack might be flustered into a mistake. With four laps left, though, the gap was still 9 seconds. Hopeless, apparently.

Or maybe not. On lap 77 Brabham was disastrously held up by an ailing Siffert, so that as he crossed the line, with three laps to the flag, he led Rindt by 4.4 seconds. On the next lap, agitated still, he lost another couple. Two laps... 2.4...

Jack collected himself now, so that his 79th lap was his fastest of the race -but still Jochen gained over a second! One lap... 1.3...

In the end Brabham blew it at the last corner. All round the final lap Rindt was gaining, gaining, but on the approach to the Gasworks Hairpin was not quite in range. Brabham, though, was unnerved by now, and decided he had to lap Courage's de Tomaso before the corner. In so doing, he got on the marbles, locked up, slid straight on into the guardrail...

The following morning there was one of the great photographs on the front of Nice Matin: Stewart, who had retired while leading, is out on the road by the finish line, cheering Rindt in. If he couldn't win, there was pleasure in his friend's success. Just like today, in fact...

The aftermath of that race was extraordinary. I had my tape recorder running, and even now the animated buzz of the crowd brings back the day.

Announcements, in French, Italian and English, added spice, and eventually the full force of Rindt's achievement came into perspective.
"Un record du tour sensationnel! Au 80ieme tour! Jochen Rindt, sur Lotus numero trois! Une minute vingt-trois seconds, deux-dixiemes!"
There were gasps at that, but there it was. On his last lap, Jochen had done 1m23.2s. What we didn't know at the time was that the one before had been 1m23.3s. And this after going on two hours around Monaco. He had qualified, remember, at 1m25.9s...

Even dry statistics come alive when they are such as these, but they cannot hint at what Rindt was doing with that Lotus in the closing stages. You could believe, watching him, that Jochen was in some kind of trance.

And afterwards, too. Up in the Royal Box, with the Rainiers, tears coursed down his cheeks as the Austrian national anthem was played. It was a spontaneous release of emotion, a man who had come suddenly back to earth, begun to understand the enormity of what he had done.

Later, much later, we saw Jochen again, relaxed now and laughing. It was after midnight when he and Nina walked from the Gala Ball at the Hotel de Paris, across Casino Square and down to the Tip-Top, swinging the trophy between them. There was simple joy in his face, and he wanted everyone to share the moment with him. It was so easy to enjoy his pleasure.

I remember this race particularly because it was a day when a racing driver transcended his car, and I have seen only a handful like that. Most of my memories of Jochen are tied to the Lotus 49, for the 72 - once it had become homogenised - was more a car to drive on rails. He won with it at Zandvoort, Clermont-Ferrand, Brands Hatch and Hockenheim, and undoubtedly it was the class of the field. "A monkey," he said, after beating Ickx in Germany, "could have won in my car..."

Jochen had a face which was easy to read, and as a fan I always loved that about him. On the victory rostrum in Holland, there was no hint of a smile, and nor should there have been, either, for his pal Piers Courage had been killed in the race. But elsewhere, when Rindt won, his elation was vivid. And when the car let him down, as at the British Grand Prix in 1969, you knew this wasn't the time for autographs.

He was arrogant, people say, and certainly didn't suffer fools, but those who knew him well recall a surprising gentleness, too, a vulnerability. Through that summer of 1970 he began to worry increasingly: "Things are going well - almost too well, in fact..."

Two weeks before Monza he drove the 72 at the Oulton Park Gold Cup. In time-honoured Lotus style, everything was a little haphazard, and in the first heat he was only third, hampered by a ridiculously low top gear ratio. They changed it for the second heat, and this one he romped.
Immediately after taking the flag, he pulled off at Old Hall, where I happened to be watching, and my last sight of him was as he climbed into a Piper Aztec, which immediately took him to a connecting flight for Vienna. The next day he had promised to run his F2 Lotus in an Austrian hillclimb.

I haven't been to Oulton, sadly, for years now, but when I do, Old Hall will momentarily bring back that genius with the deep voice and the tousled hair. The Hotel de la Ville will do the same this weekend.