Interminable – ĭn-tûr′mə-nə-bəl
- admitting no limits
- everlasting strength of character
After highlighting the career Jeff Krosnoff fought so long and hard for in last week’s entry, I would be remiss simply returning to my planned postings without telling readers about another of my greatest career inspirations – probably the greatest, given how often I have considered his career while tackling hurdles of my own. Like Krosnoff, he was another member of the “Gaijin Racers Club,” in Japan. That is, he joined other foreigners out in the Land of the Rising Sun who may have also felt like racing’s castaways. They all lived out of the President Hotel in Tokyo while carving out careers for themselves over in the far east.
Roland Ratzenberger’s racing origin story started a bit like my own, with his grandmother taking him to spectate the Gaisburgrennen Hill Climb event at a very young age. For those of you who are initiated, it really does not take much, does it? One trip to the Gaisburg roads and the racing bug was in. Not long afterward the Salzburgring happened to open near his hometown when he was nine years old. After sneaking onto the grounds, which apparently became a regular occurrence in order to watch the racing cars, he went home indicating it had been decided. He was to become a racing driver, putting a poster of Jochen Rindt up on his bedroom wall.
He charmed his way into a job at Walter Lechner’s racing school after finishing up his technical studies nine years later, after consulting the famous motorsport journalist Gerhard Kuntschink. Kuntschink advised him it could be a good way for someone like him to get into racing. Ratzenberger did not have the financial capabilities to go racing, nor did his parents really support his decision to pursue racing. Instead, Ratzenberger got his start racing cars in a way which still, very occasionally, works to this day (should a prospective racing driver still have time on his side). He was a mechanic, working on the school’s cars. Kuntschink’s advice turned out to be solid, as he was eventually able to take the school’s cars out on track, teaching himself to be a racing driver. Over the next few years, he also worked as a mechanic for drivers less capable than himself over in Germany, as an engine tuner at Gatmo, and as a mechanic at the Jim Russell School in Italy.
Roland Ratzenberger eventually got his start, as late as it came, in competitive motor racing. He began Stage 1 as described on this blog at the ripe age of twenty-three in the German Formula Ford series. He found his way into the 1985 Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch after winning both the Austrian and Central European Formula Ford titles in that season, finishing in second. The next year he ran the British Formula Ford series and won The Race of Champions, an event similar to the festival with twenty five equal cars. The Formula Ford Festival was the important event at the time for prospective professional drivers though. A quick inspection of past winners reveals why, yielding several familiar names now recognizable after storied racing careers.
Unfortunately on the cusp of a potentially huge break during his second attempt at the festival, Ratzenberger had a falling out with his team. They left him stranded with some tools and his car to fend for himself. Luckily, with the experience of technical school and working on race cars as a mechanic, he was able to prepare his own car. With the help of other teams who liked him, he somehow managed to get his car to the grid for the festival. Against odds Ratzenberger won the event in the end, putting on a bit of a defensive clinic against Philippe Favre in the process.
At some point shortly before the festival, Ratzenberger signed a deal to drive in the World Touring Car Championship for BMW, and competed there with Team Schnitzer in 1987 – his first paid drive. Alongside World Touring duties he competed in British Formula Three with West Surrey but results were not as glamourous, mostly down to a lack of budget. In 1988 he raced for Madgwick in British Formula Three and for Demon Tweeks in the British Touring Car Championship running a BMW M3.
Ratzenberger remained in the United Kingdom to contest the 1989 British Formula 3000 series as well as two rounds of DTM and entered the 24 Hours of Le Mans alongside his compatriot Walter Lechtner for Brun in a Porsche 962C – the first of five consecutive appearances in Sarthe. That year he came into contact with Toyota for the first time. His career options ran out in Europe that season but rather than give up he made the very tough to decision to abandon Europe. He headed to Japan, where he could make a comfortable living and most importantly stay in a race seat, competing in the All Japan Sports Prototype Championship. A year later he had successfully re-established himself and was signed to Toyota Racing Development as a test driver while he raced for SARD. He became Toyota’s very first non-Japanese factory driver.
By 1990 Ratzenberger was racing in Japan full time. He competed in all rounds of the Japanese Sports Prototype Championship and all but one round of the Japanese Touring Car championship as well as in a partial season of the All Japan Formula 3000 series. He managed to win the Fuji 1000km that season and raced at the 24h of Le Mans at the wheel of SARD’s Toyota 90C-V.
From reaching a career impasse in European Formula racing just a few seasons earlier, Ratzenberger reinvented himself in Japan and was now in contention for the 1991 Formula One seat at Jordan. He nearly got himself an Indycar drive after testing at Laguna Seca and Willow Springs off the back of his growing stock as a factory driver in Japan.
In what must have been a crushing blow, Ratzenberger missed out on the 1991 Jordan F1 seat in the final stages of the deal. Jordan’s main sponsor was BP station at that time; a deal to sell Austrian beer of a certain brand out of those stations was on the brink of completion. Bertrand Gachot ended up in that seat when the Austrian beer brand pulled out at the last moment. It did not work out for Roland but it may have worked out for spectators over the next sixteen seasons. Gachot eventually got himself into a little bit of trouble and some German guy weasled his way into the seat for the 1991 Belgian Grand Prix after lying about his familiarity with the way around Spa-Francorchamps. He went on to win seven titles in Formula One..
It had to have been painfully difficult watching other drivers in the Gaijin Racers Club get the call to F1; Herbert, Harald-Franzen, and Irvine. While F1 and Indy did not work out for him, that season he continued forging on in the far East. He managed a win at the famed Suzuka 1000km while competing in two Japanese racing series and added a podium at the 24 Hours of Daytona. He again raced at Le Mans, this time back in a Porsche 962C with Eje Elgh and Will Hoy as teammates.
He had been busy making a name for himself in Japan and was making a steady income. He set up a home base in Monaco and even got married. That was over in months though and he returned to racing in Japan for the 1992 season as a single man.
1992 was a bit of a tough year for Ratzenberger when he returned to Japanese Formula 3000. He was stuck in an old Lola chassis and despite extracting the maximum out of it results were hard to come by. He raced at Le Mans for the fourth consecutive year in the Toyota 92C-V with teammates Eddie Irvine and Eje Elgh.
Racing in Japan was, like now, different back then. Dangerous. Trading paint at old school tracks which punished. It remains today a potentially amazing school for a driver..
..but back in 1992 safety standards in Japan were, to say the least, shocking. He saved the life of Anthony Reid, who crashed at 100R in his Formula 3000 test at Fuji (a prize for winning Japanese Formula Three). Like many corners in Japan it is a high speed turn with a curb, next to no run off, and a wall. Reid smoked a barrier at 160mph and shunted so hard his helmet flew off. The car was launched over twenty feet and landed upside down. Ratzenberger was directly behind him, promptly stopping with Paulo Carcassi to get out and pull Reid from the wreck. The Japanese marshalls, possibly due to the blood from Reid’s bare head scrapping the track surface, simply decided it was too late to bother helping him. I wrote this bit now because it was a part of his legacy. He was concerned about safety even back then, and what followed during his F1 career carried this legacy on.
Over the previous two years Roland Ratzenberger became a revered driver in Japan, cutting his teeth in all three major championship series and testing a different car every weekend. He was also a respected test driver at Toyota Racing Development while racing for SARD. In 1993, however, the Prototype series folded and the Touring Car Championship made way for the JGTC, leaving Ratzenberger with just a partial campaign in Japanese Formula 3000. His team finally updated his car and for the rounds he did contest, he was running at the front. He competed in Le Mans for the final time that year alongside Mauro Martini and Naoki Nagasaka, managed his best finish of fifth overall and first in class with the SARD Toyota 93C-V
Roland Ratzenberger was a driver Toyota valued highly by this time. They paid him one hundred thousand Deutschemark to race at Le Mans, about one hundred and seventy thousand Euros by today’s value. He was also highly valued by the ladies and he was a big hit with them by all accounts. When his career again reached an impasse at the end of the 1993 series, his charming personality paid off in a big way. Roland was an uber charming guy who was well liked by everyone, as you may have surmised from the fact he got his team-less Formula Ford to the grid at Brands in 1986.
Years earlier he was introduced to Gerhard Berger’s manager, Burkhard Hummel, who helped him into a British Formula Three drive and subsequently helped him off the books getting into a factory BMW drive. Hummel would later be introduced to Nick Wirth of Simtek Racing in 1994, and was tasked with finding sponsors for the team. Not long afterward he repeatedly tried to direct the team’s attention to Roland for the second seat at the Simtek. At the same time, ever the lady charmer, Roland got some help from a wealthy art collector he befriended in Monaco called Barbara Belhau. She liked Roland and decided to help him by negotiating (and subsequently funding) a five hundred thousand dollar deal to put him in the Simtek seat in 1994. Giving Nick Wirth a ride home from the office after meeting for the first time, displaying some incredible car control on public roads in a tiny Fiesta hire car sealed the deal.
At long last….Roland Ratzenberger was a Formula One driver.
The Simtek team was not competitive and to make the challenge even tougher for him, there were twenty four teams competing in Formula One in 1994. That meant two teams would fail to qualify for the race every weekend. How uncompetitve was Simtek? They barely managed to make the qualifying session for the first round at Interlagos. With the help of parts from Mclaren and Williams they somehow got the car to qualifying after finishing work the night before, only to suffer from damper problems and bad weather. Both worked against Roland as the car failed to qualify for the Brazilian Grand Prix. The rough start to the season did however allow the team to familiarize themselves with his mechanical acumen. He was a valued test and racing driver at Toyota by this point and really knew his way around his machinery, something of a dead quality among racing drivers these days.
The next round happened to be in Aida, Japan for the Pacific Grand Prix which was run at Tanaka International (Okayama). He missed first qualifying due to a crash, but he had familiarity with the track due to his career in Japan. After all, for the majority of his stint in Japan he was in a race car twenty five weekends a year, and testing at every possible chance in between those rounds. He managed to qualify against their biggest rivals, Pacific, who had the superior chassis and the superior engine. He finished the race in eleventh place and registered his first Grand Prix finish.
This always stood out to me. Roland Ratzenberger was a thirty-three year old rookie in Formula One. Again, the use of such a term is a great misnomer here. He possessed a wealth of experience – Formula Ford, Formula Three, Group A Touring cars, Group C Prototypes, Formula 3000. He was testing every weekend in one category or another and racing twenty-five weekends a year during his stint in Japan, of course he turned himself into a highly adaptable driver through that process.
It is really difficult not to admire this guy. He was the last of a dying breed by then. Formula One changed quickly and still does today. He started out as a mechanic working on his own car and despite an incredibly late start, somehow made it to Formula One during an incredibly dangerous era in which cars were much more difficult to drive. I just cannot imagine the satisfaction he must have felt completing his first Grand Prix. We never saw that in Formula One again after Roland Ratzenberger. I can only think of one recent instance in touring cars.
Roland treated racing as his profession and saved everything he made while racing, even recycling the former clothing of close friend, Mika Salo. He finally started to enjoy the trappings of success after securing an F1 drive, getting himself a brand new Porsche which he drove from his home in Monaco to Imola with JJ Lehto for the next round of the season. He had just bought a new apartment in Salzburg, getting the key that weekend from Ernst Franzmieier after overseeing the remodel. His parents still live there to this day.
While his main sponsor missed his first two races in Formula One, she was in attendance at Imola. It would be the darkest Grand Prix weekend in history. Ratzenberger had struggled a bit adjusting to the Simtek car in the slow corners, and to boot the car was having brake problems which were confirmed by his teammate at the time.
During Friday’s first qualifying session Rubens Barrichello hit a kerb at Variante Bassa at over two hundred and twenty kilometers per hour. His car was sent airborne and impacted at nearly one hundred times the force of gravity. Barrichello was knocked unconscious and swallowed his own tongue. Dr. Sid Watkins saved his life, clearing his airways. He was lucky to be alive but sustained a sprained wrist and a broken nose. Ever concerned with safety, Roland expressed his wishes to other drivers that they band together in an effort to push for better safety standards.
The next day in the final qualifying session, Roland went off at the Acqua Minerale chicane. The kerb strike damaged the front wing of the Simtek. The telemetry showed that he was assessing the car, swerving a bit to ensure the car was okay. The tires were still good, the car seemed fine, so with time running out in the session…Roland decided to go for it. Undoubtedly, his decision had to do with the pressure of the situation and the details of his deal. His sponsors were there, and it was already the third race of the season. The deal negotiated by Barbara Belhau only covered the first four (possibly the first six) races of the season. Roland was running out of time to secure his race seat for the rest of the season. So he did what any out-and-out racer would have done. He went for it.
Unbeknownst to Roland he ended up damaging his wing in the preceding kerb strike. Throttling through the very fast Villeneuve corner, the compromised wing broke off under the pressure of downforce, but became lodged under the floor of the car. Essentially skating on his front wing, and therefore unable to recollect his race car, Roland was a passenger. Control over the car was lost and he hit the wall at nearly three hundred and twenty kilometres per hour, sustaining five hundred times the force of gravity on impact.
Recently seeing footage of Roland’s crash again in the Senna documentary made me physically ill. I was initially delighted to see his face, to hear his voice…but seeing his head slumped over after the impact just made me briefly feel ill. This took place before the days of the HANS device.
In his crash at Imola, Roland suffered a Basal skull fracture, blunt force trauma from his front tire striking him in the head, and a ruptured aorta. All were fatal injuries. He was transferred to Maggiora Hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival, the first driver killed in Formula One since Elio De Angelis in 1986.
I was young then, but it affected me. I am older now, and seeing it again admittedly affected me more; I saw Roland Ratzenberger and Jeff Krosnoff race when I was just a wee lad in Japan. They were both eternally linked to the time when the magnetism of racing sunk hooks into me. They became deathless to me in that impressionable time.
Ratzenberger’s death was overshadowed somewhat by Ayrton Senna’s death the very next day, who planned to wave the Austrian flag in Roland’s honour after the race. Like many others his demise affected me as well, but not quite the way Ratzenberger’s death did.
An interesting juxtaposition exists here. Senna and Ratzenberger were the same age. They experienced completely different paths to Formula One. Senna had won the F1 title thrice already by the time of his death and had been in the show for over a decade, widely regarded as one of the greatest drivers of all time. Roland conversely had completed just a single Grand Prix, and it took ten years for him to get into Formula One and add that singular Grand Prix finish to his name.
I remember being in awe when three million people mourned state wide for days after Senna’s death. On the other hand two hundred and fifty people attended Roland’s funeral, just four of them Grand Prix drivers: Heinz Harald-Franzen, Gerhard Berger, Karl Wendlinger, and Johnny Herbert.
Senna planned to visit him at his new place in Salzburg to fly model airplanes; they were friends from completely differing backgrounds. Their legacies are now intertwined for eternity after the darkest weekend in racing history. I am pleased, in a way, as a long standing admirer of Ratzenberger; as a result of losing his life the same weekend Senna lost his, Roland has not been entirely forgotten. His memory will always be attached to Senna’s.
His legacy forges on even now, as the Grand Prix Drivers Association formed the following season. The association pushed through numerous safety changes over the next several years, including the mandatory HANS device which would have prevented the Basal Skull fracture suffered by Roland.
So…Why have I written about him?
He is someone I admire most.
He was a very late entrant into motor racing. He was infected by the racing bug by himself, having no familial ties to racing. He did not have the support or the financial backing enjoyed by most other drivers. As much as I admire him, he probably did not possess the requisite natural talent most F1 drivers are blessed with either. Roland Ratzenberger accomplished his lofty racing goals despite a late start, despite all of that and… it seemed mostly the result of a few factors. Firstly, Roland Ratzenberger possessed a hardened work ethic. One must be incredibly determined to go through the sort of career trajectory he did. He treated it like a profession and made a very respectful career for himself before he ever reached Formula One. Secondly, Roland Ratzenberger was not the typical racing driver. He was a good guy, universally liked. That is not just rare now, it is non-existant. It helped him in his career especially when days probably looked the darkest. Thirdly, he was fast in any equipment and could adapt his driving style to whatever category he was racing in and be up at the front.
In other words, I admire him most because he possessed all the right qualities, the most important qualities. He became the prototype of the ideal racing driver. Good looking, talented, gracious, and extremely fit. It is no wonder everyone loved him.
Someone always has it harder than you, and it really helps to think about that when hitting inevitable bumps in the road. I have heard it from a few people in racing, “this life, this life is not for everyone,” and “there are more bad days than good in racing,” etcetera.
I simply admire those special few, those interminable figures who simply refuse to quit, who believe their own success is ineluctable. The ones who invariably forge onward, defying all manner of misfortune. Roland was one such distinctive, limited character I find it impossible not to draw nonpareil inspiration from. They have that total commitment, that ferocious internal tenacity. Unless you have that…it does not make you less than, but you just cannot understand it.
I think often of what is inscribed on Roland Ratzenberger’s tombstone, “Er lebte fur seinen Traum.” He lived for his dream..
..and all those years ago, in the Land of the Rising Sun…he inspired a black-eyed four year old to live for his.
