Not just Emmo's brother: remembering daredevil Wilson Fittipaldi
F1
Wilson Fittipaldi's F1 career is overshadowed by the success of his brother Emerson, but the driver and team-owner deserves greater recognition, says Matt Bishop
Team boss Wilson Fittipaldi (left) leans in to driver and brother Emerson in 1977
Even if his little brother Emerson were not one of the greatest Formula 1 (F1) and Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) drivers of all time, which lustrous status rightly lends extra prestige to the entire Fittipaldi family, Wilson should still be regarded as considerably more than a footnote to motor racing history. Granted, big bro’s CV pales by comparison with little bro’s, but almost everyone else’s does too, for Emmo won 14 F1 grands prix, four non-championship F1 races, two F1 drivers’ world championships, 22 CART races including two Indianapolis 500s, and one CART championship.
But, more important than any of that, we should raise a glass to Wilson tomorrow, for he was born on Christmas Day in 1943, he suffered a cardiac arrest on Christmas Day in 2023, he was revived but never recovered, and he died two months later.
Wilson Fittipaldi at Monza in 1972
Bernard Cahier/Getty Images
For the record, he raced 35 F1 grands prix, 25 for Brabham in 1972 and 1973 and 10 for Copersucar-Fittipaldi in 1975, and his best results were a fifth place in a Brabham BT42 at Nürburgring in 1973 and a sixth in a BT37 in Buenos Aires that same season. However, his day of days from an F1 driving point of view had come the previous year, 1972, at Interlagos, for on his beloved home circuit he had driven his BT33 to third place in the first ever Brazilian Grand Prix. However, it had been an F1 race of non-championship status, staged in order to satisfy the FIA that the circuit, the infrastructure, and the organisation would be fit to host a pukka grand prix the following year.
Wilson Fittipaldi, former F1 driver and brother of double world champion Emerson who set up their eponymous grand prix team, has died at the age of 80
By
Andrew Marriott
Interlagos passed muster, and in 1973 the Brazilian Grand Prix formed part of the F1 world championship for the first time. Both Fittipaldi brothers took part: Wilson retired his Brabham BT37 on lap six with an overheating engine; Emerson won the race in his Lotus 72D, which was resplendent in black and gold livery and sported a number-1 roundel boldly emblazoned on its nose-cone, as befitted the car driven by the reigning F1 world champion.
Since Wilson was three years older than his brother, and since in the 1950s and 1960s the Brazilian authorities mandated a minimum racing age of 17, the only way that young Emerson could immerse himself in the sport with which he was already in love was by working on the cars raced by Wilson and his friend Carlos Pace. He proved to be a good mechanic, and, when Wilson became Brazilian karting champion in 1963, aged 19, it was 16-year-old Emerson who had done all the spannering.
Emerson Fittipaldi won the first F1 championship GP at Interlagos in 1973
Grand Prix Photo
Wilson was sometimes fast, but he was also too often a tad ragged, and therefore he was very different from Emerson, who was very quick but in time would earn his many successes as much by measured stealth as by white-knuckle balls-to-the-wall speed. Moreover, a natural daredevil, Wilson had not focused solely on cars. In his late teens he had raced bikes, too, and even hydrofoils. In one hydrofoil race he had approached a wave “a little too fast”, as his brother described it to me decades later, with the result that his ’foil had suddenly flipped upwards and had performed a violent mid-air loop. “Wilson had a huge shunt,” said Emerson of the incident, “but, somehow, he was unhurt. We took it as a lesson, and he decided to go back to dry-land racing after that.”
In early 1967, by which time Wilson was 23, Emerson was 20, and both brothers had been racing small saloon cars for a year or more – Volkswagen Beetles and Karmann Ghias, Renault R8 Gordinis, etc – together they embarked on Formula Vee, which had been inaugurated in the early 1960s but had only just been exported to Brazil. That year, 1967, it became clear that Emerson was the hotter prospect, which reality was underlined when in 1968 he became Brazilian Formula Vee champion.
He flew to the UK in 1969, he won races in Formula Ford almost immediately, he swiftly moved up to Formula 3, and he became British F3 champion that same year, winning seven F3 races out of the 11 he started. The following season, 1970, he made his F1 grand prix debut, in a Lotus 49C, at Brands Hatch, and, three races later, in his first outing in a Lotus 72C, he scored his maiden F1 grand prix win, at Watkins Glen. Meteoric is the word.
Emerson’s F1 GP debut at Brands Hatch
Grand Prix Photo
Maiden F1 at Watkins Glen in 1970
Meanwhile, in his way, Wilson was following suit, albeit not meteorically. Nonetheless, in 1970, he too was racing in Europe. On May 31 that year, in a Lotus 59, he scored his maiden F3 win, at Silverstone, beating his team-mate and old friend from back home, Carlos Pace, who was driving an identical car, and he followed that up with another F3 win, this time at Brands Hatch, in early August. At the end of that month, at Thruxton, he won his third F3 race, again beating his team-mate Pace into second place.
In 1971 he moved up to Formula 2, finishing fourth on his debut, in a Lotus 69, at Hockenheim, beaten by François Cevert (Tecno; first), Graham Hill (Brabham; second), and Carlos Reutemann (Brabham; third), who were all just a little bit handy. Wilson was sixth next time out, at Thruxton — a race won by Graham Hill (Brabham) just 0.6sec ahead of Ronnie Peterson (March) in second, and in which Niki Lauda (March) was only 10th — and he was sixth again at Nürburgring and sixth yet again at Jarama. However, Emerson made a guest appearance in that Spanish round, also in a Lotus 69, and he won the race. Talk about raining on big bro’s parade.
Wilson had little success at Crystal Palace in 1971
Getty Images
Wilson then failed to qualify at Crystal Palace – and, guesting again, Emerson won again. But, at Mantorp Park, now in a March, Wilson recovered, finishing fourth, the meat in a Carlos Reutemann–John Watson sandwich, both of them in Brabhams. Wilson was fourth again at Tulln-Langenlebarn but DNQ’d at Albi (Emerson guested again and won again). All in all, the elder Fittipaldi had had a decent, if patchy, rookie F2 year.
Buoyed by a modicum of F2 success, and fuelled by a bit of Brazilian financial backing, he managed to persuade the new boss of the Brabham F1 team, Bernie Ecclestone, that he might be worth a punt — which is where we came in. However, perhaps F1 was a slight over-reach for Wilson; or, to put it another way, maybe he should have done another season of F2. In 1972 he was generally outperformed by his Brabham F1 team-mates, Graham Hill and Carlos Reutemann — although, to be fair to him, he did not always have equipment equal to theirs — and in 1973, by which time Hill had become the owner-driver of his own eponymous F1 team, Reutemann stepped up a gear at Brabham, finishing seventh in the F1 drivers’ world championship thanks to a number of impressive points finishes including third places at Paul Ricard and Watkins Glen, while Wilson continued to have a thin time of things.
Wilson takes shelter ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix in 1972
Grand Prix Photo
In 1974 he was out of Brabham, and out of F1, while Carlos won three F1 grands prix for Brabham and Emerson won the F1 drivers’ world championship for McLaren. Nonetheless, you can’t keep a good man down – and Wilson, who was not only a good man but also an ardent patriot, did not waste time sulking about his brother’s or his former team-mate’s F1 successes. No, instead he did a deal with Copersucar — which had been founded in São Paulo in 1959, was already a big and profitable concern by the mid-1970s, and is now the world’s largest sugar and ethanol company — and the result was a brand-new all-Brazilian F1 team called Copersucar-Fittipaldi.
In 1975 it fielded just one driver — Wilson — but the results were not good. He entered 12 F1 grands prix, he failed to qualify for two of them, and he retired from three of them; his best result from the remaining seven, 10th at Watkins Glen, had been greatly assisted by attrition, for he had qualified only 23rd and had finished four laps behind Lauda’s winning Ferrari. And, as always, way ahead was his younger brother, stealing the Fittipaldi show — although, at the Glen, Emerson did not have it all his own way, for Niki’s Ferrari team-mate Clay Regazzoni baulked him wickedly over many laps, for which transgression he was eventually black-flagged. Had he not done so, Emerson might well have won that race, for his McLaren M23 had the edge on Lauda’s Ferrari 312T that afternoon. As it was he finished second, 4.9sec behind.
Tenth at Watkins Glen was the 1975 highlight for Wilson
Grand Prix Photo
Emerson — on the grid with Niki Lauda — was second
Grand Prix Photo
Reflecting on that 1975 F1 season, and beginning to contemplate 1976, Wilson was forced to admit that one of the elements that Copersucar-Fittipaldi lacked was a genuinely top-line driver. He duly decided to hang up his distinctive helmet, painted as it always had been in the green and yellow of the flag of his beloved Brazil. So it was that Emerson made the selfless and shocking decision to abandon the world championship-winning McLaren team for his brother’s fledgling F1 outfit.
Copersucar career ended Emerson’s run of success
Grand Prix Photo
The asymmetry of what unfolded is sad indeed. Emerson Fittipaldi started a total of 144 grands prix in his F1 career. Of the 70 he drove for Lotus and McLaren, he finished on the podium 33 times, 14 times from the central plinth. Of the 74 he then drove for his and Wilson’s team, he finished on the podium just twice, never from the central plinth, and sometimes he even failed to qualify. The young man who in 1970 had started his F1 career so meteorically, and had been F1’s most consistently successful driver in the first half of the 1970s, finished it 10 years later with a long, unhappy, and decidedly damp squib.
And Wilson? In the 1980s and early 1990s he won a few races in Brazilian stock cars, and in 1994, to his great joy and enormous pride, driving a Porsche 911, he and his son Christian – yes, the Christian Fittipaldi who raced in F1, CART, and NASCAR, and was IMSA champion twice – won the Mil Milhas Brasil, a race that had been inaugurated in 1956 by Wilson’s and Emerson’s father, the original Wilson Fittipaldi, a motor racing commentator on radio and TV once famous in Brazil, who had attended the Mille Miglia in Italy in 1949 and had determined to create something similar for his mother country.
Photographs of that 1994 Mil Milhas Brasil podium are hard to find now, but I remember seeing one at the time. Suffice it to say that, standing alongside his 23-year-old son Christian Fittipaldi that day, no man has ever looked prouder than 50-year-old Wilson Fittipaldi. Below them the Interlagos crowd was cheering raucously, and the race’s founder, 73-year-old Wilson Fittipaldi Sr, was among the happy throng. In 1995, partnered by Antonio Hermann and Franz Konrad, Wilson Jr won the race again, also in a Porsche 911, but the photographs of the 1994 podium are the ones that stir the soul.
