1978 Dutch GP: How Lotus felt F1's fickle triumph and tragedy

It was a stupendously impressive performance by them. Granted, Niki Lauda did his best to put up a fight, finishing a gutsy third in his Brabham-Alfa BT46 (sans fan by then of course), but it was the manner of Mario’s and Ronnie’s ascendancy that was so striking. They had qualified first and second, the only two drivers to post laps that would stop the watches before 77 seconds had elapsed. On race day they set off in line astern, the American half a second ahead of the Swede, and they drove all 75 laps in that formation, unchallenged and therefore unruffled by Lauda’s stout-hearted efforts to keep up with them, smoothly pulling away from the Brabham-Alfa despite both their Lotuses developing mechanical gremlins, a broken exhaust that was costing his Cosworth DFV 400rpm in Andretti’s case and fading brakes in Peterson’s. Mario crossed the finish-line 0.32sec ahead of Ronnie; Niki, despite charging hard at the end, was a further 12.21sec behind.

It was Lotus’s eighth F1 grand prix win of the year, its third on the trot, and its fourth one-two. Afterwards Andretti said: “That was just fantastic. I know I’ve used that word a lot this season, but I honestly don’t believe the 79 has ever been better than it was today.”

Yet, as Verstappen and Red Bull are now only too well aware, F1 domination can be a fickle thing, and what happened after Zandvoort 1978 was not only unpredictable, and therefore unpredicted, but also tragic. Andretti, who had won 11 F1 grands prix for Lotus in a 21-month purple patch that had begun at Fuji in October 1976, never won one again; and Peterson, who, by driving quite magnificently throughout 1978, had silenced those who had wondered whether he might be past his brilliant best, not only never won again, but also never scored points again, and indeed never finished a grand prix again. The reason for that was that he was fatally injured in the next one he started, at Monza two weeks later. As Andretti famously said on the Monday morning after that cursed Italian Grand Prix, having just been told the shocking news that his team-mate and good friend had succumbed to his injuries in hospital overnight, “Unhappily, racing is also this.” So it was. So it is, for it will never be truly safe, but it is far less dangerous now than it was then, thank god.

Lotus’s 79 had harnessed ground effect technology so well in 1978 – or so we all thought at the time – that even F1 insiders assumed that Colin Chapman’s cars would kick off 1979 with their sizeable performance advantage intact. For that reason Carlos Reutemann, who had won four F1 grands prix for Ferrari in 1978, had no qualms about deserting the Scuderia to join Andretti at Lotus for 1979. As things turned out, neither Carlos nor Mario won a single race that year, for Ligier, Williams, and Renault had all created new cars that used ground effect science and technology far better than Lotus ever had, and Ferrari built a powerful and bullet-proof car in which Jody Scheckter, ably supported by his team-mate Gilles Villeneuve, made almost no errors in his diligent bid to win the F1 drivers’ world championship; he succeeded.

Reutemann left Lotus for Williams after that one disappointing season – which with the benefit of hindsight we can hail as a wise move – but Andretti stayed loyal to Chapman for a fifth consecutive year. Carlos did well at Williams in 1980 – he won at Monaco and finished third in the F1 drivers’ world championship standings – but it was an annus horribilis for Mario. Of the season’s 14 grands prix he saw the chequered flag in only five, and just one of those finishes was a points-scoring one: sixth at Watkins Glen. He joined Alfa Romeo for 1981, and he began the season with an encouraging fourth place at Long Beach, but his next 14 F1 grands prix that year yielded eight DNFs and six finishes, none of which troubled the scorers.

He announced his retirement from F1 at that point – he was no longer the sunny side of 40, after all – and he refocused his energies on IndyCar, with conspicuous success, finally calling it a day in 1994, by which time he was no longer the sunny side of 50. But his damp squib of a 1981 season in a difficult and unreliable Alfa had not in fact been the end of his F1 driving career, for he had made three ’supersub’ appearances in F1 in 1982 – one for Williams and two for Ferrari – and we who love racing can be very glad that he did. Why so? Because, at Monza, where he and his twin brother Aldo had fallen in love with racing as teenagers, he stuck a Ferrari 126C2 on the pole and raced it to third place. On the podium, alongside René Arnoux, who had won, and Patrick Tambay, second, cheered to the echo by the tifosi, he looked a bit like a proud but sheepish dad who had infiltrated his son’s victory ceremony by mistake.

And Peterson? When he was on song, no-one ever drove an F1 car faster. A few weeks before his death – which mismanaged medical catastrophe occurred on September 11, 1978 – he had agreed to join McLaren for 1979. He would never know it, but it was another of his bad career choices, and he had made quite a few of those. In a way that reminds me of Chris Amon and Fernando Alonso – superb drivers both who nonetheless so often seemed (Amon) or seem (Alonso) to be in the right teams at the wrong time – Peterson would have struggled with the 1979 McLaren M28, just as the the plucky John Watson did in his place.

We will never know where the greatest racing driver that Sweden has ever produced might have gone, or what he might have done, in 1980 and beyond. Would he have stayed at McLaren, and eventually enjoyed the success there that Watson and Lauda did in 1981, 1982, and 1983, and that Lauda and Alain Prost surpassed with triumphant domination in 1984, by which time he would have been 40? Or, disappointed and depressed by the wretched 1979 M28, would he have looked for an early way out of the McLaren team to land an alternative drive elsewhere? That would have been more like him, sadly. As I say, we will never know. All we can ever know, and all we can ever say therefore, is that he was one of the most freakishly gifted drivers whom any of us has ever seen.

I was at Brands Hatch in 1978, aged 15, to watch him put his gorgeous black and gold Lotus 79 on the pole, using rock-hard race tyres to drive a quali lap a quarter of a second quicker than the best that Andretti could manage on super-soft qualifying tyres. The way SuperSwede chucked that wonderful car around that day was prodigiously impressive, and I will never forget having been there to see him do it.