Pelted with rotten apples: why tifosi turned against Niki Lauda... in a Ferrari in Italy

So who was quickest in free practice on Friday? Lauda, that’s who, the only driver of the 34 entered — yes, 34! — to deliver a lap that stopped the watches before 99 seconds had elapsed. Reutemann was next best, a quarter of a second behind. Having just taken the transparently opportunistic decision to announce that, unlike his team-mate, he would be continuing with the Scuderia for 1978, Carlos (second-quickest), rather than Niki (quickest), was the man whom the tifosi had cheered to the echo every time he had sped past.

As the qualifying hour began the next day, Reutemann was on it straight away, and his name topped the time sheets from the outset. Running him pretty close were the other four F1 drivers’ world championship contenders — Scheckter, Andretti, Lauda, and Hunt, in that order — but, with just two minutes to go, Reutemann was still on top, his beautifully fluent lap of 1min 38.15sec apparently unassailable. Scheckter had managed to get to within 0.14sec of him, Andretti was 0.22sec behind him, and Lauda trailed him by 0.39sec; Hunt was more than half a second in arrears.

James had been uncomfortable all weekend, troubled by a sprained ligament in his right foot, sustained during a charity football match in Switzerland earlier in the week. At one point it had been feared that he might not be fit to compete at Monza, but on Friday morning he had found that his pain had lessened and his mobility increased. Now, on Saturday afternoon, still in some discomfort, he was on an out-lap, and, long regarded by the tifosi as a haughty irritant, albeit an undeniably rapid one, he fancied giving them a nasty surprise by having a crack at beating Reutemann, and to hell with the pain. He hustled his McLaren around the famous autodromo, and those who saw that now largely forgotten lap have told me that it was a banzai, white-knuckle, right-on-the-ragged-edge effort, the kind of lap that James would have described as “shit or bust”. As he crossed the line his lap-time was announced — 1min 38.08sec — pole position by just seven-hundredths of a second. Magnificent achievement though it was, both skilled and plucky, it was greeted with complete silence, for he had spoiled the tifosi’s fun. They never liked him, and he was undoubtedly a boozy playboy, but he was tough as well as raffish, and, when the mood took him, few F1 drivers have ever been more effective qualifiers than he was in 1976 and 1977.

When the race got underway the following afternoon, it was Scheckter who led, having made an excellent start from P3, passing both Hunt and Reutemann into the first chicane. However, second behind Scheckter was neither Hunt nor Reutemann but Regazzoni, who had qualified his Ensign seventh and, always a Monza favourite, knew fine well that if he got going a second-or-so early he would probably be allowed to get away with it. Third was Hunt, then Andretti, Reutemann, and Lauda. Hunt and Andretti both muscled their way past Regazzoni during the course of lap one, and Reutemann and Lauda followed suit on lap two. Andretti then nipped past Hunt, also on lap two.

Meanwhile Scheckter had been putting the hammer down, establishing a good lead over Andretti in the first eight laps, until he felt his Cosworth lose a bit of punch on the ninth tour. Andretti duly passed him on lap 10 — around the outside of Parabolica if you please — and Scheckter’s engine finally coughed its way to a halt 13 laps later. It was Jody’s sixth DNF in eight races. Had he had better reliability during that mid-season lull, he might have won that year’s F1 drivers’ world championship.

Reutemann was now second, having pressed Hunt into a spin at the first chicane during a spirited dice between them. Lauda was still shadowing his team-mate, making no effort to pass him, figuring that, with Scheckter now out of contention for world championship points, a podium would do very nicely thank you. Of all the F1 drivers I have seen in my long career, very few have had a better handle than Niki on when a flat-out approach was necessary and when it was not. No, he was not the very quickest we have ever seen; but, yes, he was among the very best. You do not win 25 F1 grands prix and three F1 drivers’ world championships without being very, very good.

With Scheckter now out of the way, Reutemann had not given up on trying to win Enzo Ferrari’s home race for him, and he set about trying to catch Andretti. For a while it looked as though he might be able to do so — until he and Lauda came up to lap Jean-Pierre Jarier’s Penske. A talented but enigmatic character, much criticised by Hunt when later he transferred from cockpit to commentary box, in 1977 Jarier still fancied himself as a potential front-runner rather than merely a fractious retainer going through the motions in sluggish Ligiers and Osellas, which would become his stock in trade by the 1980s. Nonetheless, as early as 1977, the sight of two Ferraris flashing red in his mirrors was enough to kindle his truculence, and for lap after lap he blocked Reutemann’s attempts to pass him, sometimes outrageously.

As Andretti smoothly made his escape, pulling away from the increasingly unruly Jarier-Reutemann-Lauda train, sometimes by more than a second a lap, Carlos tried everything he knew, sometimes shaking his fist at Jean-Pierre as he tried to outbrake him into the chicanes, but J-PJ never gave him an inch. It went on like that for nine long laps, until, feeling his Cosworth about to die, Jarier abruptly let both Ferraris past him as they exited Variante Ascari, then coasted into the pits to retire, his Cossie blown.

Reutemann was now 12 seconds behind Andretti, and immediately he began to try to claw back the gap. But his resurgence did not last, because now it was the turn of his Ferrari flat-12 to begin to flag. In the end his race came to a sorry conclusion as a result of an entirely different kind of mishap, for, with a dozen laps to go, he spun off on oil dropped by Bruno Giacomelli’s McLaren in the braking area for the first chicane, as did Riccardo Patrese, whose Shadow Reutemann had just lapped.