5 September 1970: The last day of Jochen Rindt

No journalist has described the fascination of Jochen Rindt more impressively than Helmut Zwickl. My long-standing colleague passed away in early 2025. On this 5th September, the anniversary of the death of the unforgettable Jochen Rindt, we are pleased to quote how Helmut described his companion, in his very own, incomparable way.

There was a week when I had to drive through the Royal Park of Monza at all hours of the day and night. That was in 1964; we were setting endurance records at the Autodromo in two Volkswagens.

Whenever I drove through one of the gates into that gloomy green hall of ancient trees – which was particularly eerie at night – I was reminded of the racing drivers who had driven through those very same gates into the park, but never emerged alive.

I thought of the Austrian motorbike world champion Rupert Hollaus, who was killed in a crash at Lesmo in 1954 whilst riding his works NSU; and of Alberto Ascari, who, in 1955, just a few days after his crash into the harbour basin at Monte Carlo, simply wanted to do a few laps in a borrowed Ferrari to test himself, only to die in the Vialone bend. Wolfgang Trips came to mind, who lost his life at Monza in 1961, and Tommy Spychiger, who flew off the track at the Parabolica in his Ferrari and was decapitated by his own crash bar.

Monza had always had a bitter aftertaste.

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Monza: Qualifying

FIA Formula One World Championship

05.09.2026 - 15:30

Saturday, 5 September 1970, turned out to be a hot day. As I drove away from the hotel with Alois Rottensteiner, I realised after a few kilometres that I’d left my wallet in the hotel room. ‘The day’s off to a good start,’ we laughed, and turned back.

The usual commotion at the Autodromo: traffic in convoys, nervous police officers, a chaotic hunt for a parking space, idiotic stewards.

Jochen Rindt strolls down the pit lane; the crowd roars. Jochen nods and waves to the people. He was very popular in Italy. With his charisma and his willingness to take risks, he would have been a good fit for Ferrari.

I’m standing with Heinz Prüller by the Lotus pit, and Jochen asks us: “Is Lucky here yet? He wanted to film the opening for the Motorama now.”

“He should be here any minute,” we say. Whilst Lucky Schmidtleitner, head of the motoring programme ‘Motorama’, is organising his cameraman Gerry Mörth and his assistant, the Viennese radio reporter Edi Finger climbs over the pit wall to get a few autographs from Jochen ‘for my friends in Vienna’.

Jochen nods and signs the last autographs of his life.

Diagonally opposite the Lotus pit, Gerry Mörth sets up his camera, whilst Jochen heads over to the March team next door. He asks Pete Kerr once again: “So Pete, when are you finally going to be my mechanic again?”

Jochen had always wanted a brilliant mechanic like the New Zealander – who used to work on Jochen’s cars for the Roy Winkelmann team – on the Lotus team too, where he’d never quite felt at ease with the technical side of things.

Lucky Schmidtleitner beckons Jochen in front of the camera and hands him a microphone. The first racing cars are heading out onto the track. Jochen delivers the opening commentary for the Italian Grand Prix. But his thoughts are already far away. He gets tangled up in the script and breaks off, saying: “There’s too much noise; I’ll do it again when I get back …”

Except: there was no coming back.

In search of a slipstream

Seconds before Jochen puts on his racing helmet for the last time, he climbs up onto the pit wall to his wife Nina’s viewing platform. Not to take a look at her lap time chart, but to check the traffic on the Monza circuit. What he had in mind also seemed clear: he was on the lookout for a car fast enough to provide him with effective slipstream.

It’s possible he had Denny Hulme in his sights, because just as Jochen catapults out of the pit lane in his Lotus 72, Hulme comes out of the Parabolica at full speed in his McLaren. Denny darts past the accelerating Lotus, but within the next three laps, Jochen slots into his slipstream.

I’m standing with Schmidtleitner somewhere near the pits; our minds are already a day ahead: how and where should we organise the winner’s interview tomorrow?

Monza after the race – that’s when the chaos flares up again. Especially if Ferrari wins. Perhaps Jochen should do the winner’s interview by the Lotus transporter? Perhaps with himself: just like last time at Hockenheim …

Suddenly, everything around us falls silent.

Racing cars roll silently back to the pits with their engines switched off. Visors are flipped up; heads lean in towards the drivers’ lips. The distant roar of the cars as they emerge from the woods over at the Ascari bend has fallen silent.

It’s muggy, and the traffic light at the pit exit is red. This silence creates a sense of unease. Restlessness builds.

‘Yes, Rindt,’ I hear someone say. I pace round in circles until I see Jackie Stewart leap down from the Lotus pit, Nina Rindt pack away her stopwatch and fold up the lap chart.

Colin Chapman clutches his head, smoothes his hair, and a look of consternation spreads across his face. For a moment, he stares blankly and despondently at the oil-stained tarmac, sensing impending doom.

A mechanic fiddles with his spanner. Pointlessly and

childishly, he drums it against the concrete wall. Ding, ding, da-ding, ding, ding – it sounds like Morse code.

I push my way over to Jackie Stewart: ‘What’s going on?’

“Jochen’s had an accident.”

“Yeah, so?”

Jackie shifts uncomfortably and says what one usually says in such a situation: “I think he’s all right.”

Chapman sends John Miles to the scene of the crash in his racing car to find out what’s happened. Just to remind you: there aren’t any TV cameras at the track yet.

Hulme is surrounded. He knows something.

“Jochen went off just before the Parabolica.”

“Where?”

“On the left-hand side.”

“You saw it?”

“I was just behind him.”

“And?”

“It looks bad.”

“How did that happen?”

“The car suddenly swerved to the left and crashed into the crash barriers. The wheels flew onto the road.”

“And Jochen?”

“I think he’s in the car …”

Like in a dream

I run away, through the pits, get caught up in the crowd; it’s like a dream – you run and run but don’t seem to be getting anywhere. I fight my way through to the press tent, where three telephone operators are manning the phones.

A dreadful place, perfectly in keeping with Formula 1’s darkest days. Whilst I’m booking a long-distance call to the Kronen-Zeitung, an Italian journalist comes up and whispers in my ear: ‘He’s dead.’

At that very moment, a young man I didn’t recognise addressed me: “Hello, Mr Zwickl, you won’t remember me. I’m now writing for the *Arbeiter-Zeitung*. It’s my first time at the Grand Prix. Can you help me get some information?”

I think to myself: Good heavens, that’s just what I needed. I practically shout the words in his face: “Jochen Rindt is said to be dead!”

He says: “That’s nonsense – I’ve only just taken a photo of him. If I run into him, can I mention your name?”

The operator tells me the long-distance call will take a while; I’d expected nothing else and walk back to the pits. The crowd is getting increasingly impenetrable. It’s muggy. The atmosphere is electric.

In the pit lane, I bump into Porsche’s racing director, Huschke von Hanstein.

“Jochen?” I ask him.

He nods.

At that very moment, Bernie Ecclestone, Jochen’s friend, steps into the pit with a tear-stained face, bends down and stows a bloodstained white crash helmet into a black leather bag. Jochen’s helmet, Jochen’s bag.

I run back to the press tent and, as if by a miracle, manage to get through to the Krone.

They tell me in Vienna: “We already know – Rindt is dead. It’s just been announced on the radio.”

I reply: “I haven’t had any confirmation yet. I refuse to believe it, because at Monza they’ve been known to declare the living dead and let the dead live.”

Minutes later, a press release is distributed: Jochen Rindt had an accident at 3.25 pm and had succumbed to his serious injuries.

Jochen died in the first-aid hut at Monza, where cuts and insect bites were treated. Barely 50 paces away was the new GP Medical Centre, a mobile operating theatre equipped with state-of-the-art medical equipment, housed in a articulated lorry.

The doctors argued with the Monza rescue services over Jochen, who was on the verge of death. The Italians refused to hand Jochen over.

Jackie Stewart still believes today that Jochen could have been saved at the Grand Prix Hospital.

Was that realistic?

Hardly conceivable. For the injuries were fatal.

A flimsy tin box

The Lotus chassis was a paper-thin tin box; its harness system was poor, and Jochen hadn’t fastened his thigh straps. The Lotus wedged itself under the guardrail, which was fitted too high, and struck an iron post.

I remember how, a few weeks before Monza, whilst inspecting the Österreichring, Jochen paused thoughtfully at one spot and remarked, ‘The crash barriers here are too high; I’d easily plough straight through them with my Lotus. Lower them and put a second crash barrier on top.’

Even two hours after Jochen’s death, Monza is still Monza: a noisy, seething, restless crowd of people beneath a blanket of haze, sweltering in the sun.

After a moment of shock, Formula 1 had returned to business as usual.

‘You’d best head home this evening,’ Lotus team manager Dick Scammell tells the mechanics, who are slumped apathetically in the dark garage.

Next door lies Jochen’s wreck. The garage door is locked, the lock sealed, and two police officers are standing guard. The public prosecutor’s office has already seized the heap of metal.

At around 6 pm, the Lotus transporter, with Miles’ and Fittipaldi’s undamaged racing cars in the load compartment, slips out of the paddock. A swift retreat, before the police can seize these two Lotus racers as well.

Jackie Stewart has taken off his overalls and is discussing with Dick Scammell – Chapman has left the arena in a flash – all the next steps as far as Nina is concerned. Jackie wants Nina to fly back to Geneva with Helen that very evening; Scammell is to charter a plane, whatever the cost.

Jackie does not yet know that Nina’s father, who had been in Milan, is already by her side, as is Austria’s CSI Vice-President Martin Pfundner, who offers his help. The CSI meeting – at that time the highest sporting authority – was adjourned in Milan after a minute’s silence.

The real reason

After 6 pm, Jackie Stewart is back in the March. What sort of sport is this, in which men race past a fire that is currently consuming one of their own, a sport that tears men away from the bier of a dead friend and back onto the racetrack?

In any case, following Jochen’s fatal crash, Jackie Stewart improved his personal best time by two tenths of a second in the last half-hour of practice.

“I knew that if I didn’t get back behind the wheel straight away, I’d never drive again,” he confided to me.

Jochen’s final lap can be reconstructed based on Denny Hulme’s account: “At the Curva Grande, Jochen had a brilliant slipstream from me; he was closing in. I messed up the second Lesmo, and Jochen overtook me. With a gap of 15 metres between us, we raced through the Ascari left-handers, then down the back straight, in fifth gear at full throttle, between 290 and 300. At the 200-metre mark – or perhaps even a bit later – Jochen braked. The Lotus threatened to spin out, but that’s normal, because in this braking zone – where you slow down to about 150 for the Parabolica – all cars are unstable and need to be stabilised with steering corrections. Suddenly, however, the Lotus veered off to the left, crossing the narrow grass verge, and crashed into the crash barriers. Wheels flew off, along with parts of the car; to me, it all happened in slow motion, as I was travelling at the same speed as him. But I feared the Lotus would be thrown back onto the track.”

Why the Lotus 72 veered abruptly to the left in the Parabolica braking zone was actually quite clear on that 5th of September: the right-hand front brake shaft snapped, whilst the left-hand front wheel was braked fully, causing the Lotus to veer to the left. Jochen was now nothing more than a passenger.

By the next race, the hollow brake shafts of the Lotus 72 – which had proved to be the major risk factor in this revolutionary racing car – were finally no longer hollow tubes, but had been milled from solid material.

Too late for Jochen.

Ifs and buts

Had Jochen already had a carbon-fibre chassis, he would have survived. He would have run back to the pits and might have made good on what he’d predicted to the Lotus team after his steering broke: ‘If that breaks again and I’m still alive, I’ll kill you all.’

Six years after Rindt’s fatal crash, Lotus boss Colin Chapman was acquitted by the Italian courts; the wreck was released, but Lotus never collected it from Italy. Only the Ford Cosworth eight-cylinder engine, the gearbox and all parts irrelevant to the accident investigation had been allowed to be taken back to England a week after the accident.

In 1977, the wreck was moved to a scrap yard in Monza Park, where it lay rotting in the open air, barely a kilometre as the crow flies from the race track.

In 1985, it was discovered by an estate agent, who, after paying a storage fee, bought the remains from the authorities. However, as the racing car collector was more interested in Lola than in Lotus, he swapped the Lotus wreck for two Lola Formula 3 racing cars in 1993.

The new owner was a Lotus collector who competes in historic races. Erich Walitsch, a Viennese IT specialist and Jochen Rindt fan who has compiled the largest Jochen Rindt archive and is also in constant contact with Nina, learnt of the existence of the car in which Rindt died whilst at Monza in 1995.

Walitsch tracked down the owner: “The wreck was lying in a corrugated-iron garage in a garden somewhere near Milan. When I saw it for the first time, I was deeply moved.”

The 37-page accident report had substantiated the theory of a broken brake shaft, a theory which the English-speaking racing historical community, however, had never been willing to accept. For years, English writers close to Lotus claimed that Rindt had had the rear wing removed to achieve a higher top speed (which was indeed true), and that by doing so he had sacrificed so much downforce that he lost control in the Parabolica braking zone.

In fact, according to the accident report, the front right brake shaft snapped – a torsional fracture, to be precise.

For me, it has always been ‘The Execution of a Champion’.

Who was Jochen Rindt?

‘Who was Jochen Rindt?’ columnists ask themselves today, and on the anniversary of his death on 5 September, they attempt to answer this question without ever having known Rindt personally.

But in the internet age, almost everything that has ever been written about Jochen Rindt is available at the click of a button, and so it all seems quite simple and well-informed.

But that does not do justice to a man like Jochen Rindt. To do that, you really had to have known him.

I was there when Jochen climbed into a Monoposto racing car for the first time at the Kottingbrunn tyre test track in February 1963 – it was Curd Barry’s 1962 Formula Junior Cooper. After his first few attempts, Jochen came back disillusioned and grumbled: ‘This is rubbish, I can’t see a thing because I’m lying on my back.’

I drove Jochen to the hospital in Adenau after his crash in the Cooper on the Nürburgring Südschleife. He was lying on the reclining seat next to me, a wretched sight. He was covered in bruises all over his body and was so devastated that the words came out of his mouth: ‘I wasn’t born to race; that was a serious warning today – I’d better give it up.’

Yet he was a born racing driver.

I was there when Jochen Rindt won at Le Mans in 1965 – even though he’d agreed with his co-driver, Masten Gregory: “We’ll set off straight away in Grand Prix style, then by 10 pm at the latest it’ll be all over, and we can go to bed.”

I was sitting next to Jochen in Gottfried Köchert’s Ferrari LM when we were allowed to do two laps at Zeltweg military airfield before practice began for the Austrian Grand Prix. Jochen went on to win the race in that car.

I can still hear his exact words as he explained his move to Lotus to me: “At Lotus, I’ll either become world champion or I’m finished.”

I was there when the Lotus 72 became a winning car in the 1970 season, but this extreme design was still riddled with fatal flaws.

And I was there when, on that 5 September 1970 at Monza, he got into the Lotus and never returned.

So – who was this Jochen Rindt really?

Today, one would say: he was cool.

He had his fears, because Formula 1 racing in his day was a matter of life and death. And overcoming fear was a more important factor than tyre selection is today. When he was in the cockpit, fear was shut out; otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to push the limits to such extremes.

He had everything that makes a racer: incredible reflexes, ambition, determination; he could slow the fastest sequences down to slow motion; he had that certain killer instinct; and he could shine even in a clunker of a car – something that was still possible in his day, when a driver could contribute much more to the overall package than is the case today.

He shared some cracking stories from the edge of the limits. He conducted the winners’ interviews with himself for the TV programme *Motorama*. He was just in the process of reducing the huge risks of his early years through experience and maturity, without slowing down.

Together with Jackie Stewart, he campaigned for greater safety on race tracks. The hardliners amongst the reporters turned up their noses: ‘What do these full-throttle millionaires want? Now they’ve got money, they just want to live the good life! Are these still racing drivers who want to live forever? Where will we end up if racing drivers no longer want to die?’

Jochen would have laughed his head off at today’s artificial tracks with run-off areas as big as the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

If his Lotus had had a carbon-fibre monocoque, he’d have stormed into the pits and killed his mechanics: something he’d already hinted at when the steering failed in Clermont-Ferrand – something they’d kept from him.

He died twelve years too early for the carbon-fibre era. He knew how to live life to the full. And Jochen didn’t want to race forever. He would have staked his claim to go gold-prospecting with his friend Bernie Ecclestone.

He had charisma. Everyone in Austria wanted to be like Jochen Rindt; that was the source of his immense popularity.

Compared to him, today’s drivers look like cloned, baby-faced lads.