Clay Regazzoni

Clay Regazzoni: Five Wins and a Second Life

At Silverstone on 8 July 1979, Clay Regazzoni won the British Grand Prix and celebrated on the podium with a can of Lilt, because the team's Saudi sponsors would not have champagne. It was the first Grand Prix victory in the history of Williams, a team that has since collected more than a hundred. He was thirty-nine, on his fourth team in four years, and eight months from the accident that ended everything. He is the rare driver whose biography splits cleanly in half at a single afternoon.

Ticino to the Grid

Gianclaudio Giuseppe Regazzoni was born on 5 September 1939 in Mendrisio, Switzerland, and grew up in Porza in Italian-speaking Ticino — Swiss by passport, thoroughly Italian by temperament, a distinction that shaped both his career and his following. He married Maria Pia in 1967 and had two children, Alessia and Gian Maria.

He started late. His first races came in 1963, aged twenty-four, in his own Austin-Healey Sprite, and he took two podiums in his first three outings. Formula Three followed in 1965 with a Brabham, then a season with De Tomaso in 1966. During a Formula Three support race at Monaco in 1968 his car went *under* an Armco barrier, the rail passing above him and missing his head by a margin measured in centimetres. He drove on.

That same year he joined Tecno in Formula Two and built a reputation as a hard, uncompromising racer. It also brought the worst episode of his career: he was implicated in the death of the British driver Chris Lambert at Zandvoort in 1968, was fully exonerated at the inquest, and then spent five years defending a legal action brought by Lambert's father. In 1970 he won the European Formula Two Championship with Tecno.

Monza, 1970

His Formula One debut came at the 1970 Dutch Grand Prix. In only his fourth Grand Prix, at Monza, he won — a result shadowed permanently by Jochen Rindt's fatal crash in qualifying at the same meeting, and made contentious by Regazzoni's aggressive weaving on the straights. Jackie Stewart's verdict was blunt: what he saw at Monza that day was "unethical, unsporting" and dangerous. Stewart nevertheless retained, in his own words, a sneaking affection for the man. That combination — disapproval and fondness — followed Regazzoni everywhere.

He finished third in the 1970 championship with 33 points.

Ferrari, and Three Points

The Ferrari years were uneven. He beat Stewart to win the non-championship Race of Champions at Brands Hatch in 1971, but the 312B was no match for the Tyrrell and he finished seventh; 1972 brought one podium and seventh again. He left for BRM in 1973 on an astronomical Marlboro-funded fee, took a pole in Argentina, scored two points all year, and was pulled from a burning wreck at the South African Grand Prix by Mike Hailwood, who received the George Medal for it. The season's real dividend was a teammate: he and the young Niki Lauda became close friends.

When Luca Cordero di Montezemolo took charge at Ferrari he re-signed both of them, and 1974 was Regazzoni's best year — seven podiums and a win at the Nürburgring, his first since Monza. He arrived at the final round in the United States genuinely able to win the world championship. A defective shock absorber wrecked the car's handling and he trailed home eleventh. Emerson Fittipaldi took the title by three points.

He won at Monza again in 1975 as Ferrari took the Constructors' Championship, and won the non-championship Swiss Grand Prix — still the only Swiss driver to have done so. He opened 1976 by dominating the inaugural Long Beach Grand Prix from pole. Then Lauda crashed at the Nürburgring, the season collapsed, and Ferrari replaced Regazzoni with Carlos Reutemann. He left as the team's longest-serving driver, 73 races, a record that stood twelve years until Michele Alboreto passed it.

He chose Ensign for 1977 over Bernie Ecclestone's Brabham because, he said, he preferred to race with nice people. It cost him: five points that year, two the next at Shadow.

Silverstone, and the Question

Then Frank Williams gave him the FW07 alongside Alan Jones, and the car was superb. The Silverstone win in July 1979 was his fifth and last, and he finished the season fifth in the championship with 29 points before being replaced — by Reutemann, again.

At Monza that year the journalist Nigel Roebuck asked him why he was still racing at forty with no realistic prospects. "I love Formula One," Regazzoni answered, "and most of all I love to drive racing cars. So why should I stop when I feel this way?"

Long Beach

He rejoined Ensign for 1980. On 9 March, at the United States Grand Prix West at Long Beach, the brake pedal went to the floor at roughly 280 km/h on the long straight. He hit Ricardo Zunino's parked Brabham, bounced into the barrier and lost consciousness for about ten minutes. "Then I remember terrible pain in my hips," he said later. He was paralysed from the waist down. He sued the organisers over sub-standard safety and lost.

The Second Career

He won his racing licence back. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s he competed with hand controls in the Paris–Dakar rally and at the Sebring 12 Hours, among the first disabled drivers to race at that level, and ran his last competitive event in 1990. He wrote two books — *È questione di cuore* and, in 1988, *E la corsa continua* — commentated for Italian television from 1996, and spent years campaigning for equal opportunities for disabled people.

On 15 December 2006 he was killed when his Chrysler Voyager struck a lorry on the A1 near Parma. He was sixty-seven. Lauda, Stewart, Fittipaldi, Arturo Merzario and Peter Sauber were at the funeral in Lugano.

Why Clay Is Called a Genius

The claim here rests on physical craft, not intellect, and it would be dishonest to dress it up otherwise. What the craft consisted of is worth stating precisely: driving 1970s Grand Prix cars — no telemetry, no traction control, no carbon safety cell — at the edge of adhesion, reading a chassis through the seat and the steering column rather than through data, and placing the car wheel-to-wheel at Monza's slipstreaming speeds while accepting that a mistake could kill. Regazzoni had exceptional car control and an appetite for combat that made him formidable in exactly the situations where computation fails.

But five wins in eleven seasons is a modest return, and the record should not be inflated. He was never world champion; he was twice discarded in favour of Carlos Reutemann; he lost 1974 by three points, and the difference was a broken shock absorber, which is bad luck rather than any evidence of genius. Contemporaries placed him a clear step below Stewart, Lauda and Fittipaldi. Lauda's own summary was that he was "a great blend of professional and playboy" who enjoyed life — affectionate, and not a claim to greatness.

The more defensible case is temperamental rather than technical. After Long Beach he recovered a racing licence and drove the Dakar with hand controls at a time when nobody expected a paralysed man to race anything, and turned that into two decades of advocacy. That is not genius. It is something harder to find.

Legacy

Regazzoni gave Williams the first of its Grand Prix victories, an entry in the record book that will outlast his own five wins. He remains the only Swiss driver to have won a Swiss Grand Prix. Pierfrancesco Favino played him in *Rush* in 2013, in the Ferrari story he was part of. Lauda's epitaph for him is the one that stuck: he died as he lived, taking life as it came.

Achievements

• Competed at 24 Hours of Le Mans
• Discipline: auto racing