Gerhard Berger

Gerhard Berger: The Man Who Went Back to Tamburello

At the 1989 San Marino Grand Prix, Gerhard Berger hit the wall at Imola's Tamburello corner at close to 180mph. The Ferrari spun along the barrier and caught fire. Marshals took sixteen seconds to put it out. He came away with burns and broken ribs — and he was back in a racing car one race later, driving through the same corner at the same speed. Almost nothing else about Berger's career is as revealing as that, including the ten Grand Prix victories.

Wörgl

Berger was born on 27 August 1959 in Wörgl, in the Austrian Tyrol. His father Johann had founded a trucking company in 1961, and Gerhard worked in the family business before racing full-time — over his father's objections. That practical background shaped how he talked about the sport for the rest of his life: he tended to describe Formula One as a professional driving job rather than a calling, which was either refreshing honesty or strategic understatement, depending on who was listening.

He was nearly finished before he started. A severe road accident in 1984 left him with a broken neck and back injuries. He recovered fully, and made his Formula One debut the same year.

Fourteen Seasons

Berger raced in Formula One from 1984 to 1997, starting 210 Grands Prix across fourteen seasons — a figure that still places him among the most experienced drivers the sport has produced. His record: 10 wins, 12 pole positions, 21 fastest laps and 48 podium finishes. He finished third in the World Championship twice, in 1988 and 1994, both times with Ferrari.

His first victory came at Mexico in 1986 with Benetton — the team's first win in Formula One. He then took Suzuka and Adelaide in 1987 and Monza in 1988 for Ferrari, drove for Ferrari again from 1993 to 1995, and returned to Benetton for 1996 and 1997. His final win, at Hockenheim in 1997, was Benetton's last. The two victories that bookend his career, eleven years apart, were the same team's first and last.

The Senna Years

From 1990 to 1992 Berger drove for McLaren alongside Ayrton Senna, contributing to constructors' championships in 1990 and 1991. The pairing was, by the team's own account, an unpromising assignment — McLaren's official history concedes that being partnered with a genius like Senna was never going to be easy — and Berger's response was to refuse to treat it as a war. He became one of Senna's closest friends.

The friendship expressed itself mostly through elaborate practical jokes, which are now the best-remembered thing about both men's time at the team: Senna's briefcase thrown from a helicopter to test its durability, and, most famously, a fire extinguisher rigged with an improvised extension and fed under Senna's hotel-room door at three in the morning. "Senna flew out of the window like a rocket," Berger recalled. The jokes were not incidental. They coincided with the period when Senna's public reputation was at its lowest, and Berger's easy company did as much as anything to make the Brazilian legible as a human being to people who had only seen the ruthlessness.

When Senna and Roland Ratzenberger were killed at Imola in 1994, it was Berger who won the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim later that season — Ferrari's first victory since the 1990 Spanish Grand Prix, and one of the few consoling results in the worst year the sport had had in a generation.

Hockenheim, 1997

His last race win is the one his admirers argue about hardest. Berger was thirty-seven, coming back from three races missed for sinusitis surgery, freshly bereaved — his father had been killed in a light aircraft accident — and under pressure at Benetton from the impressive young Alex Wurz. He arrived at Hockenheim and took pole position, fastest lap and the race. One writer has called it one of the top Formula One performances of the 1990s. He retired at the end of the season.

Why Gerhard Is Called a Genius

The word needs handling carefully here, because the one documented use of it in Berger's story describes the man in the other car. McLaren's own history applies "genius" to Senna and, of Berger, says only that the pairing was never going to be easy and that he made the best of it. Sympathetic profilers place him below the elite: an excellent professional who probably deserved a few more wins than he got, but not an all-time great. That is the honest baseline, and any claim has to be built on top of it rather than in place of it.

What Berger did possess to an exceptional degree was the capacity to recalibrate fear. Returning to competitive speed one race after burning inside a car at Tamburello — and continuing to take that corner flat for years afterwards — is not bravado; it is a specific and rare ability to keep the memory of an event from contaminating the judgement required to repeat it. Racing drivers make hundreds of tiny commitment decisions per lap, and traumatic experience corrupts those decisions in almost everyone. In Berger it did not.

The second element is the Hockenheim weekend of 1997: a compressed demonstration of what he could do when everything external was against him. Pole, fastest lap and victory, at thirty-seven, after surgery and a bereavement, is a performance that cannot be explained by machinery. And the third, least conventional, is social — he was the only driver of that era who managed to be simultaneously Senna's rival and his friend, and the humanising effect he had on the sport's most feared figure was a genuine contribution to Formula One's history.

The counter-case remains firm: ten wins from 210 starts, never higher than third in a championship, never a title contender in cars that won titles for other people. Berger was not a genius of speed. He was, on the evidence, a genius of nerve and of temperament — which is a smaller claim, but a defensible one, and it is the reason the sport remembers him more warmly than his statistics would predict.

Legacy

Berger's second career was longer than most drivers manage. He ran BMW's motorsport operation until 2003 as competitions director, overseeing the manufacturer's return to Formula One. From 2006 to 2008 he owned half of Scuderia Toro Rosso, selling the stake back to Red Bull. He served as president of the FIA's Single Seater Commission from 2012 to 2014, and became chairman of the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters in March 2017.

He is remembered, accurately, as the last of a type: a driver who was extremely fast, entirely fearless, funny in a sport that was becoming humourless, and honest enough never to pretend he was Senna. Not many people have made a career out of being the second-best driver in the garage and come out of it more liked than almost anyone in the paddock.

Achievements

• Represented Arrows, McLaren and ATS F1
• Discipline: auto racing