The story of Austria’s finest race – Thank Frankel it’s Friday

The first turn was approached at maximum speed and if you were an exceptional driver in an exceptional car maybe, just maybe, it could be taken flat. Except there was a crest on the straight so the entry point was obscured. So you turned in blind.

It was a circuit where being the best driver was not enough, you had to be the bravest too. And of all those who raced there, it was Pedro Rodriguez’s performance in the 1971 Osterreichring 1,000km race that for me stands out as the greatest drive ever seen at this extraordinary track.

It is largely a forgotten race today, which is a shame because it should live on in our memories for reasons that go beyond Pedro’s extraordinary performance in his Gulf Porsche 917K. But more of that in a moment.

Unsurprisingly, given who he was and what he was in, Pedro put the 917 on pole at over 130mph, and come the start of the race duly led away, setting a furious pace. He had two problems: first was the Ferrari 312P in second place which had qualified only 0.5 seconds slower and was equipped with the dream team of Clay Regazzoni and Jacky Ickx. Second, his regular team-mate Jackie Oliver had been fired and replaced by Richard Attwood. Now, Richard is no slouch as we all know, but he was getting out of the racing game to go and run the family business and that year had barely driven at all, being drafted in for Le Mans where he backed up his win from the previous year with a fine second place. But by his own admission, he was rusty and viewed his job as to preserve the machinery so as to give Pedro the best shot at victory.

So Pedro set about dropping the field, pulling away from none other than Jacky Ickx at about two seconds per lap, until the 29^th lap of the 170-lap race when he chugged into the pits with an engine clearly starved of sparks. It was only the battery but it took six minutes to change, six minutes in which his commanding lead turned into a two-and-a-half-lap deficit.

Even Pedro Rodriguez needed a miracle to claw that back, and one was duly provided, direct from the heavens in the form of rain. The only driver in the race with a claim to being even close to Pedro in the wet was Ickx, but when he pitted to hand over to Regga, Pedro swept by, albeit still two laps in arrears.

By half distance and the next round of stops, two laps had become one lap, Pedro inexorably reeling in an opposition apparently quite helpless to do anything about him. But Attwood had to drive the car so Pedro piled into the pits and let Richard out, who did exactly as required, handing the car back to Pedro a dozen laps later having held station throughout.

Pedro, if anything, drove faster still and overtook Ickx twice in 25 laps to put himself back on the lead lap with 26 to go. With Regazzoni back in the Ferrari, Pedro now needed to lap 3.5 seconds faster than a car that had qualified only half a second slower. And he did it. Lap after lap until something broke on the Ferrari and ended its race in the wall. At the finish Pedro was an entire lap clear of the field.

I’ve always thought this his finest drive, better even than his tour de force in the wet in the 917 at Brands Hatch the year before. By now everyone knew Zeltweg would be the brutal Porsche’s last ever race in the World Sports Car Championship because engines bigger than 3.0-litres were banned for 1972. It was no surprise either that Attwood retired from racing thereafter, because that’s what was always going to happen. But no one could have predicted that, at the time of that incredible drive, Pedro had but a fortnight to live. He died leading a minor Interserie race at the Norisring in Herbie Muller’s privately entered Ferrari 512M.

Attwood always reckoned that Pedro was unlikely to make it into old age because while not wilfully reckless in a car, nor did he leave a margin for error in racing’s most dangerous era. It was a tragedy for his family and friends of course, but also for fans who never saw him race, not least because at the time of his passing he was only 31 and still getting better. We never got to see how good he was going to be and can now only speculate. But I doubt anyone at the Osterreichring that day would have placed him anywhere other than among the very greatest the world has seen.

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images.