Jochen Rindt

Erich Walitsch

Rindt contested 60 Formula 1 Grand Prix races and won 6 of them. In 1970 he was announced posthumous World Champion. He is the only Formula 1 World Champion to be awarded this title.
His mother Ilse was a very modern and open-minded woman for her time. She ignored all traditional behaviour. She was an elegant and fashionable lady as well as a smoker. She could be found on ski-slopes and preferred to drive cars herself instead of being ferried around by a chauffeur. It is believed that Jochen’s cosmopolitan thinking came from his mother’s side. When questioned about his origin, Jochen always answered “I am an European”. This he said only a few years after the Berlin wall was built, he was ahead of his time by decades. His father Karl was a honest tradesman who managed the spice mill “Klein & Rindt” in Mainz as a stable business. From his father, he inherited his passion for numeracy as well as his business sense.

In 1943 Isle and Karl Rindt lost their lives in a bombing raid in Hamburg, while inspecting the spice mills local branch. Their bodies were never found and hence the full facts about this dreadful night of bombing was never established. Jochen was brought to his grandparents in Graz and grew up in their apartment at Ruckerlberggürtel No. 16. There is now a commemorative plaque next to the entrance of this building honouring this time.

Jochen Rindt

David Tremayne

Two decades ago (September 1990) I wrote a chapter about Jochen Rindt in a book called Racers Apart. It began: ‘Even now, twenty years after that day when tragedy snatched him from the world title that was to follow, it sets the mind tingling, instantly conjures up mental imagery of a car being driven to its absolute maximum. Of a long-faced man with a distinctively flat nose and tousled hair, who would inevitably seek the sustenance of a cigarette whenever he stepped from the cockpit.’

Another twenty years later, those words still rang true, still painted evocative images, when I penned a biography of the great Austrian called JOCHEN RINDT: Uncrowned King – The superfast life of F1’s only posthumous World Champion.

I wrote that book as part of a mission, to ensure that new generations of motorsport fans remember the heroes of the past. And what a hero Jochen was!

When I was a kid I was fortunate to watch him drive to second place in the 1970 Race of Champions, the tragic year in which…