THURSDAY, July 29, 1976, and Niki Lauda is driving me round the Nurburgring circuit in a Fiat Coupe. We’re just making our way out of the paddock when a German motorsport fan throws himself on to the bonnet. Through the open window he demands an autograph from Niki, who obliges. To express his gratitude, the guy shoves a photo into Niki’s face and adds: “This is for you, Mr Lauda. I was at the cemetery in Graz where Jochen Rindt is buried. That’s a photo of his grave. I’d like you to have it.”

Niki looks at me. What can be going through a person’s mind to give such a photo? At the Nurburgring, of all places? Niki shakes his head. “These people are mad. You wouldn’t believe the letters I get. Recently someone wrote, ‘When will you finally kill yourself in a race?’ ” Niki drives on to the circuit and we don’t say a word for the first few kilometres. Remembering today how he deliberately slowed down at kilometre 10.5, almost coming to a standstill, sends a shiver down the spine. For at precisely that spot, the Bergwerk corner, is where he would have his accident three days later. “You drive down here in fourth gear, at full throttle, at between 240 and 250kph. If a tyre bursts here, or something breaks . . . you fly off down here, or up there, or over here, but there’s nothing there. There are just stones and an embankment. They’ve put up a couple of safety barriers, but it’s not enough . . . ”

By the time the race is due to start on Sunday, it is raining lightly. Lauda has qualified second on the grid, just behind James Hunt, his closest rival for the championship. They both make terrible starts. After stopping for slick tyres at the end of that lap, Niki is in 13th place, as he approaches the Streckenteil Adenauer-Brücke section.

Even today, all that Niki remembers after that is “overtaking Carlos Pace” and “the blow to the head”. Only much later, thanks to an amateur film and photographs, was it possible to reconstruct what had happened on the left-turn at the Bergwerk corner. The film shows how the Ferrari spins after the left-hand wheels come into contact with the kerb on the inside. Going at 250kmh, Niki tries to counter-steer, but the Ferrari jerks wildly to the right. For Niki, “this lurch to the right is unfathomable to this day, although I’ve studied the film over and over. This sudden turn is abnormal. It’s completely unnatural. I can’t explain it”. A failure on the car would, however. The impacts with the barrier and then the embankment don’t appear in the film. The wreckage of the Ferrari flies in all directions and only then does the car land back on the track. Right in the middle of it, as flames burst out of the wreckage in the tangle of catchfencing, Niki’s helmet is torn from his head. Then a wooden pole from the catchfencing momentarily stuns him. The onboard fire extinguisher does not appear to be functioning. He is abandoned to the flames, without his protective helmet.

Guy Edwards, in the Hesketh, soars off the track with Lauda. Brett Lunger crashes straight into the stricken Ferrari. Harald Ertl tries in vain to avoid the road block. Then came the incredible event that saved Niki’s life. Four drivers – Edwards, Lunger, Ertl and Arturo Merzario – start a rescue mission. Niki sits in the inferno for 40 to 50 seconds without a helmet and protected only by his fireproof balaclava. “It must have been about 900 degrees,” he reveals weeks later. “Thankfully, I don’t know anything else about it.”

The most dramatic account of the Lauda rescue mission is given by Merzario. “I was going at 260kph when I saw the yellow flags at Bergwerk,” he said. “I braked. Then I saw Niki’s Ferrari on the left-hand side of the track, two metres away from the safety barrier. I leapt out of my Williams, determined to help. I was hardly out of the car before I could hear Niki screaming loudly. The flames were huge. I tried to dive into the fire, but the flames took my breath away. Then I noticed the flames were coming from the underside of the Ferrari and joining up over the cockpit. Edwards was trying, like I was, to get close to Lauda, but couldn’t. I grabbed a fire extinguisher from a steward. Niki’s screams were terrible. Then Ertl took over with the extinguisher. He made a gap in the flames with the foam and Edwards and I dived in. It was awful. We couldn’t pull Niki out of the fire because we couldn’t undo his seatbelt. But we managed in the end. I think Niki passed out for a moment, and as his body relaxed I could release his belt buckle. Eventually we were able to get him out, and laid him down in the grass . . . ”

That night, as Lauda was transferred to the intensive care unit of Mannheim’s university hospital, his condition began to deteriorate. His lungs were so corroded by smoke inhalation that the oxygen content of his blood was at a level so low that it normally causes death.

By Thursday, August 5, the immediate crisis was over. On September 7, he gets back into the cockpit. But he starts with the cockpit of his twin-engined Cessna Golden Eagle. We fly from Salzburg to Bologna – we being Niki, his pilot, Austrian fitness god Willy Dungl, Marlene Lauda and me. Niki wants “to find out if I can still make an F1 move” on the Ferrari test track at Fiorano.

His head is bandaged, his face a blood-red grimace, his eyes red-hot in their sockets. Dungl has made him a special helmet he can put on without causing himself pain as it goes over his ravaged head. After 30 laps, he knows: “I’m up to driving a racing car again.” At a press conference afterwards, the media pounce on Lauda, who says things like, “I now have my thigh on my face”. Somebody asks: “Lauda, what will your wife do now that you are ugly?” Niki snarls back: “I’m not a male model. I’m a racing driver. I’ll go on living, even with my new face.”

On September 12, Niki finishes fourth in the Italian Grand Prix. “I’d never been as scared before as I was at Monza,” he confirms later. “Scared of fire.” His decision to retire amid the blind chaos at Fuji on October 24, thus handing the world championship to Hunt by a point, was the logical thing to do for a man who had stared into an abyss that many of his fellow drivers had been spared. As he took his helmet off there ahead of time, Niki made the pivotal announcement of his career. “There are more important things in life than the world championship, like staying alive.”

There was nobody else in the world who knew that better than he did. And that one rare day of defeat did not stop him coming back to win time and again.