Mathias Lauda and the World Title Nobody Mentions

There is a kid at our track whose father won a regional championship in the nineties. He is quick, he works at it, and every single conversation about him at that paddock starts with the same four words: you know whose son.

Mathias Lauda had that conversation with the entire motorsport world for twenty years. He also won a world championship, which almost nobody mentions.

The career, without the surname

Salzburg, January 1981. Single-seaters came first, through Formula Nissan and Formula 3000, and the results there never justified staying. Tin tops came next, with three mid-2000s seasons in the DTM, in cars that were never going to win anything.

Then sportscars, which turned out to be the right answer. A factory contract with Aston Martin followed in 2015, for the World Endurance Championship, with Pedro Lamy and Paul Dalla Lana in the other two seats. Those three stayed together for five seasons.

The GTE Am championship went third, third and then first: 2015, 2016, and the title in 2017.

What that title was worth

In GTE Am the regulations require professionals to share a car with paying amateurs. Smaller fields than the headline classes, then, and older machinery by a season or two.

It is still an FIA world championship. Eight rounds, three continents, and a winning crew that has to keep an aging car design running for twenty-four hours at Le Mans. Lamy, Dalla Lana and Lauda took it with 192 points.

That trophy says FIA Endurance Trophy for LMGTE Am Drivers on it. It is not a Formula 1 title and nobody involved pretended otherwise. It is also more than most people who go racing will ever win.

Le Mans, which never worked out

Five starts in the class between 2015 and 2019 produced one finish worth recording, eighth in 2017, and a long list of retirements.

Endurance racing is like that, and it is especially like that in an Am class where one of the three drivers is paying for the seat and is not a professional. Everybody in the crew knows this when they sign.

The thing nobody could do anything about

He and Freddie Hunt, son of James, were once signed to the same team in a winter series in India, explicitly on the premise of re-enacting their fathers’ rivalry.

That is the business those two were in, whether they wanted it or not. Hunt lost his father young. Lauda had a world champion for a father who was alive, famous, and still being asked about him.

What strikes me, reading back through it, is how little either of them complained in public about a framing neither one chose.

What I take from it

The kid at our track is going to spend his whole career being introduced as somebody’s son, and there is nothing he can do about that except keep posting lap times.

Mathias Lauda did exactly that for two decades. He was never going to be his father, and the comparison was always going to be the first line of anything written about him, including this.

But a factory contract with Aston Martin is something a team gives you because of lap times, not because of a surname. Five years in the same crew is something teammates agree to. And a world title in any FIA championship is a hard thing to win, whoever your father was.

Questions about Mathias Lauda

01

Who is Mathias Lauda?

An Austrian racing driver born in 1981, a former Aston Martin factory driver and a world champion in GTE Am. His father was the three-time Formula 1 champion Niki Lauda.

02

Did Mathias Lauda race in Formula 1?

No. His single-seater career stopped below that level, and he built his record in touring cars and then in sportscars.

03

What has Mathias Lauda won?

The FIA Endurance Trophy for LMGTE Am Drivers in 2017, shared with Pedro Lamy and Paul Dalla Lana. He also finished third in the same class in 2015 and 2016.

04

What is GTE Am?

A World Endurance Championship class where professional drivers share a car with paying amateurs, which the regulations require. The cars are usually a season or two behind the top class.

05

How did he do at Le Mans?

Five class starts between 2015 and 2019, with eighth place in 2017 the only finish worth recording and retirements in most of the others.

Jake Holloway is a club racer, track-day instructor, and motorsports editor based near Charlotte, North Carolina. He has raced karts, Legends cars, Spec Miatas, and amateur endurance cars, and he writes for GreenyCars about how racing actually works, from the rule book to the pit lane.