Carlos Reutemann, who died at the age of 79, made enormous promises from the start of his Formula 1 career. It came as a big surprise to many when he retired without a World Cup at the peak of his tether.
He undoubtedly had the speed and commitment to succeed Argentina’s great five-time champion Juan Manuel Fangio. But Reutemann was a mercury talent who was prone to startling swings in form.
Reutemann started with limousines at home before moving to the regional Formula 2 championship. With the support of the Argentine Motor Club, he drove in the European Formula 2 in the following years and impressed with a third place in a Grand Prix without championship in Buenos Aires in an old McLaren.
Bernie Ecclestone took over the Brabham team in 1972 and appointed Reutemann. He started the season in a modified BT34 that teammate Graham Hill had done little with the previous year, and stunned the paddock by putting the car on pole for its home debut. It faded in the race because Brabham chose too soft a tire compound.
Ferrari lured Reutemann after Lauda’s fall from Brabham. His season was interrupted by a severe ankle fracture in a Formula 2 crash. But other top six qualifying performances, fourth place at the Canadian Grand Prix and victory in a non-championship race in Interlagos showed clear potential.
Ecclestone knew a good thing when he saw one and kept Reutemann for 1973. After the team unveiled their new BT42, Reutemann took podiums at Paul Ricard and the season finale at Watkins Glen, securing seventh place in the championship.
The 1974 championship was a wide open affair that one of several drivers could have won. Reutemann took three Grand Prix victories, but only one more points and finished the year in sixth. Although he only added one more win in 1975, his consistency improved significantly and he finished the season third behind Niki Lauda and Emerson Fittipaldi.
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Ecclestone was keen to secure the support of an engine manufacturer and brought Alfa Romeo on board for the 1976 season. However, their first engines were pitifully unreliable, Reutemann only scored a single point and began to create other opportunities.
Reutemann came to Jones at Williams in 1980 When Lauda was seriously injured in an accident at the Nürburgring, Reutemann seized the opportunity to join the team at the Italian Grand Prix. To his surprise, Lauda returned in time for the race, so Ferrari set up a three-way outing. Lauda was delighted with fourth place, five places ahead of the driver, whom he obviously considered an intruder.
Reutemann returned full-time in 1977 as a team-mate from Lauda and justified Ferrari’s trust in him initially with third place and a victory from the first two laps, which brought him into the points. But Lauda knocked him down with a string of top two finishes, won a tough title fight with two laps to go, and left Ferrari and left Reutemann to his former team.
Four wins made 1978 his most successful season in terms of victories, but it wasn’t enough to keep Mario Andretti and his ground-effect Lotus 79 – the new benchmark in Formula 1 – from winning the championship. Reutemann therefore made an opportunistic move to Lotus for the following season, but it turned out to be an unfavorable move. The Lotus 80 turned out to be too extreme an evolution of the concept, and Reutemann never drove it, and although it took some podiums with the 79 early in the season, it slipped to a winless sixth place in the championship.
In 1981 he narrowly escaped the title. He didn’t hesitate to look elsewhere, and in 1980 Williams became his third other team in as many seasons. This was a far more productive move as Williams had dominated the final stages of the previous season and Reutemann took their first win for them in Monaco. This was his second score in a run of 15 in a row, which was remarkable given the fragility of cars of the era and included 11 podiums in 12 races.
This run spanned two championship years: the 1980 season, which his teammate Alan Jones won, and the following season, in which Reutemann had the upper hand at Williams. This was not without controversy: In Brazil, Reutemann disregarded an instruction from the pit wall to let the team boss pass him and won the race, which sowed bitter hostility between the two.
With six races to go, Reutemann was 17 points ahead of young Brabham rival Nelson Piquet. The title finally seemed to be in the offing, but Reutemann’s form crumbled in the last few races. It was not clear whether it was due to the Michelin team’s mid-season change to Goodyear surfaces, the pressure of the title fight or something else.
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In a rainy race in Montreal, he decided on a mix of Goodyear rain tires front and rear; he dragged himself home in tenth place, three laps behind. Fifth place for Piquet meant Reutemann could still secure the title if he led his rival home in the Las Vegas finals, which was evident on the cards as he put his Williams in pole position, three places before his rival. But Jones took the lead at the start and Reutemann mysteriously lost to a pointless eighth place. An uncomfortable Piquet finished fifth again, enough to deny Reutemann the title with one point.
Back in a Formula 1 car with Ferrari in 2005, although Reutemann had announced his intention to retire during the off-season, he started the 1982 season opener in Kyalami and finished second. But after contracting Rene Arnoux at the Brazilian Grand Prix, he decided he’d had enough. His new team-mate Keke Rosberg won the title in a turbulent year.
After a one-off appearance at the 1980 World Rally Championship in Argentina and third place, Reutemann repeated the feat five years later in the Peugeot 205. But his racing days are behind him, at least on the competitive side. When Argentina returned to the World Cup calendar in 1995, he wowed spectators by taking a handful of demonstration laps on the track in a modern Ferrari F1 car. His former team gave him the opportunity to test the latest Grand Prix machines again in 2005 – the 63-year-old got behind the wheel of an F2004.
After leaving Formula 1, he found his calling in politics. Reutemann was elected governor of Santa Fe and later joined the country’s Senate, of which he was a member until 2021. After an intestinal bleeding in May, Reutemann began to recover and left the hospital. But after a further deterioration in his condition, Reutemann died in July at the age of 79.
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