The German racing driver Jochen Mass, who has died aged 78, won only one of the 104 grands prix in which he competed between 1974 and 1982, but he was known as a talented and reliable competitor, a useful number two to such champions as Emerson Fittipaldi and James Hunt, as well as being a winner of many endurance races in sports cars, including the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
His sole victory in a world championship Formula 1 race came in tragic circumstances. In 1975, after joining the McLaren team for his second season in the top tier, he had taken the lead of the Spanish Grand Prix on the fast and spectacular Montjuïc Park circuit in Barcelona when the race was halted after an accident.
Before the race, the drivers, led by Fittipaldi, the reigning champion and Mass’s teammate, had pointed out to the organisers that the steel safety barriers surrounding the track had been poorly assembled. Their protest meetings held up the practice sessions, and it was only after hasty remedial work that the meeting could continue. The race itself took place without Fittipaldi, who had flown home in disgust.
There had already been several accidents when another German driver, Rolf Stommelen, found himself in an unexpected lead at the wheel of a brand-new car built and entered by the team of Graham Hill. As he started the 26th lap, a rear-wing stay broke as the car approached the brow of a hill at 150mph, sending it smashing into the barriers and then flying over them. Stommelen survived but two photographers, a track marshal and a spectator were killed.
It took three more laps for the race to be stopped, by which time Mass had taken the lead from Jacky Ickx’s Lotus, and he was declared the winner. But since only 29 of the scheduled 75 laps had been completed, he was awarded only half the customary nine points for a victory. Added to other minor placings during the season, those points helped him to seventh place in the final drivers’ championship table, the highest he would ever achieve.
“I took no pleasure in my first F1 victory, believing I’d win many more later,” he remembered. Although that was not to happen, he went on to a distinguished career and after his retirement became a much-loved figure in the paddock and on the track at historic meetings, particularly the Goodwood Revival, to which he travelled from his home in the south of France.
Mass was born in the aftermath of the second world war in Dorfen, near Munich, and remembered driving his pedal car through streets still strewn with rubble. After his father died when he was nine, he followed the example of his grandfather, who had been a sailor, and joined the merchant navy, where he spent several years. It was a passion that would stay with him throughout his life; during breaks from the grand prix season he would sail his old schooner across the Atlantic.
His first experience of motor sport came in hill-climbs, where he performed so impressively in an Alfa Romeo saloon in 1970 that Ford Cologne offered him a contract. Soon he was racing the powerful works-prepared Capris, winning the important European touring car series in 1972.
The move into single-seaters came that year with his first races in Formula 3 and then his first Formula 2 victory in a works March at the Nürburgring, a circuit of 14 miles and 174 corners whose challenge he loved. For 1973 he raced for the works Surtees team in Formula 2 before graduating to Formula 1 with the same team for 1974, enduring a debut season in the top flight blighted by many retirements.
But he had shown enough of his talent to be signed by McLaren for 1974, and there he stayed for three seasons, alongside Hunt during the dramatic 1976 season as the Englishman seized the world title from Lauda. He was leading the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring when the race was halted following Niki Lauda’s near-fatal crash, finishing third after the restart. A second place in Sweden in 1977 was the closest he came to another victory.
A move to the ATS team followed in 1978, but the car was poor and his season ended prematurely when he broke a leg in a testing accident. Signing with Arrows in 1979 proved little more satisfactory, although there was a fourth place at Monaco in his second season with the Milton Keynes-based team, having avoided a four-car pile-up at the first corner.
His final year in F1, with the ailing March team, was an unhappy one. Travelling slowly during practice at Zolder, he was trying to give Gilles Villeneuve room to pass when the French-Canadian’s Ferrari hit his March and somersaulted. Villeneuve’s death in the disintegrating wreckage came as a profound shock to the F1 world, although Mass was absolved of blame.
And then, at the Paul Ricard circuit in Provence, he collided with Mauro Baldi’s Arrows and flew into a public area, leaving several spectators injured. As the car caught fire, few observers – including Mass’s wife, watching on TV – believed he could survive, never mind walk away unharmed, as he did.
That was when he decided to retire from grand prix racing and concentrate on sports cars – first with Porsche, with whom he and Vern Schuppan finished second at Le Mans in 1982, and then with Sauber-Mercedes, winning the race with Stanley Dickens and Manuel Reuter in 1989 and being deprived of a second victory in 1991 after leading comfortably for 17 hours before a minor component failed.
That period also saw him acting as a mentor to Mercedes’ junior team of three talented young drivers serving their apprenticeship in sports cars: Michael Schumacher, with whom Mass shared the winning car in Mexico City, Karl Wendlinger, with whom he won at Spa, and Heinz-Harald Frentzen. All three followed him into F1.
He is survived by his second wife, Bettina, whom he married in 1994, and their two daughters, and by his two sons from a first marriage, to Esti (nee Mellet), which ended in divorce.
• Jochen Richard Mass, racing driver, born 30 September 1946; died 4 May 2025
