The F1 champion Niki Lauda had a horrifying accident in Germany in August 1976, 49 years ago this week. He was not expected to live, let alone race again. After defying all expectations, he told the BBC in 1977 how he willed himself to stay alive.

When Formula 1 racing driver Niki Lauda spoke to the BBC in 1977, his face bore testimony to the trauma he had endured during the German Grand Prix. Trapped inside the burning wreckage of his smashed Ferrari on the Nürburgring circuit, Lauda had been badly scarred and had lost part of his ear to the flames. But the Austrian driver confessed to having no recollection of the crash that almost cost him his life on 1 August 1976. "When I had the accident, I must have got a big bang on my head, and I lost the memory for I don't know, the last three minutes. And the following 20 minutes after the accident," he told the BBC just a year later.

Warning: This article contains injury details that some may find disturbing or upsetting.

When Lauda took part in the race, he was the reigning F1 world champion, having won his first title the year before. The 1976 season was shaping up to be a dramatic one, as Lauda and his rival, British driver James Hunt, battled it out for the top spot. (Their friendship and rivalry would become the subject of the Ron Howard film Rush in 2013, starring Daniel Brühl as Lauda and Chris Hemsworth as Hunt.) Lauda had already secured five wins going into the German Grand Prix, and was on course to clinch the world champion title again. But the sport was shockingly dangerous. By 1976, 63 drivers had been killed in Grand Prix motor racing, and on average one to two drivers were dying every season.

"The circuits were not safe, that's undeniable now," American F1 driver Brett Lunger, who also took part in the 1976 German Grand Prix, told BBC's Sporting Witness in 2016. "In the '70s, the money was going into cars to make them go faster. The money was not going into safety, either in the car construction or the race circuit construction. And yet in those days that was the reality, we never even questioned it."

The Nürburgring circuit was particularly notorious. The long narrow track, which wound through the Eifel Mountains in Germany, was nicknamed "The Green Hell" by a British racing icon, Sir Jackie Stewart. "It was 14.2 miles to the lap," said Lunger. "Some 177 turns per lap, and with a course of that length you cannot have an adequate number of fire marshals, [and] there are many sections where there are no guard rails, so it was in an unsafe condition in and of itself." There were also rain showers forecast on the day of the race and, because of the circuit's length, parts of the track would be wet and parts of it dry, adding to the danger.

Indeed, Lauda had already questioned the Nürburgring circuit's lack of safety support staff, and he had gathered his competitors to talk through the possibility that they might boycott the race. "On the Sunday morning, Niki Lauda called the drivers together and we took a vote on whether or not we wanted to race, and I was one of those who said, yes, let's go ahead and race," said Lunger.

The German Grand Prix started as normal, but on the second lap, before a corner called Bergwerk, Lauda's Ferrari suddenly veered off the track, hitting the embankment at a speed of 190kmh (120mph). The impact ruptured its fuel........

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