Stefan Bellof, motorsport's 'wild horse'

Stefan Bellof only knew one way to race, flat out. It's remarkable that his greatest early successes came in endurance events - the motorsports discipline most associated with playing the long game - when the German charger is so fondly remembered as the last man to lift off the throttle.

Bellof's 1983 lap record around the Nürburgring Nordschleife, a 6:11.13 lap, still stands to this day. The 27-year-old German went to his grave with a Ferrari contract in his pocket - his chance to challenge greats of the era like Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost was beckoning. A chance, even, to become Germany's first Formula One world champion.

Teammates recall a racer unable to rein in his raw talent; Derek Bell often lamented taking over a car with a fried gearbox, turbocharger or engine, inheriting a laundry list of niggles to nurse after one of Bellof's no-holds-barred stints at the wheel.

"I was considerably older than him. In jest, we called each other father and son. It worked well with the names, too: Bell and Bellof," Bell told German website motorsport-total.com on the 30th anniversary of Bellof's death. "He was incredibly quick, and he could have become so unbelievably good. I am of the opinion, and I've said this often enough, that his entourage let him down somewhat. He needed to be controlled. A little like a racehorse, perhaps he would have benefitted from a bridle, maybe even blinkers too. A driver just wants to find out where the limit is."

Just like Bell, who has become something of a racing raconteur since hanging up his helmet, famed for his expansive and amusing interviews, Bellof loved to laugh. Some speculated that his charisma and charm might have been precisely the reasons why Porsche and F1 team boss Ken Tyrrell never managed to slow him down - Bellof was too cheerful a man to effectively reprimand.

Still remembered, revered

On September 1, 1985, heading into Spa Francorchamps' notorious Eau Rouge corner - a flat out left-right-left climbing a steep slope - Bellof went for his last overtake. He was trying to get around the outside of his own Porsche teammate, Jackie Ickx, at perhaps the most dangerous point on the circuit; the pair collided and crashed. Onboard footage from Ickx's car - which came to a halt pointing in the opposite direction to Bellof's - showed the fiery wreck resting on the outer barrier.

Endurance veteran Timo Bernhard, a Porsche works driver who has raced using a replica of Bellof's helmet this year in tribute, described Bellof as "a thoroughbred racing driver who still deserves the utmost respect today," while others paid tribute on Twitter.

What might have been in F1

As "Motorsport" magazine's Mark Hughes put it in an article entitled "One move too many," Bellof's short stint with the underpowered Tyrrell F1 team still sufficed to show the arrival of a new star. Monaco 1984 is a fabled race in F1 history, known as Ayrton Senna's "arrival" on the scene - the race Alain Prost just held from the Brazilian upstart chasing him in a Toleman. But behind Senna and Prost, and catching the pair hand-over-fist when the race was stopped early in torrential rain, was Bellof in the only car on the entire grid without a turbocharger.

"Bellof qualified on the back row, but in the rain of race day he was mesmerizing," Hughes recalled. "He began overtaking in impossible places - into the left-hander before the swimming pool, into Loews [a hairpin mid-way through the Monaco lap]. He even took to the Mirabeau pavement to pass Rene Arnoux's Ferrari."

That Ferrari, incidentally, was earmarked for Bellof in the 1986 season, only because the Scuderia couldn't get Arnoux out of his contract in time for the 1985 championship.

Removed from the record

Bellof's place in the F1 record books is only an unofficial one; his Tyrrell team was retroactively disqualified from the 1984 season for irregularities in its fuel system. Despite being stricken from the official record, his memory endures in paddocks the world over.

"Every German race driver knows who Stefan Bellof was," Sebastian Vettel, a native of the German state of Hesse, like Bellof, said on Tuesday. Vettel was born almost two years after Bellof's death, but he recalls the impact on his own childhood as an aspiring racer.

"Back then there was a race each year at his [Bellof's] home kart track, in Oppenrod, which was dedicated to him," Vettel said. "It was a great honor to take part, and especially to win it."