The 1977 Formula One season included the 28th FIA Formula One World Championship season, which commenced on January 9, 1977, and ended on October 23 after seventeen races.
Niki Lauda won his second championship, despite Mario Andretti winning more races. Jody Scheckter's Wolf won first time out, Shadow took their only victory, and Gunnar Nilsson achieved the only win of a career ended by cancer. Renault entered grand prix racing with a turbocharged car which was initially not very successful. The German ATS team took over the Penske cars and the South African Grand Prix was the last race a BRM ever qualified to start.
The season was also marred by one of the most horrific accidents in Formula One history. During the South African GP on March 5, TV cameras captured how Tom Pryce was unable to avoid 19-year-old race marshall Frederik Jansen Van Vuuren. The latter was killed by the terrifying collision, his body was hurled into the air, and his fire extinguisher killed and nearly decapitated Pryce, whose car proceeded to the end of the straight where it collided with Jacques Laffite's Ligier.
Read more about 1977 Formula One Season: Drivers and Constructors, Season Review, 1977 Drivers Championship Final Standings, 1977 Constructors Championship Final Standings, Non-Championship Race Results
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“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Let us have a good many maples and hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. They are important, like the town clock. A village that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an essential part is wanting.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)