Like in the movie: When Gerhard Berger broke into Jean Todt’s place at night

– There is an anecdote from 1990s Formula 1 that sounds so absurd you have to hear it twice the first time. It was recently unearthed again in the podcast “High Performance”. According to former Formula 1 team principal Otmar Szafnauer, the anecdote goes like this:

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Setting: a small hotel, somewhere in the early 1990s. Gerhard Berger is driving for Ferrari at this time, team principal since March 1993 is Jean Todt. It is half past one, maybe two o’clock at night. Berger is standing in front of his hotel, his driver just left, the doors are locked, the owners unreachable. The key? Inside.

Instead of lying down on a bench and waiting for the morning, Berger calls his driver back. Plan B is a bit of “Viennese charm meets action movie”.

The famous balcony climb

Berger points to a window on the second floor and says: “That up there is my room.” The two climb onto the balcony. From the car they fetch a crowbar. They start prying, levering, pushing – and then it does what glass does in such situations: it breaks. Berger looks through the freshly shattered window into the room. Pause. Then the sentence you should actually say before using the crowbar: “That’s not my room.”

It was Todt’s room.

At the same moment, the Ferrari team principal hears the crash, sees the broken window and does what any reasonable person would do at half past one at night if someone broke into their place: He locks himself in the bathroom.

Berger realizes the situation, turns to his driver and says roughly: “Not my room. Let’s get out of here.” The two flee back down over the balcony.

Todt meanwhile sits in the bathroom waiting for the police to arrive. Until the podcast episode, it was apparently unclear whether Todt ever found out who had broken his window back then. “By now he definitely knows,” said Szafnauer.

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Berger and Todt, a relationship with history

Those hearing the story for the first time might think it’s too bizarre to be true. Those who know Berger know: it fits perfectly into the pattern. The Austrian produced a whole collection of stories during his two Ferrari phases, 1987 to 1989 and 1993 to 1995, together with teammate Jean Alesi, which Maranello still tells today.

The most famous story is the one about Todt’s car: On a test day in Fiorano, Berger and Alesi stole their team principal’s car, a Lancia, from the parking lot in front of the factory. On the way to the track, Berger pulled the handbrake at the wrong moment, the car flipped over and landed on its roof.

Alesi was not wearing a seatbelt and bled from his head, Berger had buckled up. The mechanics pulled both out through the trunk, covered the wreck with a tarp and tried to hide the incident from Todt and Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo. They arrived at that exact moment. Years later, Todt reportedly told Berger: “You still owe me a Lancia!”

There were also the usual pranks among each other: Berger sent Alesi out on slicks on a partly wet track during a test in Silverstone just to see how the Frenchman spun on the grass. Alesi retaliated whenever he could. Berger himself once said that if someone had filmed the whole thing, it would have been funnier than a Mr. Bean episode.

Against this background, the hotel story almost sounds consistent: a locked room, a crowbar, half past one at night and a Formula 1 team principal waiting in his own bathroom for the police while his driver escapes over the balcony. A screenwriter could hardly have staged it more absurdly.

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