Niki Lauda

Only one of his ten planets sits in a fire sign. Air takes four, earth three and water two, with four of the ten mutable. The record says Lauda was burned almost to death at the Nurburgring in 1976 and was back racing six weeks later with the bandages still on, that he won three titles, and that he later ran an airline.

One planet in fire, in a man the record introduces with a fire, is the first thing a reader will notice and it is worth getting out of the way. The element called fire in a chart is a temperament, quick and self-starting and easily bored. The fire at the Nurburgring was petrol. They are two unrelated uses of one word and no amount of counting makes them the same one. The absence is still real: a chart with one fire planet and four in air is arranged to think a problem over rather than charge at it, and the record does not settle whether that fits the driver or not.

The Sun sits in direct opposition to Saturn at over three quarters of a degree, identity meeting a rule that will not move: self-doubt, delay, and a difficult or absent authority, with the one consolation that what gets built under it tends to last. For a racing driver who went back to the car six weeks after the burns, that last clause is the part a reader will want to be about the comeback, and it is not. It is a standing reading about durability, written about a chart rather than about a man with bandages on. Mars sits in mild friction with Jupiter at just under a degree and a half, action outrunning sense: overreaching, and taking a risk because it is available rather than because it is wise. The phrase the reading uses for it is running out of road at speed, which here is a second accident of language and not a second finding.

His Moon sits on the third degree of Capricorn at noon with Sagittarius still possible, so it is left out, and the cost of that is unusually high: the two closest contacts in the chart both run to that Moon, and so does the only transit inside a tenth of a degree on the day he died. What is left is Mercury in quiet contact with Mars at just over a degree, mental energy that goes somewhere. Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were the four retrograde planets. He died at Zurich on 20 May 2019, at seventy. Mars stood sixty degrees from his natal Saturn at three hundredths of a degree that day. The Moon was full and ninety seven per cent lit.