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It was 1986 and Elio de Angelis had moved from the second seat alongside Ayrton Senna at Lotus Renault to Brabham BMW.
In May, he and many of the other Formula 1 drivers went to France’s Circuit Paul Ricard for a post-Monaco Grand Prix test session. This was before simulators or computational fluid dynamics; to gather information on the cars and try new parts, teams convened for these mid-season open sessions.
Stefan Johansson, then in his second year with Ferrari, considered de Angelis his best friend in the series. They spent almost all their time together between races: drinking wine, going out to dinner, and enjoying life on the grand prix circuit.
Johansson was on track in his Ferrari F1-86 while de Angelis began his fateful lap. As the 28-year-old from Rome approached the Verrerie curves at 180 m.p.h., his rear wing detached.
The BMW somersaulted toward the guardrail, vaulted over, and landed on its hood far from the track. Johansson ran toward the wreckage.
“Me, [Alain] Prost, and Jacques Laffite were there trying to help him out of the car,” Johansson tells me through a grimace. “It was on fire.” It took 10 minutes to extract de Angelis as the marshals were not prepared on site. A full half hour after the collision, a helicopter finally arrived. De Angelis died in a hospital in Marseille the next day.
Johansson, 68 and lithe, sits on a red egg chair in his art studio in Venice, California as he tells me the story. His long hair is slicked back from a face accented by deep lines and bright blue eyes. The Swedish driver who spent a decade in Formula 1 and 30 years racing everywhere from Indianapolis to Le Mans wears a white t-shirt and New Balance sneakers, paired with blue khakis that stop around the calf. There’s art on every wall of the lofted space — animal head sculptures and busts by the door, and large canvases in various stages of completion, including a pointillist-style Ferrari and a self-portrait from his McLaren days.
“I’d lost colleagues before then, but not anyone I was really close friends with. So it affected me pretty badly,” Johansson says. He pauses for a moment, staring past me. “I have no idea what prompted me to go and buy some canvas and some paint and do something in his memory. It was sort of like a bolt of lightning.”
I’d driven to Johansson's studio a mile from Venice Beach to understand how an elite driver finds his way to art so late in life. There was the grief kindled-spark after de Angelis's death, certainly. But, why did the tragedy send him straight to a canvas? As we speak, it becomes clear the Johansson has felt a pull to painting for decades. It was only the magnetic force of racing that kept him away for so long.
“My grandfather was a painter, so I grew up standing next to him, and I still remember the smell of the oil paint,” Johansson tells me. He always was drawn to the aesthetic: cars, architecture, furniture, and art. “And when I started making some money in F1, I started collecting a few pieces here and there on my travels.”
His first purchase? “It was Andy Warhol. A Queen Elizabeth print,” he says. “And then I became friendly with a few artists: James Rosenquist, Frank Stella. Keith Haring was a good friend.”
They’d spend time in Monaco, Johansson tells me. Dinners at their mutual friend’s home. Wine until the sun came up. He doesn’t remember them ever speaking a word about Formula 1.
He tells me Haring, the graffiti-artist-turned-American-master, was “such a gentle soul” and “quite funny.” And he was always working. One day in the late ’80s, Haring came to him with what became the most unlikely and, perhaps, most iconic logo in Formula 1 history: a yellow man, feet and hands outstretched, with a red race car for a head.
“I don’t actually recall ever asking him for it,” Johansson says through a grin. “He worked all the time, just constantly scribbling. In my friend’s apartment, all the walls were decorated; like graffiti literally on the walls of the apartment. I mean, imagine if he could have taken it with him when he moved out of there …”
It was Rosenquist, one of the Pop Art luminaries, who taught Johansson to paint. They met at the 1988 Monaco GP and hit it off, so Johansson came to stay with him at his townhouse in New York City later that year. “I never had any training whatsoever. He taught me how to mix colors,” Johansson says.
He also shared a lesson Johansson still holds onto: The most important things for an artist is to have the idea; to have the vision. What is it you want to put on that canvas?
I ask Johansson if he remembers his first painting, the one he put to canvas in that fog of grief and inspiration after his best friend Elio de Angelis had passed away.
“I do.” He shakes his head. “It’s well hidden in my mom’s basement somewhere, never to be seen.” That first artistically unsuccessful attempt was as much about therapy as creativity, he explains.
“It was the sunset and the sunrise in the same sky,” he says. “That life goes on. That there’ll be another life.”
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The smell of his grandfather’s oil paints still lingers for Johansson, but even as a child, the track was calling. His father did club racing and brought Stefan along from the time he was three or four. He was in a kart by age eight and had his first race at 12 years old. “So then I did the karting until I was 18, and then through the whole Formula Ford, F3, F2, Sports Cars, F1,” he tells me.
His 1977 premiere race in F3 was also his first outside of Sweden. He finished fourth, behind Didier Pironi and de Angelis. “The following year, I decided to move to England and try to make a career out of it,” he says. It was a jagged path, with a late call to fill in at two races for Shadow in 1980, six races for Spirit in 1983, and three GPs for both Tyrrell (where he subbed for an injured Martin Brundle) and Toleman (where he was teammates with Senna) in 1984.
Ferrari took notice of one of his drives for Toleman. Marco Piccinini, the team principal in London, asked Johansson to meet at the Savoy. Johansson says he offered him René Arnoux’s seat the week before the Portuguese Grand Prix, the season’s second race. Piccinini asked him to fly out the next day for a secret meeting in Modena, the site of the legendary Ferrari factory.
“So, they picked me up at the Bologna airport, drove me down to the old factory there at like six o’clock in the evening, and we walked in through a long corridor,” Johansson remembers. “It was straight out of a Fellini movie: the sunlight coming through, no lights are on, just reflecting all the photographs of Nuvolari, Fangio, Stirling Moss, all my heroes.”
The junior team manager walked him into the office at the end of the hallway. Johansson spotted Piccinini and Piero Ferrari. “And you could just sort of see Enzo [Ferrari] in the background. Just the silhouette. All dark, you know?”
Johansson sat down across from the Ferrari boss, and the three men spoke together in Italian as the Swede waited. Finally, Enzo turned and said something to Johansson, which Piccinini translated. “‘Mr. Ferrari is asking if you’re hungry?’” Johansson smiles at me now. “I hadn’t eaten since six o’clock that morning, but I figured that’s probably not what he wanted to know. So, I said, ‘I’ve never been more hungry in my life,’ and he puts his hand out and says, ‘You’re hired.’”
It was like a movie, Johansson tells me, beginning to laugh. But as he grew to know Enzo, he was struck by how far from his popular portrayal the real man actually was. “I’m sure he was a tough guy in business, but towards the drivers, he was unbelievably passionate and gentle and kind,” he says. They were at the track testing every day of the week, and Enzo would host lunches at his historic home in Fiorano. “He was so excited to find just ten more horsepower,” Johansson remembers, “but most of the time, we just talked about everything under the sun. He just loved holding court and telling all the stories from his youth.”
Johansson believes his second GP for Ferrari, at Imola in 1985, was the closest he ever came to a perfect race. He knew he had one of the quickest cars, but “back then it was very much a fuel race.” There was a target RPM the drivers memorized to balance speed with stops; he was flying by cars and staying right below the target. “With two laps to go, I passed Elio for the lead and I’ll never forget it, because I couldn’t even hear the engine from the crowd when I passed,” he says. “It was crazy. It was so loud.”
But on the last lap, Johansson’s Ferrari ran out of gas. After the race, the engineers discovered a crack in the inlet manifold which had sucked air into the fuel tank. “When you drive, your brain is literally like a computer,” he says. “I’m horrible at math, but in a race car back then, I could calculate all these things: the fuel is here, I’m catching him by seven-tenths of a lap, and I got it all worked out exactly where it needs to be.”
“I knew that if I kept the pace, I would pass him with two laps to go, which I did,” he continues, “and then this freaking thing happened.”
Johansson achieved 12 podiums in his Formula 1 career but never finished first. “Obviously, it bugs me to this day that I never won a grand prix. I was close so many times, but it was circumstances always,” he says. “I’m glad I never lost a grand prix because of my own mistakes.”
Prost and Senna each taught Johansson lessons on greatness. Prost was the consummate professional — a CEO of sorts, understanding how to motivate everyone on the team toward a singular goal. “He didn’t have the raw speed of Ayrton, but he knew how to win championships,” Johansson says. “That year I was with him, I learned more than I did in my whole career.”
But what separated Senna was the willingness to push to the absolute limit. He had the competitive fire of a Michael Jordan or a Tiger Woods. “I think the really, really great ones are like that,” Johansson says. “It was just never in my personality.”
In the car, Johansson would enter a “gladiator mindset,” but in the paddock, he never moved with an edge.
He tells me a story about Senna I’d never heard before. The first race they ran together was the Portugal GP and Johansson was faster in Q1 than his new teammate. “Of course, it was absolutely inconceivable in his mind that I could be faster than him,” Johansson says. “So he forced the team to take the engine out of my car and put it into his car.”
Johansson didn’t learn of the late-night remodel until three years later, when a mechanic who’d left the team told him: “Oh, you know, we were strictly told not to tell you.”
Johansson shakes his head and leans back in his chair. “I think I was probably a little bit too nice to be super successful in Formula 1.”
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Johansson and Ayrton Senna were briefly teammates on the 1984 Toleman team.
Johansson speaks with Fiat and Ferrari owner Gianni Agnelli at Monza in 1985.
When we spoke this spring, Johansson kept a studio in Venice, near his Santa Monica home, and he still shares another with the artist Barry Reigate in London. Reigate’s favorite painter was James Rosenquist and he sees a beautiful symmetry in the Pop Artist who got his start painting billboards teaching a Formula 1 driver to paint cars. “James Rosenquist was an artist actually making commercial adverts. Then he turned it into art. Then it’s passed down to a Formula 1 racing car driver who is using these Pop Art techniques to paint race cars,” Reigate says. “They’ve got this lineage; this kind of transference of that energy that’s going into the work.”
Reigate talks with many young artists who have gone to university and then fall into the trap of looking outwards or scouring social media to chase trends. “I kind of think, ‘Well, what are you into?’” Reigate says. “And if you go to Stefan and go ‘What are you into?’ It’s cars. I admire that.”
His studio mate and friend does not duck from his passion; he’s centered it in his art. “Even if an artist turned around and said, ‘I’m into oranges,’ and then painted loads of oranges, then I’d go, ‘I admire that,’” Reigate says. “I see truth and authenticity.” Johansson has painted on and off ever since 1988, but never treated his art as a vocation until he left the track for good a decade ago. Now, he’s found some success, though he knows it’ll be a yeoman’s task to ever gain the respect of the art world as a former driver. “F1 is quite elitist,” he says, starting to laugh, “but the art world takes it to a whole new level.”
Most days, he finishes his work as a manager for racers around 3 p.m., and then transfers his attention to painting. “Then I just work through the night,” Johansson says. I ask if he pours a glass of wine or turns on music to switch into the artistic mindset. “No, no. Just nothing. No music, no sound. Silence,” he tells me. “I think maybe that was how it used to be in the car. You’re just on your own, playing with this thing. It’s just complete solitude.”
I start to understand that it is this ability to focus that has allowed Johansson to thrive behind the wheel and before a canvas. I ask if he kept racing for so long because he was chasing something. No, he tells me, I have it wrong. “It wasn’t about striving for greatness,” he says. “In the end, it was more just because I loved driving the car on the limit.”
More than three decades since his final F1 grand prix, Johansson still has a fiery passion for the sport. In 2019, he penned a meticulous plan to fix Formula 1 called “Make Racing Awesome Again.” It’s a treatise of sorts, written by a true obsessive who is terrified that downforce has robbed his sport of the bravery that made it compelling.
He tells me that in Monaco, in 1985, his 500-kilo Ferrari had 1,500 horsepower. “So going into the braking area after the tunnel, we were doing 350 kilometers per hour,” he says. “It was like a fucking missile.” The car danced and he had to keep his foot all the way down as he shifted as quickly as possible. If he let it go, the Ferrari might shoot straight into a wall. “You need to push it just that little bit farther to make the difference and then you get into that sort of gray area where you’re not quite sure what’s gonna happen,” he continues. “It’s an unbelievably liberating state of mind.”
That cosmic rush of a wrangling a missile in and out of a chicane at 200 m.p.h. feels a universe from painting a portrait. And yet, the serenity within intense focus scratches the same itch for Johansson. He must quiet everything, tune out of the world, and stare down what’s before him. And then he must create.
“That state of mind,” he says, “is a very pure and raw feeling.”
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