THE COLOURFUL CAREER OF JAMES HUNT RECAPTURED
James Hunt started out in Formula One with the slightly unreal Hesketh team who seemed to regard their racing with the aristocratic patron, young Alexander Hesketh, as an exciting sporting excuse to enjoy more champagne. They started out in 1973 with March cars and then Harvey Postlethwaite came up with the first Hesketh design in 1974. In 1975 James won the Dutch GP and was second in Argentina, France and Austria. Then Hesketh quit as peremptorily as he had arrived and James found himself unemployed and anxious to be hired.
Opportunity came to him when Emerson Fittipaldi suddenly left the McLaren team at the start of the 1976 season to join his brother in an ill-fated Fittipaldi family team, dumping the McLaren team where he had driven an M23 to the 1974 world title and finished second in 1975. Second to Niki Lauda in the works Ferrari, be it noted.
So from being unemployed or trying to get hired by a mid-grid low-budget team at best, James was suddenly in one of the best cars for 1976 and a long hectic summer spent disputing the championship with Niki Lauda’s Ferrari.
There were disputes and disqualifications and a fiery crash in the German GP at the Nurburgring that came close to costing Lauda his life… at the very least his career. But Lauda fought back, missed only two GP starts and was bandaged and back in pain to defend his point’s advantage and try to grab another world title.
Now we bend the sequence of this saga with detail from Against All Odds, the book I wrote with James at the end of the season and which, one way or another sparked the new Rush movie, nearly half a century later.
It stars Australian actor Chris Hemsworth as a very believable James and Daniel Bruhl as Niki and the races have been recreated extremely well with the use of original re-fettled cars of the day and a fake or two for the crash scenes.
There is even a tale to tell on how Against All Odds happened, 40 years on. There have been later books on the Hunt years but none with so much of his personal drive and input.
We have swept ahead to the crucial final GP of the 1975 season on the rain-soaked circuit below Mount Fuji in Japan. There were questions between organizers, team managers and drivers whether the race would go ahead. The race start was delayed as arguments were heard at a drivers meeting in the control tower. Quoting from Against All Odds: “Lauda, the automaton, the mechanical man who bolted himself into his Ferrari and went out to win, now had a soul. Victory wasn’t his most consuming goal anymore. Life was. James looked at life another way. He enjoyed his. The races were an activity he had done every second weekend during the summer. Between times, life was for living. Of these two men at the top of their profession with personalities poles apart, one by the end of the afternoon would be world champion.
But now they discussed quietly and privately whether they should race. Hunt told Lauda that he personally felt they should wait and race another day, but that if the race was started, if the cars were ordered to the grid, he would race. He wouldn’t race hard, he wouldn’t dispute the issue with the handful of hard drivers who were all for racing anyway, but he would set his own pace. Lauda was now in a corner, literally with his back to the wall, while out on the terraces the Japanese fans huddled under umbrellas, wondering what all the delay was about.”
The stewards took the decision that the race would be delayed but it would start. If James Hunt was to win the Japanese Grand Prix he would win the championship. Other permutations could also give him the title, but there were also short-odds permutations that meant Lauda could keep his crown.
Team managers looked up at the lowering skies threatening early darkness that could curtail the race and decide the championship. There were worries in the pits that the wet race would trigger accidents and worse, as the drivers released their pent-up tensions along with all that horsepower on the puddled track but others reasoned that wet races were statistically safer, that if there were accidents, they happened at lower speeds.
Suddenly, almost before the pits were aware of it, the race was on. Immediate leader was the red McLaren driven by Hunt, spearing into the murk, winning the gamble for the front and piling on a lead as the cars behind ploughed into a curtain of spray. Lauda had qualified third but he was drifting back through the pack, blind in the spray, being passed on all sides as back markers forced their way through.
It was sad to see, sadder still when Lauda dropped off the chart altogether after two laps and stopped at his pit. For the first time in his Grand Prix career he had given up. He had been unable to see, but his sight problem was aggravated by a legacy of his Nurburgring burns. He couldn’t blink his eyes and this was upsetting his focusing. Niki Lauda knew that his life meant more than a second season with the world title and he didn’t mind if the world knew it. He sat on the pit counter, his decision made and dramatically announced.
Now a breeze had sprung up and the clouds and rain were clearing and the Goodyear “wets” were becoming a problem as the treads wore on the drying track. Hunt’s left rear tyre was deflating. Would the pit stop cost him the points he desperately needed to clinch the title?
The leaders were stopping for tyre changes as James battled fate but suddenly it went his way when his troubles doubled and his left front tyre let go, worn out… but it was just at the start of the pit lane and he swerved in, and took on a full set of wets for the handful of laps left.
Now Hunt was a different man. The calculating technician had been replaced by a racer with a red mist of anger descending. How could he have blown the title like that? He cursed the tyres and cursed his luck. Cursed also the pit signal that told him he was sixth but it wasn’t only sixth, it was ‘goodbye World Championship.’
In a mounting fury Hunt slammed around those closing laps, almost unaware that he was storming by cars and climbing the results. Three cars slammed across the line side-byside as the chequer fell, Andretti a lap ahead in the black John Player Lotus, and Depailler and Hunt a lap down, Hunt in third place. And World Champion, but he didn’t know that.
“He was the only man at the track who didn’t know he was the World Champion. He came down the pit lane blipping the throttle, furious and ready to vent that fury… His burning wish was to blast team manager Teddy Mayer for the lack of decision on the tyre signals.
“Why hadn’t they told him to come in when they knew his tyre was going down? Why did they tell him he was sixth one lap and third the next?
“He braked to a stop at the pit, not caring, perhaps unaware of the crowd that surged around as he wrestled out of the safety harness and dragged himself from the cockpit, shouting so that Mayer could hear him through the bar of his Bell Star helmet. By this time Mayer, who had moved in to congratulate his new World Champion, was switching delight to concern under the verbal barrage, a sudden victim of the Hunt ‘short fuse’.
“As Hunt pulled his helmet off and paused for breath, Mayer quietly told him that he had finished third and was world champion. Hunt believed him and didn’t believe him… He wanted proof and it wasn’t until his title was officially confirmed by the race organisers, that James Simon Wallis Hunt believed himself to be the 1976 World Champion racing driver.” Phew…
I HAD BEEN COVERING THE FULL F1 SEASON
for the French Elf Oil Company, sponsors of the Tyrrell team, and I flew back to Britain early in the week, relieved that a hectic season was finally over. Or was it?
The next Sunday morning the phone rang at home in East Horsley. It was a chap telling me that he was a book publisher and he had James Hunt and his manager in his London office. They would like me to write a book on James’ title season.
My opinion of James had not improved; in my book he was still a badly behaved Hooray Henry who had just scored the world title. I told the publisher there were three problems – writing books was a pain in the butt (I’d already written several), they didn’t pay enough… and besides, I didn’t like James Hunt. Silence.
He said maybe he could do something about the money. And offered a handsome fee. I suggested he phone back in an hour. I told my wife the news and she urged me to take it. I had my own thoughts. When the publisher phoned back for my decision, I said there wasn’t enough money on offer. He doubled it. And I accepted!
Then the problems arrived. They needed the book on the title season written in a fortnight. And James would be at his Spanish home in Marbella.
Suffice to say that James turned out to be a completely different person, away from the hectic Grand Prix paddock, a super bloke. I couldn’t decide whether I had been wrong for misreading a man so totally, or whether James was wrong for behaving like such an arse in the first place.
I wrote the book and was paid in 10 days. Later the publication was parked when Daily Express writer David Benson surprised with a Hunt book for the Christmas season. I had been paid, so the stalled publication was not my problem. Publishers changed and David Hodges knocked out catch-up chapters on the first two GPs of the ’76 season.
My life returned more or less to normal. Until James arrived back in it on his retirement.
THE RUSH MOVIE
The new movie Rush has grown around that hectic season of seventy-six, a movie that has redefined the genre, and prompted my memories of those hectic days with James. Motor racing movies have traditionally been disappointing, but Rush has set sensational new standards. Brilliant!
I worked on the sets when John Frankenheimer was making Grand Prix and on Le Mans when Steve McQueen was at the helm, but I was disappointed with the gap between the movies and reality as I knew it, in the real world of racing. Rush is reality on screen.
Top UK motor racing scribe and commentator, Simon Taylor, encouraged me to see Rush.
“It will upset the purists because it is emphatically not a documentary; it is a re-telling of a good story to appeal to the masses rather than the anoraks.
“Director Ron Howard told me the movie had to work on a wet Tuesday afternoon in Des Moines, Iowa, to an audience who has never heard of Formula One, let alone James Hunt and Niki Lauda!
“As you were there at the time, I think you’ll find Howard and the writer, Peter Morgan has got the atmosphere spot-on even if some of the historical detail is simplified.”
Simon knows the inside story of the movie because he stars as himself – a TV motor racing commentator.
I originally agreed with Murray Walker’s opinion of James. Murray who was not at all impressed to learn that after he had retired from driving, James would be joining him in the BBC GP commentary box.
“Because I was I was old enough to be his father, I wasn’t at all impressed with James as a person. Rightly or wrongly, I saw him as an arrogant, opinionated, rude and intolerant Hooray Henry who smoked, drank, womanised and took drugs far too much and who had let fame go to his head.”
Couldn’t have put it better myself but Murray and I both found that James mellowed into a really good bloke when he quit racing and settled down in retirement. James died at 45 of a heart attack in 1993.
James hung up his helmet after Monaco in the middle of what was to have been his last season in 1979. The world probably thinks he was misguided to take the quitter’s way out and the world probably has a point. Not that that would worry James.
Hunt was to racing what Georgie Best was to football – the darling of the crowds while he was winning and a long-haired dropout when he wasn’t. Hunt always maintained in his World Championship year that the media was putting him on a pedestal simply to shoot him down eventually. Now they had their chance.
He was Champion in 1976 but from that pinnacle his star sank to the point where his departure from McLaren two seasons later was greeted with some enthusiasm by both parties, and his half-season with Wolf netted nary a title point.
On his day, Hunt as a racing driver was brilliant. Even his fiercest critics would, or should, concede that. He had a style of life that the world outside had the greatest difficulty in understanding but that didn’t seem to bother him, and in obviously not being bothered, the world became even more steamed-up.
Whichever way you look at it, and I’ve tried several, James Hunt just gave up. Some time before he actually announced his retirement, he confided to me that he was packing it in at Monaco ’79 and wouldn’t race again. He had convinced himself that Grand Prix racing had become a championship for designers and car builders and that drivers were now very much an “extra” bolted into the car – pure driver talent didn’t make a mediocre motorcar into a winner as it had done in the past.
Hunt said he was retiring purely because he was such a competitive person and if this was a contradiction in terms, so be it. He was a winner who wasn’t winning. He wanted to concentrate on his squash and golf, both sports where your results were directly proportional to the talent and effort expended.
I must have had reassuringly broad shoulders or something. It was back in 1965 while I was still working with Bruce McLaren that I received a call from John Surtees asking if I would travel to Maranello with him when he “handed in his notice” to Ferrari. John wanted me on the phone to the Fleet Street newspaper scribes and therefore the world to know that he had resigned – not that Ferrari had thrown him out of the team.
Now it had happened again in a different sort of way. An hour before the Belgian Grand Prix on 13 May, 1979, a messenger was sent to the Elf hospitality motorhome, summoning me to the presence of James Hunt.
He was sitting alone at the back of the Wolf motor-home, tense and nervous and not at all like the usual pre-race Hunt who could look almost alarmingly relaxed before battle. But in Belgium he was tense. He was going to tell me something, he said, which only two other people in the world knew, but he had to have my assurance of trust before he would proceed. There wasn’t much else I could do but give it, knowing that I was giving up any chance of “scooping” a story from whatever he was going to tell me. “I’m going to retire at Monaco,” he said. Just like that. Because I had worked with him on Against All Odds, he wondered if I would also work with him on the way to present his retirement announcement. It seemed simple enough, at the time, so I agreed. We had a meeting in his hotel room that night after the Grand Prix, a race where, ironically, he had driven better in the Wolf than he had all season.
But the improvement in his race fortune wasn’t going to dissuade him from retirement. He had already announced his intention to retire at the end of the season – something that struck most people as tempting fate, but now he was going to retire at mid-season.
I put it to him that the world would regard his decision to retire as petulance – if he couldn’t have the ball, he didn’t want to play. He said he appreciated that, but he felt his own personal reasons about the risk now relating to his chances of winning, rather outweighed whatever the public might think of his actions.
Now he had to work out how to tell Walter Wolf and his sponsors. Marlboro and Texaco had travelled from McLaren to Wolf, and Olympus had left their world championship innings with Lotus to join Hunt.
We played with various ways of words to try and explain why he was retiring, but the words would come close without exactly matching what he wanted to say. Eventually he decided, after talking with his sponsors, that he would simply put out a statement announcing his intention to retire, and just leave it at that. No justifications.
He had been unhappy with the car and with the team and I’m sure they were just as unhappy with him. Relationships don’t come much closer than a driver within a team where trust has to be total, and discord communicates itself in a jarring manner.
At one point Hunt had tried to instigate a private move to buy a Ligier car through a third party, but the French team weren’t doing customer business. Then Ligier driver, Patrick Depailler crashed his hang-glider, broke both his legs, and the picture changed.
Here was Hunt, disillusioned and committed to retirement and the opportunity he had tried to buy his way into, was dropped in his lap. Contact was made. I’m not sure whether manager brother Peter contacted Ligier, or Ligier contacted Peter but it was made known to James that he would be most welcome to join the Ligier team, provided he came free of encumbrances such as lawyers with writs and large Walter Wolf emissaries in dark overcoats.
Time was fleeting. Hunt was almost due to be announcing his retirement and here was the chance to redeem himself, to go out a winner as he had hoped when he signed with Wolf for his swan-song season.
Olympus would go with him, and Marlboro and Texaco gave their blessing, despite the sponsor conflict at Ligier. It was mentioned to the Wolf men that, well, perhaps he wouldn’t retire straight away, but would leave Wolf and drive a race or two for Ligier while poor Patrick was on his back.
No chance, said the Wolf management firmly. If you’re retiring, that’s your business, but you’re not leaving to race for someone else. And they mentioned that they would make sure he didn’t through FOCA channels.
So the final door was slammed in Hunt’s face and the world at large is left to think “serves him right” because quitters aren’t exactly universal favourites among hero sportsmen, although the sportsmen themselves probably understood Hunt’s move. It was Roger Penske who coined the phrase, “show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser ...”
What do I think? I think he won 10 Grand Prix races and a World Championship.
I’ve never been able to condone what James did or the way he did it, but I have an idea that I understand why he did it. I’m not excusing him, but then I’m not condemning him either, as most other people tend to.
He was a totally competitive person as he understood the word, and in the Hunt dictionary, competitive means only one thing – winning. Unless he was in with a chance, he didn’t feel it was worth delivering the goods.
Another problem for Hunt and for the Wolf team was that James was a little short on technical smarts. He was not a racing engineer, he was just a racer.
At McLaren he showed disinterest in test and development driving to the increasing displeasure of Teddy Mayer. There were those who said that Hunt’s world title in 1976 was in a McLaren that still carried the mark of Emerson Fittipaldi.
The new “modular” Wolf for 1979 was interesting as a concept from Postlethwaite’s pencil, but it required sympathy and understanding from a driver who wanted to make it work. James wanted only to win...
He also wanted to have wine, women and song in generous proportions, but the women came and went, usually wealthier than when they arrived, and James coasted downhill in retirement.
He often drove down to the Barley Mow in Horsley for lunch in his quaint little Austin A35 van he used to convey his collection of rare budgies, was more or less ‘one of the lads’ with no suggestion of bravado and great company.
He died at his home in Wimbledon one night in June 1993 – 20 years ago – but his colourful career has been revived in splendid style with the new movie Rush.
In the closing scenes there is a copy of my book, Against All Odds on a studio chair.