HUNT’S AMAZING CHAMPIONSHIP
In 1976, James Hunt nicked the F1 Championship from Niki Lauda by the tiniest margin. The new Omologato James Hunt Chronograph® honours that great achievement
GRAND PRIX RACING enthusiasts of a certain vintage will remember fondly the summer of 1976, when one of the Formula 1 World Championship’s most celebrated battles for supremacy – between British playboy James Hunt and his prickly Austrian rival Niki Lauda – played out. And it wasn’t just the weather that was a scorcher.
Even for motor sport fans not old enough to have witnessed the almost do-or-die conflict that year between McLaren’s new boy Hunt and Ferrari’s reigning World Champion Lauda, the characters and their heroic activities – on and off the track, during an era typified by high risk in the car and high jinks out of it – will resonate. These were two men made of the ‘right stuff ’, the like of which no longer surface in the sport’s top tier.
James Simon Wallis Hunt was a unique and unconventional character whose demons contributed to his short yet spectacular life. To many he seemed every bit the arrogant public schoolboy, with a commanding presence and the self-confidence with which to carry it off. Tales of this Surrey stockbroker son’s womanising and hard partying are legendary but, beneath that tall, wavy-blonde-haired, surfer-dude look that he often used to his advantage, beat the heart of a dedicated individual, a perfectionist who was driven – no pun intended – to be the best at whatever he tackled. And that applied equally to all the sports he participated in (as well as his racing career, he competed at Junior Wimbledon, plus played cricket, squash and golf to tournament level), and, in later life, his budgerigar breeding. If you looked beyond the shabby, disorganised, unpunctual, devil-maycare facade you found an intelligent, articulate and ruthless sportsman.
Of course, it’s Hunt’s relatively brief time in Formula 1, from 1973 to ’79, for which he’s best remembered. During that period he competed in 92 Grands Prix, experiencing the full gamut of emotions – from fending off the nickname ‘Hunt The Shunt’ in his early, crash-strewn forays, to winning the