If Hamilton is trying to be James Hunt, he’s falling flat
AT the Royal Automobile Club in London tomorrow night, the friends and family of James Hunt will celebrate the biggest race of his life. It will be precisely 40 years ago, in blinding spray in the foothills of Mount Fuji, that one of sport’s most extravagant playboys beat his great rival, Niki Lauda, to the Formula One title. As Hunt wrote on the front page of the next day’s Daily Mail: ‘By all the laws of humanity I should not be motor racing champion of the world’.
It was really too dangerous to drive in that Japanese Grand Prix. To do so was almost to demand to die. It was also the first race to be televised live by satellite in the middle of the European night. Those are just a handful of reasons why the end of the 1976 still evokes emotions all these anniversaries later.
Below the chandeliers in the RAC’s clubhouse will be a living reminder of Hunt. Freddie Alexander Hunt, to be precise. James’s 29-year-old son is the spitting image of his father. The long blond hair, the free spirit.
Freddie was once a professional polo player and pest controller. He is also a racing driver and competed in European Nascar this year. He reveres his father’s memory and cannot see anyone in Formula One now living up to his excesses.
There is a faint chance that this season’s Formula One title could yet go down to the wire, like in 1976. Lewis Hamilton is 33 points adrift of Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg with four races to go and the Briton beat his German rival to pole for today’s United States Grand Prix.
But does Freddie think the drivers are as exciting as in his father’s time? Britain’s triple world champion Hamilton has spoken of his love of drinking and carousing and seems to court controversy.
‘Lewis like dad?’ says Freddie, laughing. ‘He might try to be, but if so he’s failing miserably. He is incredibly quick, one of the quickest drivers ever. But I am struggling a bit with his personality. I don’t dislike him, but he doesn’t really captivate me. Kimi (Raikkonen) gives it a good go, but nobody can get close to being like dad, can they? He was a one-off. You can’t be like dad now.’
Freddie is grappling with the usual angst of a racing driver, struggling for the budget to press on towards success in the Le Mans Series.
Freddie was nearly six when his father died and he remembers clearly the moment his mother sat him and his elder brother Tom down in their garden and told them: ‘Dadda’s gone to Heaven’. Hunt was just 45.
Freddie sports a tattoo of his father’s autograph on his back and gobbles up any information he can about his life and times. ‘We never spoke about motor racing, or if we did I can’t remember it,’ he says.
So they never spoke of that day in Fuji, when Hunt had to finish third or higher to pip Niki Lauda to the title. It was a miracle that Lauda was even there, as only a few months earlier the Austrian had been pulled out of his blazing Ferrari seconds before he would have died at the Nurburgring.
But this bravest of men refused to drive on that rain-lashed day, pulling in after a lap of the race, muttering ‘insanity’ at the danger posed by the conditions.
Hunt drove on. ‘He won the title by the skin of his teeth,’ says Freddie. ‘I think he cocked it up royally. God only knows why, he refused to cool his tyres and one burst. He had to come in. It made it more spectacular than was needed.’
Hunt sank half a can of beer after being told, to his astonishment, he had finished third and won the title. He then threw it up over the feet of Japanese television crew who moved in to capture his elation.
Freddie settles for the occasional roll-up cigarette and reflects: ‘It was dad’s lifestyle that killed him. I can be like him. But, frankly, I’d like to see my 50th birthday. Maybe even my 60th.’