Rush to Glory: FORMULA 1 Racing's Greatest Rivalry

by Tom Rubython

  Ronnie Peterson proved to be in scintillating form and was never really challenged for pole position. In the end, his March-Ford was eight one-hundredths of a second faster than Hunt’s McLaren-Ford in second place. Hunt had endured handling problems in qualifying, with a severe lack of traction and understeer due to a tire problem. But his problems were small compared to that of his teammate, Jochen Mass, who was a very unhappy driver. He was forced to drive the new M26 and it proved to be a dog, and he could only qualify 15th on the eighth row of the grid.

  Tom Pryce was the sensation of qualifying, in third place in his Shadow-Ford. John Watson was fourth, with Clay Regazzoni and Mario Andretti fifth and sixth.

  After qualifying on Saturday afternoon, there was a bizarre scene in the pit lane when Hunt tried to keep the peace after his close friend Jody Scheckter got into a vicious argument with his team principal, Ken Tyrrell. Hunt’s sponsor, Marlboro, organized a pit stop competition whereby two cars would come into a simulated pit area, change all four wheels, and then go around the circuit. The winner got $500 provided he lapped within 10 percent of the fastest qualifying time.

  Scheckter looked set to win, but because of a crowded pit lane, he had to slow down and could not complete his lap within the 10 percent time limit and forfeited the $500, even though he had won on the road. Tyrrell thought Scheckter should have ignored the people in the pit lane and completed the lap in time. There was an ugly scene in the pits as the two men yelled at each other. Hunt intervened to separate the two men. He took Scheckter’s side in the argument and was stunned by Tyrrell’s attitude. That day Hunt began a personal feud with Ken Tyrrell that would last the rest of his life. The row had immediate consequences. On race morning Scheckter took Hunt to one side and confided that he would be leaving the Tyrrell team at the end of the year.

  When Hunt looked around on the front row of the grid in Holland, he saw Peterson’s familiar blue-and-yellow helmet and felt somewhat reassured; it was a feeling he had never felt with Lauda. In the race, Hunt botched his start as usual, spinning his wheels and letting Peterson pull away in front. To add to the ignominy, John Watson came through from the second row and overtook Hunt at the end of the pit straight in full view of everyone.

  Hunt bided his time in third as Peterson and Watson scrapped for the lead. His McLaren was understeering again as a braking air scoop worked loose. Despite that, Hunt overtook Watson on lap seven and Peterson for the lead on lap 12. Afterwards he said he simply took advantage of mistakes by both drivers.

  Hunt said, “I didn’t really do any serious passing of anyone during the whole race, but it put me in the lead, which was the best place to be because I had a real problem with the understeer. It meant that the onus was now on Watson to get past me if he could. I think if he had got past me, he would have left me.”

  In fact, Hunt had to drive as hard as ever to block Watson from getting past. In terms of car handling, the Ulsterman was easily faster, but Hunt was simply better at blocking than Watson was at overtaking. In the end it didn’t matter, as Watson coasted to a halt on lap 47 when his gearbox broke. Watson’s demise was a signal for Clay Regazzoni, in the lone Ferrari entered in the race, to take up the chase. Hunt got in a panic, because he feared Regazzoni might have instructions to punt him off if he couldn’t get past. Hunt recalled: “Boy, was I in a panic. I was something like 10 seconds ahead of Clay, and I didn’t want him to get within reach.”

  But, tellingly, Regazzoni was just not up to it, and by the end, Hunt won the race barely a car’s length ahead of the Ferrari—too close for comfort. Hunt was absolutely elated and threw both arms aloft as he had the previous year, and nearly put his car straight into the barriers as a result. In the grandstands opposite the pits, anxiety gave way to relief and delight for his family when they belatedly realized he had won the race.

  John Watson remembers it as a classic race: “I had a car which was quicker over a whole lap, but he had a car which was fractionally quicker down the straight because we were running different levels of downforce. He successfully defended his position with a fair degree of firmness. It was a classic duel of two Brits in Formula One.”

  Hunt’s victory was a disaster for Lauda; there would be no more whooping and hollering or congratulatory phone calls. Regazzoni’s failure to overtake Hunt was telling, and Enzo Ferrari was said to have decided on the basis of that performance alone to sack the Swiss driver as soon as he found a replacement. The championship score now read Lauda 58, Hunt 56.

  Aside from the motor racing, there was plenty of drama off-track in Holland after the race.

  As Hunt closed the gap on Lauda and started winning races regularly, he felt he deserved an increase in salary. He was being paid a basic salary of a paltry $50,000 a year, which was a quarter of what other top drivers were getting. Hunt became more and more disgusted with the money McLaren was paying him. He was actually earning much less than he had at Hesketh the year before, when the team had been on the breadline. At Hesketh he had been paid extra by sponsors for every promotional day. But at McLaren they were all gratis as part of his retainer. He had picked up around $70,000 from such promotional outings in 1975 but hardly anything in 1976. With his share of prize money, he looked set to earn $100,000, exactly the same as he had at Hesketh in 1975.

  Before the race, Hunt had appointed his brother Peter as his new business manager. He had previously been managed by a combination of Mark McCormack’s American IMG agency and Barrie Gill and Andrew Marriott’s British CSS operation. IMG and CSS split the duties between them, but it meant Hunt paid double commission on many of his deals. Marlboro’s John Hogan recalled: “For James, it meant that he was able to be freed from the high-pressure American business approach and to operate more easily with his brother.”

  IMG and CSS agreed to withdraw gradually and to let Peter Hunt take over. But his brother did not want to become his full-time manager and abandon his accounting practice. Hogan recalled: “The brothers eventually decided on a compromise whereby Peter stayed with his firm in London and handled James’s affairs from there.”

  With his new management arrangements in place, an emboldened Hunt decided to confront Teddy Mayer straight after the podium celebrations. They had a brief but furious row, with Mayer telling Hunt to “fuck off” and Hunt saying, “I might just do that.” Of course neither man meant it, but Mayer was sticking to his contract. As Alastair Caldwell remembered: “James and Teddy were always on about money. It got to the stage where James decided we weren’t paying him enough, although he’d been only too happy to come and drive for us for nothing at the beginning of the year. By now, of course, he’d decided he was a superstar who needed paying a lot of money. That became a constant source of friction.”

  Hunt stormed out of the pits after his row with Mayer and joined his friends and family waiting outside to celebrate his birthday. They built a huge campfire in the sand dunes of Zandvoort. They celebrated into the night and passed out on the sand, incoherent with drink. His need to celebrate his birthday, along with the anniversary of his first win and his latest victory, all inevitably took their toll. John Hugenholz, the Zandvoort circuit manager, presented Hunt with a giant birthday cake in the shape of the track. It was meant as a token to mark his birthday and as a celebration of his win the year before, but it now became an ever more poignant and appropriate symbol of all he had achieved.

  CHAPTER 23

  Lauda Returns from the Dead

  Monza Rising Stuns Hunt

  Italy: September 10–12, 1976

  There was plenty of activity for both James Hunt and Niki Lauda in the fortnight between the Dutch and Italian Grand Prix races. There was also plenty of speculation about how the Italians would try and thwart the British at their home race in Italy. There was lots of incentive to do so, as the Italians certainly thought they had been cheated at Brands Hatch and seemed determined to return the compliment.

  It started at the beginning of September; news items appeared in Italia
n newspapers speculating that the Texaco fuel used by the McLaren team was illegal. The stories were baseless, but still, Texaco engineers examined the stories and immediately took precautions and double-checked that its fuel was within the regulations.

  The differences were all about octane ratings: a gray area at the best of times and open to much subjective interpretation. The maximum octane allowance was 102. However, the rules were vague and allowed teams to use the octane rating of the best available fuel in their country of origin plus one octane. The best available in Britain was 101 octane, which meant 102 octane would be the maximum allowed. But Ferrari was subject to other measurements prevailing in Italy, as were Ligier in France. In those countries the top grade of fuel available was only 100 octane, so Ferrari was limited to 101 octane. The rules’ variance didn’t matter, because higher octane levels made no difference to performance in normal circumstances.

  But James Hunt realized that it would be a difficult time and decided to get himself out of the way. He agreed to go to North America for a week. He had been offered $10,000 to race in the Formula Atlantic series, which was the North American equivalent of Formula Two. Three fellow Formula One drivers, Patrick Depailler, Vittorio Brambilla, and Alan Jones, also made the trip for the race in the quaint town of Trois-Rivières near Quebec in Canada. It was there that Hunt met the young Canadian driver Gilles Villeneuve for the first time. Villeneuve won the race and Hunt was third, but Hunt was mightily impressed with the skills of the young Canadian. So much so that after the race, Hunt called Teddy Mayer and John Hogan in England and recommended they sign him before anyone else did.

  After his Formula Atlantic experience, Hunt traveled south to the Michigan International Speedway to take part in an IROC saloon car race on an oval track and earn himself another $10,000.

  The IROC series used identical, modified Chevrolet Camaros that were regularly raced by top American drivers in something akin to a celebrity series. Hunt managed to qualify his Camaro on pole at an average speed of nearly 150 miles per hour. It was his first experience of driving on an oval, and he found he was good at it.

  But racing on an oval was altogether a different experience, and he couldn’t crack it. As a result of trying too hard, he crashed into a concrete wall at 150 miles per hour and had a very narrow escape from serious injury when a piece of metal guardrail pierced the cockpit of his car. Hunt was shaken by his inability to race other cars on an oval track. He said, “I got in the race and didn’t have a clue because of all the high-speed drafting. I was right out of my depth. To tell you the truth, I was scared shitless.” After berating the organizers of IROC about safety, it was with some relief that he boarded an airplane to return to Europe.

  Meanwhile, Niki Lauda was preparing to come back from the dead. After three weeks, he was discharged from the hospital and went to the island of Ibiza to recuperate, taking with him Willie Dungl, the physiotherapist who had helped him when he broke his ribs. Under Dungl’s supervision, Lauda began taking physical exercises for 12 hours a day. Lauda wanted to return to Formula One as soon as he could properly hold a wheel, and he believed that lying in bed thinking about the accident was counterproductive. He said, “I wanted to get back to work as soon as I possibly could.” Dungl believed as much physical exercise as he could stand was the secret to Lauda’s quick recovery. Just as when Lauda broke his ribs, Dungl set out to perform a miracle so Lauda could race again. Whereas a serious rib injury recuperation was shortened from six weeks to two weeks, Dungl now set out to shorten a year’s recovery process to just six weeks.

  Dungl was with Lauda 24 hours a day, and when they weren’t exercising, he was massaging his body. Lauda also hired a doctor who worked with Dungl to look after every detail of his day, including rest, diet and, crucially, how much exercise he could tolerate. Soon his lungs and physical fitness were certified as being back to normal.

  The treatment regime was so successful that he said, “My training program is entirely up to me and my own willpower. I feel better now than I was before. That was when I took the decision to go to Monza.”

  In the intervening period, it seemed that Lauda had reappraised his whole attitude to motor racing. As he explained: “The problem I have had to face since the accident is whether I would enjoy my motor racing again and what effect it would have on me. No one can discover this until they have been through an experience like mine. I have found that I love the positive side of motor racing. So why should I give it up?”

  On September 6, exactly 38 days after the accident, he reported to the Ferrari factory at Maranello and told Daniele Audetto he was fit again and would be able to race at Monza.

  Audetto and Enzo Ferrari were shocked to see Lauda. They did not believe he would be returning in 1976 and did not think he would race for Ferrari again. In his absence they had hired Carlos Reutemann as his replacement. Reutemann had fallen out with Bernie Ecclestone and had abruptly left the Brabham team, probably sensing that a more competitive Ferrari drive might be available after Lauda’s accident.

  It was the news of Reutemann’s appointment that inspired Lauda to return quickly. Lauda did not like Reutemann; as he confessed, “We never could stand each other, and instead of taking pressure off me, they put on even more by bringing Carlos Reutemann into the team.”

  Reutemann’s premature signing had been fueled by all the hysteria in the Italian press. Its timing was a huge error and caused immediate problems in the team.

  Audetto, who couldn’t believe Lauda was fit enough to race, ordered him to test the Ferrari at nearby Fiorano to see if he could drive competitively. Lauda was as fast as he had ever been. With that, Audetto had no choice under the terms of his contract but to make a car available for him and to enter a third car for Reutemann at Monza.

  But it was not as easy as that for Audetto. Entering a third car breached Lauda’s new contract, and as a result, Audetto had to ask Lauda to waive the clause for Monza. Lauda agreed, but only for one race, believing he would soon see the back of Reutemann. Inwardly Lauda was furious with both Enzo Ferrari and Audetto. As he said later, “To the outside world, Enzo Ferrari and his company were standing by their slightly singed world champion, but from the inside, the pitiful insecurity of each and every one of them was palpable. Tactics took precedence over trust. Ferrari kept telling the world how solidly they were behind me, but in private they were at sixes and sevens.”

  It was clear that the Ferrari team didn’t want Lauda back. They thought he was finished and wanted him gone. As Lauda recalled: “They didn’t know what to make of a defending champion with a disfigured face who carried on as if everything was quite normal.”

  The fact that Lauda had signed a new contract for 1977 before his accident put him in a much stronger position than he might have been otherwise. As he admitted: “If I hadn’t had that contract, they could have ground me down mentally and turned me out to pasture. It was my one piece of good fortune that [Enzo] Ferrari had been so anxious to get me under contract for the following season.”

  After the test, Lauda departed from Maranello that night and returned to Austria, leaving a stunned Daniele Audetto and Enzo Ferrari behind him. That evening, as soon as his plans were confirmed, Lauda called up his trusted friend, the motoring editor of the Daily Express, David Benson. He told Benson he had an exclusive for him. And what an exclusive that was.

  On Wednesday September 8, Benson flew into Salzburg airport to meet up with Lauda. From Salzburg he flew with him on Lauda’s private plane to Milan airport and on to the Monza circuit for the Italian Grand Prix. Also on the plane were Willie Dungl and Marlene.

  Lauda had chosen Benson to tell his story to the world, and the writer got an exclusive interview with Lauda on the flight and scooped the rest of the world’s press. It was an amazing coup for the Daily Express newspaper, and it became the first and last time Lauda ever talked intimately about the accident and his recovery.

  He told Benson during that flight: “A lot of people have said
that they think I am crazy to go back to racing so quickly. They say that a man with a face that is not like that of a human being but like a dead man’s skull should want to give up immediately. People who think like that are those who would probably be very happy to be ill and stay at home and not have to go out to work. This is not my attitude to life.

  “I do not enjoy life unless I am active and have something to do and look forward to. I must work. If I have an accident in my work, then my aim must be to recover as soon as possible with all the help of modern medicine. Once I had decided to go on, then I had to make a comeback as quickly as possible. That is why I am here at Monza.

  “I have not raced for over a month, and when I climb into my car, there will be enormous pressure on me because it is Italy, and Ferrari is the ‘king,’ and we have three cars entered for the race. But I will not let this pressure affect me. I may only finish in 15th place, but now I know that I am ahead of my programs, and when we go to Canada and North America, I’ll be in a position to win and to keep my world championship.”

  The interview appeared almost verbatim in the Daily Express of Friday, September 10, the day Niki Lauda reappeared at the Monza track; it had been less than six weeks since he had crashed out of the German Grand Prix and been airlifted to the hospital. His return to the paddock at Monza was only 41 days after the accident. He had missed two races and ceded 21 world championship points of his lead over Hunt.

  Statistically, the two rivals were now even, as both drivers had now completed exactly the same number of races during the season. Lauda and Hunt were within two points of each other in the championship table.

  Lauda’s arrival in Monza was greeted with pure amazement by the rest of the Formula One fraternity. As for James Hunt, he was just as stunned as everyone else at Lauda’s quick return to racing. In fact, when he analyzed it, he found Lauda’s story of his recovery all rather unconvincing, saying, “I know that little fucker. Only Niki could take the last rites and come back at the Italian Grand Prix.” John Hogan, who sponsored both Hunt and Lauda and was very close to both of them, agreed: “Niki, who’d never been to a church in his life, wouldn’t know what the last rites were if they hit him in the head.”