Rush to Glory: FORMULA 1 Racing's Greatest Rivalry

by Tom Rubython

  Hogan now believes that Lauda overstated his injuries in order to get a psychological advantage over Hunt and to lull him into false sense of security. Whether that was true or not, no one will ever know, but the fact was that Lauda was there and he was going to race.

  When he finally emerged, it was clear that Lauda was making a supreme effort. He was obviously very frail and weak, and it was clear he should not have been there. In today’s strict medical environment, he would not have been allowed to race. Although hidden by bandages, his face and head were still noticeably disfigured. He kept his cap firmly planted on his face, but the disguise wasn’t enough to allay the serious doubts about his fitness to race—doubts being expressed even within his own team. Hogan said, “He looked horrible: blood and pus all over him.”

  It could not have been lost on Lauda that donning a racing helmet so soon after the accident would make the scars on his face ultimately much worse and more visible for the rest of his life. Lauda admitted: “My matter-of-factness in automatically resuming my career as soon as all systems were go was disconcerting. Some thought it betrayed a lack of dignity; others found it downright unappetizing.”

  In the pits, Lauda’s wife, Marlene, kept attending to her husband’s face and stroking it to give him reassurance. She had her sewing kit and was constantly modifying Lauda’s new flameproof balaclava for maximum comfort. She wanted to be certain that there was no irritation to the sensitive new skin grafted around his eyes. Everyone was deeply impressed by Marlene’s devotion. David Benson wrote in Saturday’s Daily Express: “I am conquered by her courage. Here is a woman truly worthy of a very great sportsman.” He added: “Marlene is a delightfully warm person. Her handshake is firm. Her eyes are steady and constant. They are the eyes of a woman who could inspire a man to great things.”

  And that is exactly what she did that weekend.

  Besides worrying about Lauda’s return, the McLaren team had problems of its own to worry about. At Monza, McLaren was not only fighting Ferrari for the world title but was battling the entire Italian nation. In a fair fight, there was no doubt that Hunt could beat Lauda. But Teddy Mayer knew that the Italian Grand Prix was unlikely to be a fair fight. He knew the Italians would try do anything they could to handicap the team. The fuel octane scare stories in the press had been an early warning.

  It started almost immediately. As the McLaren team’s trucks reached the Italian border, the Italian border guards decided to take a long time signing off on the customs paperwork. There was nothing wrong with the paperwork or the trucks, but the trucks were effectively detained for a day and a half. The time that was lost at the border ate into precious time at the track to prepare the cars.

  When the McLaren trucks finally did pull into the Monza paddock, they found a hostile reception. As they entered Monza park, they saw fans holding up banners that read “Basta con la Mafia Inglese.” Translated, they said “Away with the English Mafia.” And whenever James Hunt appeared in public, he was loudly booed.

  But all this was nothing compared to what would happen in scrutineering, which was outright Italian chicanery. The CSI officials present seemed powerless to intervene as the Italian scrutineers pored over Hunt’s car. It seemed they had already decided how to hinder him. But even they had no idea how effective they were to be as the rains fell on the track, rather conveniently for Ferrari.

  The first qualifying session on Friday was wet, and Hunt spun off and damaged the nose of his car. When he walked back to the pits, the Italian fans erupted in the grandstands with joy. It was unseemly as they spat on him from the stands. He had to put his helmet back on to avoid being soaked in saliva.

  Meanwhile, Niki Lauda, with the Italian crowd right behind him and willing him on, got back into a car for the first time since his accident. On Friday he had employed his normal mental preparation tactics, which included an objective review of his emotions to ensure he was mentally “well primed” before going out to qualify.

  But then it all changed. As Lauda recalled: “When I climbed into the cockpit at Monza, fear hit me so hard that all self-motivation theories flew out the window.” Lauda’s lap times were poor, and he admitted later that he had lied to journalists, including David Benson, whose interview had been published only that morning, about his state of mind. Truthfully, he had been “rigid with fear” during qualifying, and in particular he found the rain had been “terrifying.”

  Lauda explained later: “I had to play the hero to buy myself enough time to sort things out. The fact is you have to play the hard man on occasions, whether you actually feel like one or not. It is really all a game of mental hide-and-seek; you would never be forgiven if you blurted out the truth at an inopportune moment. You would be finished.”

  That night, alone in the quiet cocoon of his hotel room, Lauda reviewed his performance and tried to identify what had gone wrong. He had been trying to drive as he had before the accident, and it wasn’t working. Feeling insecure, he said, “I had got myself into a stupid tangle.”

  His overnight analysis helped him, as he put it, “reprogram his brain for the following day” and to eliminate all the pressure he felt. Managing to repress his anxiety somehow, Lauda told himself to “drive more slowly.” He said later: “And that’s what I did. I started slowly, then gradually built up speed until, suddenly, I was the fastest of the Ferraris—faster than Regazzoni and the newcomer Reutemann. I had managed to prove in practice what I knew in theory: I could drive as well now as before the accident.”

  Lauda was fifth fastest by the end of the session. For some reason, both the Ferraris and the McLarens had been slow, but Lauda was fastest of the five. He had outqualified both his Ferrari teammates, causing Reutemann and Clay Regazzoni considerable embarrassment, not to mention James Hunt, who could only manage ninth place on the grid. There was also no excuse for Hunt, as Monza was a fast circuit that suited the characteristics of his car. Lauda’s returning performance simply stunned everyone. Psychologically, he had struck an enormous blow on his rivals, including those in his own team.

  Jacques Laffite put his Ligier on pole, followed by Jody Scheckter’s Tyrrell-Ford, Carlos Pace’s Brabham-Alfa Romeo, and Patrick Depailler’s Tyrrell-Ford.

  During the Saturday session, fuel checks were made by the scrutineers in the pits. Forewarned, Texaco had made absolutely certain that the McLaren’s fuel was legal, measuring at 101.2 octane. But overnight the Italian stewards analyzed the McLaren’s fuel and found it was 101.6 octane, not 101.2, but they seemed to confirm it was within the allowed limits. Then, feigning ignorance of the rules, the Italians telexed the CSI, the FIA’s sporting division in Paris, and asked the governing body for clarification of its own ruling. The message in the telex was vague in the sending, which was deliberate, and even vaguer in the reply. The secretary of the CSI replied and said the maximum allowed was 101.

  So on Sunday morning, the Italian stewards announced that Hunt’s and his teammate Jochen Mass’ fuel was illegal and that their Saturday times would be disallowed. Only their Friday qualifying times, run in the wet, would count. The cars were sent to the back of the grid. They also disqualified Saturday times for John Watson’s Penske car. The Penske team had no argument, as their fuel was almost certainly over the allowed maximum. They had pushed the rules to the limit and imported special fuel from the United States.

  The organizers’ clear intention had been to put the McLaren cars out of the race completely, thereby thwarting Hunt. The disallowed times effectively meant that Hunt, Mass, and Watson would not be allowed to start; their sub-two-minute, rain-affected qualifying times on Friday were not fast enough to get in the race.

  But even before all this happened, there was an even more bizarre incident—Italian policemen came to the McLaren pit and took Alastair Caldwell away. They told him they were arresting him on suspicion of importing illegal fuel into Italy. It was a trumped-up charge, and Caldwell’s theory was that Ferrari wanted him out of the way when the stewards made thei
r fuel announcement.

  Caldwell believed that Enzo Ferrari had been able to manipulate the situation by calling a friend in the local police station. He explained: “[Enzo] Ferrari had obviously said, ‘We need to get rid of Caldwell completely because he’ll go bananas. He’s the man to worry about. What can we do? We’ll pretend that the fuel has been illegally imported; we’ll tell him that and have him arrested on this basis.’ We had Texaco fuel, which had been brought in a truck from Belgium, certainly imported correctly with the right paperwork, but that didn’t matter. They had an excuse to lock me up.”

  Caldwell was put in a cell at Monza police station and was held incommunicado for over two hours until a Texaco technician brought the customs paperwork that proved the fuel had been correctly imported. Caldwell emerged from incarceration only to be surprised with the news that Hunt was out of the race.

  In the absence of Caldwell, Mayer had gone to the stewards’ office with Texaco’s analysis in his hand, demanding to know what was going on. The Italians showed him the telex they had received from the CSI in Paris to explain why they had acted as they had. But crucially, they showed him only the reply and not their original message. It was deliberate, underhanded skulduggery, as the scrutineers had always known exactly what the rules were. If they hadn’t, they had the very articulate Teddy Mayer on hand to remind them. Waving the CSI telex in his hand, the Italian chief scrutineer confidently sent Mayer away. But he was a dishonest individual, and for once Mayer had not asked the right questions, and lacking much Italian, he had been fobbed off with much gesticulations and mock indignation. Mayer lacked Caldwell’s technical knowledge to make an argument and couldn’t understand the paperwork in front of him as Caldwell would have been able to do. Enzo Ferrari had been very clever in removing Caldwell from the scene.

  Meanwhile, Hunt, also lacking Caldwell’s guidance and the requisite technical knowledge about fuel chemistry, was in high dudgeon and prepared to believe that his fuel was illegal. The Italians had done their job so well, they convinced Hunt the fuel was illegal. He was furious with John Goosens, who headed up Texaco’s racing effort in Europe. Goosens was adamant that Texaco had done all it could, but Hunt was having none of it.

  Hunt was apoplectic, not so much because of his exclusion but by the scrutineers’ assertion that he was a cheat. The implication of their actions was that the team had not competed fairly throughout 1976. Hunt, on learning the facts, later recalled: “The implication that we had been cheating annoyed me enormously. Not only had we not been cheating but running a high octane fuel would not help unless we had increased the compression ratio of the engine to match the increased octane rating. You have to modify your engine accordingly, and we certainly hadn’t done that—we could have run 150 octane petrol and our engine wouldn’t have given an ounce more power. Our fuel was totally legal, and we had gone to a lot of trouble before the race to make sure that it was, but to have that understood by the general public was more than one could ask. So this mud had been thrown, and some of it was inevitably sticking.”

  Meanwhile, Mayer was continually on the telephone to Paris asking the CSI officials exactly what was going on. Mayer effectively wanted to know why the fuel, which was identical to that used throughout the season, had not been declared illegal before. No one had any answer to that. CSI officials were just as confused as Mayer about what was going on in Italy in its name. The Italians had done a lovely number on everyone. Niki Lauda and Daniele Audetto, who despite his many failings was an honorable man, realized exactly what was happening and were embarrassed but could hardly intervene.

  Both Mayer and Hunt finally realized exactly what was going on but were powerless to do anything about it. They appealed the decision straightaway, which proved to be a mistake, as the matter then became sub judice in the eyes of the stewards, and they then refused to discuss it further. As Hunt remembered: “Because we appealed, we couldn’t discuss it further, so I was stuffed out of the race. You can’t run the grand prix a month later; and by putting me on the back of the grid, the argument could only be sorted out later.”

  And that was the genius of the Italian tactics. It was one thing appealing a result after the event. But a no-result caused by cheating could not be reversed.

  The fuel situation was later clarified and corrected by a statement from the CSI, but by then it was too late; the damage had been done. Hunt laughed when he saw the statement and said, “I was frustrated even more when the CSI put out a press release saying that everything was all right and that the McLaren team hadn’t been cheating.”

  Added to what had happened in Spain and Britain, the Italian press ran huge headlines announcing “McLaren cheats,” and the coverage was read around the world. Mayer said, “I think Ferrari began to believe that if James could beat them, we must be cheating; and they began to try and find excuses.”

  It was later found that the Italian fuel checks had been wrongly interpreted by the stewards, an interpretation that would almost cost James Hunt the world championship. He said at the time, “The rules are very complicated and they are difficult to understand, but they state that you can use the top grade of commercially available fuel in the team’s country of origin plus a tolerance of one octane.”

  But at that moment, the Italians believed that Hunt, Mass, and Watson were out. But then something equally bizarre happened. Before the exclusions, three drivers hadn’t qualified for the race: Brett Lunger’s works Surtees, Arturo Merzario’s Williams, and Otto Stuppacher’s private Tyrrell. Gradually, all three drivers withdrew to make way for the disqualified drivers, and much to the chagrin of the Italians, Hunt, Mass, and Watson were back in the race.

  But Hunt would still have to start the Italian Grand Prix from the second to last row of the starting grid. Hunt was so angry, he even thought about withdrawing. But realizing it would be a fruitless protest, he focused on trying to get some points—although he knew he could no longer win outright.

  But his heart was not in it, and by the 11th lap, he was in 12th place when he came together with Tom Pryce’s Shadow and went off the road. His McLaren-Ford went into the sand and got beached, with its rear wheels spinning wildly. The sand traps, which were gradually replacing catch fencing, decelerated cars very effectively and slowed the McLaren so that it stopped just in front of the barrier. Hunt jumped out of his car and walked round, checking for damage. Seeing it was intact, he pushed the car out of the hole dug by the spinning tires. But he was then prevented from getting back in the car by the Italian marshals. For once, the Italians were abiding by the rules; although they didn’t please Hunt. But the longer time went on, the less relevant it became.

  Hunt said, “They wouldn’t let me get back in. They pounced on me. But it wasn’t really worth making an issue of it because, firstly, the car was stuck in the sand and, secondly, I was now completely out of the race, even if I could have restarted. It was then hopeless trying to gain points as far as I was concerned.”

  All this was going on against a backdrop of hissing and booing Italians. It was more like feeding time at a zoo than a motor race, and as he was too far away for their spittle to reach him, they started throwing the contents of their picnic baskets at him. Hunt showed his contempt for them by casually picking up an apple that had hit him and starting to chomp on it. He casually waved back in thanks, incensing the Italians in the stand.

  In reality, Hunt was stupefied with frustration and seemed to want a fight with the entire Italian nation as he began his long walk back to the pit lane. During that walk he made up his mind that his accident had been the fault of Tom Pryce, so he decided to have it out with the young Welshman after the race. The blame culture and revenge seeking were a throwback to his public school background. When it surfaced, it exhibited the worst elements of his character. The truth about the accident was that Hunt had become distracted when he went into the corner and had braked far too late, with the inevitable result.

  Convinced that Pryce had blocked him, howev
er, Hunt stormed up to him after the race and shouted, “You are a brainless moron,” adding in for good measure that he was “absolutely brainless.” Almost immediately afterwards, as he cooled off in the motor home, he knew he had been wrong. He went to find Pryce and to apologize. He said later, “I just made a mistake.”

  His high emotional state after the race had been made worse by his walk back to the pits. He called them “animals” and explained, “They were spitting and hissing. I wanted to confront them but thought better of it.” In the end, Hunt confessed, “I must admit I was quite pleased to get out of there unscathed. The propaganda campaign against me in the Italian press was really quite incredible: a very heavy deal. They really hated me in Italy, to an extent that was quite unbelievable. Anybody would think it was I who had caused Niki’s accident.”

  Meanwhile, Lauda, unaware of all the drama, had enjoyed a steady race and managed to finish fourth. It was the bravest driving performance ever seen in Formula One—before or since. When he took off his helmet after the race, his fireproof balaclava was soaked in blood; his head and face wounds had opened up. The repercussions for the scarring on his face would be enormous. But he had done what he came to do; he had increased his championship lead. Hunt’s failure to finish had also been a huge bonus. Lauda’s courageous comeback had exceeded all expectations, not least those of his English rival.

  Lauda said, “I did what I could. On the last lap, the oil pressure dropped and I took my foot off the gas a bit, as I wanted to finish at all costs. In the circumstances, fourth place was not bad at all for me.”