Shunt

by Tom Rubython

As for sponsors, Hunt had most success with companies already in the car business, and quickly focused on them.

  Mike Hughes, who ran Hughes of Beaconsfield, an upmarket car dealership, was the first to say ‘yes’ to him and put its name on the car for the 1968 season, although the deal was worth only UK£50. But Hunt carried on making the rounds and managed to get Gowrings of Reading interested in a much bigger deal.

  The dealership asked him to prepare a budget for the 1969 season. He went back with a budget of UK£2,000, which was accepted. For their own tax reasons, Gowrings actually bought him a new car so it could take the depreciation write-off against corporation tax. They ordered a brand new Merlyn Mk11A, which was the car to have in 1968 in order to be really competitive.

  But the James Hunt story was very nearly over before the 1969 season started. The new car turned out to be an absolute necessity after his Russell-Alexis was written off in a very serious accident at Oulton Park circuit on 21st October.

  Hunt was racing in close proximity to Tony Dron when the accident happened. Dron remembers: “It was the first race I did with [seat]belts, which were coming into the lower levels of racing 1968, and the last race he did without a seatbelt.”

  In the race, the track was very slippery and Dron was running in third place with Hunt only just behind in fifth place. The race leader was already 100 metres up the road by the end of the second lap. The chasing pack ran down to cascades corner, which was adjacent to the lake in the centre of the picturesque circuit. Dron’s car suddenly spun and Hunt was caught unawares at over 100 miles per hour. Dron explains: “I spun the Titan at the exit from cascades in a very big way, going off to the right and then to the left.” But the car was intact and the engine was still running. Dron put it into gear to get going again but, before he could, he saw Hunt’s car headed straight for him. Hunt took avoiding action but was launched into the air and flew over Dron’s head.

  Dron recalls: “James hit a bump on the edge of the track and that was enough to launch him. His car flew through a Shell advertising hoarding, breaking off a massive piece of wood that was holding it up.” Dron was shocked and thought to himself: “That looks very nasty, indeed. That’s not good.”

  Dron leaped from his car to do what he could: “I got out of my car and found bits of his car all along the way, from both the front and the back, so he’d obviously been cartwheeling along at fantastic speed. Then I found his rollover bar, which he had modified to clear his head because he was taller, so I feared the worst.”

  Dron thought it was unlikely that anyone could have survived such a violent multiple impact. But he couldn’t find the car’s chassis, as he remembers: “I got to the edge of the lake and there was nothing to be seen. I looked more closely into the lake and saw his car upside down on the bottom. It was completely submerged in about three feet of water, and I thought: ‘Oh shit.’” It struck Dron that, even if Hunt had survived the accident, he could drown. In truth, he thought Hunt was dead, saying: “I was about to go into the water. It was a horrible moment.”

  But suddenly, Hunt stood up. It was like a scene from John Frankenheimer’s movie, Grand Prix. There was blood running down the side of his face and he was covered from head to toe in brown mud and green slime. Dron says: “He was concussed and he wasn’t making sense but he was talking. His head had obviously had a knock. He was actually trying to tell me a dirty joke, but normally he would have made complete sense.”

  The marshals took ages to arrive and eventually the circuit ambulance turned up. The doctor gave Hunt a cursory examination and decided he was basically alright but took him off on a stretcher to the circuit’s medical centre to be treated for shock and some cuts and bruises. Hunt’s girlfriend Taormina was sitting in the pits waiting for news and she also thought, because of the reports of the severity of the accident, he was unlikely to have survived. She prepared herself for the worst, especially when the circuit commentator said over the loudspeakers: “I’m afraid it doesn’t look too good.”

  Taormina remembers people coming up to her in the pits: “Everyone came up to console me and we just had to wait. Eventually, he came back from the medical centre and it was obvious he was terribly shaken. He could hardly move because he was so bruised and battered and his face was white. I think it was the first time it really hit home what could happen to him in a car.”

  Hunt remembered later: “I was flung clear as the car went over. I remember being on my hands and knees under the water and then suddenly emerging like Neptune. Seatbelts were not yet compulsory and I didn’t have them because I couldn’t afford them. Had I been wearing them, I might have drowned.”

  Later, Hunt was more shocked when he saw the remains of his car and realised it was a write-off and could not be repaired. Tony Dron was even more shaken than his friend, as he admits: “The experience very nearly put me off racing for good at the time, but I had got over that completely by the time I got home that night. It did not linger in my mind.”

  Hunt was in no condition to drive himself home, so they locked his car, trailer and race car in a pit garage for the night. Taormina remembers: “He didn’t know whether he was coming or going.” Dron drove Hunt and Taormina home that night: “I made arrangements to get his stuff sorted out, as he was obviously in no fit state to drive on the road.”

  A few weeks later, at Mallory Park, Hunt was driving his new Merlyn and duelling with Dron’s Titan again when they had another accident. In fact, Dron had predicted it would happen. As he recalls: “The first corner at Mallory Park was doubly dangerous in those days, and I remember complaining a lot to the race organisers and just getting a blank look as if to say: ‘Get lost’. They started cars much too close together on the grid. It was just ridiculous.”

  It was the first corner of the circuit and, duelling for fourth place, Hunt put his back wheel between Dron’s front and back wheels. But that was par for the course in Formula Ford in those days of very close racing. Dron remembers: “I’ll never forget seeing the underside of his car just above my face, still doing 90 miles per hour. I hit the brakes just in time and he landed back on my left front wheel, puncturing the tyre this time.”

  During all this, Hunt was hit from the rear and his car was launched into the air off Dron’s front wheel. Hunt’s Merlyn flew into the air and right over the top of Dron’s Titan and landed on Dron’s nosecone, chopping it off. Dron, with a punctured tyre, couldn’t avoid it and ran straight into him.

  Both cars came to rest against the bank, Dron recalls: “With our wrecks neatly parked, we sat up on the bank and he got out his packet of ten Embassy and passed it to me. We said nothing. I just took out a cigarette, he took out a cigarette. He lit mine, he lit his and we sat there and watched the race. The accident wasn’t mentioned.” On closer inspection, the cars were not badly damaged and it could have much more expensive than it was.

  Hunt raced the new car a few times in 1968, preparing for a big push in 1969. Formula Ford carried on racing through much of the winter, although not so frequently, so the changeover to the new season was virtually seamless.

  At the end of that season, the two men scraped up enough cash to go on holiday together to Oberndorf, near Salzburg, in Austria. They flew out straight after the boxing day race meeting at Brands Hatch and stayed in a family house which belonged to a friend.

  The 1969 season turned to be a totally different proposition to 1968. It was the year Formula Ford really took off and entries doubled. Every event now consisted of two qualifying heats and a final. Counting heats, Hunt was now winning races regularly. Also in 1969, Ford promoted Formula Ford outside of Britain for the first time and organised races in continental Europe. It was called the European Formula Ford Championship. It was being run from London by promoter Nick Brittan, who had hired Tony Dron as his personal assistant.

  Dron’s Formula Ford career hit the buffers after his deal for 1969 fell apart just before the season started, and he decided to become a professional journalist to give him inc
reased credibility and financial back-up. He managed to compete in four races before temporarily retiring.

  Dron admits that Hunt was braver than him when it came to taking financial risks: “He had terrible troubles over the next few years, really desperate financial stuff...but he kept going.”

  Even when they stopped travelling to races together, Hunt and Dron remained close. Hunt spent as much time at Dron’s family’s home in Wentworth than he did at his own, as he remembers: “James was probably at my house more, and he would drop in unannounced. I would often return home and there would be James eating bacon and eggs with Jim and Audrey, my father and mother. My mother would often give him a meal and he would say ‘thank you very much’ and go on his way. He was quite charming and everyone accepted that was just how he was.”

  Hunt was desperate to race abroad and he couldn’t wait to start roaming the continent, towing his race car to exotic foreign tracks. He was one of the first British drivers who started travelling regularly to the continental races. The results were noted far more. But it was with some trepidation that he set off on his first European road trip in early April to take in two races in Holland and Austria. At Zandvoort on 8th April he finished third and, then, a week later, he took second place at Aspern on 14th April. His sponsors, Gowrings, weren’t particularly pleased and wanted to know what benefit they were getting from his racing in Europe. Luckily, Autosport had printed some photographs of his car with the Gowrings name prominent, which placated them for a while.

  One of Hunt’s enduring faults was that with success came arrogance. That trait never went away whilst he was racing. There was no better example of it than when a young Autosport reporter called Ian Phillips approached Hunt at Brands Hatch on 21st April. Phillips was making his first steps in the profession and Hunt was in the middle of pumping up the tyres on his car. Phillips admits he asked Hunt a “stupid” question but says he wasn’t prepared for the stream of rudeness he got in reply. Hunt said to him: “What kind of fucking stupid question is that?” Phillips says: “I remember thinking: ‘What an obnoxious sod’ and so I told him he was.”

  But Phillips had caught Hunt at a bad moment, and the driver was full of remorse afterwards. As Phillips remembers: “He phoned me up at the office the following week, we went out and, after that, we clicked.” He adds: “It was a defence mechanism with him and he was like that with a lot of people.” Hunt and Phillips became firm friends after that shaky start and travelled to many European races together. He says: “In those days, you socialised as often as you could for lots of different reasons – booze and birds, mainly.”

  Phillips became a Hunt promoter in the pages of Autosport after that, and, as his reputation grew, so too did the opportunities.

  Hunt’s occasional rashness and arrogance showed up again when he went on his second European trip in late May. He was due to compete at Vallelunga in Italy for round three of the 1969 European FF Championship on 1st June. Hunt had started the championship well and was keen to perform. The Ford Motor Company was paying generous start and prize money.

  But it all went wrong in Vallelunga, and this was the first big negative incident in Hunt’s career.

  There were problems with his medical papers. All the drivers were required to have a medical certificate stating their blood group. It apparently hadn’t been necessary in the two previous rounds in Holland and Austria, but Italy had different rules.

  Hunt didn’t have the certificate and the organisers told him he couldn’t start. In those days, there were no fax machines or overnight couriers such as DHL or FedEx, and there was no way he could get his medical certificate over from England in time.

  Hunt was furious and told the organisers he had not been made aware of the requirements in advance nor had they been stated in the entry conditions.

  A row began after they point blank refused to let him start in the event. Tony Dron wasn’t there that day, but recalls: “He’d travelled all the way to Vallelunga and he was buggered if he wasn’t going to race.”

  Hunt had a rush of blood to the head and decided to take the law into his own hands. He drove his car out of the paddock, parked it at across the front row of the grid, turned the engine off and walked away.

  The race couldn’t start until Hunt’s car was removed. By that time, he was resigned to not starting and to losing the UK£100 he would have earned as well as his leading championship position.

  Hunt had chosen the wrong day to make his protest, as in the grandstands was sitting Stuart Turner, head of motorsport at the Ford Motor Company. He had a lot of important guests witnessing the debut of Formula Ford in Italy.

  Turner was furious with Hunt, and turned round to Nick Brittan and said: “Mark my words, that young man is going nowhere in motor racing.”

  Brittan knew Hunt well and liked him. But Turner’s displeasure meant he had to take some action. Brittan, who has since died, said at the time: “I took him to task over his silliness and said to him: ‘Hunt, you’ll never make a professional racing driver as long as you’ve got a hole up your arse.’” Brittan would later have cause to regret those words as, in 1976, some seven years later, Hunt would approach him at Brands Hatch and say: “I’ve still got that hole. How am I doing?”

  The Vallelunga incident is now lost in the sands of time, and the following week’s Autosport report of the race hardly mentioned it.

  Halfway through the season, Motor Racing Enterprises (MRE), owned by Mike Ticehurst, made Hunt an offer to run his car for him and to relieve him of his responsibilities.

  Motor Racing Enterprises ran Formula Ford and F3 cars for drivers who could pay. It was a professional team, run by Mike Ticehurst and Gerard McCaffrey. Like Hunt, they were both ex public schoolboys. McCaffrey was wealthy and lived in a smart mews house in West London. Ticehurst was the wheeler dealer. The ambition was to become a big second hand racing car dealership.

  Ticehurst was a huge Hunt fan and the offer was altruistic, not financial. Hunt met Howden Ganley at MRE. Ganley, one of the top drivers in the formula, who had graduated to Formula 3, remembers the change to MRE as being highly significant for Hunt: “James was a bit of a shambles at running his own team, and Ticehurst picked him up and steered him right. Mike had a real insight into James.”

  Ganley’s assessment was correct, and the difference in having his car prepared by a team of people who knew what they were doing was immediate, as Hunt won his first race out of Lydden Hill as an MRE driver.

  Getting Ticehurst and McCaffrey’s backing was Hunt’s first big break, says Tony Dron: “We could all see it quite clearly. Early in 1969, he had really shown his skills and he had certainly got it. People were starting to believe in his ability.”

  The link up with MRE soon blossomed into something more, and after just a few races Ticehurst told Hunt that it was time to move up a formula and that he would fund it. The big time beckoned, and James Hunt was on his way.

  He told his sponsors the good news, and Gowrings got some of its money back when Hunt sold the Merlyn for them. But he didn’t get as much money as he had hoped because the car was in bits in a shed in Reading – as one anonymous and bemused would-be buyer recounted years later: “He tried to sell it to me, so I collected him in central London, drove him all the way down to Reading and, as we walked in, he said: ‘Oh, by the way, did I say it was disassembled?’ And there, on the floor, was a pile of bits and a chassis. I didn’t buy it.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The embarrassment factor

  The human gene that he lacked

  The story of James Hunt’s life can in many ways be summed up as the story of a human being born without the embarrassment gene. There is no question that Hunt was born without the capacity for it; in fact, he was never embarrassed by anything in life. It meant he could do anything; things other humans would not even contemplate. And it was all because he never knew or understood what it was to be embarrassed. In some ways, at its most extreme, it can be thought of as a mental defi
ciency. Certainly, if he had been born with the gene, then his life would have been somewhat smoother to say the least.

  Nowadays, most human conditions are chronicled and analysed ad nauseum. For instance, Hunt’s enormous libido is now called a ‘sex addiction’ but it was something he recognised in himself long before anyone coined the phrase. The lack of an embarrassment gene, however, has never been discussed or analysed, probably because most of the people born with the condition in the 21st century are already in jail. But, as Hunt amply demonstrated, if it is a mental condition, then there should be a treatment for it.

  But Hunt got away with being without this gene by the skin of his teeth. By some strange twist of luck (never judgment), he was never imprisoned – although there were a few times times he perhaps should have been. He certainly would have been had he lived thirty years later. There is no question that, in this century, Hunt never could have been world champion without that gene.

  Sarah Lomax, Hunt’s second wife, despite every indication to the contrary, was actually the person who understood Hunt’s character imperfections better than anyone else. She also passed on that understanding to her sons, Tom and Freddie. Freddie, in particular, understands precisely what his father was and wasn’t. As for Sarah, she reacts strongly to people who mistook the lack of embarrassment for arrogance: “There was no arrogance in James as I knew him. Maybe it came across as arrogance, but deep down it wasn’t that. It was just his manner or his reactions.” Admitting he was stubborn but never arrogant, she insists poignantly: “He was very humble inside – very.” That resonates with former Lotus team principal, Peter Collins, who was close to Hunt in his later years: “James was just a terribly decent man with certain defects he could not always control. I’d even go so far as to say he was one of the most genuinely decent men I ever met.” None of this of course resonates with what is printed next. But it does go some way to demonstrating just how disadvantaged it is in life to be born without an ‘embarrassment gene’.