Shunt

by Tom Rubython

  But the Torneo series became better known for the social high jinks led by Hunt rather than the racing. Lord Hesketh had provided the Hunt and Horsley with generous expenses to have a good time. The series was being followed by two well-known British journalists, Ian Phillips and Alan Henry, who witnessed Hunt’s escapades at the time and remain impressed by them even to this day. Hunt allegedly made such a nuisance of himself, and his behaviour was so bad, that the organisers considered asking him to return to Britain. Often spending all night drinking and, on more than one occasion, climbing straight into his race car the next day without having gone to bed, Hunt’s hell-raising attracted the attention even of the police. He was kept out of jail only after much pleading from the organisers. It was “booze and birds all the way”, as Alan Henry remembers it: “Certainly we drank a lot and partied a lot in Brazil.” That was something of an understatement, but Henry remembers the following incident particularly well. The incident became part of motor racing folklore and was to be retold many times. It started when Hunt’s antics deeply offended one journalist who was also part of the trip. Her name was Priscilla Phipps, wife of the well-known photographer, David Phipps. She was also a well-known author, writing under the pseudonym of Elizabeth Hayward.

  Hayward, a not unattractive woman who also liked to drink, enjoyed the company of motor racing people and had enjoyed brief affairs with such notables as Jack Brabham, Denny Hulme and Colin Chapman on previous trips.

  The whole of the British group attending the series had gathered for dinner at the hotel. Witnessing Hayward becoming increasingly drunk, Hunt bet Horsley US$100 that he couldn’t have his way with her that evening. Horsley took the bet and succeeded. In order to check on the status of his wager, Hunt decided to bang loudly on Horsley’s hotel room later that night – while Horsley and Hayward were in the middle of their lovemaking. When Horsley answered the door, Hunt entered the room in front of a shocked Hayward, who was lying naked on the bed. He proceeded to tell her about the bet and paid Horsley his winnings in front of her. Hayward, who was naturally extremely distraught, screamed at Hunt the memorable line: “My husband and I will ensure that you never, ever get into Formula One.”

  The outburst was witnessed by many of the people on the trip, who, as it turned it, had followed Hunt up the stairs to Horsley’s room. Luckily, none of them could remember much about it the next morning and it was not mentioned again on the trip. There were many more similar antics to follow. So much so that the situation in the Brazilian hotel eventually got completely out of hand, with girls being shuttled in and out of rooms as if on conveyor belts, and furniture being thrown out of the windows onto the street, amidst other high jinks.

  The hotel managers were at their wits’ end but were in a dilemma as they did not want their guests arrested before they had paid the bill. After all, they had been there for six weeks and the bill was pretty big.

  But the real trouble started when some mechanics, aided and abetted by Hunt, stole the number plates from a yellow Ferrari Dino 246 parked outside the hotel. It initiated a chain of events which led eventually to a well-known British journalist being arrested and deported.

  Years later, Ian Phillips, who was not at all involved in the pranks, vividly described how he was deported from Brazil in 1972 when he took the rap for Hunt: “All hell had broken loose while I had been out. James had been on his balcony emptying waste baskets full of water over the other hotel guests coming in and some mechanics had been around writing anti-Brazilian slogans on the guest’s breakfast cards, hanging outside their doors.”

  The hotel management decided enough was enough and for some reason made an example of Phillips.

  Half an hour after he had gone to bed, six policemen burst into his hotel room and arrested him. He says: “It was always me that opened the door to the porter, it was always me that got caught for stuff that famous racing drivers were up to. Eventually, I was the one thrown into jail and deported. The British consul had to come get me out. I got blamed for everything.”

  Phillips had trouble denying his role in a litany of incidents in a police report that ran to many sheets of A4 paper. Even São Paulo’s chief of police, who was now personally handling the ‘situation’, was doubtful that one man could have caused so much mayhem in such a short space of time. Phillips says now: “I couldn’t deny that I was there and involved, and to get everybody else off the hook I had to take the rap.” He eventually got a letter of apology from the Brazilian police over his treatment, but, despite that, São Paulo remains one of his favourite cities in the world.

  As for Hunt, he was eventually poured into an aeroplane to go home and he reportedly slept the whole way back. Hunt made a lot of friends during those three weeks in São Paulo; friends that would endure for the whole of his career and to whom he would return time and again.

  As the year ended, anyone looking at Hunt’s race statistics would not have been impressed. For the record, Hunt was placed 17th with only five points in the 1972 European Formula Two Championship. In the John Player British Formula Two Championship, he was sixth with only eight points. Officially, he was sixth in the Tourneo rankings on five points.

  Back in England for the 1973 season, Horsley decided to buy a new Surtees TS15. Mike Hailwood had won the Formula Two Championship the previous year in a Surtees, and Horsley believed it was a better bet than a March. John Surtees had set up his own factory making racing cars when he retired from top line Formula One. Surtees, the only man to have won the world championship on both four and two wheels (as a motorcyclist), also ran his own Formula One team from a factory in Edenbridge, Kent.

  The decision was made purely on the basis of what had been the most successful car the previous year. And, as everyone in motor racing knows, that is never the best way to make such a decision.

  On paper, however, it looked like a good choice. Surtees sold Horsley a brand new TS15 chassis for US$12,000, and Horsley paid another US$5,000 for two Ford-Cosworth BDA engines.

  The first race the team contested was the first round of the British F2 championship at Mallory Park, Leicestershire, on 11th March. The circuit was an hour’s drive from Easton Neston. Lord Hesketh decided to have a party weekend and used a Bell Ranger helicopter and Rolls-Royce to ferry his guests to the circuit. He even brought his butler from Easton Neston to serve drinks.

  No one was used to this sort of extravagance, not even Hunt. But he took it in his stride, saying: “They were a jolly nice crowd and, after the race, when it was time to stop work, I was able to join the party.” In the race, Hunt retired on lap 21 when a wheel fell off the car, but he was still classified 15th. The car suffered from a lack of straight line speed and Horsley and the mechanics were unhappy with the TS15’s aerodynamics, a disappointment with which Hunt concurred. So Horsley decided to hire the old Goodwood circuit for a test session to see what they could do about it.

  The solution was both highly simplistic and highly dangerous. They gradually flattened the wings to give less downforce and, as they did so, the car became faster and faster.

  But such changes could be very dangerous when made by people who did not know what they were doing. Horsley seemed completely oblivious to what had happened at the circuit only three years earlier. In June 1970, Bruce McLaren’s rear wing had broken on his Can-Am sports car, whereupon he had lost control, hit a marshal’s post and been killed.

  That day, Horsley seemed flat out determined to kill Hunt in similar circumstances when he finally removed the front and rear wings from the car completely and sent Hunt out. The car was certainly faster, but, without any downforce, it became increasingly unstable and Hunt struggled to keep it on the track. Suddenly and without warning, he felt the front wheels leave the ground. For the mechanics in the pits, the first indication that something was wrong was the complete silence as the engine came to a stop. It was eerily reminiscent of what had happened to Bruce McLaren.

  Horsley couldn’t see Hunt anywhere on the track. Turning to h
is two mechanics, he said rather gormlessly: “Where’s he gone?”

  The situation was serious. The Surtees had taken off at high speed and flown right over an earth bank and landed upside down. Horsley jumped into his road car and drive round the track at high speed looking for the Surtees.

  He eventually found the car on its back, but there was no sign of Hunt. He was trapped somewhere in the car, and it was only by chance that the tank had been almost empty and the car hadn’t caught fire. As there were no marshals around, Horsley didn’t know what to do. Knocking on the side of the chassis to see if there was a response, Horsley heard Hunt swearing at him, telling him to get him out before there was a fire. He eventually managed to turn the car over and Hunt emerged to throw more abuse at the hapless team manager.

  At any other time and in any other place, it could have been catastrophic; but Hunt climbed out of the car almost completely unhurt bar a sore neck. The car was wrecked and had to be returned to the Surtees factory at Edenbridge for a complete rebuild.

  John Surtees was not impressed when he heard what had happened. Branding the team as irresponsible, he reminded them of the consequences for him if a driver was killed in a Surtees car. The incident and the cavalier behaviour remain etched in Surtees’ memory and, unsurprisingly, he does not look back on Hesketh or the crew favourably, saying: “There are things you want to remember in life and things you don’t. And Hesketh is one you don’t want to remember.” Surtees told Horsley never again to remove the wings – with some choice language.

  The rebuilt car, with wings firmly in place, was brought to Germany for the first race of the European Formula Two season at Hockenheim on 8th April. Hesketh hired three chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz s-class limousines to transport the entourage of friends he had brought with him.

  The race was a disaster for the team when the fuel pump failed in qualifying and then again on the warm-up lap of the race. A facetious Horsley gave an extraordinary post-race interview to a German journalist where he blamed a flying buzzard for the retirement. The journalist printed the story verbatim, appearing to take Horsley entirely seriously.

  The next race was at Thruxton in Hampshire on 23rd April for the British series. This time, Hunt finished the race in tenth place. The team returned to Germany and Nürburgring on 29th April, when he retired again.

  Between the Nürburgring and Pau races, Hunt spent a few days off in Barcelona with Ian Phillips. Phillips, then a journalist on Autosport magazine, used to travel with Hunt across Europe in a Ford Granada estate car to save money. In Barcelona, the two men slept on the beach during the day after having spent the entire previous evening in nightclubs.

  Phillips remembers Hunt setting up a record player in the back of the Granada, recalling: “The trick was to drive as quickly but as tidily as possible so that the needle didn’t jump off the LP record. James didn’t regard this as unusual; it was just to keep us amused.” In fact, Hunt drove very smoothly and the needle hardly ever left the record.

  Phillips was also amused by Hunt’s habits as a passenger, saying: “If you drove anywhere with him on a long journey, his brain was like a calculator: average speed, fuel consumption, this, that and the other. Most people would sit in the back and go to sleep, but not him. His brain was whirring, whirring, whirring all the time.”

  The race at Pau on the weekend of 5th and 6th May was a disaster. Hesketh broke a bone in his foot pushing the car, and then Hunt wrote off the car in qualifying as Phillips remembers: “At Pau, he broke his foot. It wasn’t a serious injury, but enough to stop him racing that weekend. He had it in plaster.”

  Self-evidently, a car that couldn’t be repaired would not be able to start, so Hunt found other interests to pursue. Hooking up with a local beauty queen that evening, Hunt wasn’t seen again until the team was back in England.

  The car was again sent to the Surtees factory in Edenbridge to be repaired, but this time it never came out. It didn’t leave the factory again for 35 years. For reasons best known to himself, Horsley refused to pay the repair bill. Hesketh Racing no longer needed the car, as Hunt had driven his last race in Formula Two. The repaired chassis is now in the Barber Museum in California.

  Formula Two had been a very unpleasant experience in 1973, and it was all over by the end of April, as Horsley said: “We actually managed to make a bit of a mess. We chose the wrong car for the 1973 season. We did everything that you shouldn’t do.”

  At least he was honest.

  After the fiasco, no sane man would give Hunt or Horsley a job nor, indeed, have either of them anywhere near a racing team. But Hesketh saw it all rather differently. He was about to put the two of them in charge of a Formula One team.

  But one man who did view Hunt’s ascent to Formula One favorably was John Webb. Despite all of Hunt’s shenanigans over the past three seasons, somewhere he saw some good in Hunt – although he told friends he was not sure where.

  CHAPTER 15

  Finally Formula One Beckons 1973

  Lord Hesketh applies his own logic

  Lord Hesketh’s decision to enter Formula One was based on a simple premise that appeared to have escaped everyone else involved in Formula Two in 1973. He had worked out that the budgets for a Formula Two team were approximately the same as for Formula One, and he couldn’t understand why all the F2 teams weren’t competing in F1. In business terms, it was perfectly rational. Upon making the discovery, his next move was fairly obvious. Rather than playing around at the back of Formula Two races, he reasoned, he might as well be running Formula One races for the same money. James Hunt explained it thus: “Alexander suddenly took the rather intelligent view, we all thought, that we might as well do Formula One; his philosophy, very simple, really, being that: ‘If we’re going to mess around at the back, making fools of ourselves, let’s do it in the real thing.’”

  The team had had a disastrous start in Formula Two in 1973, writing off its Surtees chassis in a foolhardy aerodynamics experiment at Goodwood during testing. With nothing to lose, therefore, Hesketh became a big believer in the philosophy of “failing upwards.”

  The truth was that Formula One had become a relatively inexpensive sport in which to participate. The reason was simple: most of the cars were powered by the ubiquitous 3-litre Ford-Cosworth V8 engine.

  The engine cost UK£7,500 to buy brand new – the same price it had cost in 1968. High inflation in the years since then had made the engine incredibly cheap. And, as the British currency deteriorated, the dollar price of the engine dropped dramatically.

  The reason for that was even simpler. Keith Duckworth and Mike Costin, who owned Cosworth Engineering, were engineers and not business men. They had a profit target of 15 per cent of turnover and they priced the engines accordingly. They charged only UK£3,500 for rebuilds, and a rebuilt engine from Cosworth was effectively the equivalent of a brand new engine. They easily could have charged double or treble. As it stood, Hesketh’s total engine bill for its first season of eight races was less than UK£25,000. The low cost and high quality of the engines completely transformed the economics of running a Formula One team.

  To Hesketh’s further astonishment, it soon became clear that his team was more successful in Formula One than it ever had been in Formula Two. Despite the bizarre results, logic dictated that if the team was more comfortable competing in F1, it should quickly move into that.

  Hesketh, like everyone else, had been overawed by Formula One but found the difficulty of competing in the category to be a complete myth. As this became common knowledge, Formula Two eventually came to an end. In fact, it was the main reason why the Formula One grid became so oversubscribed in the mid seventies; and essentially it was all Hesketh’s fault: he had shown the way.

  But Hesketh, not quite believing his own theory, decided first to test it out. He told Bubbles Horsley to rent a car and engine so they could contest the upcoming Formula One Race of Champions on 17th March. It was a non-championship Formula One race that was held ev
ery year at Brands Hatch in the spring.

  In a press release, Hesketh announced the foray to the Race of Champions as “an exploratory programme prior to embarking on a full Formula One season in 1974.” Sounding rather grand, his news was met with some scepticism, as Gerald Donaldson recounted: “There was amazement at the arrogance and presumption of Hesketh Racing, owned by a zany playboy peer and managed by a failed Formula 3 driver named Bubbles, whose ignorance of the finer points of the sport was confirmed by the choice of driver.”

  Jackie Stewart, who was a close friend of Hesketh’s, was also surprised. He recalls: “Alexander himself was an entertainingly eccentric man, and he still is for that matter, but I thought it was a bit speculative, to say the least, when he announced he was grooming James to be a future champion.” Stewart added: “The whole thing seemed to be too outlandish to be a serious consideration for the future.”

  Soon after the announcement that he was to become an F1 driver, Hunt broke his arm in some high jinks at a country house weekend. He explained: “I was down in the country having lunch, then started playing silly games on the lawn afterwards, like they do in the country, and just fell over.” Luckily for Hunt, Hesketh remained resolutely determined to proceed.

  Horsley, a consummate wheeler-dealer, was given a tiny budget to find a competitive chassis, engine and some mechanics to run it for a weekend. He tried March, which laughed at his audacity. Max Mosley just didn’t take him seriously when he floated the idea of Formula One. In fact, Horsley had a real problem being taken seriously by anyone when he told them he was entering Formula One, especially people who knew him from his Dastle Formula 3 days. So, Horsley was forced to go to John Surtees, who did at least agree to discuss it.