Shunt

by Tom Rubython

  Discovering that Surtees had an old Surtees-Ford TS9B that he used as a reserve chassis, Horsley went down to the factory to take a look. Sure enough, Surtees removed the dust cover and revealed an immaculate TS9B. The TS9B was the 1972 chassis but broadly similar to the 1973 works car, the TS14A being driven that year by Mike Hailwood.

  The car hadn’t turned a wheel for four months but, after an hour of horse trading with a sceptical Surtees, he finally agreed to hire out the car for the weekend for US$15,000 all in. It included a rebuilt Cosworth engine complete with four mechanics. Surtees says it was a turnkey operation which included repainting the car in Hesketh’s simple red and white plain livery. Agreeing to the deal, Surtees practically had to pick himself up off the floor when Horsley produced a blank cheque signed by Hesketh. As Horsley was about to fill in the amount of £8,000, the sterling equivalent, Surtees prodded him with: “plus VAT”. “Oh,” said Horsley, and meekly added the extra UK£1,500. Surtees remembers: “Bubbles was always out to do a deal; it was our spare car. We had a floating car.” Surtees was right to insist on getting his money first, as Hesketh would later refuse to pay him for rebuilding the Formula Two Surtees TS15 when Hunt crashed. Surtees kept the rebuilt chassis and had the last laugh in 2008, 35 years later, when he sold it as one of Hunt’s ex chassis for approximately 30 times the rebuild cost for which Horsley had stiffed him.

  Surtees couldn’t understand the Hesketh set-up at all, and he particularly couldn’t understand James Hunt, as he says: “He was a likeable character, but I used to say: ‘Stand up, the real James’ because there were so many sides.”

  On Surtees’ advice, Hesketh ended up buying Firestone tyres on which to run the car, and Horsley began a relationship with the Firestone that would pay huge dividends over the next two years. Horsley discovered that Firestone’s construction design was particularly good, and it perfectly suited Hunt’s driving style. Tyre construction design rarely changed, although compounds often did, and, although the Goodyear compounds were often better because they could afford to spend more money on them, the Firestones of the day had superior construction. As Hunt recalled: “That car was a lot better than most people thought it was, and – at Brands Hatch, on Firestones – it was really very good.”

  The 1973 Race of Champions was open to F1 and Formula 5000 cars. While the Formula 5000 cars were less sophisticated than F1 cars, they were somewhat more powerful, and the established Formula One stars that competed were hard pressed to match their speeds.

  The Hesketh team arrived with its full complement of hangers-on, with Hesketh’s helicopter ferrying his friends back and forth from his home at Easton Neston. For one hanger-on, it was his very first experience of motor racing. David Gray worked at Collett Dickenson Pearce, London’s most creative advertising agency of the era, and he would become an important part of Hunt’s commercial future. Gray had a very useful purpose as a link to the agency world. He met Lord Hesketh via Bubbles Horsley’s uncle, John Wood, another hanger on. Gray remembers: “Woody became kind of obsessed with the whole thing, the whole racing thing, but I also became a hanger-on without a doubt. Before that, I had never been to a motor race in my life.”

  Gray says: “I loved it, and we had an extraordinary time. James became a great friend and I loved him dearly. He was irritating quite a lot of the time and also very headstrong. But he was incredibly able.” For Hesketh’s guests, it was one big party.

  The Hesketh team lost time in qualifying while setting up the car for Hunt, and he struggled to adapt to the power of Formula One, which was a big step up from F2. The throttle also kept sticking, which caused Hunt some hairy moments. He said later: “I had to spend the first half of the race getting used to its power and finding out about driving a Formula One car. If we had been able to run a full practice, then there might have been a shock result and we could have won.” It was no idle boast. The Surtees-Ford TS9B on its Firestones was very fast round Brands Hatch. Then came crisis. The team’s only Cosworth engine blew up and it looked certain Hunt wouldn’t be able to start the race. To solve the problem, Lord Hesketh adopted an unusual approach. He gathered the team members in a circle to pray to what Hesketh called the “great white chicken in the sky” to ask for an engine. Amazingly, the unorthodox approach worked. Max Mosley, who happened to be passing by, noticed the curious gathering. He remembers: “I came round the back of the Hesketh transporter and found them all sitting in a circle, and so I said to Hesketh: ‘What are you all doing?’ And he said: ‘We’re praying to the great chicken in the sky to give us another engine. We’ve only got one engine and it’s blown up.’ And I said: ‘Well, maybe the great chicken of Bicester can help you.’ So we all started laughing and we lent him an engine; it was the sort of thing one did in those days.”

  Astonished at Mosley’s gesture, Hunt became firm friends with him from that day on. He gave Mosley the nickname the ‘great white chicken of Bicester’ in recognition of the engine loan. In later life, he modified it to the ‘grand poulet.’ Mosley says: “Right to the end of his life, he called me that. If he walked in now, he’d say: ‘Oh, there’s the grand poulet.’ It was all very childish, but it kept us amused.”

  With his new engine, compliments of Mosley, Hunt eventually qualified 13th out of 29 cars in the mixed field of Formula One and Formula 5000 cars. The BRMs of Jean-Pierre Beltoise, Niki Lauda and Vern Schuppan took the first three places on the grid, with Jody Scheckter’s McLaren coming in fourth. It appeared that some F1 teams had been clever enough to modify their cars to match the lack of regulations for the race, while established stars such as Emerson Fittipaldi, Ronnie Peterson and Denny Hulme performed surprisingly slower.

  Hunt did not find it easy to adapt to the extra power and grip of a Formula One car, as he confessed to journalists at the time: “The car is driving me.”

  45,000 fans turned up on race day and everything came right for Hunt. The race marked the debut for the new McLaren-Ford M23 model driven by Denny Hulme, and Hunt finished just behind it in third place. Hunt was aided by the fact that all the faster cars, including the two Lotuses of Fittipaldi and Peterson, retired. The race was actually won by ex-F1 driver Peter Gethin in a Formula 5000 Chevron.

  The success at Brands Hatch took Lord Hesketh completely by surprise. He wasn’t used to any sort of success in motor sport and just couldn’t understand the ease of Formula One relative to the trials and tribulations he had undergone in Formula Two and Formula 3. As the light faded at Brands Hatch that evening and the celebrations continued, a light-headed Hesketh told Horsley to turn Hesketh racing into a full-time Formula One team.

  Hunt remembered: “Alexander was very encouraged and excited when we came third in the Race of Champions, our first Formula One race. His attitude was that we were doing pretty badly in Formula Two and, for very little additional cost, we could do badly in Formula One.”

  Hesketh said to Horsley: “Let’s go and mess about at the back of Formula One.”

  Hesketh set Horsley a target of the Monaco Grand Prix on 3rd June for the team’s Formula One debut. Horsley had two and a half months to get things together and Hesketh had provided him with a budget of US$100,000 for the year.

  Horsley concentrated on Formula One and, in the meantime, the rest of the team got on with its Formula Two programme, competing in four F2 races between then and Monaco.

  Horsley hadn’t been very impressed with the Surtees experience at Brands Hatch and wanted his team under his own control. He found John Surtees crusty and difficult to get on with, so he approached Mosley and told him he wanted to buy a car. Mosley, again, had great difficulty taking it seriously but he had observed what had gone on at Brands Hatch and instinct told him that it might turn out to be a serious enquiry. Anyway, he had a brand new March-Ford 731 sitting in the factory at Bicester looking for a customer, so he had little to lose and quoted Horsley a price.

  The 731 was an upgraded Formula Two chassis with a Ford-Cosworth DFV engine in the back. March had foun
d this combination extremely successful and had abandoned designing expensive, dedicated Formula One chassis. Horsley paid US$35,000 for the chassis. But then he needed a couple of engines, and that meant approaching Cosworth Engineering.

  When Horsley phoned Cosworth, however, he couldn’t get past the receptionist. Even the store’s manager, Jack Field, wouldn’t speak to him about buying DFVs. Field wouldn’t waste time on him. Cosworth was a very straightforward company and dealt in a very straightforward way. It had a price list and it didn’t give discounts or haggle. When it came up against a wheeler dealer character like Horsley it naturally bridled.

  When Horsley reported this back to Lord Hesketh, the Lord mistakenly thought that Keith Duckworth might be one of his tenants and told Horsley to go and “sort him out”. Duckworth, the brilliant engine designer, was by then a very wealthy man and had no need to rent a house on Hesketh’s estate.

  By then, Horsley was getting desperate and Cosworth simply would not speak to him. Without Cosworth engines, there was going to be no Formula One team. So Lord Hesketh decided to visit the Cosworth factory at St James Mill Road, in Northampton, which, as it happened, was about 15 minutes by car from Easton Neston.

  When Hesketh arrived at the Cosworth reception, he asked to speak to Cosworth director Bill Brown, who was also general manager. Brown’s office was upstairs on the mezzanine and his secretary, Valerie Given, buzzed him to say there was someone in reception who wanted to buy two DFV engines and was demanding to see him. But by that time, Hesketh had already mounted the stairs and was standing in Brown’s office, uninvited. Brown takes up the story: “One morning, a fat man appeared in my office without warning. ‘Who the hell are you?’ I asked. ‘I am Lord Hesketh’, was the reply. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I am Bill Brown. If you want to see me, go down and clear it with my secretary.’”

  Hesketh, not used to being spoken to in such a manner, did as he was told and went down the stairs and politely asked Valerie if he could have an appointment, and, as he was already there, please could it be now. Brown says: “He actually went down and came back up with Valerie, who said: ‘This is Lord Hesketh, he wants to buy some engines.’ From then on, everything went smoothly, and he bought his engines.”

  Brown sold him two new Ford-Cosworth engines for another US$30,000. Brown also arranged for one of Cosworth’s engine builders, an Irishman called Pat, to go and work for the team to look after the engines at the track.

  With a suitable truck and some spares, the whole package came to US$80,000. This left him US$15,000 to run the car for the season, after paying out the US$5,000 he had agreed to pay Hunt to drive for the team. He had also promised Hunt 45 per cent of any prize money he won, but, in truth, he didn’t expect to get any in the first year.

  Hesketh took a deep breath and wrote the cheque. He had the cash, some US$3 million in all: the world’s economies were booming all around him; his other business interests in London were doing well, at least on paper; and running a Formula One team was really very good value at this time – it was the era of motor racing before the technology and the costs ran out of control. When asked what his motivation was, Hesketh said: “A lot of people want to make a lot of money to store it away. I want to make a lot of money to be able to spend it. I like spending to create something which is entirely my own, and this is why I have the racing team.”

  Horsley recalls: “Formula One was relatively unsophisticated back then compared to now and there was quite good money to be made. Bernie Ecclestone was beginning to get better appearance money, better travel money and better prize money. And, of course, we were quite quickly running towards the front.”

  When the car and the two engines arrived at Easton Neston, Hunt was hit with the reality that he was going to be a Formula One driver after all. Finding it hard to cope, his confidence vanished. It seemed that although, in his heart of hearts, he may have always wanted to be a Formula One driver, he had never really thought he would make it. Now, he was scared stiff.

  Retreating from his London flat back to his parents’ house in Surrey, he tried to prepare for the race and to find some moral support. The nervous tension wore him down. He said: “I had gone home and stayed with my parents in order that I could become really fit before my first Grand Prix.” He would say later that he was “fit as a fiddle” otherwise.

  But this was not quite true. Five days before he left for Monte Carlo, Hunt started getting terrible headaches. The headaches were a legacy of the accident at Goodwood. He explained: “I’d gone on my head so many times that my neck muscles had sort of seized up from the abuse and the blood supply was restricted. I had been having blinding headaches four or five days a week.”

  He eventually sought treatment and physiotherapy cured the problem, but he then became reluctant to go to the doctors again for fear that he would be ruled unfit to race. He admitted: “I was frightened to go and get anything done because I thought there might be something seriously wrong and, in truth, I was very worried about my fitness at Monaco.”

  Meanwhile, the opposite experience was being had by the 23-year-old Lord Hesketh, who was taking it all in his stride and looking forward to the Monaco Grand Prix, where he was in charge of the social arrangements. His social budget was far bigger than Horsley’s; in fact, it was pretty much unlimited, and restricted only by the time he had available to spend. He rented a 162-foot yacht called ‘The Southern Breeze’, which had originally been owned by John Bloom, the washing machine tycoon who had founded Rolls-Razor. Bloom had sold the yacht when his empire collapsed in the late sixties.

  Occupied with the social arrangements, Hesketh wasn’t at all worried about challenging the big names of Formula One. Not so the other way around, however. The Formula One world was aghast at Hesketh’s entry; the Race of Champions was one thing, but entering the Monaco Grand Prix was quite another. They regarded Hesketh as an upper-class hooray who had no business being in Formula One. There was also the issue of Hunt. With his reputation preceding him, Hunt was labelled by one team principal, who had experienced his antics on Formula 3, as an “overbearing upper-class lout.” To most people in Formula One, he was ‘Hunt the Shunt.’ Universally disliked, Hunt’s arrival in Formula One arm-in-arm with Alexander Hesketh didn’t serve to increase his popularity.

  1973 was the last year Jackie Stewart competed in Formula One. Stewart was arguably the most influential driver ever to race, and a pivotal driver in the history of motor sport. He ushered the sport into the modern era and then quickly retired at the top of his game.

  Stewart espoused the importance of preparation. He advocated no smoking, no drinking and no sex in the four or five days before a race. Stewart had established the textbook image of the ideal racing driver. But Hunt was the antithesis of this, positively encouraging smoking, drinking and sex the night before a race; in fact, sometimes five minutes before a race. On more than one occasion, he would have sex with a woman in an empty pit garage just minutes before getting into his cockpit – such was the case at the world championship decider in Mount Fuji in 1976.

  To his credit, Jackie Stewart never judged Hunt, but he did look askew at his antics and shrug his shoulders in disbelief. Even today, Stewart is bemused by what Hunt got up to, but refuses to judge him. He says simply: “James was James”, and admits that even he enjoyed indulging in the Hesketh hospitality after the race. In fact, Stewart went on to become great friends with Alexander Hesketh at the end of his career.

  Although Hesketh’s spending on the team was to be dwarfed by his spending on entertainment, this was not so unusual at the time. Most sponsors spent more on hospitality than on racing. Philip Morris’s Marlboro hospitality budget, for instance, was three times the amount it spent sponsoring its teams and drivers.

  But Hesketh introduced excess to Formula One, as Mosley remembers: “Hesketh would start the day with a glass of champagne to settle his stomach at the beginning of the morning; and on it went.”

  As well as the yacht bobbing in t
he harbor, Hesketh flew his Bell Jet Ranger helicopter down to Monte Carlo while his chauffeur drove his Rolls-Royce down to the principality. Hunt drove down in Hesketh’s white Porsche Carrera RS and another friend rode his Suzuki superbike across France.

  Helicopters were a rarity in Formula One in those days, and the American-built Bell Jet Ranger II was brand-spanking new and had cost close to US$600,000. A makeshift helipad was set up next to Monte Carlo’s swimming pool near where the yacht was moored. At night, Lord Hesketh flew the helicopter back to Nice airport so that it would be ready to begin ferrying guests coming in on the first flight the next morning. He then drove back to Monaco in his Rolls-Royce as dusk fell.

  The Southern Breeze was one of the biggest private yachts of its day, and it provided a base for the day-long parties indulged in by Lord Hesketh’s entourage. The Rolls-Royce was continually ferrying Hesketh’s guests from Nice airport, and the helicopter was in and out of the Monte Carlo heliport, transporting his guests back and forth to private villas along the coast.

  As the weekend progressed, the pile of empty champagne bottles built up on the quay, and the principality’s dust trucks put on an extra lorry to cope.

  The only cloud came when the Lord discovered that the yacht next door, chartered by Philip Morris, owners of the Marlboro cigarette brand, was 20 feet longer than his. He told Pete Lyons, the American journalist who was covering Formula One for Autosport magazine: “Well, but you can see The Southern Breeze is wider abeam and our guests have a much more comfortable footing in rough seas. And besides, there’s our helicopter, and not even those Marlboro people have anything like that.”

  In the pit lane, the all-white pinstriped March-Ford 731 looked undeniably impressive. Horsley had hired Dr Harvey Postlethwaite to act as the team’s chief engineer. Postlethwaite was a designer at March and had been attracted by the notion of working for a race team. Hesketh’s was the first offer he received.