by Tom Rubython
So the Brazilian Grand Prix became the opening race of the season. It was held as usual at the Interlagos track, just outside São Paulo, over the weekend of the 23rd to 25th January. Brazil had been the scene of much hedonism for Hunt in 1973 and 1974, in the Hesketh days when money flowed easily. Now, in 1976, it was different – albeit not too different.
A few days before the race, Hunt took Max Mosley out on the town. He roped him into a Marlboro reception he was attending for John Hogan. Hunt knew Mosley would lighten the evening, and they set off together across São Paulo. Mosley remembers: “It was a Marlboro party and James suggested we go together. We also had with us, as one did, a driver. James said to me: ‘Do you mind if I stop at one of my friends’ on the way?’ And I said: ‘No, not at all.’ So we stopped at this very posh block of flats and went up to the top floor. There was this amazing flat with an amazing view, and a very nice man. We all sat down and the nice man got out a piece of highly polished stone and laid out on it three lines of white powder. James turned to me and said: ‘You don’t want yours, Max, do you?’ And he did both of them. We then went happily on to the party.”
Recalling other typical goings-on in his time spent with Hunt, Mosley adds: “I mean, he also was just full on into women. Good for him.” But his antics in 1976 were a mere shadow of what had gone on in the Hesketh days in São Paulo.
Although McLaren was not in the same position as Lotus, and even with the end of the global recession in sight, money was still very tight, as Teddy Mayer was always reminding people. The recession had seriously affected McLaren and curtailed the lavish spending of the Fittipaldi era. But Mayer had gone too far with his economising and it was affecting the team’s performance.
Although the McLaren team had a reputation for engineering excellence, Hunt found it wasn’t so in his experience. In fact, the lack of preparedness couldn’t have been greater at the first race. There had been effectively no winter testing except for the few days spent at Silverstone in the wet. Although Ken Tyrrell and Jackie Stewart had pioneered hot weather winter testing in South Africa at the Kyalami racetrack back in 1968, Mayer was too parsimonious to sanction the money needed for a winter testing programme.
Mayer was counting the pennies and it was the least Hunt could have expected. Two weeks in Kyalami, at a cost of US$10,000, would have made all the difference to the opening races of the season. But Hunt was not even able to go to Paul Ricard in the south of France to test.
Mayer and Alastair Caldwell believed that Emerson Fittipaldi had developed the car as far as it could go and they didn’t think a winter testing programme was necessary. And it was true, by 1976, the M23 was a beautifully-sorted car. Fittipaldi had been recognised as a meticulous, almost workaholic, test driver and he had left Hunt with a developed car with highly-sophisticated suspension.
But Hunt had plenty of reasons to be angry. As number one driver, it was not unreasonable for him to expect McLaren to build him a brand new chassis for the new season, to suit his physical characteristics. Instead, they gave him an old Fittipaldi chassis which had been built in 1975. Hunt was expected to drive the M23/8/2 chassis and to keep it for the rest of the season. Mayer refused to authorise the building of a new chassis on the grounds of cost. Mayer also expected to be introducing a new model.
Hunt was shocked; meticulous attention to detail had always been a McLaren hallmark. Hunt remembered: “I got to Interlagos and it was the first time I had driven the car in any sort of anger, certainly on a dry track, and Friday’s qualifying practice was totally aborted.”
It was clear that the car was too small for Hunt and the seat fitting at the factory had been less than perfect. Hunt was tall while Fittipaldi was tiny, and the fitting had been done in a static car. At racing speeds, it was very different. Hunt found the McLaren car “undriveable.” His feet were uncomfortable on the pedals, his knees were too high in the cockpit and his elbows didn’t clear the sides of the cockpit. He also complained that the steering was heavy. He said: “The cockpit was all wrong. I literally couldn’t drive the car. I was in great physical discomfort.”
It was obvious that a new chassis should have been built, and Hunt told anyone who would listen that the McLaren team under Mayer was a “rudderless ship”, adding: “It didn’t have any direction.” Hunt famously told Mayer: “I’ll tell you Teddy, and I’ve told you before, you don’t know anything about motor racing whatsoever. Go and buy a new briefcase.”
Hunt continued to be shocked by the unreadiness of the team and the sheer tightfistedness of Mayer; it was not at all what he had been expecting.
Hunt had expected a very competitive car from the get-go. The McLaren Ford M23 had been the outstanding car of the 1970s, competitive straight from the day it was introduced in 1973 and subsequently driven to the world championship by Emerson Fittipaldi in 1974. The car was straightforward and uncomplicated, and seemed to have unlimited development potential. Its designer Gordon Coppuck’s pedigree was unmatched. He had produced the legendary M8 series of McLaren Can-Am cars, arguably the most successful car in motor racing history, dominating the American sports car series for well on five years and winning virtually every race held.
Coppuck was the first of a new breed of race car designers. He had joined McLaren from the National Gas Turbine Establishment and replaced Robin Herd as McLaren chief designer in 1968. His M23 car was successful most of all because it was kept right down to the weight limit throughout its life. It also had some clever underfloor jiggery-pokery that created extra downforce, although the team never really understood why. Coppuck had, purely by accident, designed a very clever shape underneath the car that was delivering an early version of ground effects. It was the reason the M23 was so good on slow corners at fast circuits. Alastair Caldwell would later boast that M23 was the first ‘ground effects’ car in Formula One. Years later John Hogan recalled: “The M23 did have a lot of plastic stuff underneath. But McLaren or Alastair didn’t understand it.”
One innovation for which Caldwell could claim credit was the new six-speed gearbox for 1976. Gearbox design had been a specialty of McLaren’s ever since the days of Bruce McLaren. Caldwell had overseen the development of the new unit during the winter. It gave McLaren an extra gear, one more than any other team. The Ferrari flat 12 engine was generally perceived to be more powerful than the Ford Cosworth V8 and the extra gear at the top of the range was McLaren’s answer to getting more speed on the straight.
Hunt also complained that the team was treating his teammate Jochen Mass as the number one driver; a role he thought he had signed up for. Hunt had history with Mass in Formula 3 from 1972 when Mass had taken over his March works drive, and Hunt now sensed that history was repeating itself.
Mass was born in Munich. He was a year older than Hunt but a far less experienced driver. He started driving competitively at the age of 21, after a career in the German merchant navy. He was a quiet, unassuming man, who spent most of his time sailing in the south of France. But after getting to know each other, the two drivers formed a close bond, as Mass said later: “As teammates, basically we got along fine. It was a very happy team.”
Hunt was genuinely surprised to find that, in so many ways, McLaren was inferior to Hesketh, and that Horsley had been a much more rounded manager than Caldwell. Hunt explained: “With Hesketh, we used to spend a lot of time examining ourselves. Bubbles used to exercise tremendous discipline.”
He was scathing about McLaren’s approach to team discipline. He had expected a much harsher regime, as he said: “McLaren don’t give me any discipline at all. They let me do exactly what I want to do; they don’t take any notice of me.” Hunt was particularly upset about McLaren’s casual attitude to de-briefs as he said: “The debriefing sessions we have at McLaren aren’t the same sort of thing at all. We discuss something if we feel like it. But (here) if nobody wants to talk, we don’t… I would actually get into trouble with Bubbles if I talked to anybody else after a practice and before I had sat dow
n he would have wrung the truth from me and we would all have had a big post-mortem.”
Mayer and Caldwell were forced to defend themselves against Hunt’s accusation, and Mayer said: “Possibly, Hunt’s initial shortcomings were that he didn’t like taking decisions. He had been in a team where all the decisions were taken for him; where Bubbles Horsley told him exactly what to do all the time. I think that it’s better for a driver to learn to take his own decisions because he has more information available to him, and this is where a more mature driver will ultimately do better.” Caldwell added: “As team manager, I want to be able to contribute to the choice of tyre or choice of settings on the car, but ultimately the driver has got the say, and I think initially James wanted us to do that.”
In fact, Hunt came close to walking out of the team at the first race when he discovered that McLaren was not the nirvana he had expected it to be. But luckily, John Hogan was at hand to soothe his frayed nerves. Privately, Hogan was also angry with Mayer. Marlboro’s budget was generous by the standards of the day – the biggest in the paddock – and Marlboro expected the money to be spent making the car as competitive as possible. Hogan wasn’t at all enamoured with the penny-pinching he was witnessing.
But Mayer and Caldwell and the team were being judged too harshly. It later emerged that McLaren had spent the money developing a new car: the M26 for the 1976 season. It had never expected Hunt to race the M23. But the new M26 proved substantially slower than the M23, so its debut was aborted and the car quietly forgotten.
As the situation in Brazil developed, Hogan advised Hunt to quieten down, bide his time and to air his grievances back in Europe when the opportunity presented itself. Hunt, who had always valued Hogan’s counsel ever since the Australian first began advising him in 1971, heeded his guidance. But when Teddy Mayer heard what Hunt had been saying about his team, there was a furious row. Once again, it was Hogan who intervened; this time in order to soothe Mayer. Things finally came to a head in first qualifying on Friday, when Hunt came back into the pits with a blistered thumb as a result of the heavy steering and waved it at Mayer. Caldwell, who had taken Mayer’s side of the argument, realised then that Hunt had a point.
It was a pivotal moment: Hunt could either walk away from the team at the first race or McLaren could start listening to him. Caldwell decided to listen and set to work lightening the steering and modifying the cockpit surround to suit Hunt’s, rather than Fittipaldi’s, body shape.
The results were immediately obvious. Hunt managed to set the seventh-quickest time in the first session, with Mass fourth and Lauda fastest. The following day, as final qualifying approached, Hunt’s engine blew in the morning session. The engine change didn’t go as planned and the final qualifying hour began with the back of the car still in bits.
As the minutes ticked by, Hunt became increasingly angry with Mayer interfering with the set-up he wanted on the car. Screaming at Mayer to get out of his way, Hunt told him he was working on the suspension settings as best he could to suit the conditions. But Mayer told him he would have to go out with the car in the same spec in which the last session had ended. Hunt recalled: “I was going out with twenty minutes left on a five-mile track. I was guessing the settings and Mayer told me: ‘You can’t do that.’ I told him I was driving the bloody thing. I wasn’t going to be pushed around when I knew what I wanted.” The quarrel took place in full view of the pit lane, in front of mechanics astonished to hear their boss being addressed in such a manner. They had never seen anything like it.
As soon as the car was ready, Hunt knew he was in trouble and likely to be sacked if he qualified behind Mass, so he couldn’t have been more motivated to succeed. As he left the pit lane for his warm-up lap, there were 20 minutes left in the session. In an extraordinary few minutes, Hunt landed pole on his first flying lap with a guessed set-up and a newly-rebuilt Cosworth engine. He said: “It was my first-ever pole, which I was rather pleased about. And it impressed the boys. After that, I was very much number one.”
The lap was arguably the most important of Hunt’s career, and Caldwell and the mechanics were suddenly in awe of their new driver. In that five minute window, Hunt had established undoubted number one status, ensuring that Mayer would not challenge him again.
Ruminating that life could not get much better than this, Hunt felt it was one of the greatest days in his motor sport career. All of his nemeses, Mayer, Niki Lauda, Fittipaldi and Mass, had been vanquished at one stroke.
The pole position was made even sweeter by the fact that he was in Brazil, Fittipaldi’s home country, driving Fittipaldi’s old car. And it was even sweeter still by the fact that he had blown away Niki Lauda in his first race in a works car.
As for Mayer, he couldn’t believe what he had just seen, and stood in front of the pits open-mouthed as Hunt rolled back in gesticulating wildly at him. Never before had he witnessed such amazing bravado and experienced such a conflict of emotions within a 20-minute time frame. Having been prepared to sack Hunt the minute he stepped out of the cockpit, Mayer was now ecstatic and embraced his number one driver with as much vigour and passion as he had ever shown towards another man.
But deep inside, Mayer was even more excited that Fittipaldi’s nose had been rubbed in it. The resentment at Fittipaldi’s abrupt departure had been gnawing away at Mayer. Hunt recalled: “In front of the Brazilian crowd, it was almost more than Mayer could take. It was not what McLaren had been used to with Emerson. But it was important psychologically because we immediately had each other’s respect.”
Not everyone was happy. Lauda was clearly miffed that Hunt had taken pole away from him, and the following day the two men sat on the front row of the grid glaring at each other. It was a widely held myth that the two were close friends and, although that was true later in life, they were fierce rivals in 1976 and there was much antipathy under the surface of their relationship.
Jochen Mass was also destroyed by Hunt’s pole performance. He began the race believing he would easily out-qualify Hunt and be crowned the team’s undoubted number one. So too had Mayer and Caldwell.
And Emerson Fittipaldi was even more crestfallen as Hunt put his car on pole in front of his Brazilian fans.
None of what had happened in those five minutes was in the script. It was the most important five minutes of Hunt’s life, before, then and afterwards. Oddly enough, his greatest success was barely reported in the following day’s British newspapers. Only one national newspaper had even bothered to send a representative. Of all the editors, only the Sunday Times’ Harold Evans had recognised the importance of Hunt’s McLaren debut and sent its reporter Keith Botsford out to São Paulo to report on it.
But by race day the next morning, Hunt found he was very nervous about being on the Interlagos pole. He was vomiting more than usual – caused by a combination of extreme nervousness and the amount of cocaine, alcohol and nicotine circulating in his body. Although he had completely refrained in the few days before the race, it was all still there in his bloodstream.
Hunt was particularly frightened of burning his clutch on the start line and feared he would make a poor start and let Lauda go off. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy and that is exactly what happened. Lauda went off into the lead, never to be seen again. Hunt said: “I erred on the side of safety; one thing I didn’t want was to not get to the first corner at all.”
Hunt was also passed by Lauda’s Ferrari teammate, Clay Regazzoni. In the end, it didn’t much matter as his Cosworth engine let him down once more. One of the eight fuel injector trumpets physically fell off and one of the cylinders stopped firing altogether. The engine would still have taken him through to the finish if it hadn’t been for the trumpet moving around and eventually dropping into the throttle slides. Hunt had a frightening moment when the throttle jammed wide open and threw him into the catch fencing at high speed. But he managed to put the car into a spin and went into the fencing backwards.
Catch fencing, widely used
in that era of Formula One, had many faults; but that day, it probably saved Hunt’s life. That, coupled with his skill in spinning the car around, prevented what would have been a major accident. The manoeuvre had been so effective that Hunt was able to get his car out of the fencing with the engine still running, but the oil coolers had been ripped off and he dared drive no further.
Afterwards, Hunt was brutally honest about his race debut: “I wasn’t quite quick enough; I was about five seconds behind Niki when I had trouble. A trumpet fell off and the engine started misfiring and then, not content with that, it jumped down the throttle slides which stuck it open in the middle of a great long corner. I wasn’t man enough to handle that, even though it was only on seven cylinders.”
Lauda easily went on to win, and his predecessor Emerson Fittipaldi brought his dire Copersucar car in 13th in front of some very disappointed fans. Jochen Mass finished sixth.
After all the drama of qualifying, Hunt was relieved when the race was over, saying: “Fortunately we got it all together, and I think everyone – particularly Teddy, John and me – breathed a big sigh of relief.” Alastair Caldwell, who had favoured Jackie Ickx to replace Fittipaldi, was the most impressed and declared how glad he was to have Hunt in the team. It was high praise from the man who had once said of Hunt in 1974, during his days at Hesketh: “I was glad he didn’t drive for me.”
For all his faults, Caldwell was said to be one of the main reasons for McLaren’s success. He was a rough-hewn, capable New Zealand-raised Brit, steeped in motor racing. He had come to Britain in 1967, after his brother Bill had been killed in a motor racing crash. Like most New Zealand motor racing exiles, he went to work for fellow kiwi Bruce McLaren. But his rise was blighted by the fact that he didn’t get on with Mayer, who was McLaren’s business partner at the time. In truth, Mayer didn’t rate him. But when McLaren was killed in 1970, Mayer softened his attitude upon becoming the boss and, four years later, made Caldwell manager of the Formula One team.