Shunt

by Tom Rubython

  So it was a still very angry James Hunt who flew back to Britain to take part in the non-championship Silverstone International Trophy Formula One race. He duly won it in style. In a display of driving perfection, he completely dominated the race in front of 75,000 almost-out-of-control, screaming fans. It was close to a repeat of 1974 and David Benson, witnessing it all, said: “James that weekend gave one of the most impressive displays of high speed Formula One driving I have ever witnessed. From the moment he went out onto the track for the first of the two practice sessions on Saturday, he was clearly the fastest man on the track. He was beautifully controlled. It was smooth, clean driving without a hint of over-exuberance.”

  The International Trophy had been renamed the Graham Hill Trophy, in memory of the late champion, and the trophy was presented to Hunt by Bette Hill. Hunt, as she later revealed, whispered to her on the podium: “If I can achieve only a small percentage of what Graham achieved in his life, I will be happy.” Bette Hill later telephoned Suzy Miller in New York to tell her about her former husband’s “magnificent day.”

  It was a correct description. Having spent a comfortable week at Lord Hesketh’s country home Easton Neston nearby, Hunt’s performance and demeanour at Silverstone was in marked contrast to that of Long Beach. Journalist Ian Phillips wrote in Autosport magazine: “His style was impeccable, both on and off the track, which should shut up the childish newspaper critics for good and all.”

  If the two non-championship races had counted for world championship points, it was not lost on Hunt that he would have been leading it. As it was, he only had six points from a second place finish to show for his troubles. Lauda already had 22 points. Hunt wasn’t even second or third in the rankings; sadly not even fourth. He was by now desperate to win a Grand Prix for McLaren, as he said: “I need a victory to make Niki sweat, and I need one to know I can do it.”

  After Silverstone, Hunt was riding the crest of a wave. From having been a little-known playboy racing driver, he was now internationally famous – not least because of his wife’s affair with Richard Burton. As a genuine world championship contender, he was now recognised wherever he went and was enjoying it immensely. When it got too much, he retreated to Marbella where he was left alone. Moreover, with his wife gone, he could smoke as much cannabis and drink as much beer as he liked; he could also sleep with as many girls as he liked – often two or three together, if it took his fancy.

  Although he regarded most of the stories written about him in the media as “absolute rubbish”, he told the writers he was nonetheless grateful for the coverage.

  In the gap between the races, there was other good news for Hunt; somewhat less good for his rival, Lauda. Lauda had been on his tractor at the new home he was building with Marlene, near Salzburg, shifting earth and digging a hole to build a swimming pool, when the world champion lost control of the tractor and it overturned. The tractor tipped over with a load of earth piled high in the scoop. Lauda somehow fell between the seat and the transmission as the tractor rolled forward. He eventually struggled clear with earth caked over his eyes and in his mouth, but he was badly shaken and in pain. He said: “I was trying to shift a mound of earth from the meadow in front of my house when I somehow managed to tip the tractor right over on top of myself. A couple of inches either way and it would have been really serious. As it was, I was pinned to the ground and ended up with two broken ribs – all things considered, not too bad for a shunt with a 1.8 tonne tractor. But the pain was excruciating.” Lauda was extremely fortunate to escape with two badly broken ribs. He was immediately bound up by a doctor and administered with routine pain-killing injections. Lauda later referred to the incident as “the ridiculous business with the tractor.”

  But it was a serious injury, and there was a strong chance that he would be unable to race his Ferrari in Spain at the next race. The accident caused a sensation in Italy and set in motion a series of events that totally destabilised the Ferrari team. The team had already been falling apart internally since its guiding light, Luca di Montezemolo, had left.

  Montezemolo had spearheaded the revival that had culminated in Lauda’s 1975 championship win and had been totally responsible for the team’s renaissance after years in the Formula One wilderness.

  Montezemolo had been parachuted into Ferrari by Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli at the age of 26 to effectively sideline the founder, Enzo Ferrari, and take control of the team. But Agnelli had great respect for Enzo Ferrari and wanted his dénouement done subtly with no embarrassment to the old man who, despite his failings, Agnelli revered. Before Montezemolo’s arrival, the team had not won a world championship for 11 years. Part of the problem was the irascibility of founder Enzo Ferrari, then in his late seventies.

  Enzo Ferrari was a schizophrenic. One moment he could be incredibly overbearing and pompous, a complete bully, but after he got his own way in a discussion, or thought he had, he immediately turned into a charming, warm human being whom no one could fail to like.

  Montezemolo had succeeded brilliantly in sidelining him, placing the Ferrari founder in a metaphorical box where he could do no damage but still take all the credit for the team’s revival.

  But Montezemolo was a talented young man in a very big hurry. Running the Ferrari Formula One team, as glamorous as it was, was a small job and he was eager to move on to bigger things. As soon as he could, he quietly left the team to join Fiat. Montezemolo was effectively replaced by new team manager Daniele Audetto. Too young and inexperienced, Audetto was immediately out of his depth. He was more like a referee trying to keep order amongst Ferrari’s feuding factions, all of whom came out to play once Montezemolo was gone.

  Lauda described Audetto as a “fraught personality.”

  Montezemolo’s departure left a power vacuum in the team, into which stepped a newly-energised Enzo Ferrari. The result was chaos. With Montezemolo gone, Audetto could barely control the team.

  Ruefully observing what was happening, Lauda lamented Montezemolo’s departure, saying: “The first hint of trouble came with the departure of my friend and ally Luca Montezemolo, who had to make a career for himself and couldn’t afford to stay on the lower rungs of the ladder as team chief indefinitely. Luca was promoted closer to the seat of power in the Fiat dynasty.”

  The tractor incident was the spark that set off a fire. There had been much jealousy in the team over Lauda’s success and, internally, his detractors wanted an Italian driver to win in the Italian car. They believed Lauda’s success had been down to the car and not the driver, and they wanted him out. Lauda recalls: “The Italian press got hold of the story – you can hardly blame them – a Formula One world champion crushed by a tractor makes a pretty good copy.”

  Audetto made the mistake of immersing himself in these day-to-day intrigues in an effort to carve out a niche for himself, and Italian journalists started clamouring for Lauda to be sacked and replaced with an Italian. Believing the injured Lauda to be overrated, they maintained that an Italian could do better in such a good car.

  Lauda said: “As soon as the news leaked out about my accident with the tractor, they sensed an opportunity to promote an Italian into the cockpit. There just happened to be a young lad around called Flammini, who had had a good result in Formula 2; he would be an automatic choice. All races I had won for Ferrari had still not silenced one particular section of the Italian press, which constantly clamoured for an Italian driver.

  “Tempers ran high and, in the heat of the moment, I paid scant attention to what I said. I came out with a few choice remarks, notably to the effect that [Enzo] Ferrari could take a long walk off a short pier, and Gazzetta dello Sport ran that in a banner headline. All Italy was up in arms.”

  Lauda also offended Italy by responding to the possibility of the young Flammini replacing him by saying: “Italians are only good for driving round the church.” He was so fed up with the negative publicity, he gave Enzo Ferrari an ultimatum. He would be available for the next Grand Prix
in Spain, he asserted sardonically, but only “if and when Ferrari required him.”

  This statement successfully spooked Enzo Ferrari, who now changed tack completely and panicked at the thought of losing Lauda. Audetto and Enzo Ferrari despatched a top executive, Sante Ghedini, to drive overnight from Maranello to Salzburg and to arrive in the early hours of the next morning at Lauda’s home in order to provide regular bulletins of their driver’s medical condition.

  The whole event turned into an Italian farce and seriously destabilised the team. The feeling was that if Lauda wasn’t fit to drive in Spain, Ferrari would replace him, probably for good. By this time, Lauda was fed up with Ferrari’s politics and couldn’t care less. But as he said later: “There were panic stations at Ferrari, and I was determined to do everything I could to start in the next race.”

  That looked nigh-on impossible until Lauda met Willy Dungl for the first time. Dungl was a world class masseur and regarded as something of a miracle-worker by Austria’s winter Olympics team.

  Dungl had been called in to help treat Lauda’s injuries, and from that first meeting, he hardly left Lauda’s side; he kept him in tip top physical condition. Lauda said in his autobiography To Hell and Back: “Willy Dungl has been one of the most important people in my career and my life. There is no one to touch him; he is simply a genius. His knowledge, his sensitivity, his touch, and his methods – I simply cannot imagine that there is another like him anywhere in the world.” Dungl had Lauda back on the grid two weeks after the accident.

  The Spanish Grand Prix that year took place on 2nd May. It was the first race of the new European season and it was being held at the Jarama circuit, just outside Madrid. By the fourth round of the 1976 world championship, James Hunt had made himself familiar to everyone; he was the centre of attention in the Formula One paddock. But despite that, his teammate Jochen Mass remained confident that he would beat Hunt at Jarama. It was the anniversary of his first Grand Prix win and he was determined to re-establish himself in the team by winning the race. It set the scene for a real needle match between the teammates, especially as Mass was fourth in the championship with seven points, whilst Hunt was fifth with six points. It had previously been established that whoever had established a lead on points early in the season would be regarded as number one driver and would then be backed up by the other driver for the world championship.

  While Hunt had been getting up pole positions and making the front running in the opening races, Mass had actually scored more points: from a sixth place in Brazil; a third in South Africa; and a fifth in Long Beach. Going down to Madrid, Mass saw his chance to regain team leadership with a win.

  Ferrari took the opportunity to debut its new car, designated the 312T2. It was the second in a series of what would eventually be three models of the 312T series spanning five highly-successful seasons. Lauda had it working well straightaway.

  There were also hidden forces at work in Spain. Regulation changes had taken place at the beginning of the season which, up until then, had not really been enforced. At the start of 1976, both the Formula One teams and the governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), had become concerned that cars were getting wider and longer and going faster with more downforce, and thereby becoming more dangerous. To counter that, a revised set of measurement regulations aimed at keeping cars within specified limits and simplifying the technical regulations was agreed upon. To establish the maximum allowable width, they measured the widest car – the McLaren-Ford M23 – and declared it the limit. Likewise, the longest car was measured and its length was written in as the maximum for all cars. Alastair Caldwell remembers it all very clearly: “Our car had been measured by the authorities at the Nürburgring in 1975 as the widest. They said: ‘Okay, we’ll make that the maximum width for 1976.’ We said: ‘Come on, mate, give us a centimetre’, and they replied: ‘Okay, your car measured 2.9, we’ll make the rule 2.10.’ In 1976, the rule came in.”

  Coincidentally, the race was also marked by the debut of the new six-wheeled Tyrrell-Ford car, to be driven by Patrick Depailler. The six-wheeler had been designed with the new regulations in mind.

  The weekend began well, with Hunt grabbing pole three-tenths of a second faster than Lauda in the Ferrari beside him. It was Hunt’s third pole in four races. Mass was third as the two McLarens sandwiched Lauda’s Ferrari on the front row of the starting grid. The Austrian, with Willy Dungl in attendance, seemed unaffected by his painful injury.

  The start was delayed while King Juan Carlos, a keen Formula One fan, arrived in his helicopter. Once again, Hunt, fearful of his clutch, was slow to get away from the start while Lauda, high on painkillers, stormed into the lead for the first 31 laps. Hunt was again beaten off the line.

  But Lauda could feel his broken jagged rib-ends grinding together under the G-forces in hard cornering and, as the painkillers wore off, he had increased difficulty controlling the car. Hunt was content to play a waiting game, knowing that Lauda’s ribs simply wouldn’t let him continue at that pace for the entire race. Hunt recalled later: “Niki was motoring hard at the start and I was able to tuck in behind quite comfortably. I couldn’t do anything about passing him, it was just a case of waiting until his ribs started to hurt and I’d be able to nip through.” And so it proved, as Hunt went past on lap 32, followed by Mass a few laps later. Mass’ engine failed with a few laps to go, and Hunt crossed the line to take his first Grand Prix victory for McLaren. Lauda crawled in for second place, 31 seconds behind and in agony.

  Hunt was ecstatic afterwards but totally exhausted from having wrestled the McLaren round the difficult Jarama circuit for 75 laps. On the way to the podium, he punched a spectator in frustration.

  But bigger problems than a wayward spectator lay ahead in post-race scrutineering.

  Peter Jowitt, a Farnborough based scientist, had been employed as a consultant by FOCA as a technical consultant. He worked for the teams and his brief was to check car dimensions, investigate causes of accidents and suggest modifications for safety. Jowitt was not a scrutineer and had no official powers at all. But he had noticed that the McLaren was 1.8cm too wide across the rear wheels. Jowett innocently brought the problem to the attention of the Spanish scrutineers thinking they would merely inform McLaren of the error and ask the team to correct it. He was horrified when they disqualified the car on the basis of his discovery.

  The celebrations in the Marlboro motorhome in the Spanish paddock were curtailed shortly after eight o’clock when Hunt was brought the bad news by David Benson. Hunt was stripped to the waist, wearing only a pair of jeans, talking to his teammate, some girls and his normal retinue of hangers-on. He immediately grabbed a shirt, shouted to teddy Mayer and they ran to the steward’s office in the race control tower.

  Benson had extraordinary instincts for news and he had somehow sensed trouble and gone to the scrutineers garage purely on a whim. By then, it had just been announced in the press room that the stewards had ruled Hunt’s car to be illegal and that he was therefore disqualified. The scrutineers had ruled that the rear tyres of Hunt’s M23 extended 1.8 centimetres wider than allowed by the new regulations. After a series of measurements and remeasurements, the McLaren M23 was deemed undeniably too wide across the rear wheels. The stewards announced Lauda the new winner of the race. It was the first time the cars had been rigorously checked under the new rules, and the FIA had asked the scrutineers to carefully check the dimensions of each car.

  Teddy Mayer argued with the stewards in vain. He told them that such a small discrepancy couldn’t give Hunt’s McLaren any advantage and that the ruling was “unbelievably harsh and unjustified.”

  Hunt was distraught, and tears welled in his eyes. He said: “It’s stupid. It does not affect the performance of the car or make it any faster. Not even the Ferrari team protested and they were the ones who had the most to win.” Lauda had already left the circuit by helicopter to the airport to fly back to Austria for further treatmen
t on his ribs. He learned that he had been declared the winner of the race from air traffic controllers at Salzburg airport as he was landing his plane. His subsequent attitude was perfectly straightforward: “A rule is a rule. The McLaren was illegal and therefore it should have been disqualified. I am very sorry for James; he drove very well but the car was not legal. If the same had happened to my Ferrari, I would accept the ruling.”

  Teddy Mayer, apoplectic towards the stewards, filed an official protest and muttered something to journalists about a conspiracy by Ferrari. In fact, Hunt’s car had been measured twice in pre-race scrutineering and had been found legal. But there was now no doubt that McLaren was guilty, as Caldwell freely admitted: “We [thought we] had no worries because our car was exactly the same. Like idiots, we didn’t even bother to measure it – my fault – because as far as I was concerned the car had been measured and the rule based on it. However, over the winter, Goodyear developed the tyres and made them with wider sidewalls. I didn’t realise that the tyres had been made this much wider. We got caught out.”

  Mayer, caught in a very tricky situation, put out a press release: “The entire McLaren team extends its sympathy to James Hunt.” Stating he would appeal against the severity of the sentence rather than the correctness of the decision, he went on to say it was like being hanged for a parking offence. Mayer maintained that, since the minute oversight could have given Hunt no possible advantage, he should at least be able to keep his driver’s points.

  After his initial disappointment, Hunt became surprisingly sanguine about the entire affair, although he called his team’s failure to ensure the car was the correct width “a fantastically sloppy performance.” Hunt said years later: “The point was they’d taken the current widest car in the business and the current longest because they didn’t want them to go much wider, like someone suddenly worked out if you had it twice as wide it would have twice as good road holding; likewise if you made it two yards longer. The point was the McLaren was the widest car in the business at the time. But McLaren didn’t bother to check the width of its car because it had established the standard the previous year when it was all checked. The only problem was we were using slightly different tyres, which had a bigger bulge. And that’s the widest point on the car. It was in fact 1.8 centimetres too wide, and that was purely the bulge.”