Shunt

by Tom Rubython

  When Lauda turned up on Friday morning, Caldwell slipped off the covers. When Lauda saw what they had done, he pretended not to notice but immediately rushed back to the Ferrari pit with news of what he had seen. Daniele Audetto immediately instigated a crash programme to do the same for the three Ferraris in the garage. All Friday morning was taken up with the modifications, and every open orifice on the three Ferraris was covered up with fine mesh grilles.

  Just before qualifying, Caldwell removed all the screens and Lauda realised he had been fooled. He had wasted a lot of his team’s valuable preparation time on a load of concocted nonsense.

  Compared to the race, the two qualifying days were entirely uneventful with neither Ferrari nor McLaren dominating – as had been expected. The John Player-sponsored Lotus team proved to be the most-improved team of the year, with Mario Andretti taking pole and Hunt managing second-fastest time alongside. Niki Lauda and John Watson’s Penske-Ford were side by side on the second row. Jody Scheckter’s Tyrrell-Ford was fifth and Carlos Pace was sixth; one of his best showings of the year in what had otherwise been a disastrous 1976 for the Brabham team with its thirsty Alfa-Romeo engine.

  Hunt and Lauda were very close, separated by only 0.28 seconds. Clay Regazzoni was seventh in what would be his last race for Ferrari after Lauda lost the battle to keep him as his teammate. Carlos Reutemann, Lauda’s teammate for 1977, did not appear at all after Lauda threatened to walk out if he replaced Regazzoni for the few remaining races of 1976 – as had been Enzo Ferrari’s intention.

  Despite his good performance in qualifying, Lauda was clearly tired and jet-lagged. Hunt’s two weeks in Japan meant he was totally acclimatised.

  But having Andretti on pole was good for Ferrari. Andretti, who was half Italian, felt the need to tell journalists that – despite his origins – he was neutral and would do nothing to influence the outcome of the race either way. But he also pointed out: “Hunt’s got everything to lose. You don’t have to be a mathematician to work it out. Lauda just has to beat Hunt, but Hunt’s got to beat him – and all the rest of us. He’s got to win.” But Andretti’s comments were the least of Hunt’s problems. The poor weather forecast for Sunday was becoming one of the primary concerns.

  Up until then, the weather had been relatively good and the only drama had been caused by the sheer number of journalists, print and broadcast, demanding interviews. Such was the interest in the Hunt-Lauda showdown that the media contingent was nearly eight times the normal number. Nearly 1,000 media personnel crowded into Mount Fuji, and everyone wanted to talk to Hunt.

  But race day was to bring dramatically different weather. As the drivers looked out of their bedroom windows, it was hard to imagine a worse storm. The weather had closed in, and even the volcano was obscured by low clouds. The whole of the surrounding countryside was shrouded in thick drifting fog. It had been raining all night.

  As the dawn rose, the organisers dispatched hordes of men in grey cagoules and armed with wide brooms to sweep the track of water. From time to time as the fog rolled in, it hid the army of circuit sweepers from view.

  In the morning warm-up session, several cars crashed and one of them even aquaplaned off the main straight. When Niki Lauda took out his car, he knew he was in deep trouble. Lauda was very worried about his eyes in the wet and the reduced visibility. He had missed his chance to have the corrective operation and was reluctant to bring it to anyone’s attention lest he should fail a medical inspection and be stopped from racing altogether. It was a legacy of the accident, when both his eyelids had been burnt away. He had sought the advice of six different specialist eye surgeons on how best to proceed. Eventually, a Swiss surgeon had taken skin from behind Lauda’s ears to graft on as new eyelids. But they weren’t perfect, and the right eye in particular was a problem. The doctors advised him not to race in Japan, telling him he needed an urgent operation on his right eye and that it would close properly only after further skin grafts.

  Hunt was a member of the drivers’ safety committee with Lauda, and the two now joined forces to tell the organisers that there couldn’t be a Japanese Grand Prix as it was far too dangerous for the drivers. With the exception of Brambilla and Regazzoni, all the drivers voted against racing.

  Caldwell was absolutely adamant that Hunt drive, and said to him: “James, don’t be an idiot. You can’t win the championship unless there is a race.” James simply responded by saying that safety came first, and that he and Lauda would not race. Jochen Mass agreed with Hunt.

  In fact, Hunt was so adamant he would not race in the conditions that he said: “I would rather give Niki the title than race in these conditions.”

  As the day wore on, however, the race was not cancelled so Hunt told Lauda they should try to have the race postponed. However, postponement didn’t appear to be an option that the organisers would entertain. Slowly, the drivers’ moods began to change, and Ronnie Peterson, Tom Pryce, Vittorio Brambilla, Clay Regazzoni, Alan Jones and Hans Stuck all fancied their chances on a wet track and decided they should get on with it. When Hunt heard this, he knew he was fighting a lost cause; once a few drivers lined up on the grid, others would surely follow. Especially as their team managers were threatening them with the sack if they didn’t race.

  Meanwhile, with the race still in doubt, Hunt was behaving very bizarrely. At one point he came out, jumped over the pit lane counter, dropped his overalls to his ankles and proceeded to take a pee in full view of the crowds in the grandstand. The spectators, many of whom had high powered binoculars trained on him, applauded him after he finished. He waved back. Half an hour later, Patrick Head, then technical director of the Walter Wolf team, accidentally walked into the wrong garage. Thinking it empty, he was surprised to find Hunt inside, with his racing overalls once more down around his ankles and a young Japanese girl kneeling in front of him with his penis in her mouth. Hunt laughed when he saw him, but Head hummed and hawed and quickly left in a daze not quite believing what he had seen. He was clearly disturbed by having witnessed such a graphic sex act from a leading participant so near to the start of an important race. But when Head recounted the story at dinner later in Tokyo, he found that no one was shocked by Hunt’s pre-race preparation antics. They had become the norm.

  The team managers usually took little notice of the drivers, but this time they were worried. In normal circumstances, as the weather was so bad, the race almost certainly would have been abandoned. But these were not normal circumstances. The organisers had spent over US$1 million to stage the event and would have to refund the spectators, who had paid high ticket prices. The circuit was full of television crews from all over the world who had booked expensive satellite time to broadcast the race live. From a financial point of view, there had to be a race. There were nearly 80,000 people rammed into the circuit, and the world championship had to be decided. There had never been so much pressure to hold a sporting event to schedule.

  As the Formula One cars remained motionless, covered in tarpaulins in front of the pits, the team managers huddled with organisers and race officials in the first floor of the race control tower. It was plain to everyone that it was too dangerous to race. The time scheduled for the race start came and went. The pressure from the television crews was relentless.

  The pressure on organisers was immense. They sought the opinions of both Hunt and Lauda, asking them if they wanted to race. Lauda didn’t want to race. Hunt was ambivalent, but still agreed with Lauda. Hunt had decided to defer to Lauda, and told him that he personally felt they should wait and race the next day. But he told Lauda he would race if the race was held, saying: “Everyone was still arguing and expressing their point of view. Mine was to not race, to have it another day or something like that. But you get a few weak people to break the strike and then everybody’s at it.”

  After further discussions, Hunt changed his mind again and told Alastair Caldwell that he and Lauda were withdrawing from the race, whatever decision the organisers made.
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  Bernie Ecclestone was getting frantic. He had taken some big money from the TV companies to broadcast the race. If there was no race, he faced having to give it all back.

  The grandstands, which ran the whole length of the main Fuji straight, were packed with fans sitting silently beneath a sea of umbrellas. The crowd sat motionless and in absolute quiet, a perfect demonstration of Japanese reserve. There was none of the Brands Hatch mayhem; it was a different world.

  Caldwell started ruminating and decided to get the crowd agitated. He got a mechanic named Lance Gibbs to stand and blow his whistle to get them roused. Caldwell knew that most Japanese carried whistles. The gesture worked, and they all brought out their whistles and started blowing to put pressure on the organisers. With Gibbs’ encouragement, they also started shouting.

  As the crowd became increasingly roused, the organisers became more and more nervous. Bernie Ecclestone also frightened the organisers by telling them they could have a riot on their hands if there was no race. Ecclestone, by now frantic with worry, told them: “You’ve got to hold the race. You’ll have a riot. They’ll tear down the stands.”

  Caldwell believes that the fans and their increasing agitation, admittedly stirred up by him, was a strong factor in eventually getting the race started.

  Lauda remembers: “We all refused to drive in the prevailing conditions. We sat in the race official’s trailer and told him ‘no go.’ At that point, the organisers had decided there would be no race. But they were being stalled from making an announcement by Bernie Ecclestone and others.”

  At four o’clock in Fuji, it started to get really dark. Ecclestone told them: “The race must start.”

  Caldwell had noticed Lauda’s demeanour and guessed there might be a problem with his eyes in the wet. He knew it was now or never, and if the race was cancelled or abandoned then McLaren might lose the title race by default. So he literally grabbed Hunt by his overall lapels and told him, if the race was on, he would drive. A shocked Hunt agreed. Lauda was now in a difficult position.

  The race should have started an hour and a half earlier, and in another two or three hours the Mount Fuji circuit would be in darkness. Finally, a decision was made and announced over the loudspeakers: the Japanese Grand Prix would begin in five minutes. Vittorio Brambilla led the drivers out to their cars.

  Lauda, Emerson Fittipaldi and Carlos Pace were all determined not to race and would just do a few laps to please their team owners. Lauda said: “We went to the start so that our respective teams could pick up their starting money, but then we would pack it in. Because nothing changed: everything was just as dangerous as before, and the fact that it was getting dark could hardly help matters.”

  The drivers went out and did some exploratory laps and then came back in to vote again. Another drivers’ meeting voted by a substantial majority that the circuit was too dangerous, but the organisers overruled them and decided to hold their motor race. But the new worry was the light.

  They opened the pits and the cars trickled out one by one to take up their positions on the grid. Hunt again told Caldwell that he wasn’t driving, and again Caldwell told him he was. Hunt said to Caldwell: “Alastair, fuck this, I’m getting out.” Caldwell retorted: “Get out of that car and I’ll break your fucking neck.” John Hogan witnessed this and remembers: “James replied: ‘Oh, alright.’ And that was it.” But Caldwell wasn’t completely reckless and did recognise the dangers. He told Hunt that if he wasn’t happy after the warm-up lap, he could come into the pits and retire without consequences but warned him that his championship bid would be over.

  So the race officials took the decision away from the drivers, and the showdown in Japan finally got underway. Niki Lauda would start the race and see how conditions were. He said: “At the start, the feeling was absolutely unbearable. I was sitting there panic-stricken, rain lashing down, seeing nothing, just hunched down in the cockpit, shoulders tense, waiting for someone to run into me.”

  In the gloom, the cars were pushed out to the starting grid. Lance Gibbs drilled holes in the visor of Hunt’s helmet to stop it fogging. He placed down a plank of wood on the tarmac so Hunt could walk to his car with dry shoes.

  Once Hunt was in the cockpit, it felt damp as he wiped water off his steering wheel.

  Hunt started as favourite to win the race as the in-form driver with a high grid position. From the start he went straight into the lead and, with a clear track in front of him, sped away easily. Hunt had made the best start of his life, and his McLaren’s heavy spray covered everyone in his wake. The other drivers all had to contend with spray and fell further back. As only he could see where he was going and the other 24 drivers were navigating blind, Hunt sought to maximise the advantage he had earned.

  Lauda was losing positions on every lap and was clearly in some sort of trouble. As Caldwell had suspected, his eyes were not up to it. There was so much standing water on the track that Lauda could hardly control his Ferrari, he simply couldn’t see through his damaged eyelids. He couldn’t have continued even if he wanted to. He said: “Everybody was skating and spinning; it was crazy. Looking at it this way, it seemed only sensible to drive into the pits and give up.”

  After two laps, he stopped. He had been unable to see and couldn’t blink his eyes, which ruined his focus. It was too dangerous to continue. As he pulled to a halt, his four mechanics shielded the cockpit and he told them he had decided to retire from the race. Cuoghi said they could blame engine failure but Lauda wanted none of it, and he’d tell the truth to whoever asked – but, of course, not the whole truth. Without making excuses or offering explanations, as he didn’t want the trouble with his eyes to stop him from racing in the future, Lauda admitted: “The rain has totally destroyed me.”

  The truth was that he should never have come back that season. His eyes were poor and he was physically unfit, but he would never admit he was unable to cope with the conditions that prevailed at the start of the race. Later, as the track dried, he rapidly began changing his mind, but by then it was too late.

  Lauda sat on the pit counter, cross-legged next to Daniele Audetto, watching events unfurl. As he remembered later: “It was a miracle: after twelve hours of solid downpour, the rain stopped – about a quarter of the way into the race. If I had only held out that long, driven slowly and avoided being hit, there would have been no problem putting my foot down, which was necessary to clinch the title. As it turned out, fifth place would have been enough. Sadly, hanging on patiently was more that I could manage that day.”

  Three other drivers – Emerson Fittipaldi, Carlos Pace and Larry Perkins – also withdrew after a couple of laps.

  As Hunt sped past the finish line for the third lap, he was shown the McLaren board, which read: ‘Niki Out’. Straightaway he knew why, but Hunt felt no emotion or pleasure at his rival’s demise. Lauda’s behaviour that season had earned his total respect.

  Hunt maintained his lead and, surprisingly, Vittorio Brambilla was now in second place in his March-Ford. On lap 22, Brambilla actually tried an overtaking maneuver on Hunt, but as he drew alongside he inevitably lost control of his car and missed Hunt’s by a few millimetres. He went off the circuit in a shower of mud.

  As Brambilla departed into retirement, the conditions started improving with every lap. By lap 23, the two McLaren-Fords led 1-2 with Mass tucked up in second place, guarding Hunt’s flank. The cloud cover was lifting, taking with it the rain, and a strong breeze was beginning to dry out the track. Speeds picked up accordingly, and the gaps between cars shrank appreciably. But the drying track meant the wet-weather tyres were unsuitable for the new conditions and were starting to overheat. As the track dried, Caldwell kept out a permanent pit sign with ‘cool tyres’ written on it. He needed Hunt to drive through the puddles to get the tyres home. Jochen Mass immediately understood, and began searching for the puddles to drive through.

  Hunt was so focused and preoccupied with winning the Grand Prix that he failed to give any
consideration to the state of his tyres. He either ignored the sign or didn’t understand it. With remarkable candour, Caldwell told Hunt’s biographer Christopher Hilton: “James handled the race very badly. He disobeyed clear instructions. In previous races, we’d suffered the same problem: you went from a wet track to a dry track and the wet tyres overheat. They’ve so much more rubber on them and when they begin to slide around in the dry, the rubber boils and starts to rip off. The sign was to get the drivers to drive in puddles on the straight bits of the track. That kept the temperature down and, while you’d get less grip, the tyres certainly lasted longer.

  “We hung this out to James and Jochen, who were travelling in line astern. Jochen saw the sign and immediately turned right, nearly hit the pit wall in a big cloud of spray. Then lap after lap they came down the straight together, James running clear and open in the dry, Jochen in the wet. In the end, we were waving this sign over the pit wall.”

  Mass continually sought out the wet areas of the track to keep the tyre temperatures down. As the pace of the race dropped dramatically, his tyres kept in good condition. Mario Andretti was also searching out the puddles.

  Mass was getting frustrated because, having preserved his tyres, he caught up with Hunt and could have easily passed him and won the race. But he knew he couldn’t with what was at stake, although Hunt could still have been champion from second place. In the end, it didn’t matter as a frustrated Mass lost concentration on lap 35 and glanced a barrier, bending his front suspension and being forced to retire.

  So by two thirds of the race distance, Hunt was still the comfortable leader. But his tyres were degrading fast and he was slowing. Patrick Depailler’s six-wheeled Tyrrell-Ford started to catch him up. The six wheeler’s tyres were coping well as Hunt’s rubber deteriorated rapidly. Depailler soon passed Hunt and so did Andretti.