by Tom Rubython
Hunt just couldn’t say ‘no’ to a press conference or a personal appearance, and the day before the Argentine Grand Prix weekend, Hunt spoke to the local Buenos Aries media to help sell tickets. The organisers got a bit of a shock when he turned up at the press conference in bare feet, dirty jeans and a t-shirt. He was also unshaven, many years before it was fashionable.
Buenos Aries was a city that prided itself on formality. The following day’s newspapers carried little information about the race, but focused heavily on the disrespect shown by Hunt for the city and its citizens. The articles mentioned his unkempt hair, the bags under his eyes and his constant yawning.
The coverage didn’t bother him at all. He was more bothered about the high temperatures, which hovered around 38 degrees. The circuit was set in open parkland on the outskirts of Buenos Aires and track temperatures were to reach nearly 50 degrees during race weekend.
Out at the circuit, there were soldiers and police everywhere. They were toting automatic rifles and sub machine guns backed up by shotguns, tear gas and even some light artillery. The circuit looked more like it was preparing for a war rather than a Formula One Grand Prix.
The Argentine government feared that an extremist group might use the Grand Prix as a platform for a national incident. The extremists were, at the time, very active, protesting about the economy and an inflation rate that exceeded 300 per cent annually.
The worries were ened because Argentina was scheduled to host the World Cup soccer tournament in 1978. Should the Grand Prix have been disrupted, it was likely the soccer governing body FIFA would have cancelled or reallocated the World Cup tournament. The government was taking no chances.
For the McLaren team, it was business as usual. Time had seemingly stood still as the team wheeled out the McLaren-Ford M23 model for its fifth season of racing. The new M26 had again proven to be slower than the older car in testing.
The two-model dilemma had cost McLaren dearly, both in competitiveness and cash, and there was no solution in sight. Hunt explained the essence of the dilemma: “Most teams introduce a new car because they bloody well need it and therefore are prepared to speculate, to chuck away the old car and get on with the new car on the theory that the old car wasn’t good enough, even if it means struggling with the new car for a couple of races. McLaren’s problem was that the old car was brilliant and carried on being brilliant, and a new car was not necessary.”
It made the development programme slower than it should have been, as Hunt explained: “When you’ve got a car that can win races, why change for the sake of change?” It was good advice that the team ultimately didn’t take.
As reigning world champion, the number 1 graced Hunt’s car as he pulled out of the pit lane to join the first practice session of 1977. Although only three months had passed, much had changed. As well as Scheckter’s move to Wolf, Ronnie Peterson had left March and joined Tyrrell, and there were a pair of new six-wheeled Tyrrell-Fords for him and Patrick Depailler.
Team Lotus had two new Lotus 78s, the first ground effect cars, for Mario Andretti and Gunnar Nilsson. John Watson was now ensconced at Brabham after the Penske team shut down. Clay Regazzoni had joined the small uncompetitive and underfunded Ensign team. When Hunt learned of this, he thought to himself: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Had Fittipaldi not left McLaren, it might easily have been Hunt’s predicament.
Niki Lauda appeared dejected at the first race. He had lost the battle to keep Regazzoni as his teammate and now had a co-driver he didn’t like – Carlos Reutemann. Lauda and Regazzoni had been far closer than people knew, often flying together to races and spending social time together. Lauda now viewed Reutemann as a rival he had to beat, not a teammate.
What had not changed was the fractious relationship between Lauda and Enzo Ferrari.
Lauda now regarded him as a buffoon, and the two were at loggerheads all winter. When he had withdrawn from the Japanese Grand Prix and lost the championship, Lauda believed that Enzo had behaved disgracefully, as he recalled: “There was none of the legendary Ferrari greatness about him. It was less than dignified and he reacted like any other team boss who sees his chance slipping away.” In Tokyo’s airport lounge, Lauda and Enzo had had a ludicrous telephone conversation, which Lauda described as “heartless.” According to Lauda, Enzo Ferrari made all his decisions based on what he read in the Italian newspapers. The newspapers had called Lauda a “coward”, and Enzo had believed it. This naturally infuriated Lauda, who said: “At 78, and with a lifetime of intrigue and distorted information behind him, he was far too removed from the essential issue. He could only sit and read his newspapers.”
It was revealed that when Lauda had returned to Italy after Japan, Enzo had offered him the job of team manager. His object was to sack Lauda as a driver and to stop him driving elsewhere. In another pantomime session with Enzo, Lauda threw his contract at him and said he was off to drive for McLaren. Frightened, Enzo called in his advisers and they, who only half an hour earlier had advised him to sack Lauda, now advised him on how to persuade him to stay.
When he returned to the meeting, Enzo informed Lauda that while he could stay on as a driver, Reutemann would be the team’s number one. Lauda, tired of arguing, simply shrugged his shoulders and left. It was at that moment that he decided not to sign a new contract with Ferrari for 1978. He would take Ferrari’s money in 1977 and see what developed.
As the 1977 season opened, James Hunt seemed to carry on where he had left off three months earlier: he was second fastest to Depailler’s Tyrrell-Ford in the opening session of practice; fastest in the afternoon session; and faster still the following day, taking pole position – the ninth of his career. John Watson put himself alongside Hunt on the front row of the grid in his first race with his new Brabham-Alfa Romeo. Surprisingly, Scheckter was a disappointing eleventh and Lauda fourth. But no one remembers any of that. The qualifying sessions were dominated by an explosion in the pit lane on the first day. The bang rocked the pits and caused panic amongst soldiers and police who were convinced that an extremist bomb had been deployed. The noise caused Teddy Mayer instantly to drop to the floor, expecting a hail of bullets to follow as soldiers tried to shoot the bomber. Mayer said: “I knew that if it was a bomb, there would be bullets spraying everywhere.”
But it was no bomb; it was a fire extinguisher bottle and a Lotus driver. Mario Andretti had had a lucky escape from death, probably the luckiest in Formula One history. Andretti found himself with no brakes and was blinded by oil flying through the air. With the driver now a passenger, the car hurtled down the track out of control. While Andretti was lucky in not having been killed by the explosion, he was doubly fortunate in also surviving the resulting accident. When the car came to a rest, his only grievances were sore eyes and tingling feet from the force of the explosion against the pedals.
In most Formula One cars, the fire extinguisher bottle was situated under the drivers’ seat. The Lotus extinguisher was in the nose, and no one had ever considered the safety implications of it exploding. After the blast, pieces of Andretti’s black car rained down on the pit lane and bounced across the track. But there was no sign of the car. The force of the blast had blown the nose off the car and ripped open the aluminum chassis, tearing off the brake cylinders and the oil radiator.
The entire paddock was shocked by what had happened and amazed that Andretti was still walking around. Opinion was divided in the paddock as to what would have happened had the extinguisher been located under his seat. Andretti seemed totally unmoved and was cracking jokes all day about the incident. James Hunt was deeply concerned; the horrors of what could have happened to vital bits of his anatomy if the extinguisher had exploded in his car were not lost on him.
On race day, Argentine weather forecasters proved very unreliable. While the forecast had called for heavy rain, it turned out to be a scorching hot day. On such days, Hunt took salt tablets but he had forgotten to bring them from Europe, and none cou
ld be obtained locally in Buenos Aires. He said: “The most important thing before a race like this is to make sure your sugar, salt and liquid content is topped up, and I had forgotten my salt tablets. The only thing I could get hold of was medical saline solution, the stuff they feed into your arm through a drip. It was disgusting. I drank one bottle on the Saturday night and one on the Sunday morning, and I didn’t stop feeling sick until Monday night. I felt as though I was going to be ill all the time. It really screwed up my stomach.”
Other drivers fitted thermos flasks in their cars filled with cool water. Hunt had orange juice with glucose in his, or at least that is what he told people. No one was quite sure.
When the race started, John Watson went into a commanding lead as Hunt made another of his poor starts, even falling behind Lauda’s Ferrari. But he soon took the place back from Lauda and followed Watson closely around. The Irishman’s tyres started to go off quite early on, and Hunt took the lead relatively effortlessly.
Hunt pulled away and already looked victorious. But on lap 32, he lost his steering, went straight on round a corner and ploughed into the catch fencing. A bolt had broken in the rear suspension. When Hunt arrived back at the pits on the pillion of a motorcycle, he was unsure what had pitched him off. He just said: “I was onto the quick bit of the circuit when the rear suspension broke.”
He watched the rest of the race from the pits as Watson again led briefly and allowed Carlos Pace in the other Brabham-Alfa Romeo to go ahead. The two Brabhams were first and second and in command of the race. Scheckter in the Wolf-Ford was third after a mighty drive through the field.
Hunt was astonished at how much the Brabhams had improved and how powerful the engine was: “The Alfa in that Brabham was considerably more powerful than the Ferrari; it really was. It wasn’t a heavy car but it used masses of fuel, so it used to start a race very heavy but in the latter part of a race with no fuel load I had no chance against them on the straights.”
But they were not always reliable, and Watson’s Brabham retired while Scheckter passed Pace’s Brabham, which was having handling problems, to win with Reutemann’s Ferrari third and Emerson Fittipaldi fourth. It was a personal triumph for Fittipaldi, and one of his best ever results ever in the Copersucar car. There were three South Americans in the first four, which pleased the crowed immensely.
Hunt was delighted for Scheckter, who was his closest friend in the paddock. The friendship had started in Spain, where he lived when he first started racing. Scheckter was another talent Teddy Mayer had let slip away after he debuted for McLaren in 1972. He ran only one race before being snapped up by Tyrrell, effectively to replace the retiring Jackie Stewart. When Scheckter moved to Monte Carlo, the two men kept in touch. Both were highly intelligent and enjoyed each other’s views on life, as Hunt admitted: “I like people with good minds, I find it stimulating, and Jody has an exceptionally sharp brain. He’s very funny but it takes him a long time to get it out because he’s not an educated guy.” Many read that as an insult, but Hunt continued: “Because of his intelligence, he was aware that he lacked education. He felt he was at a disadvantage and therefore he was very defensive, but he’s got over that now. He’s got his confidence.”
Hunt advised Scheckter on his career and told him he thought his friend Harvey Postlethwaite was a good car designer. Hunt hadn’t known about Patrick Head, apart from when Head had caught him in the Mount Fuji garage with a girl.
Hunt was aware that Scheckter had suffered at Tyrrell because the Frenchman Patrick Depailler was number one, and everything was done Depailler’s way as a result. After the Zandvoort incident Hunt never thought much of team boss Ken Tyrrell, as he said: “I think Jody was being inhibited because Ken wanted to do what Patrick said all the time, and it wasn’t necessarily what Jody wanted.” But despite Postlethwaite, Hunt doubted the wisdom of signing for Wolf: “I wondered if he had gone for the money instead of the best drive. Mind you, I don’t know whether there were any obvious championship-winning drives available to him.”
The whole of the Grand Prix circus stayed on in South America for the fortnight before the Brazilian Grand Prix on 23rd January in São Paulo. Hunt had many friends in the city, which was awash with cocaine. A few years earlier, Hunt had formed what he called the São Paulo Diving Society. Having nothing to do with water, it actually referred to a popular sexual pastime called ‘muff diving’, which apparently Hunt found was to his taste.
Max Mosley remembers it well: “It was actually going a bit far. You’ve heard the New Zealand expression, ‘Oh, he’s a muff diver.’ James was the honorary president of club.”
Hunt resolved to have a very good time at the São Paulo Hilton, just as he had at the Tokyo Hilton. But his main entertainment theme for 1977 was surprisingly staid; he was obsessed with playing backgammon, often against Bernie Ecclestone.
A marathon game was held in the São Paulo Hilton before the 1977 Brazilian Grand Prix. It started on the Thursday afternoon and continued until the next morning, a few hours before the opening qualifying session at the Interlagos circuit. The players quickly grabbed breakfast and Ecclestone finagled the Argentine police to give the world champion a police escort, of which the rest of the players in his retinue also took advantage.
It was a ludicrous way to prepare for the race, and on the first day of qualifying Hunt was really unwell and in no fit state to drive the car. By the final qualifying the following day, he had recovered and managed to secure pole position for the first race of the year. The McLaren-Ford, suited to long straights and fast bends, easily looked the best car on the São Paulo track.
But the newspapers the next morning were dominated by Hunt’s off-track antics. During qualifying, a Brazilian journalist from the São Paulo Times had been wandering up and down the pit lane. He rested his foot on the sidepod of the McLaren M23 as Hunt sat in the pit waiting to go out to qualify. Hunt didn’t care much for this and, when the journalist asked him for a quote, he said jokingly: “All Brazilians are cunts.” Not realising just how to the point the Brazilian media operated, Hunt was confronted the next day with a headline which read: ‘James Hunt says all Brazilians are cunts.’
The quote quickly spread around the world, and John Hogan soon had executives from Philip Morris in New York on his back for an explanation. While Hogan may not recall precisely what he told them, he certainly remembers the experience, saying: “The phone lines were hot between São Paulo and New York over that one.”
The race organisers were also behaving strangely and, overnight, the unexpected happened. The organisers, apparently ignorant of Formula One’s subtleties, ordered the track to be washed down with pressure washers. They were seemingly unaware that, during a Grand Prix weekend, vast amounts of rubber are deposited on the track and that all race tyres are designed with this in mind. With all the rubber wiped off, the increased friction with what was now fresh tarmac meant that Goodyear’s tyres would not last the race distance. This unsettled Hunt, who made another poor start from pole position and was passed by Carlos Pace’s Brabham-Alfa Romeo, which stormed through from the third row of the grid. Reutemann’s Ferrari also got past. Hunt took second back from Reutemann on the third lap. Three laps later, Pace made a mistake and Hunt dived past his Brabham to take the lead.
The 80,000 South American crowd, made up of Brazilians and Argentines, was in a frenzy of disgust as the British driver, who had two days earlier called them all cunts, passed their two local heroes with apparent ease; Argentines also had never cared for the British due to the constant arguing over the sovereignty of the nearby Falkland Islands.
During the overtaking maneuvers, Hunt had damaged the nosecone which dramatically altered the handling of his McLaren-Ford, but he still led Reutemann by four seconds, with Jochen Mass third and Mario Andretti’s Lotus-Ford fourth. Mass crashed and took four other cars with him into the catch fencing, and Andretti started to close up on Hunt and Reutemann.
By half distance, the inevitable happen
ed as Hunt’s tyres became worn out by the bare tarmac. As his lead shrunk, with the memory of Mount Fuji still fresh, he decided to stop for new tyres. He remembered: “I reckoned I could go three seconds a lap faster on new front tyres, and there were twenty laps left. It would be worth the pit stop.”
The pit stop took fourteen seconds and Hunt came back into the race on Niki Lauda’s tail in fifth place. A lap later, he had passed the Ferrari and Watson’s Brabham-Alfa Romeo to take third, a long way behind Reutemann and Tom Pryce’s Shadow-Ford, which had benefited from all the accidents and retirements.
Six laps later, tyre wear started to wreak havoc with the field as Pryce’s car stopped and Watson’s was also out. But Hunt couldn’t catch Reutemann, who was 11 seconds ahead at the finish. Somehow, Reutemann’s tyres had lasted even though, as he admitted later, they only had two laps left in them. The victory was a massive relief for Reutemann, as it had been a long time since he had crossed the line first. Niki Lauda was not so pleased; he had barely been noticed in the first two races of the season.
Hunt was happy to come away with six points but knew in his heart he could easily have won had it not been for niggling problems out of his control.
The South African Grand Prix followed a fortnight later, on 5th March. After São Paulo, Hunt was on a high and enjoyed himself a little too much on the South African Airways flight from London. He was travelling to South Africa early to do some testing at Kyalami the week before. Hunt usually flew economy class to save money, but it was full so he was upgraded to first class. The clientele in that section were not used to his antics. Whereas in economy, he found he could get away with any sort of behaviour and no one batted an eyelid, it was not so in the front of the plane, where a member of the De Beers family was sitting. The popular British singer of the time, Leapy Lee, was also aboard.