by Tom Rubython
When he left school, David worked in various odd jobs to make money to go racing – just as his elder brother had done. He got as far as Formula 3000, driving for Eddie Jordan, before giving up because of lack of money. David Hunt thought the danger factor was the reason that James wouldn’t help him; he believed James would feel responsible if anything happened to him. Indeed, aside from withholding cash, Hunt tried his very best to end his brother’s career. Hunt directly appealed to Eddie Jordan to drop him from his team on more than one occasion. Jordan recalls: “James used to ring me up and say: ‘Why are you running that wanker?’” It was not in his nature to be deliberately destructive and, in any case, Jordan believed David had a talent worth pursuing, as he says: “He wasn’t his brother but he was a good driver.” Jordan believes now that Hunt was desperately frightened for his brother. The fear was borne from a realisation, belatedly, of just how lucky he had been. Ian Phillips, who by then had left Autosport and was working for Eddie Jordan agrees with that assessment: “James was a hugely intelligent man for all the play acting and this, that and the other, and he worked out how to go racing with the least amount of risk.”
Long after his death, James Hunt’s eldest son Freddie took up racing but it is unlikely he would have been able to if his father had still been alive. James certainly wouldn’t have given him any money, just as James’ own father hadn’t before him. In fact, before Hunt died, he made his attitude clear: “I would discourage [Freddie] because if he was going to be any good he would do it in spite of anything I said, and if I managed to put him off he wouldn’t have been any good anyway. The first thing you need is massive motivation from within. You’ll never be any good at anything unless you have that.” But it was mainly fear of anything happening to his brother or his son that prevented him from supporting either of them in their racing endeavours.
From September 1978 onwards, risk was constantly on his mind. Hunt wrote as much in his book Against All Odds: “The way I looked at it, I made my decision at the beginning of each season that I was there. You work out the risk and then you make your decision: ‘Do you want to take risk or don’t you?’”
What he wrote next, at the peak of his powers and three years before he retired, is telling: “It is a very specific risk, and the risk isn’t the way you drive the car; it’s whether you get in it or not. Because the difference between driving a racing car fast and slow is, in racing terms, probably two seconds a lap. Two seconds a lap slower is terribly slower than you’d normally do. At an average circuit that might be a difference in average speed of, say, four miles an hour. So what it means is the accident at when you’re going flat out two seconds a lap quicker – shall we say you have an accident at 170, the other one’s at 166 – well, the car’s not really going to do a lot different between those two, so the accident’s the same. And if a car fails, you don’t really put a lot more strain on it; they are designed to do it. If they are going to break, they break anyway, and from a driver’s point of view, I was more inclined to take the risk.”
Ian Phillips best summed up Hunt’s attitude, saying: “I think James mentally planned out what he wanted to do and how he was going to achieve it, and the moment he achieved it, that was the end of it.” Or as Max Mosley said: “There’s a fine line between being brave and being stupid, and James wasn’t stupid.”
The time to quit was nearing.
CHAPTER 32
The end of the road with McLaren 1977
A devastatingly poor year
If 1976 and 1977 had been vintage years in Formula One for different reasons, 1978 was to work out very differently. It was a year when one team would dominate and effectively be unbeatable.
James Hunt started out in 1978 less than optimistic. He was angry with McLaren team principal Teddy Mayer. What troubled Hunt was the continuing battle of wills between Mayer and the team manager, Alastair Caldwell, and some of the buffoonery Hunt believed the two men displayed whilst running the team. Although both were highly capable in their own ways, they were continually clashing. Mayer owned the team but they effectively ran it as equals, which led to a weakened chain of command.
This weakness manifested itself when they failed to sign the young Canadian Gilles Villeneuve as Hunt’s teammate for 1978. Villeneuve was Hunt’s protégé. On his advice, Mayer had taken an option on Villeneuve for 1978; but he let it lapse. So the rising star left McLaren behind and signed for Ferrari.
Villeneuve had been primed to replace Jochen Mass, who was moving to his friend Gunter Schmidt’s German ATS team. Instead, Mayer signed Frenchman Patrick Tambay to replace Mass in the team.
However, Mayer was not entirely to blame for losing Villeneuve. Philip Morris had been dead set against Villeneuve as the sponsor, seeing no marketing value in having a Canadian driver promoting its Marlboro cigarettes. Its opinion mattered because Philip Morris effectively would have paid Villeneuve’s not inconsiderable salary. But Hunt felt Mayer should have put the team first and signed Mayer anyway.
Hunt discovered afterwards that Mayer, aware that Marlboro would not pay, wanted Villeneuve to drive for nothing and would not pay the young Canadian a salary. A disgusted Villeneuve, who was very highly paid to race in his native Canada, simply turned his attention to the many offers he was receiving from elsewhere.
In any case, Mayer and Caldwell were just as keen on the clean-cut Frenchman Patrick Tambay to replace Mass. Convinced that Mayer and Caldwell knew nothing about drivers, Hunt now understood why they had wanted to sign Jackie Ickx instead of him in 1976. Tambay was a quick driver but not in Villeneuve’s class. John Hogan remembers the saga well: “It’s where sponsorship does get in the way sometimes because, in Phillip Morris’ world, a Canadian was no good for them at all. And that really was the issue because we had Patrick Tambay hovering in the wings and he was French – a big attraction to us. James said early on: ‘I promise you, he’s not going to get the job done. Villeneuve’s the way to go.’” Hogan added: “One of the consequences was that Ferrari got on the phone to us at Phillip Morris and said: ‘If you can’t find a hole for him, we’d really like him.’ So we said: ‘Well, maybe.’ So that’s how that transfer happened. There wasn’t anything mysterious about it as it happened. It was a surprise only because we kept it quiet. That’s why it was a surprise.”
Hogan believes now they might have done it differently: “He was certainly a spectacular driver, absolutely spectacular. Whether he would have done better and therefore lasted longer in a cool, calmer McLaren environment, I don’t know. Commercially, for McLaren-Marlboro it didn’t make any sense, and you’re sometimes forced into things because of commercial considerations.”
Hogan did however sign Villeneuve to a personal Marlboro contract, indicating that there were other politics afoot in Villeneuve going to Ferrari of which Hunt was not aware.
Hogan’s explanation didn’t stop Hunt telling anyone who would listen that the team bosses had no clue about the relative merits of different drivers. When the criticisms got back to Mayer, it caused tensions between them. But by then it was too late – Villeneuve was already ensconced in the Ferrari team. Hunt was right about Tambay he was completely inexperienced and not anywhere near as fast as Villeneuve. Hunt simply could not understand the attitude of Philip Morris, and told John Hogan what he thought. As Hogan admits: “Oh, James thought we were nuts. Yeah, and he told us all the same. He told Teddy, told me, told everybody: ‘You’re nuts, this guy is the future.’” The loss was a watershed for the McLaren team and marked their passage from being a top team to an also-ran.
But by then the team had other problems to worry about; namely, ground effects.
Right from the beginning, it was clear that 1978 would be Colin Chapman’s and Lotus’ year. Mario Andretti should have won the championship in 1977, and only bad luck had prevented it.
To underline Lotus superiority, Colin Chapman hired Ronnie Peterson away from Tyrrell to return to the team he had left two years prior. Peterson had left becau
se of money troubles but he was tempted back by Chapman whose problems had eased as the global recession ended. The seat was available because the young Swede Gunnar Nilsson had been forced to retire early when he developed cancer.
In all truthfulness, though, it almost did not matter who the drivers were that year. James Hunt joked that even Jackie Ickx could have won the world championship in the Lotus.
Lotus would have a new car for 1977, called the Lotus 79. Until it was ready, it would rely on the older Lotus 78 model. The 79 was full ground effects, and the 78 partial ground effects. For six races, the other teams could take their chances.
The Lotus 79 worked by creating a partial vacuum of air beneath the car, which sucked it into the ground and enabled much higher cornering speeds. For ground effects to work, it needed a system to keep the air from escaping from underneath the car’s flanks. Chapman and Peter Wright, a then unknown aerodynamicist, solved this problem by bolting on strips of brush heads to the bottom of the car’s side panniers. The strips actually brushed along the ground and kept air underneath the car, thereby ensuring the integrity of the partial vacuum.
None of the other teams really understood what Lotus was doing, and as the season progressed they just bolted the same type of skirts to the sides of their cars without really knowing why. In fact, apart from Chapman and Wright, only one other man in the paddock understood the concept. This was former Wolf designer Patrick Head, now working with Frank Williams. Head would eventually design a better car than the Lotus and would come to understand Chapman and Wright’s concept better than they did. But that was at least a year away, and for now Formula One was a Lotus playground.
But Lotus’ rivals were not entirely without hope. Ferrari also had a secret weapon. It had signed a deal to race on Michelin tyres for 1978, ditching Goodyear tyres for the untried French rubber. Michelin, the French tyre company was new to Formula One and no one expected much from it. In fact, pundits thought Enzo Ferrari had made a big mistake. Michelin introduced a new tyre construction to Formula One called the radial; Formula One tyres traditionally had been made of cross-ply construction.
Another change in 1978 was the amount of money suddenly sloshing around. The recession was well and truly over, and the world economies were booming once again. Driver salaries were going up every year, and team budgets were beginning to head skywards. The number of teams wanting to enter Formula One was also multiplying.
Formula One was also beginning to receive the benefits of increased television exposure. There was at last some income from the sale of TV rights. The effects of Hunt’s championship victory in Mount Fuji in 1976 were being felt. Demand for live Formula One coverage in Europe, especially Germany, meant that for the first time Bernie Ecclestone could get cash for the rights.
The Brabham team owner was appointed chief executive of the Formula One Constructors’ Association (FOCA) and handed the job of officially negotiating television contracts. He had been doing the job unofficially for years. The teams had been doing this outside of the FIA’s control and it would eventually lead to conflict with later FIA president Jean-Marie Balestre. It also marked the beginning of the Max Mosley-Bernie Ecclestone alliance which would so benefit Formula One commercially in the years ahead.
Money was flooding into top teams like Lotus, and there was enough to pay Andretti and Peterson the US$500,000 a year retainers they now demanded. Just two years earlier, they had not earned even half of that.
So it was no surprise when Mario Andretti dominated the Argentine Grand Prix from pole position to the finish flag. Although still in his old Lotus 78, the ground effects were so effective that no one could keep up with Andretti’s pace.
Only his teammate and Carlos Reutemann could get close, and they lined up alongside him on the grid. Hunt could only manage sixth on the grid, with Lauda fifth.
Andretti drove off at the start and stayed ahead for all 52 laps. Lauda did well in his debut race for Brabham-Alfa Romeo to finish second only 13.2 seconds behind at the finish. Hunt was more competitive than he expected in fourth, only three seconds behind Lauda and third-placed Patrick Depailler.
When it was announced over the circuit’s loudspeakers that Gilles Villeneuve had driven the fastest lap of the race, Hunt sneered at Mayer and gave him an ‘I-told-you-so’ look.
The race marked the debut of the new Williams team with a car driven by Alan Jones; a team and driver destined to have a big impact on Formula One over the years.
Two weeks later in Brazil, on Sunday 29th January, it was Peterson’s turn to take pole position. The race was marked by the debut of the new Arrows team that had been started by ex-March man Alan Rees and former driver Jackie Oliver, with Tony Southgate designing the cars. They had all come over from the Shadow team the previous year after falling out with its irascible American owner, Don Nichols. Nichols had then sued them for plagiarism and they had had to totally redesign their new car, thereby missing the first race. The team, with its new driver Ricardo Patrese, also brought over from Shadow, was not immediately impressive.
The race was dominated by tyres, namely the new Michelin radials, which caught Goodyear flat-footed. Reutemann’s Michelin tyres were to prove supreme in the race and he came up from fourth on the grid to immediately claim the lead, which he held to the flag. Hunt, who had managed to get himself placed second on the grid, had a troubled weekend. He had been fined for driving on the circuit without a crash helmet on Saturday and it had put him in a black mood.
But the race was marked for the best ever performance by Emerson Fittipaldi in his Copersucar-Fittipaldi car after placing second at his home Grand Prix.
Hunt spun off and, after a pit stop to change tyres, he got stuck in the sand pit in the run-off area and couldn’t get going again. He was forced to retire.
Hunt blamed his altercation on a lapse of concentration and on being held up by slower cars He said bluntly: “I simply lost interest and spun off.”
In early March, after a five-week break, Hunt returned to his favourite playground of South Africa and the Kyalami Ranch Hotel. There, he was reunited with his hedonistic friend, the former South African tennis star Abe Segal. Together, he enjoyed all the pleasures on offer, from alcohol to recreational drugs, smoking and women. To say he indulged in all four joyfully and copiously would not be an overstatement.
The two enjoyed themselves so much that South African gossip journalists began following them around, printing stories about just how good a time they were having. South African journalists had few inhibitions and recorded events far more liberally than their counterparts in Europe and America. It was seventies excess redefined.
Hunt, reading all this, momentarily had pause to wonder what his girlfriend, Jane Birbeck, back in Britain would think if she had access to South African newspapers. Luckily, she didn’t.
The race was held at Kyalami on Sunday 4th March, and Ferrari and Brabham had their new cars. For Ferrari, it was the third version of the highly successful 312T series, designated the 312T3, and Brabham had its new Alfa Romeoengined BT46. The race also saw the return of a much modified Renault turbo charged car driven by Jean-Pierre Jabouille.
Lauda put his new car straight on pole position with Andretti second and Hunt a strong third. But the race was marked by the extraordinary performance of the young 24-year-old Italian Ricardo Patrese, who led the race until lap 63 in what was only the second race for the new Arrows team. He was halted only when his Arrows blew its Ford engine.
With Patrese gone, Ronnie Peterson in his Lotus 78 battled Patrick Depailler’s Tyrrell to the last lap for victory. John Watson finished third for Brabham. Lauda retired with his engine blown, as did the Ferraris and both McLarens.
Ironically, in view of what would happen later, Hunt described Patrese’s race-leading performance as “extremely impressive.”
Hunt returned to England to compete with the Silverstone International Trophy non-championship race on the 19th March. It was an impressive field, including An
dretti and Peterson in their Lotus 78s, Emerson Fittipaldi, Niki Lauda and Patrick Depailler. Hunt usually specialised in winning these British non-championship events, but not this time. Heavy rain decimated the field and Hunt spun off. The race was eventually won by Keke Rosberg in only his second outing in a Formula One car.
On Easter weekend, on 26th March, Hunt competed in a celebrity saloon car race at Brands Hatch with, amongst others, Jane Birbeck. It was Birbeck’s first time on a race track and, although she managed to spin the car right round three times during the race, she was not lapped and the car was undamaged at the finish.
A week later, it was back to serious business for the third running of the United States Grand Prix West at Long Beach, on 2nd April. This time, Hunt flew in on the Wednesday and spent all weekend scowling at Chris Pook. After last year’s shenanigans, the two men were not the best of friends.
With hardly any promotion, attendance suffered. But even if fans were short on the ground, the number of competitors was not. Formula One was so cheap to compete in and so popular that there were a staggering 30 entries for the 22 available starting slots.
With the Lotus drivers still waiting for their new 79 models, it was Ferrari who proved to have the best driver-chassis-engine-tyres combination. In fact, the Ferrari team was absolutely dominant on its Michelin radial tyres. The new Michelins worked so well it left Goodyear scrambling to catch up.
Niki Lauda set the early pace in his new Brabham-Alfa Romeo. It was now clear that the Alfa Romeo V12 was the most powerful engine on the grid, although it had obvious reliability problems. But Reutemann’s Ferrari set pole time and no one was able to better it on Saturday. The first three rows of the final grid were occupied by three teams, Ferrari, Brabham-Alfa Romeo and Lotus-Ford, absolutely reflecting current form. There was no place for McLaren.
After only five races, Gilles Villeneuve had already and almost effortlessly established himself as one of Formula One’s top stars. Hunt had an accident in qualifying which curtailed his running time.