by Tom Rubython
This was the first time he had felt that emotion, and it hit him hard. He took Mariella for a short holiday to Marbella as he thought about whether he should continue racing or not: “For the first time, I felt unsure of myself. Maybe I wasn’t the fantastic driver I believed myself to be.”
But it gradually began to dawn on Robin Herd that Peterson was a poor test driver and had little mechanical feel for how a car was behaving. By contrast, he realized that Lauda had a very good feel, and they soon wished they had listened to him earlier instead of Peterson.
Peterson wisely avoided racing the March 721X and raced a modified 1971 car throughout 1972. But Lauda was stuck with the 721X. Saddled with a slow car in a slow team, it seemed his career might be over. Lauda called the car “a colossal mechanical fiasco.”
Lauda said, “It was obvious the car was wrong from top to bottom, and no amount of redesigning would help. The experience was certainly salutary for me. I learned that I should have more faith in my technical judgment.”
The 721X nearly brought down the whole March organization and stopped Lauda’s progress in its tracks. Peterson left the team at the end of the year, and Lauda blamed him for much of what had happened: “There are well-known drivers who would rather try to tame a vicious car than attempt to explain to the designer where the car’s faults lie and how one can perhaps correct them.”
Lauda found himself out of a drive and with debts of $80,000. By way of compensation, March offered him a Formula 2 seat for 1973 but nothing in Formula One. He argued he was due a refund for being supplied with such a terrible car, and there was a heated row with Max Mosley. Mosley told Lauda there were no guarantees and would not budge on a refund. Lauda drove away from March’s Bicester factory for the final time in high dudgeon. It was the lowest point of his life, and he decided to end it all, as he remembered: “I knew there was a T-junction a few miles ahead, and all I had to do was keep my foot to the floor and there was a solid wall on the other side.” As he candidly recounted later, he floored the accelerator and resolved to end his life—so desperate was his financial plight after Mosley refused to hand him a lifeline.
But in the few minutes it took him to drive the 2 miles, he somehow got himself together. As he said, “I clicked my brain back into gear in time.”
He realized that he had to persist, as there was nothing else to do. He knew it would take 20 years to pay back his debts and decided he had to make his racing career work. Once again, he justified his failures in his head and decided they weren’t his fault.
One thing he did know for certain was that there could be no more borrowing. He was in debt up to his neck.
Then Louis Stanley, the boss of the Marlboro-sponsored BRM team, appeared out of the blue as his savior and invited him to test the new BRM Formula One car at Paul Ricard circuit in France.
Stanley, who so often appeared to be a buffoon, was in fact sometimes very astute—he was just good at hiding it. He had heard that Lauda was an excellent test driver, and he knew that was just what BRM needed. So Stanley figured that instead of paying Lauda to test the car, he would invite him to a trial for the team. Lauda went along with it.
Lauda was kept out of the car for the first few days by niggling problems that always plagued BRM, and the driving was left to team drivers Clay Regazzoni and an Australian named Vern Schuppan. He ended up driving 20 laps on the third day of the test.
Lauda knew that he only had to be faster than one of them to be in consideration for the third car BRM was going to run that season. But more progress was made on that third day than in any previous day’s testing that winter. Lauda was also considerably faster than Schuppan.
Louis Stanley was very impressed with the “Lauda package,” as he called it. So he summoned Lauda to his suite at the Dorchester Hotel in London for a discussion about his future. After keeping him waiting for an hour amidst some grand theatrics, Stanley told Lauda he would drop Schuppan and that the third BRM was his, subject to certain conditions. But then came the bombshell. There would be no salary, and he would have to pay his own expenses; plus he would have to attract some sponsors. It was a deal that Lauda could just about afford to accept.
To seal the deal, he promised to go out and raise some sponsorship. Lauda knew he would have three races at least before he needed to deliver on the promise.
But before he would sign, Stanley wanted to meet the prospective sponsors. So he flew into Vienna airport, and Lauda brought along Karl-Heinz Oertel to impress him. Luckily Stanley could not understand a word of German, and somehow Lauda managed to persuade Oertel to advance him another $80,000 to up his overdraft to $160,000 in all. Stanley thought the loan was actually sponsorship and agreed to contracts being drawn up by lawyers in Vienna for signature before he went home.
While he waited, Stanley went to visit St Stephen’s Cathedral to listen to the carol singers and enjoy a helping of Austria’s favorite dessert—boiled chestnuts and cream. Back at the airport, he signed the contract before he flew off.
Lauda was back from the brink, and his career was on again.
But Lauda described the financial consequences of the deal as “madness,” and it was only with Mariella’s support that he got through it. He recalled much later how he put it all to the back of his mind: “I gave as little thought to my precarious financial position as I was to give, a couple of years later, to the fantastic amounts of money I was earning.”
Lauda quickly found dealing with Louis Stanley on a day-to-day basis hilarious. Everything Stanley did was accompanied by grand theatrical gestures designed to impress. But amid it all, Lauda quickly realized that the BRM team was in terminal decline. He managed to make his first sponsorship installment but could not pay the balance, as he was using this year’s debt to pay back last year’s. He was sick with worry that Stanley might want the contract he had signed translated and that he would lose the drive. He was also worried he might be accused of fraud if BRM’s lawyers discovered that a contract they thought was a sponsorship agreement was actually a loan agreement from a bank.
On the track, the 1973 season with BRM proved almost as big a disaster as 1972 with March. The best result the three drivers managed among them was a fourth place. Lauda’s best placing was fifth at the Belgian Grand Prix, where he picked up his first ever world championship points.
His career was saved by the one outstanding performance he put in at the Monaco Grand Prix. Lauda drove perfectly that day and held a superb third place before retiring. His performance that day caught the attention of a lot of people at the race. Louis Stanley, for all his faults, suddenly recognized that Lauda was going to be a big star of the future, and he was the first person to do so. Consequently, Stanley offered Lauda a three-year contract with a salary and canceled the sponsorship agreement he had signed. Lauda was so relieved that he signed immediately.
But 1973 was the BRM team’s last year in the big time, and its future prospects were poor.
Luckily for Lauda, Enzo Ferrari had watched the Monaco Grand Prix on television and, like Stanley, had been mightily impressed. Acting completely out of character, Enzo turned up at the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort for the qualifying sessions specifically to meet Lauda.
Enzo became obsessed with signing Lauda to drive for Ferrari in 1974. But now Lauda had the problem of getting out of his long-term contract with BRM. Luckily, Lauda had negotiated a breach of contract penalty, and in the end he used some of his Ferrari salary to buy himself out of his BRM contract. Ferrari agreed to pay Lauda $50,000 a year to drive, and so he began to repay his debts. He had come back from the brink.
Although initially Lauda found Enzo Ferrari difficult to work with, it was clear that the Ferrari team was coming back from a very difficult period, and the only way was up. Mauro Forghieri, a 40-year-old engineering genius, had returned to be technical director, and Lauda threw himself into the task of helping Forghieri make the old car competitive and design a new car for 1975.
The other good thing
that Lauda found at Ferrari was its new team manager, Luca di Montezemolo. Montezemolo was very well connected with the Agnelli family, which owned Fiat and controlled Ferrari. The downside was that he was only 26 years old and unproven. But Montezemolo seized control of the team, sidelined Enzo Ferrari, and restored sanity to the team’s management.
Montezemolo was to prove the catalyst to a Ferrari revival. Montezemolo, Forghieri, and Lauda were suddenly in the right place at the right time.
Lauda also got on well with his teammate Clay Regazzoni, and they soon became very close.
Forghieri soon reengineered the car and put it on a par with the McLaren M23. It all worked so well that either Regazzoni or Lauda could have won the world championship that year—and Regazzoni, then at his peak, very nearly did. As it was, Ferrari narrowly lost the world championship to Emerson Fittipaldi’s McLaren-Ford.
Lauda’s life was totally transformed after he won two grand prix in Spain and Belgium and was suddenly a genuine bona fide Formula One star. And Ferrari found itself a contender again after many years in the wilderness.
The following year, in 1975, everything came right for Lauda as Forghieri introduced the new Ferrari 312T. Lauda called it “a permanent monument to Forghieri’s skill, a gem of a car.” Lauda completely eclipsed Regazzoni that season and won races in Monaco, Belgium, Sweden, France and America. It seemed he effortlessly annexed the world championship with little opposition. It was his year, and he was suddenly famous and successful after all those years of struggle. By the end of the year, he had paid back all his debts and had over $250,000 left in the bank. The turnaround in his life was complete. So it was with some confidence that he looked forward to 1976.
But as the 1976 season beckoned, James Hunt found himself in an entirely different position to Lauda. By contrast, his Formula One career was in ruins, and he could only look and dream of the success Lauda was having. But Hunt knew that he was every bit as good a driver as Lauda, and that gave him the renewed determination to carry on.
Hunt was born on August 29, 1947 in the southern English county of Surrey. He was the son of a successful stockbroker. His parents were solidly middle class and earned enough to educate their many children at public schools. Hunt, 18 months older than Lauda, was a gifted boy intellectually and exceptionally talented at sport. His parents had ambitions for him to become a doctor.
But just before his 18th birthday, a friend took him to see a motor race at Silverstone, and Hunt was instantly hooked on the sport. From then on, he knew he wanted to be a racing driver.
He started off in a Mini before graduating to Formula Ford and Formula 3. He quickly got himself noticed as a fast driver with an aggressive driving style. But he also gained a reputation for crashing cars and earned himself the nickname “Shunt.” He seemed prone to spectacular accidents. In October 1970 he was involved in a spectacular finish-line accident with another driver, Dave Morgan. The race was televised, and Hunt flattened Morgan in front of millions of television viewers.
He spent nearly five years in Formula 3 trying to make it and failing. Just as he was about to give up, he met a young English aristocrat named Alexander Hesketh. Lord Hesketh was a young man who had inherited a great deal of money on his 21st birthday and founded his own racing team. The team was managed by Anthony “Bubbles” Horsley.
Hunt was adopted by Hesketh, who was a petrolhead. He and Hesketh were of similar age and bonded together like brothers. Together they dabbled in Formula 3 until Hunt wrote off the team’s cars in spectacular crashes. Far from being discouraged, Hesketh then graduated to Formula 2 and bought a new car for Hunt to drive. After that he decided to go into Formula One. It was the break that Hunt had been looking for, and he seized it with both hands.
Lord Hesketh had enough money to build a Formula One team around Hunt. And he did just that, starting in 1973, when he bought a new March-Ford 731 car from Max Mosley for Hunt to drive.
The following season Hesketh invested a small fortune and built his very own car, the Hesketh-Ford. The first Hesketh, designed by Harvey Postlethwaite, was loosely based on the March, but faster.
For the next two years, Lord Hesketh backed Hunt all the way, and his little private team enjoyed spectacular success, with Hunt winning his first Grand Prix in Holland in 1975, beating Niki Lauda for the victory. But just as it scored its greatest success, the Hesketh team ran out of money, and Hunt found himself without a drive as 1976 dawned. By then it was too late to find another drive.
It was his own fault of course, as the writing had been on the wall at Hesketh Racing since the end of 1974, when Lord Hesketh had effectively stopped putting new money into the team. It had survived the 1975 season by using up funds left in the bank account, selling off assets, spending Hunt’s prize money, and renting out its spare car at races to drivers willing to pay.
Because of the success of the team, particularly after its first Grand Prix win, Hunt believed that a sponsor would be signed with relative ease for 1976. He said, “It didn’t worry us too much because we felt that we were in a very good position with the success we were getting. Bubbles particularly wanted to do that because, of course, it was his future. He knew there was going to be no long-term future with Alexander. He wouldn’t just pay forever.”
Hunt admitted as much to Nigel Roebuck years later: “From mid to late 1974, there was no more money really forthcoming from Alexander. He’d spent what he’d got for racing.”
Although what happened in the following two months seemed like a disaster, it eventually proved to be the making of him.
Suddenly, events transpired in James Hunt’s favor.
CHAPTER 2
Contrasting Fortunes
Lauda on Top of the World, Hunt Down and Out
December 1975
As Niki Lauda wrapped up his first world championship season on October 5, 1975, he was looking forward to an even more successful 1976 season. By contrast, James Hunt was down and out of Formula One.
Hunt was out of a drive as Lord Hesketh finally closed down his team after running out of money. Hunt was desperately grateful to Lord Hesketh and had hung on until it was finally confirmed that the team would close. It was an expensive gesture; by then it was too late for Hunt to get another competitive Formula One drive.
But Niki Lauda couldn’t have been better positioned. He was established at Ferrari, and its designer had a brand-new car, the Ferrari 312T2, on the drawing board. Lauda could sense that the new car would be a winner. He had also negotiated a contract that would see him earn over $300,000 if he won the championship again. Not only that, he had negotiated a personal sponsorship contract with Marlboro worth another $75,000. A year earlier he had been struggling to survive; now he was a very wealthy young man with the world at his feet. He was also in love.
But suddenly Lauda received a shock that threatened to knock him off his confident perch. Luca di Montezemolo, the young Italian manager who had been responsible for the Ferrari team’s renaissance, announced he was leaving the team to take a top job at the parent company, Fiat. Lauda was stunned and recalled, “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.” Suddenly Lauda knew that all bets were off and everything was to play for.
Montezemolo’s departure was the big break James Hunt needed, although he did not yet know it.
On November 14, 1975, it was finally confirmed that Hesketh was definitely closing. Hunt, not really believing that the day had finally come, wondered what he would do.
Although it seemed the end of the world at the time, it was eventually to prove to be Hunt’s salvation. If Hesketh had survived and continued, Hunt would have stayed with the team for the rest of his career and probably never won a world championship. The closedown was the catalyst for Hunt to move on to bigger and better thi
ngs, although it certainly didn’t feel that way at the time.
Lord Hesketh was full of remorse and said, “I am deeply grateful to James for having stayed when the going got tough. The fact that he has not secured his future drive for next year is because he believed in a dream that we all believed in.”
But Hesketh’s deepest thanks could not secure Hunt a drive for 1976.
As it was, there were only two less-than-desirable drives available. The first was at the Lotus team, and that was far from definite. Lotus had suffered in the economic recession and had no money to pay its drivers. As a consequence, it expected number one, Ronnie Peterson, to leave. At the end of 1975, team manager Peter Warr, desperate for cash, had hawked Peterson’s Formula One contract around the Formula One paddock to the highest bidder. There were no takers for Peterson’s contract, and once he learned what Warr was doing, Peterson became disillusioned with the team. Sensing, but more likely hoping, that Peterson might leave, Warr opened negotiations with Hunt on the basis that he would agree to drive for nothing and be paid for each world championship point he scored.
But with no cash to develop the car, the Lotus would probably be uncompetitive. And added to that the fact that Hunt did not like Peter Warr and refused to work for nothing, it meant that there was no drive at all. In any case, it soon became apparent that Warr was determined not to have Hunt driving for Lotus and had only been going through the motions of offering him a drive to make himself look good. When Hunt realized what was happening and that he was being used, he called Warr a “pygmy.”
Hunt’s other offer was from the new, reconstituted Wolf-Williams team, owned by Walter Wolf and Frank Williams. Williams had bought the Hesketh 308C car that Hunt had driven in the last three races of 1975. Both Wolf and Williams were now keen to see Hunt drive their cars. But Hunt believed that the 308C was a terrible car, and he would only take the drive with Wolf-Williams as a last resort.
