by Tom Rubython
Mosley recalled a reception hosted by Marlboro cigarettes, Hunt’s main sponsor. To get to the party, Mosley and Hunt decided to share a car and set off together across São Paulo. As Mosley recalled, “James said to me, ‘Do you mind if I stop at one of my friends’ on the way?’ And I said, ‘No, not at all.’ So we stopped at this very posh block of flats and went up to the top floor. There was this amazing flat with an amazing view, and a very nice man. We all sat down, and the nice man got out a piece of highly polished stone and laid out on it three lines of white powder. James turned to me and said, ‘You don’t want yours, Max, do you?’ And he did both of them. We then went happily on to the party.” It was a typical incident and by no means uncommon.
Mosley also observed at close hand Hunt’s remarkable capacity for women. He believed Hunt was a man totally incapable of being monogamous or faithful to one woman. In modern parlance, he believed Hunt was a sex addict, and there is no question he had a big appetite for it. Hunt’s preference was for wholesome, nice girls. At races he was very successful with women, but the type of girl he liked did not always fall easily into bed with him. For those who resisted his charms, he had a fallback line that typically won them over. He would tell the women: “But I might be killed in the race.”
Hunt had a girl in every port, and his main Brazilian girlfriend at the time was 19-year-old Charlene Shorto, a well-connected socialite, and they were an item for much of the time he was in South America. Shorto was the sister of Baroness Denise Thyssen, who was married to Baron Henri Thyssen, the iron and steel heir who also owned the world’s most valuable art collection. But Shorto was by no means the only girl on Hunt’s radar in Brazil. Jochen Mass, his teammate, recounted an anecdote that reflected Hunt’s cavalier attitude toward women at the time: “There was a girl called Mercedes, and she worked for Spanish television. She said, ‘Can I do an interview?’ He said, ‘Not a problem,’ and they stood him beside the camera. And as she was asking him a question, he asked her [on camera]: ‘Do you fuck?’”
Mass recalled that Hunt was never afraid of discussing sex and his requirements, even with journalists. He said sex for him was a therapeutic form of relaxation. He called it a “form of communication.”
Mosley witnessed all of this in São Paulo in the week before the race and remarked, “I mean, he was just full-on into women.” Hunt was very candid about his attitude toward sex during a race weekend: “I don’t usually have sex before a race because I am very definitely concentrating. I find that it is the communication between two people that makes it worthwhile, and before a race I am pretty uncommunicative. However, if, say, I have an hour or so to spare before dinner on the night before a race, then I can enjoy the physical release. But I will only do it with someone who is fully understanding.”
After two weeks of virtually nonstop partying, the race weekend finally arrived, which meant there was less time for hedonism.
Both Hunt and Lauda had political problems within their teams. Neither felt they had done enough testing over the winter season, and both believed that their teams were resting on their laurels.
Lauda, in particular, was reeling from the resignation of Luca di Montezemolo as Ferrari team manager.
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. Before Montezemolo’s arrival, the team had not won a world championship for 11 years. Agnelli, who had great respect for Enzo Ferrari, wanted the denouement done subtly with no embarrassment to the old man who, despite his many failings, Agnelli revered.
Montezemolo had owed his rise at such a young age to his special connections with the Agnelli family. His own family background had always been shrouded in some mystery. Officially he was born in Bologna and was the youngest son of Massimo Cordero dei Marchesi di Montezemolo, a minor Piedmontese aristocrat whose family was connected to Italian royalty. His mother was Clotilde Neri, who was related to the famous Italian surgeon Vincenzo Neri. The rumors were that his real father was Gianni Agnelli, who had had an affair with his mother. Those rumors are unspoken in Italy, and the real story has never been revealed.
Whatever the truth, Montezemolo more than lived up to the responsibilities he was given by Agnelli. Although ridiculously young for the role as head of Ferrari’s Formula One team, Montezemolo rose to the task. His reign had been fantastically successful.
Part of the problem had been the irascibility of founder Enzo Ferrari, then in his late 70s. 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 at least thought he had—he turned immediately into a charming, warm human being whom no one could fail to like.
Montezemolo had succeeded brilliantly in sidelining Enzo, 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.
Montezemolo did all that was asked of him and proved a brilliant manager and, more important, a brilliant politician. Montezemolo spearheaded the revival that had culminated in Lauda’s 1975 championship win and was entirely responsible for the team’s renaissance after years in the Formula One wilderness.
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. Lauda had total respect for Montezemolo and pleaded with him not to leave. But the ambitious Italian saw Formula One as a backwater and had higher ambitions within the top management at Fiat Group, which owned Ferrari. As soon as he could, he quietly left after appointing a new team manager, Daniele Audetto. But Audetto was a very strange choice and seemed to have been decided upon more by Montezemolo’s personal friendship with him than by his ability to do the job.
Audetto, who had a rally background, had previously managed some of Fiat’s motor sporting activities. Montezemolo was a close friend, and they had driven rally cars together in their youth. Their driving careers ended when Audetto was seriously injured in an accident that also prompted Montezemolo to retire from the sport. After Audetto recovered from the accident, he graduated from Bocconi University, and Montezemolo helped him get a job at Fiat.
Lauda had approved the appointment of Audetto on Montezemolo’s advice, but it soon became apparent that although the 33-year-old Audetto was four years older than Montezemolo, he was too young and inexperienced and seemed immediately out of his depth. Audetto grated on Lauda straightaway, and Lauda described him to a friend as a “fraught personality.”
The problems did not really start, however, until they got to Brazil. Lauda said later that Audetto’s personality changed before his eyes. As he perfectly described: “Slowly he realized, mostly through the Italian press, who treated him with great respect, what an unbelievably important job it is to be racing team leader for Ferrari; he was quite overcome by his own importance.”
In São Paulo the invitations flooded in from Brazil’s great and good. Audetto loved socializing and wanted to go out every night and take Lauda, whom he saw as his employee, with him. Audetto treated Lauda as a trophy, and the driver thought this was ridiculous. Lauda resisted the invitations and flattery, and soon a split appeared.
After that, the relationship deteriorated rapidly as Audetto discovered what a difficult job he had taken on. There were additional complications.
Montezemolo’s departure had left a power vacuum in the team, into which stepped a newly energized Enzo Ferrari. It was not something Audetto had anticipated, nor was it something he was equipped to handle. Audetto likened the job to being a referee trying to keep order among Ferrari’s feuding factions, all of whom came out to play once Montezemolo was gone.
The result was typical Italian chaos where order had previously reigned. As Lauda observed ruefully, “The loss of Luca is a great blow to me.”
It also seemed clear that Audetto preferred Ferrari’s number
two, the Swiss driver Clay Regazzoni, to Lauda. Whereas Lauda was dismissive of Audetto and what he believed were his pompous airs and graces, Regazzoni played up to him. The 37-year-old Regazzoni secretly harbored grudges against the younger Lauda that dated back to 1973, when they had driven together in the BRM team. When they both moved to Ferrari in 1974, Regazzoni had been number one driver, but he had been completely outdriven by Lauda in 1975 and was relegated to number two status. It rankled, and when Audetto arrived, the older man saw it as his chance to push Lauda aside.
Regazzoni assiduously went about the task of undermining Lauda. Lauda believed that he pandered to Audetto’s vanity. As Lauda recalled, “Audetto was naturally closer to Regazzoni than he was to me, partly because they spoke the same language but also because of Clay’s more enthusiastic social life.”
During the weekend, Lauda coped with the shifting political sands by completely outdriving Regazzoni on the track. It solved the immediate problem; the real difficulties would surface a few months later.
James Hunt found that he had remarkably similar problems at McLaren.
The management of the team was dominated by two men, Teddy Mayer and Alastair Caldwell. Both were talented in their own way, but both were men of extremes with, as Hunt once confided to a friend, “a capacity for competence and incompetence in equal measure.”
Caldwell and Mayer had a difficult relationship themselves. They disliked each other and most of the time held each other in contempt. It was a recipe for management disaster, but somehow the team seemed to work under their complementary skills.
Mayer had graduated from Cornell Law School in New York with a law degree. But he never practiced and after graduation went to work managing the affairs of his racing driver brother, Timmy, in Australia and New Zealand.
Mayer met McLaren team founder Bruce McLaren in the early 1960s. Bruce was impressed by Mayer’s sharp analytical skills, and they quickly became friends. When Timmy died after a racing accident in Tasmania, Bruce McLaren invited Mayer to come and work for him in England. Mayer bought shares in Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Ltd. and became a director. When Bruce McLaren was killed in June 1970, Mayer bought more shares and shared ownership of the team with Bruce McLaren’s widow, Patty. In the five years that followed, Mayer turned McLaren into Formula One’s most successful team. Whether this success was due to serendipity, the foundations laid down by Bruce, or to Mayer’s own ability, no one really knew. But whatever it was, Mayer took the credit.
In all this time, Alastair Caldwell was Mayer’s number two. Caldwell was a rough-hewn New Zealander steeped in motor racing. Like Mayer, he had arrived at McLaren after a tragedy; his brother Bill had been killed in a motor racing crash in 1967.
Caldwell proved to be a talented engineer, but his rise was blighted by the fact that he didn’t get on with Mayer. Put simply, Mayer didn’t rate him. But when Bruce McLaren was killed, Mayer increasingly appreciated Caldwell’s talents and softened his attitude. Four years later, he made Caldwell manager of the Formula One team.
The record says that Caldwell’s appointment was a huge success and he welded together a talented team of mechanics, including the legendary Dave Ryan, Steve Bunn, Lance Gibbs, Ray Grant, Howard Moore, and Mark Scott. But Caldwell’s critics say he was made to look good by the skills of these mechanics.
And that is the situation in which James Hunt found himself when he arrived at the team in 1976.
What Hunt didn’t know then was that Alastair Caldwell had told the team that Jochen Mass was the number one driver and that the mechanics should treat him accordingly. Mass had the support of the management and, in both Mayer and Caldwell’s judgment, he would prove to be faster than Hunt. So although Hunt had taken the number one car, they considered Mass to be the number one driver. Instead of fighting Niki Lauda for the championship, Hunt found his first battle was with his teammate—to be number one in his own team. Both Mayer and Caldwell fully expected Mass to blow off Hunt.
It was a massive misjudgment, as 30-year-old Jochen Mass was only an average driver. Born in Munich, Mass was a year older than Hunt, although a less-experienced driver. He had started driving competitively at the age of 21 after a spell in the German merchant navy.
The matter was further complicated by the fact that Hunt had history with Mass from their Formula 3 days in 1972. Mass had taken over Hunt’s March works drive, and Hunt now sensed that history was repeating itself. Indeed, Mass harbored the same secret grudge against newcomer Hunt that Regazzoni held against Lauda.
It was a difficult situation, particularly as Hunt and Mass became good friends straightaway. Mass was something of a playboy himself, and when he wasn’t racing, he spent most of his time sailing in the south of France. Later Mass denied there were ever any such problems between them: “As teammates, basically we got along fine. It was a very happy team.”
But not in Brazil it wasn’t.
The political problems that both Hunt and Lauda were facing at McLaren and Ferrari were being fanned by the winds of economic recession blowing down the Formula One pit lane. The global recession had started with the Arab oil crisis in 1973–74 but, in true fashion, had only hit Formula One once longstanding sponsorship contracts had expired and proved difficult to renew at previous rates.
By 1976 the recession was in full swing, and every Formula One team was hit hard at the start of the season. Money was very tight, as Teddy Mayer was always reminding people. The lavish spending of the Fittipaldi era was well and truly over. But Hunt felt that Mayer had gone too far with his economizing and that it was affecting the team’s performance.
McLaren had a reputation for engineering excellence, but Hunt found a complete lack of preparedness at the first race. There had been no preseason testing, as Mayer wouldn’t sign off on the money needed for a proper winter testing program. Mayer believed that Emerson Fittipaldi had developed the car as far as it could go, and they didn’t think a formal testing program was necessary. To some extent that was true; by 1976 the McLaren-Ford M23 was a beautifully sorted car. Fittipaldi was a brilliant test driver, and he had left behind a car with a highly sophisticated suspension system.
The lack of winter testing bothered Hunt, but he was even more troubled by the fact that McLaren had not built him a new chassis to suit his physical characteristics. Instead they gave him an old Fittipaldi chassis, no. M23/8/2, which had been built in 1975 and had seen plenty of use. Hunt was a tall man, while Fittipaldi was diminutive. But Mayer refused to authorize the building of a new chassis for Hunt on the grounds of cost.
When he first got in it for a shakedown at Silverstone, Hunt found the McLaren car not to his liking. His feet were uncomfortable on the pedals, his knees were too high in the cockpit, and his elbows didn’t clear the sides of the cockpit. He also complained that the steering was heavy. He said, “The cockpit was all wrong. I literally couldn’t drive the car. I was in great physical discomfort.”
It was clear that the car was too small for Hunt, and the seat fitting at the factory had been less than perfect. The trouble with seat fittings was that they were done in a static car. At racing speeds, it was very different.
It was obvious that a new chassis was needed for the taller driver, and Hunt was shocked that it wasn’t built. Meticulous attention to detail had always been a McLaren hallmark, and Hunt told anyone who would listen that the McLaren team under Mayer was a “rudderless ship,” adding, “It didn’t have any direction.”
Added to that was the uncertainty of McLaren’s new car, the M26, which was waiting in the wings.
Hunt was genuinely surprised to find that, in so many ways, McLaren was inferior to the Hesketh team and that the Hesketh team manager, Anthony (Bubbles) Horsley, was a superior manager to Caldwell. Hunt explained: “With Hesketh, we used to spend a lot of time examining ourselves. Bubbles used to exercise tremendous discipline.”
In fact, Hunt was scathing about McLaren’s approach to team discipline, as he had expected a much harsher reg
ime. He explained: “McLaren don’t give me any discipline at all. They let me do exactly what I want to do, and they don’t take any notice of me.”
Hunt was particularly upset about McLaren’s casual attitude to debriefs. As he said, “The debriefing sessions we have at McLaren aren’t the same sort of thing at all. We discuss something if we feel like it. But [here] if nobody wants to talk, we don’t . . . I would actually get into trouble with Bubbles if I talked to anybody else after a practice, and before I had sat down, he would have wrung the truth from me and we would all have had a big postmortem.”
Mayer and Caldwell were forced to defend themselves against Hunt’s accusations, and they blamed his attitude for the problems.
Mayer said, “Possibly, James’s initial shortcomings were that he didn’t like taking decisions. He had been in a team where all the decisions were taken for him; where Bubbles Horsley told him exactly what to do all the time. I think that it’s better for a driver to learn to take his own decisions because he has more information available to him, and this is where a more mature driver will ultimately do better.” Caldwell added, “As team manager, I want to be able to contribute to the choice of tire or choice of settings on the car, but ultimately the driver has got the say, and I think initially James wanted us to do that.”
Hunt complained to John Hogan of Marlboro about what was going on. He was so angry that he informed Hogan he wanted to leave McLaren and cancel his contract. Hogan sympathized and was also angry with Mayer. Marlboro’s budget was generous by the standards of the day—the biggest in the paddock—and Marlboro expected the money to be spent making the car as competitive as possible. Hogan wasn’t at all enamored with the penny-pinching he was witnessing.
But after a meeting with Mayer, Hogan was told that all the team’s cash had been spent on developing the new car, the M26. Mayer told Hogan that he had never expected Hunt to have to race the M23. Mayer finally admitted that the new M26 had proved to be substantially slower than the M23 in testing and needed a redesign.
