Shunt

by Tom Rubython

  In saloon car racing, cars raced in three classes in the same events. It meant a Chevrolet Camaro and Ford Mustang would race alongside Minis. So Hunt decided to buy a Mini to start his career and began scanning the classified pages of Motoring News, the weekly that carried pages upon pages of adverts for second-hand race cars.

  Eventually, he found one he could afford; a gold-coloured racing Mini stripped down chassis that had been crashed and needed repairs. As 1965 dawned, he bought the bare chassis and body for less than UK£25. It needed repairing and building up almost from scratch.

  His father, Wallis, indulged him and let him convert one of the garages at the family home into a workshop, so he set the Mini on stilts and got to work. Hunt was no mechanic and diligently followed the basics laid out in Haynes manual and whatever else was to hand.

  He was forced to buy parts second-hand and from scrap yards, and aimed to rebuild the car as best he could. There was no time frame for James; it was simply a matter of money as he rebuilt the car when he could afford to buy the components. He thought it might take him two years, and it did.

  He said later: “I had no money, no knowledge of racing cars or the racing business and nobody near me to give help and encouragement. Even so, at 18, I reasoned that three or four years of total dedication to a project wasn’t going to cost me too much, even if it failed, which – viewed objectively – it might have been expected to do.” Retrospectively, he may have held such an enlightened view, but, at the time, he was not so sanguine. He fully anticipated success at the outset.

  It has to be said that the rest of the family thought he was slightly unhinged, but, like his father, they indulged him. He was certainly a different sort of boy from the average. Hunt’s boyhood friends also did not believe in him and thought the ‘craze’, as they called it, soon would pass.

  But James Hunt had a rare confidence, knowledge and other-worldly authority that allowed him to pursue his dream and retain his sanity. Set against that, however, was a strange naïveté which meant he often missed the obvious and direct solutions to problems and ended up doing things the hard way. But, that said, doing it the hard way meant he was learning all the time.

  The sacrifices he made to pursue his dream, even at that stage, were extensive. He virtually gave up any form of socialising that involved spending money. Luckily, his girlfriend, Taormina Rich, was very understanding and contentedly spent weekend evenings handing him spanners and sanding down bodywork. Hunt pulled in all his friends at weekends to work on the car, including, legend has it, the family milkman, who had a certain technical knowledge useful in rebuilding a Mini.

  His parents were not altogether unhappy with their son spending all his weekends in the garage and eschewing a social life. It meant he was always available for babysitting duties at weekends and evenings, often with Taormina’s assistance. Tim, David and Georgina were 10, 8 and 6 respectively, and Hunt became close to them as he watched them grow up. Because of his age, James’ role towards them was more that of a very close uncle than a brother and he was, by all accounts, a superb uncle. Taormina remembers babysitting with him one evening. After Hunt had tucked them in, she read them a bedtime story. When Taormina came back downstairs, Hunt surprised her by asking if they had said their prayers. They hadn’t, and, as she recalls: “James said to me: ‘Right. You’ve missed out hugely there. Come on, we’d better go and do it.’ So we did. His attitude was that he had been taught to do that by his parents, and it simply had to be done.”

  To fund his new career, James had got his first proper full-time job as a van driver for the Medical Research Council, based at the Royal Marsden Hospital, in Belmont. He earned around UK£14 a week delivering packages all over the local area. More usefully, he effectively had use of the van during the day and could easily stop off at scrap yards to buy spare parts for the Mini. In fact, he soon became a very familiar presence at the local scrap yard in Belmont.

  The scale of the task facing him was reflected by the fact that his car had no engine. It was just a lump of unattractive metal on stands in his parents’ garage. The biggest expense he faced was buying an engine which then would need to be tuned for racing. He eventually found one he could afford, of doubtful origin, in a yard and paid UK£25 for it, almost two weeks’ wages.

  To earn even more money, he supplemented his day job as a van driver for the Royal Marsden by becoming a cleaner in the hospital for four hours every evening. Even his sceptical father was impressed by his entrepreneurial zeal, astonished that his son was working so hard to turn his dream into reality.

  Throughout, Hunt remained realistic about what he was doing. He had no idea whether he would be any good, as he had never driven a car in anger on a circuit nor had be been benchmarked against anyone. Some inner resolve kept him going, but he didn’t know what it was and neither did anyone else. It was, one might say, ‘a blind faith in himself ’ that kept him going, spending insane amounts of money on a dream that had no objective prospect of success at all.

  Eventually, his father became concerned about his son’s obsession and used family connections to get in touch with former Grand Prix driver Stirling Moss for advice. Moss, although he can’t remember now, actually visited Belmont and met young James and gave him some sound advice. But what he couldn’t tell Wallis was what Wallis so desperately wanted to know: whether or not his son was any good.

  When he had collected most of the parts he needed, Hunt sought a change of job and became a bus conductor to earn even more money. The inspiration behind the change of jobs was farcical. It was rooted in a new TV sitcom that was first broadcast in early 1969 called ‘On the Buses,’ which aired on ITV every week. ‘On the Buses’ took Britain by storm and quickly became the country’s most popular comedy sitcom. It was written by Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney, and featured a bus company inspector, a bus driver and the star of the show, a bus conductor called Stan Butler, played by one of Britain’s top comedy actors, Reg Varney.

  The inspector’s name was Cyril Blake, whom everyone called Blakey, and the driver was called Jack Harper. The TV show centred around the Butler family, which consisted of his mother, brother-in-law Arthur, and sister Olive. Hunt was attracted to the position of a bus conductor because of Stan Butler’s continual success with women – either those he met on the bus or the conductresses who worked for the bus company.

  Together, the three main characters and the Butler family made the nation laugh with smutty scripts, in which the unmarried Butler normally ended up with a girl.

  Although the show wasn’t serious, it had an enormous impact on Hunt, who loved it. Hunt adapted his whole family and work life to characters in the show, although his own mother, Susan, couldn’t have been more different from Stan Butler’s working-class and over-sentimental mother.

  Having applied for a conductor’s job on Green Line buses, James Hunt got it. But his attitude turned out to be all wrong. Treating every day on the job like an episode of the TV show, he was often heard using the catchphrases: “I hate you Butler” and “I’ll get you for this Butler.” In truth, he was not very popular with his work colleagues, who all actually hated the TV show, which they thought belittled their jobs. But Hunt didn’t get it, and found that real life as a bus conductor was as far removed from ‘On The Buses’ as it could be. When he started calling his inspector “Dracula”, Cyril Blake’s nickname on the show, it was the last straw. He was called into the inspector’s office. As his reason for sacking him, the inspector said that James was simply “too tall” for the post.

  When Hunt remonstrated and pointed out that there were several other conductors taller than him, the inspector capitulated and told him the truth; he had “too much chat.” As a sop, the inspector allowed him to retrain as a bus driver, knowing full well that the minimum age for a driver was 22. So he was out, and his colleagues at the station were pleased to see the back of him. But ‘On The Buses’ remained his favourite TV programme for the four years it ran, and, years later, a
s soon as video tape recorders became popular, James purchased all the VHS tapes and watched them with his friends, reliving his own time on the buses.

  Undaunted by his brief sojourn on the buses, his next job was working for Telephone Rentals Plc, a quoted company that rented out telephone systems to companies. Telephone systems were taking off in Britain at the time, and it seemed that every company had to have one. It wasn’t possible for a customer to buy a system from Telephone Rentals; it had to rent. Telephone Rentals had placed big orders with most of the manufacturers and, along with British Telecom, monopolised supplies. But BT was still supplying old-fashioned switchboards, and only Telephone Rentals had the new electronic models customers actually wanted.

  Once a contract was signed with a customer – and a contract could run for as long as 14 years – the customer was trapped. When upgrades came along, a new contract was signed and the existing contract would be extended for even longer. A deal with the company was for life, and there was no way out. When a salesman made a deal, the commissions could be huge.

  So Telephone Rentals was all about sales and that vital signature on a contract. It recruited Hunt as a trainee salesman, and he attended a training course on how to sell the systems.

  The new job meant that he would have to wear a suit and tie and sport a rather shorter haircut. But he was prepared to do it because the basic salary was good and the commission he would earn for every signature he received was many times his basic salary.

  He did some early deals and his earnings rocketed, but every penny went into the car while his lifestyle did not improve at all.

  Recalling those years to his biographer Gerald Donaldson, he said: “I lived a life that totally freaked out my friends. They couldn’t believe it. They thought I was mad because I gave up everything that was part of normal life for somebody my age. All I ever did was work to earn money and build my car. I had no social life, never went to the pub, never spent on anything I didn’t have to. I could not accept other people’s hospitality because I couldn’t reciprocate. My only relaxation was squash. The club had a beer kitty so I was able to get drunk once a week. That was it. The club members simply regarded me as a nutter.”

  Chris Jones, who was arguably Hunt’s closest friend over his life, admitted he had no faith in his friend’s nascent career as a racing driver. Jones confessed that everyone felt James was wasting his time and they doubted whether he would enter even one race, let alone make a career of it.

  John Richardson, another of Hunt’s very good friends, called the Mini project “strangely eccentric.”

  But Hunt was deadly serious. He did everything he could to save money for his racing, including cutting down on smoking 40 cigarettes a day to hardly any.

  Sue Hunt remembers the period well, as she told Donaldson: “He despaired from time to time. He was always short of cash, always in debt – mostly to us. But we didn’t try to dissuade him from going racing. There was no point. He had made up his mind and he never faltered. He used to fly into tantrums over that Mini, but they were over quickly and all was forgiven.”

  Once he had bought the engine, the only thing he could think of was the day that the car would be fired up. He imagined the sound of the engine running and, when that milestone was passed, he yearned for the day when the car would run under its own steam and, then, the day it would hit the tracks.

  In anticipation of that day, Hunt sent off for this competitions’ licence from the Royal Automobile Club and went to his doctor to get the necessary medical certificates.

  The blind faith in his own ability confounded everyone, as his mother said: “James had a lot of charm, although at this stage he was always more charming when he was out than when he was at home.”

  Eventually the day came, in 1967, two years after he had started, when the engine did fire up. And, eventually, the day also came when the car ran under its own steam, albeit up and down the Hunt family driveway before he gingerly ventured it onto the streets, totally illegally. The road trips were very risky, as he chanced being shopped to the police by the Hunt family’s very annoyed neighbours. They were less than appreciative of having a would-be racing driver living next door continually revving up his car.

  But in reality, although his car certainly moved and made noise, Hunt had no idea what he was doing.

  He bought some second-hand race tyres, which were worn out and bald, and he hand-cut some treads in them, thinking he could fool the scrutineers into believing they were new.

  He had little choice in the matter, as a set of new racing tyres cost over UK£75; money he simply did not have.

  He was desperately short of parts, as everything had to be paid for in cash. As the Mini was Britain’s most popular car and highly unreliable, second-hand Mini parts were also very expensive. There wasn’t even any glass in his car’s windows. Saloon car regulations stated that the car had to have a passenger seat, and Mini seats fetched good prices at the scrap yards, so he bolted in a deckchair. Legend has it that it was actually bolted down with parts from an old meccano set he had played with as a child.

  With the car virtually completed, Hunt bought a 22-year-old 1947 Rover T6 for UK£15 to use as his tow car. He also bought a car trailer, which cost considerably more.

  With that, he was all set to make his racing debut and chose a saloon car race at Snetterton, in Norfolk, as his inaugural event. He couldn’t see anything in the regulations that said his Mini had to have windows, so he didn’t bother to try and find any.

  For his first race, James intended to compete in the under 1300cc class and sent off the entry forms to the British Automobile Racing Club (BARC) which, in those days, was headquartered in Argyll Street, London, above the offices occupied by the Beatles management company Nems Ltd, run by the legendary Brian Epstein.

  Knowing it shouldn’t have been made possible, James was amazed when the BARC accepted his entry. The official acceptance was delivered to his parents’ home by the postman. It was a big moment as he opened the envelope and read aloud the standard stenciled letter, signed by Grahame White, who was competition secretary and then general secretary of the BARC from 1962 to 1973.

  White would later become a close friend of Hunt’s but does not remember his debut or his first race entry. In fact, the name ‘Hunt’ did not register with him until James started racing in Formula Ford and delivering his entry forms by hand to Argyll Street. White says it was common for drivers to begin racing Minis in those days: “Minis had been around a few years by then. It was a very good way of starting racing because it was easy to race and easy to drive, cheap to maintain.”

  With his entry accepted, all that was left was for James to decide on his helmet colours. He had long ago purchased a helmet in preparation for the big day. He scanned the pages of Autosport and Motoring News looking for inspiration, which finally came from Graham Hill. Inspired by Hill’s black helmet design, with the distinctive insignia of his rowing club, James also chose a black design and, just like Hill, painted on his Wellington College colours: red, blue and yellow bands. Rather ironically, having gone through all the trouble of designing the helmet, he could not actually afford to have it painted and so he raced in a white helmet for the first few years. But barring the helmet, proper windows, seat and tyres, Hunt was now ready for his race debut, and he set out to confound his friends and family, who had never thought the day would come.

  But, in truth, he wasn’t ready and was actually UK£100 short of finishing the job. But he couldn’t wait any longer. The project to rebuild the Mini had cost around £250 and he had run up a UK£50 overdraft.

  He travelled to his first race with no mechanic, and was accompanied only by his girlfriend for moral support. No family attended. If he was to make a fool of himself, he didn’t want any witnesses. Surprisingly, the old black Rover towed the Mini to Snetterton without any trouble.

  It had been precisely two years between buying the damaged Mini chassis to entering his first race.

  But
the race scrutineers were horrified when Hunt drove his Mini into the scrutineering bay. The chief scrutineer said to him: “You cannot be serious”, or words to that effect. But Hunt was deadly serious and didn’t get the joke.

  The scrutineers ruled the car out of the race, principally because its tyres were worn out. The deckchair did not pass muster and there was effectively no proper exhaust system, which was also illegal. They also ruled that the car must have glass in the windows.

  Upon receiving the rejection slip listing four major defects and being told he could not start, Hunt was devastated. He burst into tears and made rather an exhibition of himself, just as he would four years later at Brands Hatch, when he was disqualified for cheating. He said later: “My whole world collapsed around me. I was a broken man.”

  Hunt was, of course, exaggerating, and it was a minor setback in the grand scheme of things. He was no fool and he had a copy of the rule book; he must have known that passing the Mini would present difficulties to the scrutineers. Some people say it was just a sighting shot to see what there was left to do, and that he portrayed it as a crisis as a ruse to get more money out of his father to finish the car more quickly. Whatever the truth of it, Hunt had no choice but to winch the Mini back onto its trailer, ready for the journey home. But before he left, he stopped off to watch the race in which he had so desperately desired to compete. He walked round the paddock and stared closely at the cars and the preparation methods of many of the teams.

  When he pulled back into his parents’ driveway that evening, his mother was genuinely delighted to see that he was still alive. As far as his parents were concerned, his non-event at Snetterton had been a success. As Hunt later said: “My mother was flabbergasted when she saw me come back alive. She was convinced I would be killed first time out.” And there was some validity in those fears. If he had gone out on the track that day as a novice in his car in the state in which it was, that could well have been the result.