Shunt

by Tom Rubython

  The season started at the Argentinian Grand Prix on 12th January. Inflation was rampant in Argentina and there had been some doubt whether the race would take place. The race organisers were desperately short of cash and only just managed to pay the teams their starting money. Hunt was quiet all weekend and focused entirely on his racing, seemingly aware that 1975 was a make-or-break season for him. In his first race on Goodyear tyres, Hunt qualified sixth on the grid driving a modified car that was dubbed the Hesketh 308B.

  The new chassis was a vast improvement on the old, and in the race he went from sixth to third and then overtook Niki Lauda’s Ferrari to be second to pacesetter Emerson Fittipaldi’s McLaren-Ford. Hunt mounted a furious challenge on Fittipaldi but fell back at the end, coming in six seconds shy of the Brazilian.

  He could so easily have won, but second place at the opening race was a brilliant start to the season. It came with US$14,000 prize money. The money helped pay for the team’s two-week stopover in South America until the Brazilian Grand Prix on 26th January.

  As soon as the race was over, Hunt and Fittipaldi – along with Suzy and Fittipaldi’s wife, Maria Helena – boarded a light plane and headed for Fittipaldi’s beach house on the Brazilian coast. The house became Hunt’s favourite place, to which he would return many times, but now, on his first visit, he launched into all the available activities, including tennis and running on the beach. Fittipaldi, astonished at Hunt’s high level of fitness, said: “James was always very fit physically, very trim and one of these drivers who surprised everybody when he got to Grand Prix racing.”

  The Fittipaldis and the Hunts were great friends, as Fittipaldi recalls: “I spent quite a lot of time with Suzy. She was a great lady and I enjoyed James and Suzy together.”

  For Hunt and Suzy, it was to be the last truly great time they spent together as a couple. When the time came, they all boarded the plane and flew to São Paulo for the serious business of the Brazilian Grand Prix on 26th January.

  The 1975 event was significant because it would mark the final race of Graham Hill’s long career; he would be forced into retirement shortly afterwards. Hill had started his own team two years earlier, sponsored by Embassy cigarettes, and was running a couple of Lola cars built for him by Eric Broadley.

  Hunt and Hill were great friends and shared the same outlook on life. Hill’s wife Bette had also struck up a friendship with Hunt’s wife, Suzy. The relationship would endure for many years, even after the Hunts were divorced and long after Graham Hill was dead.

  Hunt qualified seventh on the grid alongside Jody Scheckter’s Tyrrell-Ford. It was a surprise when relative newcomer Jean-Pierre Jarier put his Shadow-Ford car on pole position. Hunt brought the Hesketh home in sixth and fought off Mario Andretti driving the American-built Parnelli-Ford.

  Hunt returned from South America having earned the team nearly US$22,000 in prize money and seven world championship points. But, most importantly, he had established Hesketh racing as front runners in 1975 and placed the team high up in the Goodyear pecking order for tyres.

  A five-week gap until the South African Grand Prix, on 1st March, gave the team plenty of time to prepare the car. But qualifying was disappointing, as Hunt managed only 12th after his Ford Cosworth engine blew up. In the race, fuel feed problems put him out on lap 53 and Jody Scheckter won his home Grand Prix in his Tyrrell-Ford, now back in four-wheel configuration.

  Hunt returned to Marbella for another six-week gap before the Daily Express International Trophy non-championship race marked the start of the European season, on 13th April. The gaps in the calendar enabled him to earn some money by making personal appearances. He earned nearly US$25,000 in those six weeks.

  At Silverstone, Hunt dominated the race from pole position. He beat back challenges from Lauda, Fittipaldi, Peterson and Reutemann. But on lap 25, after setting the fastest lap of the race, he suffered another engine blow up. Lauda eventually won from Fittipaldi after Hunt retired.

  He may not have gone on to win, but the morale boost from Silverstone had a wonderful effect on Hunt and the team. His dominance had been total, and the team went to the Spanish Grand Prix believing they could win it. The money situation had also eased, as Horsley was starting to run the rent-a-drivers scheme in the spare car. He did a deal with Harry Stiller to run Alan Jones in a car. The US$15,000 came in very handy.

  But the Spanish Grand Prix at the Montjuïch Park circuit in Barcelona was fraught to say the least. The first day of qualifying was abandoned after it was found that many of the steel Armco barriers round the track were loose after the bolts hadn’t been tightened. It was partially fixed overnight, but not to the drivers’ satisfaction.

  The race organisers then threatened the teams with legal action if they did not race. Fearful of the cars being impounded by the courts, the team principals ordered their drivers onto the track. But many of the barriers were still loose and the circuit was fundamentally unsafe in almost every respect.

  World champion Emerson Fittipaldi was furious. He drove the requisite minimum three laps at very low speed before pulling off into the pits. To placate his drivers, team principal Ken Tyrrell got some spanners and went out himself to help fix the barriers.

  Fittipaldi announced he wouldn’t race and left for the airport to fly home to Brazil. Hunt qualified third behind the two Ferraris of Lauda and Regazzoni. The Ferrari team had debuted their new car, the 312T, and it had proved stunningly quick straight away.

  At the start, there was an accident involving Andretti, Regazzoni, Lauda and Patrick Depailler, which enabled Hunt to lead the race for the first six laps. Wilson Fittipaldi and Arturo Merzario withdrew their cars straight away.

  Hunt’s lead only lasted for six laps before his car was pitched off into the barriers along with the cars of Mark Donohue and Alan Jones; all of them had spun on oil that had been left behind when Jody Scheckter’s Tyrrell-Ford blew up. It was to be a race marked by accidents – no less than eight of them.

  The race was then led by German Rolf Stommelen in the Lola-Ford car of Graham Hill’s team. But after two laps, the rear wing broke off and the car rammed the barrier head-on. It bounced off across the track into the barrier on the other side of the road, collecting Carlos Pace’s Brabham along the way. It was then launched over the barrier into a spectator enclosure. Four people, including a fireman, a photographer and two spectators, were killed. Stommelen cracked two ribs and broke his leg and wrist.

  Ironically, the accident occurred on a stretch of track where the Hill mechanics had tightened up the barrier fixing bolts.

  The race continued for four more laps after the Stommelen accident, and Jochen Mass inherited the lead in his McLaren-Ford. Upon realising the seriousness of the situation, the organisers stopped the race. Mass was declared the winner and Jacky Ickx’s Lotus-Ford second. As the race had lasted only half distance, Mass received half points.

  It was a race best forgotten, and so the Formula One circus headed for Monaco on 11th May. The future of Formula One was at stake following the Spanish race. With the organisers and the FIA panicking, extra guard rails and catch fences were erected, some kerbing was remodelled and the chicane modified.

  For safety reasons, the FIA decided that only 18 cars would be allowed to start around Monte Carlo’s narrow streets.

  Graham Hill realised he wasn’t going to qualify and gave up trying; Niki Lauda got pole and shared the front row with Tom Pryce’s Shadow-Ford. The Shadow car was suddenly competitive and Pryce’s teammate, Jean-Pierre Jarier, was on the second row. Hunt qualified sixth in one of his best-ever performances at Monaco.

  It was raining at the start and Lauda led the field on wet-weather tyres. As the track rapidly dried, Hunt quickly stopped to change onto slick tyres, anticipating a drying of the track surface. The team was very slow putting on the new wheels, dissipating his advantage. The same happened to Ronnie Peterson. Lauda led by 15 seconds from Emerson Fittipaldi and Carlos Pace, with incidents going on all around the
track. One of these was Hunt’s accident on lap 63, where Mass came up behind him and forced him off the track; the Hesketh touched the barrier very hard. Instead of walking back to the pits, Hunt stood by the wreck of his Hesketh shaking his fist at Jochen Mass.

  In the last laps, Lauda’s oil pressure faded and Fittipaldi closed in. With three laps left, the gap was 2.75 seconds. However, as the two-hour maximum race time limit had been reached, the race was stopped. Lauda’s win was Ferrari’s first Monaco Grand Prix win in 20 years.

  The Belgian Grand Prix on 25th May marked the debut of Graham Hill’s protégé Tony Brise. Brise was to prove stunningly quick right from the start of his career. Lauda got pole from Carlos Pace’s Brabham-Ford and won the race from Jody Scheckter’s Tyrrell-Ford. Hunt went out on lap 15 with his gearbox shattered.

  In Sweden, a few weeks later, Lauda completed a hat trick of victories. Since the introduction of his new Ferrari 312T car, Lauda had been untouchable; man and machine were at one. Oddly, Vittorio Brambilla in a March-Ford took pole position and led for the first 16 laps. A variety of cars took up the chase, but Lauda overtook them all. Hunt lost all his brakes on lap 21 and retired for the second race in succession, earning very little prize money.

  The two retirements had a big effect on Hesketh’s finances. With its minimal income, every thousand dollars counted, and as Horsley ducked and dived to keep the team alive, he thought Hunt wasn’t taking it seriously enough. Horsley and Hunt came the closest they ever would to falling out. He told him the future of the team was perilous and he needed extreme performance. His concern was not without cause, as Horsley told Hunt’s biographer Gerald Donaldson: “If he wanted to be on the piss all night, that was his business, as long as it didn’t affect his driving. What we tried to do was focus where discipline was needed.” He added after a pause: “And we did have to discipline him in both his racing and in his private life. Anyone outside your life can see you much clearer than you can perhaps see yourself. On that basis we were able to see, on occasions, that he was leading the kind of lifestyle that would not help his driving.”

  After Sweden, Horsley was on a mission. Back at the Easton Neston stables, he gathered the mechanics together and told them the dire position of the team. He was already running the team as an incredibly lean operation, with only 20 employees. Hunt was also at the meeting, and Horsley told him he had to muck in and quit playing the superstar. Realising it was a battle for survival, Hunt knew that the best tonic would be to win a Grand Prix. By mid-1975, the whole of the Hesketh team was well aware that it had never won a Formula One Grand Prix, and it was starting to grate.

  Hunt said at the time: “There was a feeling that perhaps my living out of the country had caused a schism in the team. So now, I’m going to be coming back between races on a regular basis to just go up and visit the shop. I’m not sure anything really valuable will come of it, but there’s got to be an intangible benefit to seeing the lads, keeping closer together.”

  The next race was in Holland. But as the team’s motorhome and truck set out from Towcester for the short trip across the channel to Zandvoort, the Dutch Grand Prix showed no prospect of being about to deliver the team anything. In fact, Zandvoort’s fluid, high-speed design suited the Ferraris perfectly, and so it proved as Niki Lauda and teammate Clay Regazzoni wrapped up the front row of the grid with ease. But Hunt was third-fastest, and half a second shy of the Austrian. He was the best of the rest.

  When it started raining before the start, Horsley knew the team had a chance from its high grid position. He looked up at the sky and saw a tiny patch of clear sky. Just as the mechanics had been about to change the dry weather set-up on the car to wet, Horsley ordered that they leave it, believing the weather would clear up.

  So whereas Hunt started with wet tyres and a dry set up – a severe disadvantage especially whilst he remained on the deep grooved wet tyres – the rest of the grid did the opposite. Horsley told Hunt that the moment the track began to dry, he was to come into the pits to change to slick racing tyres.

  The cars were obscured in spray at the start. Lauda jumped into an early lead on the very wet track, pursued from the second row by Jody Scheckter’s Tyrrell-Ford. Regazzoni was third, ahead of Hunt. That order remained for the first seven laps, with Hunt keeping an eye on the sky overhead. On the seventh lap, two dry strips appeared on the track and he quickly veered into the pits for the dry-weather slick tyres. It was a bold gamble. “The track was starting to dry quite quickly,” he recalled, “but there were only two dry strips to begin with, with slippery wet stuff either side, which made it tricky if you had to go off it to pass anyone. But I knew that switching tyres then was the right thing to do.”

  It was a trick he had pulled many times before, but never quite as successfully as this. But Hunt’s bold decision didn’t look immediately promising, as the Hesketh dropped down to 19th in the 22-car field. But as soon as all the others were forced to stop for dry tyres, the complexion of the race changed altogether. Hunt made up the lost ground hand-over-fist as he clung to the dry line wherever possible.

  The Ferraris stopped last for tyres, with Lauda getting preference over Regazzoni.

  As Lauda came out of the pits after his stop, it was not clear who would lead the race; it was to be the race’s pivotal moment. Lauda got out just ahead of Hunt, but without any momentum at all. The momentum was all with Hunt.

  Hunt was flying down the main straight and came into the braking area for the 180-degree Tarzan corner. While the Ferrari’s tyres were not yet at working temperature, Hunt’s tyres – fitted six laps earlier – were. The difference was crucial as Hunt steeled himself and got right on the Ferrari’s tail. Slipstreaming, he darted out and got ahead halfway round the 14th lap. That put Hunt second behind Regazzoni, who had not stopped. When Regazzoni finally pitted for his dry tyres, Hunt took the lead. Sensing a momentous victory might be around the corner, the thousands of British onlookers who had travelled over for the race went absolutely wild.

  But that was certainly not the view in the pit lane; everyone thought it a matter of a few laps before Lauda and Regazzoni reasserted themselves. And that is the way it might have been if fate had not intervened. Jean-Pierre Jarier, in his Shadow-Ford, obliged Hunt by getting in the way. Somehow, the mercurial Frenchman managed to put his Shadow-Ford ahead of Lauda. It was the start of a ferocious duel between Lauda and Jarier, enabling Hunt to pull away. Jarier managed to put a cushion of air between himself and Lauda. Instead of battling with Hunt, as he had been for 28 laps, Lauda found himself battling with a backmarker. The Shadow kept the Ferrari at bay as Hunt made the most of the opportunity.

  Lauda’s problem soon became clear. He was on slick tyres and the car was set up for the wet. He was running with a lot more rear wing downforce than either Hunt or Jarier, which negated his power advantage. Both the Hesketh and the Shadow, which were also, as it turned out, on dry weather settings, had less wing and therefore were faster on the straights regardless of any power disadvantage of the Ford Cosworth engine. As Hunt said: “[The Ferrari] really wasn’t any quicker on the straight than me.”

  On the 44th lap, Lauda finally squeezed past Jarier into second place. With 31 laps left in which to catch and pass Hunt, Lauda closed in for the kill. Coming under severe pressure, the Englishman looked to be facing a wretched task, as Hunt remembered: “I just settled myself down and focused on avoiding mistakes, and I was damned if I would let Lauda by.” Lap after lap, he kept Lauda at bay. His tactics worked and Hunt crossed the line on the 75th lap – just one second ahead. Hunt became the first Englishman to win a Grand Prix for four years since Peter Gethin in 1971.

  Lauda said later he didn’t try and get past Hunt in the end: “I didn’t win because I wanted six points. I was driving politically for the world championship contender in those days, so six points were more important than nine.” But it certainly didn’t look like that as Hunt fended off Lauda during the race.

  Whatever the truth of Lau
da’s statement, the chequered flag finally fell. Hunt had not only won his first Grand Prix and secured Hesketh’s sole triumph, he had done so in style. Lauda was well beaten.

  Hunt said immediately afterwards: “I could not have had greater pressure than I did in that race.” And, as he remembered many years later: “I lacked experience leading races, which is why I cocked up a couple of times earlier that year. But now my education was complete. For once I didn’t make any mistakes, and after that it became easier.”

  Lord Hesketh was in a champagne daze. Despite his brash proclamations at the start of each season, a Grand Prix victory was something he never really expected. As the winning car and driver mounted a lorry decorated with flowers, so too did the team patron. As they circled the track, on top of every sand dune, there were hundreds of union jack flags being waved by British fans delirious with joy that Hunt had won.

  As the lorry rode past the pit lane, Lord Hesketh gave a minute-long two-fingered salute to the personnel of the mighty teams of Formula One, including Ferrari, McLaren and Brabham. They had lined up to watch the spectacle of what they regarded as an upper class hooray and an overbearing upper class lout, neither of whom had any business being in Formula One, actually winning a Grand Prix. It certainly didn’t endear him to them, but now he could get away with it.

  Hunt went straight back to the camp site, where his friends were staying amongst the sand dunes. Suzy had stayed home in Marbella and had missed her husband’s triumph as well as the extraordinarily raucous party that went on late into the night.

  For Lord Hesketh and James Hunt, it was the greatest day of their lives; the day their dreams came true. It had also been beneficial for Lord Hesketh’s business interests: “James’ win stood me in very good stead. A lot of people who thought I wasn’t serious were disabused, and it made a lot of people’s reputations and gave them opportunities they might not otherwise have had. It gave me huge satisfaction.”