Shunt

by Tom Rubython

  On 13th May, a Spanish tribunal confirmed the disqualification but Teddy Meyer said that the proceedings were a travesty of justice as he had not been allowed to take McLaren’s Spanish-speaking lawyer to the hearing. Mayer later described the tone of the tribunal hearings as follows: “The judges said: ‘Do you know the rule about the width of the car?’ I said: ‘Yes.’ They said: ‘And do you realise that your car was wider?’ I said: ‘Yes’ again. And they said: ‘Right, thank you, Mr Meyer.’” Mayer was the only person called on to give evidence. Mayer launched another appeal to the FIA in Paris about the tribunal’s decision.

  Alastair Caldwell simply accepted the blame and admitted there was no doubt the car had been too wide. He had failed to allow for a new design of Goodyear tyres.

  The usually very efficient Caldwell was mortified by his mistake, and he reacted to it by subsequently erring in the opposite direction. In fact, Caldwell’s reaction to the initial oversight went on to have dire consequences for the team and for Hunt’s championship bid. Back at the McLaren factory in Colnbrook, the repentant Caldwell went on a binge to make his car legal beyond doubt. Forgetting that all Formula One cars go fast by being barely legal and by pushing the envelope as far as it will go, his decisions were to cost McLaren and Hunt even more dearly than the forfeited Spanish points. Becoming obsessed with making the car legally watertight, he declared that an oil cooler modification he had made earlier in the season was also potentially illegal. The oil coolers had been moved towards the back of the car, but Caldwell ordered them to be moved forward to their original position. He also ordered the lowering of the rear wing and moved it forward as well for good measure. He then reduced the track of the car by two centimetres.

  The changes rendered the car immediately uncompetitive. Hunt called his revised car: “utterly hopeless”; just how hopeless would become apparent at the upcoming Belgian Grand Prix.

  The Belgian Grand Prix that year was held at Zolder on 16th May. It was a 2.6-mile tight, featureless and artificial track with few passing opportunities. It was the sort of track James Hunt despised, entirely different in character to the sweeping Spa-Francorchamps circuit where the Belgian Grand Prix had traditionally been held, but which was now excluded for safety reasons.

  Amazingly, Hunt managed to top the qualifying charts on the first day of practice ahead of Clay Regazzoni’s Ferrari and Jody Scheckter’s Tyrrell-Ford.

  Strangely enough, there had not been time at the McLaren factory for the oil coolers to be moved, so the plans were to modify them at the track. Between the morning and afternoon sessions, the mechanics shifted the oil coolers back to their old position below the rear wing. Hunt said: “We put them back virtually where they had been, under the wing, but because the wing had been moved forward, the coolers were now about an inch away from their old position.”

  The change was startling and the combined effect of Caldwell’s modifications completely changed the car’s aerodynamic set-up. So much so that, in the second session, Hunt was ninth fastest, and in the final session he was eleventh. But he managed to line up on the second row of the grid by virtue of his time in the first session – before the oil coolers were moved. The changes had turned the car into an ill-handling brute. One journalist described Hunt’s revised car as a “bucking bronco.” Hunt recalled: “In order to make it narrower, they unnecessarily moved radiators around and things like that. But they hadn’t checked it out and completely ruined the performance of the rear wing. As a result, the aerodynamics of the car overall were hopeless.”

  Caldwell defended the changes: “We had several things on the car which were reasonably dodgy. You couldn’t have oil fittings above a certain width from the centre of the car, let’s say 80 centimetres, which meant the oil coolers in front of the rear wheels could be – could be – construed as illegal. We had a little conference and said: ‘Okay, next race we must be absolutely 100 per cent safe, not get caught again. We’ll narrow the car, bring the wing down just on the limit and put the oil coolers back where they were before, on the back of the car.’”

  Caldwell had taken holy orders, and the car was now very legal but no longer fast enough.

  From the start, Hunt somehow managed to clamber into second place behind Lauda’s Ferrari. But Lauda quickly built up a huge lead and a slow Hunt was holding up the rest of the cars, which were queued up behind him. Gradually, Regazzoni, Jacques Laffite in the Ligier, Patrick Depailler and Scheckter all passed him. He was sixth when his car’s gearbox seized up and he retired from the race at exactly half distance. Lauda easily went on to win from Regazzoni for a Ferrari 1-2. Jacques Laffite came home in third place and Scheckter fourth.

  After the race, there was another huge row with Hunt centre-stage but this time he was defending his own driving tactics. He had upset many of the drivers by employing some dubious driving maneuvers to stop them overtaking his slower car. Several times, Scheckter’s Tyrrell-Ford was nearly shoved off the road and Laffite’s Ligier was hit by Hunt’s front wheel when he attempted to pass. It was also Patrick Depailler’s turn to be angry with Hunt: “Hunt was driving very wild, holding everybody back. If Hunt says all these things about crazy French drivers, he should not drive in the same way himself.” The drivers all had a very good point and, once again, it was not the Englishman’s finest hour in Formula One.

  But that was far from Hunt’s biggest concern. Lauda now had 42 points in the world championship, with the next best placed driver his teammate, Regazzoni, on 15 points. Hunt was seventh in the standings with six points, with Jochen Mass ahead of him in fourth with eight points.

  Meanwhile, back in England at the McLaren factory, Alastair Caldwell had no idea what had caused the car suddenly to become uncompetitive at Zolder. The team had completely lost its way and Caldwell and his men were running around like headless chickens. Having concentrated so hard on making the car legal rather than making it fast, they had briefly forgotten what Formula One was about.

  The Monaco Grand Prix dawned on the weekend of the 26th to 30th May, and Hunt had other worries than the sudden poor performance of his car. Hunt was becoming increasingly disenchanted with IMG, his management agency. He telephoned his brother Peter from Monte Carlo and asked him if he would consider leaving his accounting firm to come and manage him full time. His brother was taken by surprise at the request and told him he would meet him at the Dutch Grand Prix to discuss it.

  With that settled, Hunt focused on Monaco’s social scene.

  In his first year away from Hesketh, he was free to party anywhere he liked and he hooked up with former Formula One racer Johnny Servoz-Gavin. Servoz-Gavin had retired from Formula One in 1970 after problems with his eyesight. Now he lived on a boat in Monte Carlo harbour. Hunt and Servoz-Gavin had been friends for years. They were joined by Philippe Gurdjian, who knew them both. Gurdjian remembers: “They were very close, and I was very close to James.”

  The first night in Monaco, the three young men painted the town red. The following night, they jointly hosted a huge party on the boat which ended up with many of the female guests naked.

  Gurdjian remembers it fondly: “We finished the party the night before the Grand Prix at four in the morning, and they were all racing the day after without any problems. Now, it’s completely different and you cannot imagine that.”

  That night, Hunt promised Gurdjian he would give him his helmet after the race, and he did. The Frenchman still has it today, a prized possession from that championship year. He remembers his friend fondly: “He was very friendly, he had a real face and it’s a pity we don’t have more guys like that.”

  For the serious business of racing, Hunt’s car was in exactly the same specification and set-up as it had been in Zolder. When Hunt could only qualify in 13th place, they were still none the wiser about what had happened. The McLaren-Ford M23, that had been so fast earlier in the season, was now a pig to drive, and for no good reason that anyone could identify. Hunt found himself on the seventh row of the grid
on a circuit where grid position was paramount. Without retirements, the cars would normally finish the Monaco Grand Prix where they had been placed on the grid since overtaking was virtually impossible.

  On race morning, a desperate Caldwell ordered the removal of the airbox from the engine and found it to improve the performance of the rear wing. They had been scratching around overnight trying to find the problem, and removing the airbox was a last desperate measure. It made them look like amateurs. Up and down the pit lane, rival technical directors shook their heads. Colin Chapman of Lotus, for one, had already worked out what had gone wrong, but he wasn’t about to tell Caldwell.

  Hunt was dejected and knew he was finished before the race even began. The only plus point was that the brute, which is what he now called the car, handled better with a full tank of fuel, giving him hope for the early part of the race. He said: “The dreadful problem was that I was so far back on the grid I wouldn’t be able to pass anybody simply because there isn’t anywhere to pass at Monaco without doing anything risky or stupid. It’s a pretty stupid way to have a race.”

  When the race started, Hunt was stuck in twelfth position, although with full tanks his car was the fastest on the track. He remembered: “I was running two seconds a lap slower than I wanted to simply because there was nowhere to pass.” He quickly lost concentration and spun off but avoided hitting the wall: “I have to say that I spun the car through my lack of interest and sheer bloody frustration.”

  Hunt dropped to the back of the field and, clear of traffic, he found he was lapping as fast as Lauda, who was leading the race. But it didn’t matter as, on the 24th lap, he was put out of his misery when his Cosworth engine blew up. For once, Hunt was delighted to be out.

  From then on, it was a procession: Niki Lauda won, followed across the line by Scheckter, who was followed by Depailler’s Tyrrell. Lauda now had 51 points to Hunt’s six. Any notion that Hunt was a world championship contender was simply forgotten. No man had ever before won the championship from his position with six races gone.

  McLaren was not the only top team experiencing severe technical problems. There were also problems at Brabham. Bernie Ecclestone seemed to have made a huge mistake in choosing Alfa-Romeo engines for the 1976 season. The cars were having to start races with ten gallons more fuel than the Ferrari-and Ford-engined cars, a weight penalty of about 45 kilos. Even with that extra fuel, they were still regularly running out of fuel if they lasted to the end the race. The team’s number one driver, Carlos Reutemann, was looking to leave as a result.

  Meanwhile, Alastair Caldwell was still in denial as the McLaren team travelled to Anderstorp for the Swedish Grand Prix on 13th June. Hunt was 14th in the first qualifying session, eleventh in the second session, and eighth in the final session for a grid position on the fourth row.

  But between the second and final qualifying sessions, it finally dawned on Caldwell that the car’s problems might have something to do with all the changes he had ordered after Spain. In the early morning, he woke up his mechanics and ordered the car be put back to its back to its previous specification and set-up, except for the oil coolers which couldn’t be changed at the track. Hunt recalled: “We decided in desperation to put the car back exactly to Spanish settings, but it made no difference to the car at all.” Hunt had a dreadful time and spun a total of six times in practice and qualifying.

  But for once, Lauda was not dominant. Jody Scheckter qualified on pole with Mario Andretti’s Lotus alongside him. In the race, Andretti stormed off into the lead but was penalised a minute for a false start. So Scheckter led, and on the 45th lap Andretti’s engine blew up. Scheckter and Depailler finished 1-2, Lauda was third, and Hunt fifth. He was awarded two hard-earned points as he wrestled his way around the Anderstorp track. Those two points earned in Sweden were to prove absolutely crucial six months later. Afterwards, he told journalists that he considered it his best performance of the year; a mark of how bad the car really was. Lauda came third in his worst result of the year, but was still leading Hunt by 47 points. Hunt said: “My best drive of that year; I finished miles behind in a very undriveable car and, with hindsight, it was absolutely crucial to winning the championship because it got me two points. And I won by one.”

  Of course, nobody saw it that way at the time. Back at the factory in England, Caldwell and the McLaren mechanics were panicking. Teddy Mayer put them under intolerable pressure, and they all feared for their jobs. Hunt had suspected what was wrong from the start but Caldwell simply wouldn’t listen. Now Mayer was listening, as Hunt recalled: “It was one of the problems I had with McLaren; trying to persuade them to do anything. Straightaway, I said to them this 3/8 inch on the rear track is screwing up the car. Something fundamental has changed, so why don’t we put it back to exactly how it was for Spain, except to be within the width limit?”

  The mechanics had already put the car back to the Spanish Grand Prix configuration – apart from re-mounting the oil coolers. But Caldwell was sure that the mounting of the oil coolers wasn’t the problem as, outwardly, there was nothing to suggest that it could be. Hunt said: “They had been moved so minutely from their old position relative to the wing, that we couldn’t believe it could be that.”

  For once, it was Teddy Mayer who was right about a technical issue. At this stage Mayer was so frustrated that he even considered firing Caldwell, taking direct control of the team himself and promoting one of the mechanics to be the new team manager. Caldwell, under extreme and unrelenting pressure from Mayer and, against his better judgment, put the oil coolers back to where they had been. Mayer, convinced he was right, authorised an expensive test session at the Paul Ricard circuit in the south of France to test the car in the revised configuration. Caldwell remembered: “We went down there with a car and James.”

  When the team got the revised car to the Paul Ricard track, it was clear within a handful of laps that Mayer had been right and that they had sorted the problem simply by reverting to the pre-Spain specification. Caldwell told Hunt’s biographer Christopher Hilton the fascinating manner in which the discovery was made, at least as he remembered it: “We ran with the coolers on the back, James driving, then put them on the side and James went a second and a half quicker.”

  Hunt, however, was not immediately convinced, believing that the changing track conditions were affecting his time. As he told Caldwell: “No, no, no. It’s not the car, it’s me. The track is cleaning up, the tyres are working better.” Caldwell told him: “Ah well, just to check, we’ll switch them to the back again.” Hunt said: “No, no, no need to do that.” Caldwell responded: “Well, we’ll do it anyway.” The mechanics moved them back and Hunt went out again. When he returned, he asked: “What happened there?” Caldwell replied: “You were two seconds slower again.” Hunt still did not get it and said: “The track’s worse, it’s not the coolers, they have no effect at all.” Caldwell said: “Okay, we’ll change them back again.”

  Hunt was becoming increasingly angry, and said: “I won’t drive the car”, to which Caldwell said: “Oh yes, you will.” The mechanics changed the coolers and, as Caldwell said: “James went one and a half, maybe 1.8 seconds quicker. That proved it to us.”

  But many of the people present at the test session that day say that Caldwell has rewritten history in his version of the events. In actual fact, they say things happened the other way around, with Caldwell not believing the changes and Hunt forcing him to make them. They say Caldwell was miffed over the cock-up he had made, and was attempting to change the narrative of what happened.

  Caldwell made his comments to Hunt’s biographer after Hunt was dead and therefore unable to set the record straight. But before he died, Hunt had always been very clear about his version of what happened: “It took me until the French Grand Prix and we were still struggling disastrously until finally I persuaded them [to make the changes]. They did it overnight and we stuck it straight on the pole.”

  Despite the successes, Caldwell always s
eemed to have something against Hunt and was frequently scathing of his abilities as a test driver, saying: “James was not a good test driver: lazy, never interested in testing, and the results he gave us were dubious.” He added: “He tried to be professional. But he was always lazy. We should have hired a more competent test driver and got the car quicker. Then, on race day, we could have dragged James in on his leash, strapped him into the car and let him loose like a mad dog.”

  But Peter Collins, the former team principal of Lotus and a close personal friend of Hunt’s, said: “James was an extremely intelligent individual who thought about the science of motor racing. From my memory, James was very voluble about the problems after Spain and just wanted the car returned to its previous spec.”

  Harvey Postlethwaite who had worked with Hunt at Hesketh between 1973 and 1975, also disagreed strongly with Caldwell’s remarks: “James could talk about racing cars, about driving, understeer, and oversteer, whatever. He was a super guy to work with; very English, very pragmatic, intelligent. One realised how technically good he was. He understood racing cars and he did not believe in the bullshit, and I found that refreshing.”

  The McLaren mechanics discovered that changing the position of the oil coolers by less than two centimetres had been enough to upset the extremely sensitive pressure area under the rear wing and disrupt the airflow. It was a lesson in aerodynamics the team was never to forget. Soon after, the McLaren-Ford M23 was a potential race winner again, and Hunt could feel it.