by Tom Rubython
The race also marked a rapprochement with his new teammate Patrick Tambay, whom he was growing to like. The disappointment of Villeneuve’s exit was fading and the two enjoyed a convivial dinner after the French race. Hunt told Tambay he was designating him “Formula One’s ‘fastest frog’” and emptied a bottle of wine over his head to anoint him. Tambay didn’t get the joke, grabbed the ice bucket and emptied the half-melted contents over Hunt.
Hogan recalls Hunt and Tambay eventually becoming great friends. Tambay was a handsome Frenchman and effortlessly attracted women to his side, as Hogan recalls: “Tambay had a certain handsomeness which attracted pit followers, team followers, and that was fine by James. So for that reason alone he got on with Tambay very well and there was absolutely no problem.”
With two very handsome drivers, the supply of girls to everyone in the team increased dramatically. But on the track, any success was very hard to come by.
Back at the McLaren factory in Colnbrook, England, with Caldwell and Mayer fighting, the McLaren team was floundering around wondering what to do about ground effects. Mayer ordered sliding brush skirts to be stuck on the side of the M256 so at least the cars looked like a Lotus 79. It was the limit of the American’s technical knowledge. He also ordered Hunt to stay at Paul Ricard to test the modified car, instead of going home to Marbella.
Ironically, Caldwell would later claim to have invented ground effects in Formula One with the undeniably clever underside of the original M23 car. John Hogan thought the M23 clever but dismissed Caldwell’s claims, saying: “I would define the inventor as being the first guy who knows how it works; so that’s why the Wright brothers invented the aeroplane, not the Montgolfier brothers.”
Initially, Mayer was in total denial about McLaren’s problems. He had taken to publicly blaming the driver for the faults of the car. He said pointedly to a journalist: “I can get James to talk about women, backgammon, tennis, golf, business, taxes, Spain, food, childhood, but I can’t get him to talk to me about racing cars.”
Caldwell also had his views on the situation, as he told Gerald Donaldson: “He needed to be competitive, and if he wasn’t quick he was disappointed. I think his interest in motor racing was never that great anyway. He didn’t want to work at it. He wanted it to be easy. So when it became hard work, he lost interest. He wanted to just turn up and be the star, and when that didn’t happen he was not happy.”
Hunt didn’t like what was being said, but he would admit his motivation was waning. In truth, he was looking for a way out of his McLaren contract but couldn’t see how, saying: “I find it a great struggle to slog around endlessly in a car that is so fundamentally bad that whatever you do to it doesn’t change anything. I’ve got no peace of mind at the moment. I only get that from winning. I must win if I am going to stay in motor racing.”
But he said he was still racing with the same determination and enthusiasm: “I’m still racing to win, but at the moment I’m not doing it very well. But winning can come back to you at any time and, when it comes, you’ve got to be ready to capitalise on it. The important thing is to not get depressed about it. I’ve been through far too many bad patches in my career to let something like this get on top of me.” But, of course, it did.
It was not only Hunt who was fed up with McLaren. Hogan admits that Marlboro was also getting very itchy feet: “The condition of the team was basically terminal due to an outside influence which McLaren and, in fairness, everybody else called ground effects. And it just wiped everybody out. Nobody had a clue as to what was happening in terms of ground effects. You just saw how much quicker ground effects cars could be than regular cars, and it was monstrous. It was seconds a lap.”
Hogan admits that Philip Morris seriously considered dropping McLaren at this point but couldn’t find another team at the time: “We wanted to stay in Formula One, first decision. Second decision was which team we should be with. There was actually only Lotus, but there was no chance because they were already sponsored by a tobacco company. So we had to, in a way, grin and bear it. There were good people at McLaren. Teddy was first class: honesty, integrity and everything. He was very open and said to us: ‘Listen, until we get somebody who knows about ground effects, we’re fucked.’”
The British Grand Prix was on the horizon and would normally be a much-anticipated occasion for Hunt. But in 1978, he was dreading the return to Brands Hatch. He knew that the Lotus 79s would dominate and that his car would not be competitive. He couldn’t stand the thought of being an also-ran in front of his home crowd.
And so it turned out.
In qualifying in the skirted M26, he was half a second slower than he had been in the un-skirted M23 in 1976. He mused that his McLaren team had actually gone backwards, and the M26 programme had been an unmitigated disaster. He wondered what would have happened if all the team’s efforts had been put into the M23 and the M26 programme scrapped when it had become clear the car was a dog.
As it was, putting skirts on the M26 was very risky if the engineers didn’t understand what they were doing. It made the car unpredictable.
By then, the team had completely lost direction. The team’s leadership was non-existent and Teddy Mayer was having trouble with his marriage, which made his decision-making and leadership even worse. The team was in a mess, and it was getting to Hunt.
But things were only to get worse. Hunt qualified 14th at Brands Hatch. The Lotus duo of Andretti and Peterson annexed the front row of the grid. Hunt couldn’t even see the Lotus 79s from the seventh row. In the race, he was running alone in ninth place when the car suddenly and without any warning spun right around at high speed, as if someone had put on the handbrake. The car flew off the tracked and ran into the Armco barrier. Hunt said: “Nothing broke. The car was handling badly and I just made a mistake.” Since the start of the race, he had been experiencing understeer in right-hand corners and oversteer in left-hand corners. He blamed the tyres.
But dark rumours abounded, and people said they had seen Hunt snorting cocaine over the race weekend. The inference was that he was still under the influence in the cockpit. There was no drug testing of any sort in those days and drivers could get into cars drunk if they so desired.
In truth, Hunt was already on the slippery slope, and the decline that would continue for the next 12 years had already begun.
The German Grand Prix at Hockenheim on 30th July was another Lotus benefit. Mario Andretti was looking certain to be crowned world champion. Goodyear had got its act together and seen off Michelin’s challenge, and Reutemann was being demoralised by the sheer speed of his teammate Gilles Villeneuve. Brabham had also been knocked back by the effort it had put into the fan car, which had displaced its development programme.
Hunt was just trying to finish the season so he could go home to Marbella and lick his wounds. He was desperately seeking a way out of McLaren and was even talking to his nemesis Peter Warr about driving for Wolf the following year. By then, Jody Scheckter had told Warr he was leaving for Ferrari in 1979, and Warr was desperate to sign a star replacement. And there was no bigger star in the Formula One paddock than James Hunt.
But Hunt disgraced himself again at Hockenheim. In the final qualifying session, he was running eighth when his fastest lap to date was ruined by Vittorio Brambilla’s Surtees-Ford, which got in his way. Brambilla had run out of fuel and was coasting to the pits with his hand raised to warn oncoming drivers. Hunt had to slow down and was incensed. A reactionary Hunt drove his car in front of the Surtees, slowed down quickly and then braked sharply. But it went wrong, and Brambilla was unable to brake quickly enough to avoid running into the back of Hunt’s McLaren. The antic had been performed right in front of the pit wall.
Jumping out of his car, Brambilla ran down the pit road ready to hit Hunt, who wisely kept his helmet on and stayed in the car when he saw the veteran Italian approaching at high speed in his mirrors. He shouted at Hunt in his broken English: “You’ve got to be a crazy man to do
that.” Brambilla slammed his fists down on the top of Hunt’s helmet. The McLaren mechanics grabbed the crazed Italian and carted him off back to the Surtees pit.
But the paddock’s sympathies were entirely with Brambilla. Mayer shook his head. Just as Hunt didn’t want to re-sign with McLaren, Mayer didn’t want him to sign either. The relationship was over.
Andretti and Peterson dominated the race until Peterson retired on lap 36 with a broken gearbox. Hunt was disqualified on lap 34 after he got a puncture and took a short cut to the pits.
By the Austrian Grand Prix on 13th August, Hunt was shot through mentally. The Lotus 79s were on the front row at the Österreichring track, and Hunt qualified eighth. But he spun off on the seventh lap and that was it, as Peterson’s Lotus won.
Hunt was no longer enjoying his racing nor his turning to drink and drugs for solace. The following morning, after Österreichring, he felt increasingly disillusioned and bitter. He was starting to look much older as well; overnight, he seemed to have lost his youthful features.
For the first time, he contemplated retirement and was even considering turning down the highly lucrative offer he had received from Peter Warr at the Wolf team. Wolf authorised Warr to offer him the magic figure of US$1 million to drive in 1979. It was double what Hunt had earned in 1978.
There was also another incentive for Hunt. His friend David Gray of Collett Dickenson Pearce was keen on the deal to take Hunt to Wolf. Olympus, despite its success, was looking for a way out of Lotus and offered US$1 million to be sole sponsors of the Wolf team for 1979 on the condition that Hunt was driving. It was strange for Olympus to leave its Lotus partnership so early but Gray was fed up dealing with Fred Bushell, Lotus’s finance director and was delighted when Hunt left McLaren to go to Wolf and when the sponsorship went with him. In fact, the Olympus deal was worth exactly the same as Hunt’s retainer, and even Hunt could overcome his general dislike of Warr for that kind of money.
Hogan says: “He despised him. There’s a French word I’m trying to think of. That famous incident when he didn’t buy him any lunch; that was Peter to a tee.” But Hogan adds: “But Peter was very efficient at running a team. James had a high regard for his technical ability. He was not a great admirer of Warr as a person but admired him in technical sense. He used to call him ‘the pubic warr’”, after the rivalry between the pornographic magazines Playboy and Penthouse in the 1960s and 1970s.
In truth, Hunt was not overly enamoured with the prospect of working with Warr, but he liked the chance of rejoining Postlethwaite again. Although Postlethwaite was vastly overrated and never actually designed a successful Grand Prix car, Hunt rated him and, more importantly, liked him.
By then, Hunt could have afforded to retire. He had made about US$2 million in his three years at McLaren and thought that would be enough to sustain him for the rest of his life. But joining Wolf seemed to be like getting a new lease on life, even if it was to turn out to be illusory.
Hunt tried a Lotus before he signed for Wolf, but he just didn’t think the car was safe. This would come back to haunt him when he heard what Colin Chapman said upon learning of Ronnie Peterson’s death: “Oh no, not another one.”
So before the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, on the eve of Hunt’s 31st birthday, it was announced he was moving to Walter Wolf Racing in 1979.
The early announcement, he said, would give McLaren plenty of time to find his replacement, sparing them of the agonies they had suffered with Emerson Fittipaldi three years earlier. Hunt said at the press conference: “I decided that, on the professional level, I had grown stale with the McLaren team. Our relationship had gone as far as it possibly could, but this new team is a tremendous stimulus. I think they’re going to provide me with a challenge that I so desperately want.
“I’ve still got it in me to be a winner. I know it’s still there even after a year like this. I am convinced that once I get back into the right car the good results will come. My aim is to be world champion in 1979 so that I can go out of this business on a high. That’s the way I want to retire.”
John Hogan believes that Hunt had realised he hadn’t earned as much as he probably should have done, and that the million dollars was the main attraction.
Now that he had announced he was leaving, Hunt’s relationship with the team suffered and he was constantly rowing with Mayer and the mechanics. Immediately, Mayer signed Ronnie Peterson to replace Hunt, as Peterson was disillusioned about his status at Lotus playing second fiddle to Andretti and wanted out again.
Ironically, with the announcement made, Hunt’s relationship with Teddy Mayer improved dramatically. The pressure was suddenly off and Mayer knew he had Ronnie Peterson’s contract in his back pocket. John Hogan recalls the thaw with great affection: “James had this sort of British sense of humour which Teddy appreciated. After that, they were always ribbing each other all the time.” Hunt started to socialise with Mayer and his wife in Surrey, and attended many barbeques, lunches and dinners in those last few months of 1978.
Hunt managed to qualify seventh at the Zandvoort track, which was by now considered an excellent outcome.
He finished seventh at Zandvoort, but that in itself was a minor miracle considering his state of mind and the disarray of the team. Mario Andretti won the race from pole position, and Ronnie Peterson was second, with Lauda third.
The Italian Grand Prix was to prove the most traumatic of Hunt’s career. Mario Andretti was on pole but Ronnie Peterson had a difficult qualifying and had to start the race in his spare car, an old Lotus 78. Gilles Villeneuve qualified second.
At the start, the race began before all the cars had joined the grid. The middle of the field was travelling faster than those stationary at the front. There was a huge pile up and Peterson and Vittorio Brambilla were badly injured. Brambilla had head injuries and Peterson’s legs were broken in 27 places.
Three hours later, the race restated and was won by Andretti from Villeneuve. But both were penalised and dropped to sixth and seventh, respectively. Lauda was declared the winner. But sixth place was enough for Andretti to be crowned world champion; an achievement that paled when Ronnie Peterson died on early Monday morning.
At the United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, on Sunday 1st October, Mario Andretti returned home as the newly-crowned world champion and put his Lotus 79 on the pole in front of over 150,000 fans who had come to celebrate his championship. Andretti headed the Ferraris of Reutemann and Gilles Villeneuve and the two Brabhams of Niki Lauda and John Watson. Bobby Rahal made his Formula One debut as Wolf ran two cars for the first time. Hunt qualified sixth in a car that was running the livery of Lowenbrau beer, another subsidiary of Philip Morris.
At the start, Andretti jumped into the lead, but on lap three Reutemann went past, along with Villeneuve a lap later. They pulled away. On lap 23, Villeneuve’s engine blew and Alan Jones earned a deserved second place finish. Reutemann was never headed and came home almost twenty seconds ahead of Jones. Jean-Pierre Jabouille was forth for the rapidly improving Renault turbocharged car. He scored the first points for Renault and the first for a turbo charged engine. Hunt finished down in seventh place, one lap behind the leaders.
The Canadian Grand Prix, at the new circuit around the parks of Montreal, was a sombre affair. According to the organisers, exactly 72,632 spectators paid to get in on race day, attracted by their local hero Gilles Villeneuve who, on cue, scored his first Grand Prix victory. It was a sort of triumph for James Hunt who had been responsible for bringing Villeneuve across the Atlantic into Formula One.
It was James Hunt’s final race for the McLaren team and, by then, as the season began to run out, he had repaired his relationship with the mechanics and also with Teddy Mayer. Before the start, the mechanics pinned a note on his steering wheel that read: “This is the last one, good buddy – it’s been a great three years.”
He drove his worst-ever qualifying performance to be 19th on the grid and then retired from the race on
lap 51 when one of the wheels came loose and he went off on the grass. There was time for one last altercation with a marshal as he crossed the track, but this time no punches were thrown.
By season end, Hunt was 13th in the world championship with only eight points – exactly the same as his teammate Patrick Tambay. It was six fewer points than in his next-worst year, with Hesketh in 1973. His car had retired in ten of the 16 races. Six of the retirements were due to accidents. Hunt called it “a disastrous season.”
As soon as the season was over, he headed off to Australia and the Tasman series to drive a Formula 5000 single-seater at Winton for a fee of US$25,000. He was booked on Malaysian Airlines and took with him an entourage that included McLaren mechanic Ray Grant, his friend John Richardson and his brother Peter.
The flight to Australia via Kuala Lumpur was just a 24-hour drinking session. Hunt, who could barely stand by the time he arrived at Melbourne airport, was greeted by a party of dignitaries, journalists and a brass band playing uplifting music very loudly. He quickly learned his arrival was being televised live. Although Hunt was paralytically drunk, as he would say later, he “rose to the occasion.” To disguise his condition, he said he adopted a “composed and thoughtful look” as if considering the full gravitas and import of the questions being posed to him. In reality, he was trying to steady himself to keep from falling off the chair. Afterwards, the Australian public was said to have been “impressed with his articulate and knowledgeable answers.”
At the Winton circuit, north of Melbourne, 15,000 Australians attended the 30-lap race to see him win it easily. It was his first victory in 12 months, and the very last of his career.
CHAPTER 33
The death of Ronnie Peterson
A devastating weekend
On Sunday 10th September 1978, James Hunt effectively made the decision he would retire from Formula One racing. Although he would carry on for another eight months after reaching his decision, his heart was no longer in it after that fateful day. Only a few days earlier, retirement had been very far from his thoughts as he signed a new US$1 million a year contract with the Wolf team for the 1979 season.
