Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One

by Charles Jennings

  The season was basically fought out between Fittipaldi and Stewart, despite a couple of intrusions from Denny Hulme and Jean-Pierre Beltoise (the latter in a BRM, with the team’s last-ever victory). Fittipaldi went on to win five GPs, Stewart, four. Crucially, Fittipaldi also picked up some seconds and a third in the first half of the season. This meant that he was able to wrap up the title by Monza. Stewart had, coincidentally, given himself a duodenal ulcer, scampering around in pursuit of fame and money, and was required by his doctor to calm down for the second half of the season – handing Emerson a small, but useful, advantage.

  Which he took, and nailed the Championship in September, 1972. ‘As soon as I was level with the pits,’ he said, recalling this blissful Monza experience, ‘I could see Colin jumping out over the guard rail and throwing his hat in the air.’ This iconic vision, a revisiting of his first Grand Prix win, ‘was the happiest moment I have ever had in my racing career! It was just the right thing to happen – I couldn’t believe it.’ And it made him, at twenty-five, the youngest world champion in the history of the sport.

  But also it announced the eclipse of the Argentinians (Fangio, Carlos Reutemann, Froilan Gonzalez, Marimon) and the formal arrival of the Brazilians. Emerson Fittipaldi was the first term in an astonishing series, which would go on to include Rubens Barrichello, Carlos Pace, Felipe Massa, Nelson Piquet, Ayrton Senna. The likely lad from São Paolo was redefining the sport, reformulating the Latin American connection and giving it a completely new meaning. And what do you know, the first Brazilian Grand Prix was held in ’72, although it wasn’t part of the Championship. By the following year, it was.

  And last but not least: it’s worth noting that at Watkins Glen, 1972, despite the cool weather, girls were seen walking around in hot pants. Which will lead us, in the fullness of time, to only one thing. James Hunt.

  14

  ALL THE WORLD RACES FORMULA ONE – BUT THE CARS ARE MADE IN SURREY. OR THEREABOUTS

  The major Formula One constructors, 1965–75.

  England:

  Cooper Car Company, Surbiton, Surrey

  Lotus Engineering, Hethel, Norfolk

  British Racing Motors (BRM), Bourne, Lincolnshire

  Motor Racing Developments (Brabham), Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire

  Bruce McLaren Motor Racing, Woking, Surrey

  Anglo American Racers (Eagle), Rye, East Sussex/Santa Ana, California

  March Engineering, Bicester, Oxfordshire

  Tyrrell Racing, Ockham, Surrey

  Surtees Racing, Edenbridge, Kent

  Shadow Racing Team, Northampton, Northamptonshire

  Hesketh Racing, Easton Neston, Northamptonshire

  Frank Williams Racing Cars (Politoys/Iso-Marlboro), Reading, Berkshire

  Lola Racing Cars (Honda/Embassy-Hill), Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire

  Ensign Racing, Walsall, West Midlands

  Fittipaldi Automotive, Reading, Berkshire

  Italy:

  Scuderia Ferrari, Maranello, Modena

  Japan:

  Honda Racing, Minato, Tokyo

  France:

  Matra, Velizy-Villacoublay, Paris

  15

  JAMES HUNT: LAST TRUE BRIT

  Emerson Fittipaldi won the title in 1972 in a version of the Lotus 72. The next year, Fittipaldi and Ronnie Peterson slugged it out at Team Lotus, their messy rivalry letting Stewart sneak through and steal the title.

  There were all sorts of snippy little rumours going round about bad feeling between the two drivers – Fittipaldi being the number one, but Peterson the quicker and more charismatic – and Emerson duly promulgated the intelligence that ‘If Ronnie has any problems he will talk to me, and if I have any I will talk to him. We will talk to nobody else.’ Which was later modified, after Peterson’s appalling death in 1978, to: ‘Ronnie was a great team-mate. He was one of the best friends I ever had in racing.’

  On the other hand, Lotus did win the Constructors’ title in 1973, with seven wins to Tyrrell’s five. And the following year, the Lotus 72E managed three more wins – at three contrasting circuits, Monaco, Dijon and Monza – in the hands of Ronnie Peterson, which was mildly extraordinary, when you consider that a car which had first come into being in 1969 was still winning races nearly five years on – and even managed a podium place in 1975, with Jacky Ickx at the Spanish Grand Prix. Yes, it had been tweaked and primped, with chassis refinements, aerodynamic changes, suspension modifications and so on; and the 72E that Peterson drove in 1974 certainly looked (and still looks) intensely menacing and purposeful, especially with its Munsters paintjob – but underneath, it was still the same 1969 brainwave that Jochen Rindt had alternately been terrified and entranced by.

  Fittipaldi, meanwhile, took his second title in a McLaren M23, a car which looked remarkably like a Lotus 72 and, indeed, owed quite a lot to it: ‘It’s a car that’s easy to make handle well on any circuit,’ he said, brightly, ‘because it’s so simple.’

  So Lotus and McLaren were doing the business as Great British constructors. But the drivers? Who did we find at the top of the table in ’74? Fittipaldi, Regazzoni, Scheckter, Lauda, Peterson, Reutemann. What had happened to that Anglo-Saxon domination which had been going on since the start of the 1960s – Hill, Clark, Surtees, Hulme, Stewart, Brabham, all those names?

  The fact of the matter was that it all came to end in October ’73, when Jackie Stewart’s team-mate, François Cevert, died in a particularly terrible crash during practice for the US Grand Prix at Watkins Glen.

  Cevert was being groomed for stardom by the Tyrrell team. ‘François can get past me whenever he likes,’ Stewart said, indulgently, even though the twenty-nine-year-old Frenchman had only one GP win to his name. ‘He’s faster than I am.’ What’s more, Stewart was planning to retire from the sport after The Glen, his 100th Grand Prix, with his third Championship already in the bag: a typically neat and decisive piece of reasoning. Only Stewart and Tyrrell knew about this plan. It was all going to work out very nicely.

  And then, in the last minutes of qualifying, Cevert lost control of his car, going through a particularly evil combination of bends known as The Esses. He smashed through a barrier, uprooting it, the car turning upside-down on the rail and destroying itself in a maelstrom of dust, GRP and metal. Cevert was more or less cut in half by the impact. Jody Scheckter was first on the scene and was so appalled by the destruction wrought on car and driver that from that moment on his views on racing changed fundamentally. From then on, he later confessed, ‘My preoccupation was keeping myself alive.’ Stewart and the Tyrrell team – ‘distraught and disgusted’, in Stewart’s words – couldn’t go on. They packed up and left, Stewart wretchedly forgoing his 100th race, the capstone to a brilliant career.

  Indeed, it was another bad year for fatalities in Formula One – not least because of poor Roger Williamson’s hideous death at Zandvoort. This has since become one of the more infamous moments in Grand Prix racing, not least because it was captured on Dutch TV: the crash, the burning car, David Purley abandoning his race to help – only to discover a couple of frightened and incompetent marshals unwilling and unable to assist the trapped Williamson, Purley’s increasing horror and rage as he tries to manhandle the blazing car into an upright position, rupturing blood vessels in his arms, forced to listen to Williamson’s screams as he burns to death. And the other drivers, in Purley’s bitter words, ‘just kept bombing through the accident scene.’ Ronnie Peterson barely altered his racing line.

  Stewart won that race. But first Williamson, and then Cevert – enough was enough. He hung up his crash helmet, winner of a record twenty-seven Grands Prix, and suddenly, the Brits dwindled to almost nothing. Graham Hill, absurdly, was flogging himself in his mid-forties round the back of the field, crocked up, greying, still nursing his injuries from 1969, but unable to quit. Jackie Oliver, a perennial trier, was, well, trying, without having much to show for it. David Purley, for all his bravery, was an unknown quantity.

 
Which left only one really viable proposition: James Hunt.

  Hunt was, in many ways, a reincarnation of Mike Hawthorn – shagger, boozer, smoker, nutter, patriot, controversialist, blond. What had changed, principally, in the twenty years between Hawthorn and Hunt, were (a) the cars, (b) the publicity. And it was (b) the publicity which sealed Hunt’s unique place in motor racing history, compounded with (c) his alarming frankness about himself and everything around him.

  Hence, it is impossible not to warm to a driver who admits that, in the course of his first GP – at Monaco, 1973 – ‘I was going well for the first third of the race, then suddenly it hit me: I couldn’t drive at that pace any more. I was simply going to drive off the road. The heat plus the physical effort of driving the car had me completely knackered.’ Equally, it is impossible not to be mildly repelled by the character he became at the height of his success – stupendously self-indulgent, boorish, arrogant, puerile. Hunt the world champion was often a creature without any grace whatsoever, lounging around in his motor home, smoking, holding forth to a bunch of sycophants, making fart noises, and taking the rise out of anyone who failed to amuse him. Racing journalist Maurice Hamilton was given the unenviable job of turning out The James Hunt Magazine – a fanzine for the credulous young – and had to spend hours being snubbed and derided by Hunt, in his search for quotable material. ‘He behaved like a spoiled brat,’ said Hamilton, ‘and I thought he was a right sod.’

  Like Hawthorn, Hunt came from the prosperous middle classes of south-east England. He went to Wellington College, where he firmed up his vowels and his officer-class diction, before horrifying his parents by deciding to be a racing driver. He was mad, but genuinely committed – something easy to overlook in the general confusion of girls and partying that evolved over time. His father, a stockbroker, may have been well-to-do, but his parents detested his chosen career, and none of the family cash came Hunt’s way. His early cars were hectic bargain-basement lash-ups, and it was only extreme determination which got him as far as Formula Three and the Hunt the Shunt phase of his life. Convinced about the rightness of what he did, he was nonetheless unnervingly candid about the contract he had entered into: ‘Motor racing makes me come alive,’ he avowed. ‘But it also scares me to death.’

  Scares me to death was an interesting admission. And conflicted would be another way of describing Hunt’s relationship with his chosen career. His internal frictions weren’t the same as Jim Clark’s Jekyll and Hyde personality shifts. Nor were they equivalent to Graham Hill’s jolly prankster/grim-faced battler dichotomy. They were more extreme than either. Hunt quickly became notorious for throwing up in the pits immediately before a race, and for trembling so convulsively with nerves that he made the whole car (in which he was sitting) shudder like a washing-machine. Peter Warr, team manager of Wolf Racing (where Hunt ended up later in his career), said, ‘He was the most nervous driver I ever worked with. His eye movements would be rapid. He’d be snappy and almost quivering. When his car broke down, he’d jump out shouting “This car’s a fucking heap of shit!” You’d just reel under the shock of this onslaught.’

  He once physically attacked a driver called Dave Morgan, after both had got entangled in a Formula Three race at Crystal Palace. Some years later, in 1975, Patrick Depailler nudged Hunt’s Hesketh into the barriers at Monaco. Hunt immediately leaped out of his car and spent the next few laps loitering at the edge of the track, shaking his fist and yelling at Depailler each time the latter went by in his Tyrrell. More or less the same thing happened a year later, at the United States West GP at Long Beach, California, with the same protagonists, the same minor shunt, the same abuse and fist-shaking. Niki Lauda, friend and epic rival, claimed that ‘Hunt was an open, honest-to-God pal – and one helluva driver.’ Many others, conversely, thought he was a wastrel, a loose cannon and, to borrow Hunt’s own phrase, ‘Barking mad.’

  Under normal circumstances, personality traits such as these would have condemned Hunt to burn brightly but briefly as a micrometeor trapped in one of the lower formulae. But his get-out-of-jail card arrived when eccentric British peer Thomas Alexander Femour-Hesketh, the Third Baron Hesketh, gallantly decided to manufacture an entire, fun-loving, team around him. As Hunt freely admitted, no one else was prepared to take a punt on him at the start of 1973. He owed everything to Lord Hesketh, a wheeler-dealer called ‘Bubbles’ Horsley and, surprisingly, ‘Doc’ Harvey Postlethwaite, a genuinely talented engineer who would go on to do great things for Ferrari.

  Thus constituted, Hesketh Racing was every bit as implausible as the 1950 BRM team, but for wholly different reasons. Hesketh himself travelled around in a pinstriped Rolls-Royce and a flight of helicopters. Hunt took his Lordship’s Porsche off one day, ostensibly to get it serviced, and never gave it back. They made a terrific fuss about the correct hanging of the Union Jack at race tracks and solemnly saluted it when raised. They prayed, loudly and in public, to a Chicken God. They got blind drunk, and on Champagne, at that. They had a lot of women around. ‘They’re attracted by fast cars, which have always been considered sexy,’ Hunt confided, of the women. ‘But most of all I think it’s because racing drivers are nasty. Women always prefer nasty men.’ Hunt, almost as an article of faith, eschewed all forms of clothing other than jeans and a T-shirt, apart from when he was working: in which case he would condescend to put on racing overalls. He also had a big dog called Oscar, who would eat with him in restaurants. Hesketh, Hunt and Horsley: to all intents and purposes, the Commedia dell’Arte of Formula One.

  But unlikely contradictions are never hard to find in Hunt’s career. The deranged Hesketh Racing équipe, using a modified March 731, did better in ’73 than the works March team. Their home-brewed Hesketh 308 was better yet. Hunt managed three podium finishes with it in 1974 and famously won the ’75 Dutch GP in an updated version of the same car. The nutters at Hesketh were far more competent than anyone had given them credit for; and Hunt was faster, too. With endearing modesty, he confessed that he didn’t see himself as someone with an ‘enormous natural talent. I’d put myself in the second rank, behind people like Peterson.’ Ronnie Peterson, the Flying Swede, was unquestionably one of the heroes of Formula One: fast, aggressive, good for the sport. On the other hand, ‘Maybe I can’t do one-off banzai laps in practice like Ronnie, but I reckon I can get the job done over eighty laps or so. Even Ronnie has got to drive a race distance like the rest of us mortals, and a Grand Prix is quite a strain.’

  Nevertheless, success was infectious. Master James began to take things seriously, to the extent of becoming something of a fitness fanatic, running, playing squash and tennis, training with the Chelsea FC players. Obviously, being tall, lean and muscular also did him no harm in the perennial search for sexual encounters, and fitness training at a professional level gave him a useful insight into the advantages of not being, say, a marathon runner: ‘I can be chatting up a bird and were I a serious professional athlete I’d have to go off to bed at ten. But as a racing driver I can perhaps stay with her another hour, and that might make all the difference!’

  And yet, at the end of the fraught British GP of 1976, he had barely got out of the car before calling into the crowd, ‘Can I grab that cigarette off you?’ and attaching himself urgently to someone else’s half-smoked gasper. It was all most odd. He was smoking up to forty a day, boozing, he was a rowdy, posh oddball, racing for a team of posh oddballs, and yet he came eighth in the drivers’ rankings in his first full season, fourth the next year, 1975, giving Hesketh Racing that first and only GP win; and he won the Drivers’ Championship in ’76.

  Stranger yet: McLaren gave him a job. McLaren, the winners of the ’74 Constructors’ title with Emerson Fittipaldi, were, even then, a byword for good sense, hard work and dependability. They were well financed, with money from Marlboro cigs and Texaco fuel. The M23 had proved itself as an ugly, but very effective car. The only snag was that Fittipaldi had baffled everyone by abruptly quitting at the end of the ’75 s
eason, to form his own (monotonously ineffectual, as it turned out) racing team. A brief, dream-like moment was experienced, in which McLaren looked around to find that all the best drivers had got their places sorted out. Niki Lauda – 1975 world champion – was with Ferrari; ditto Clay Regazzoni. Jody Scheckter was at Tyrrell. Ronnie Peterson was at Lotus, although soon to return to March. Carlos Reutemann was ensconced at Brabham; Carlos Pace, likewise.

  That only left Hunt. Hesketh, meanwhile, were strapped for cash. Having been running high-mindedly without any sponsorship, they were in something of a transitional state and couldn’t find a way to keep Hunt on. Early in ’76, Hunt ran off to join McLaren, where, to the astonishment of many, he fitted in rather well. ‘I think James worked at being an eccentric,’ said Team Manager Alastair Caldwell, ‘prancing around wearing unconventional clothes, doing crazy things and getting his name in the papers and so on. But it drew attention to the whole team, and everybody enjoys working for somebody who’s important.’ Or, as Teddy (‘The Wiener’) Mayer cheerfully pointed out, Hunt ‘Certainly is quicker than Emerson ever was when he drove for us.’ Who would have thought it?

  And there was definitely something in Caldwell’s claim that Hunt ‘worked at being an eccentric’. Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins partied because they were old-fashioned, instinctive fun-lovers. Hunt, on the other hand, was driven in all sorts of ways: it seemed at times as if the bad-boy shtick was willed, an attempt to mask, or at least deal with, the seriousness of his ambitions; a seriousness which McLaren tapped into.