James Hunt

James Hunt: One Point, and a Lifetime of Trouble

At Fuji on the last afternoon of the 1976 Formula One season, in torrential rain, James Hunt needed fourth place to take the world championship from Niki Lauda. He suffered a puncture, lost time in a slow stop, and came back out to pit signals that nobody could read. He finished third. It gave him the title by a single point, and it was the last thing in his life that ever went that well. He was twenty-nine, and had another seventeen years to live.

Wellington and the Mini

James Simon Wallis Hunt was born on 29 August 1947 in Belmont, Surrey, the second of six children of the stockbroker Wallis Hunt and his wife Susan; the paternal line ran back to the industrialist Sir William Jackson. He went to Westerleigh preparatory school at St Leonards-on-Sea and then to Wellington College in Berkshire.

He passed his driving test at seventeen and said his life "really began." The obsession arrived when he watched his tennis partner's brother, Simon Ridge, race Minis at Silverstone; Hunt bought a Mini and took it to Snetterton. In 1968, in a Russell-Alexis Mark 14, he won his first Formula Ford race at Lydden Hill and set lap records at Brands Hatch. In Formula Three the following year, driving a Merlyn Mark 11A on Gowrings money, he won repeatedly and collected a Grovewood Award as a coming man.

Hunt the Shunt

The nickname followed him out of the junior formulae — "shunt" being British paddock slang for a crash — and it stuck because it rhymed rather than because it was strictly true. He was tail-happy and aggressive, but not measurably more accident-prone than his contemporaries. A notorious 1970 collision with Dave Morgan at Crystal Palace ended with Hunt cleared by an RAC tribunal and Morgan suspended for twelve months.

The Aristocrat's Team

In 1973 he signed for Hesketh Racing, the private outfit run by Lord Alexander Hesketh, which the paddock regarded as a champagne party with a racing car attached. Hunt made his Grand Prix debut at Monaco in a March 731 designed by Harvey Postlethwaite, and took podiums in Holland and the United States in his first season. In 1974, on £15,000 a year in the purpose-built Hesketh 308, he beat most of the Formula One field to win the non-championship International Trophy at Silverstone.

Then, at Zandvoort in 1975, Hunt won the Dutch Grand Prix outright — a privateer team with no manufacturer behind it beating the works cars, still one of the sport's great underdog results. He finished the season fourth. Within months Hesketh's money ran out and the team folded.

1976

McLaren picked him up at the last minute on a $50,000 retainer plus a share of prize money, brokered by Marlboro's John Hogan, which made him one of the cheapest world champions the sport has produced. The season was chaos. He took pole in Brazil in a hastily rebuilt M23. He won in Spain, was disqualified because the car was judged 1.8 centimetres too wide, and had the win restored on appeal. He collided with Lauda on the first lap in Britain, won the restarted race, and was stripped of it later.

Then, at the Nürburgring, Lauda crashed and nearly burned to death. Hunt won the restarted German Grand Prix and, over the six weeks of Lauda's absence and painful return, ate into a lead that had looked untouchable — winning in Canada and at Watkins Glen before the finale at Fuji, where Lauda withdrew after two laps because he judged the conditions unsurvivable.

Hunt was the last British world champion until Nigel Mansell in 1992. His full record: 92 Grand Prix starts, 10 wins, 14 poles, 8 fastest laps, 23 podiums, one title.

The Long Decline

Nothing after 1976 worked. He won at Silverstone and Watkins Glen in 1977 but the M26 was unreliable, and he collected fines for shoving a marshal in Canada and for skipping the podium at Fuji. In 1978 the Lotus 79's ground effect made the McLaren obsolete and he scored eight points all year. That September at Monza he pulled Ronnie Peterson, a close friend, from a burning Lotus after a first-corner crash; Peterson died in hospital, and Hunt spent years blaming Riccardo Patrese before video evidence cleared him. In 1979 he moved to Walter Wolf Racing, found the car hopeless and his enthusiasm gone, and announced his retirement at Monaco on 8 June — six years, almost to the day, after his debut at the same circuit.

The Commentary Box

Jonathan Martin invited him into the BBC Grand Prix box, where he sat beside Murray Walker for thirteen years until his death. He made his debut at Monaco in 1980 with his plaster-cast leg draped across Walker's lap and two bottles of wine inside him, and frequently arrived minutes before the start. He once grabbed Walker's collar in a fight over the microphone. He was also, unmistakably, good: dry, technically literate and viciously intolerant of drivers not doing their jobs. He called René Arnoux's excuses "bullshit" live on air and described Jean-Pierre Jarier as "pig ignorant," a "French wally" with the "mental age of ten." He also quietly donated his fees from apartheid-era South African broadcasts to black-led anti-apartheid organisations.

Why James Is Called a Genius

Hunt's case is physical craft, not intellect: car control at the limit. It is worth defining, because the popular version is wrong. "Hunt the Shunt" implies recklessness; the best testimony says the opposite. Lauda, who had every reason to be ungenerous, said: "We were big rivals, especially at the end of the [1976] season, but I respected him because you could drive next to him — 2 centimetres, wheel-by-wheel, for 300 kilometres or more — and nothing would happen. He was a real top driver at the time." That describes millimetric precision sustained for hours, from the one man qualified to judge it. John Hogan added a second dimension: "James was the only driver I've ever seen who had the vaguest idea about what it actually takes to be a racing driver" — a claim about self-knowledge, not speed. His eye was good off the track: beaten by an unknown in a 1976 Formula Atlantic race, he arranged a McLaren drive for Gilles Villeneuve.

The counter-case is serious. Hunt won one championship, by one point, in a season his rival missed through catastrophic injury and ended by withdrawing from the decider; Britannica notes that some regarded the title as compromised on exactly those grounds. Ten wins from ninety-two starts is good, not great. He was undisciplined, lost interest by 1979, quit at thirty-one, and was no technical innovator. The word "genius" does not appear in the sources; what appears is "top driver," which is more modest and better earned.

Legacy

Hunt claimed to have slept with 5,000 women, lived as a tax exile in Spain, married twice and divorced twice, lost £180,000 at Lloyd's, and suffered periodic depression after he stopped racing. He turned down £2.6 million from Bernie Ecclestone to come back in 1982. On 14 June 1993 he telephoned Helen Dyson, whom he had been quietly seeing for four years, and proposed. He died of a heart attack at his Wimbledon home in the early hours of the next morning, aged forty-five. Stirling Moss and Alexander Hesketh spoke at the funeral. Lauda's verdict was the one that lasted: he was not surprised, only sad, and Hunt was the only man he had ever envied. He was inducted into the Motor Sport Hall of Fame in 2014, a year after Chris Hemsworth played him in *Rush*.