Rush to Glory: FORMULA 1 Racing's Greatest Rivalry Page 6

  When Hunt learned of this, he was apoplectic and shouted at Mayer for not telling him the truth of the situation. Hunt famously told Mayer, “I’ll tell you Teddy, and I’ve told you before, you don’t know anything about motor racing whatsoever. Go and buy a new briefcase.”

  As soon as Caldwell had realized that the new M26 was a dog, he had embarked on a crash course to improve the M23. It was too late to build a new chassis, so Caldwell modified the existing cars. Caldwell made three principal changes to start the season. He managed to knock a staggering 40 kilos off the weight of the car, principally by redesigning the bodywork using the latest materials. He tweaked the rear suspension by reverting to the previously used lower wishbone design instead of parallel links. But his masterstroke was the introduction for the first time in Formula One of a six-speed version of the Hewland FGA box, which he had intended to debut in the new M26. The car certainly looked faster, as John Hogan had repainted the cars in Day-Glo red to make them stand out on television.

  But there had been no time to test any of the modifications. So when qualifying started on Friday, January 23, Hunt immediately found that the steering was very heavy and the new bodywork cramped. On his first time out, he found himself wrestling with the steering and his hand continually hitting the cockpit sides. As a result, he badly blistered his thumb in only a few laps. He drove back into the pits, waving his blistered thumb furiously at Mayer.

  Hunt went public straightaway on McLaren’s unpreparedness and readily spoke his mind to journalists. John Hogan of Marlboro was on hand and advised him to quiet down. Hogan warned Hunt that he risked being fired if he carried on and that he had no other place to go if McLaren rejected him. But it was too late; the damage had been done.

  Predictably, when Mayer learned what Hunt had been saying about his team, there was a furious row. For Hunt it was a pivotal moment—he could either walk away from the team at the first race, or Mayer could begin listening to him. That Friday evening, Caldwell intervened between the two men and set to work lightening the steering and modifying the cockpit to suit Hunt’s requirements. Despite the problems, Hunt managed to set the seventh quickest time in the first day, although his teammate Jochen Mass was fourth fastest.

  Niki Lauda had had an entirely different first day of qualifying. Ferrari had a new car under development that was still six months away from being completed. In the meantime, it would rely on last year’s championship winning car, the 312T. Even though it had had minimal testing or development over the winter, it was fast straightaway. The only modification was slightly narrower track rear suspension that was supposed to lift the top speed. As a result, Lauda simply carried on where he had left off in 1975. He was fastest of all at the end of the first day, and Ferrari underlined its supremacy with Regazzoni coming in second fastest. Hunt was also outqualified by Emerson Fittipaldi in his new Copersucar-Ford car.

  Caldwell and the McLaren mechanics worked all night to modify Hunt’s car and presented it to him on Saturday morning with heavily modified steering and bodywork—as much as could be achieved thousands of miles away from the factory.

  But Hunt’s luck was out and, as the final qualifying approached, his Ford-Cosworth engine blew up. In those days, engines could be changed in less than two hours provided everything went smoothly. But the engine change didn’t go as planned, and the final qualifying hour began with Hunt’s car still in bits.

  Predictably, the tension rose in the McLaren pit, and Mayer and Hunt started arguing again. While he was waiting, Hunt ordered his mechanics to make some suspension setup changes. But Mayer immediately countermanded the instructions and told the mechanics to leave the suspension settings alone. A furious Hunt barged into Mayer, elbowing him in the ribs. Screaming at Mayer, he told him to get out of his way. Mayer stood his ground and told Hunt he would have to go out with the car in the same spec in which the last session had ended. Hunt recalled the situation that afternoon: “I was going out with 20 minutes left on a 5-mile track. I was guessing the settings, and Mayer told me, ‘You can’t do that.’ I told him I was driving the bloody thing. I wasn’t going to be pushed around when I knew what I wanted.”

  The fierce arguing and physical altercation took place in front of the McLaren mechanics, who were astonished to hear their boss being shouted at. They had never seen anything like it before.

  Hunt then threw Mayer’s briefcase to the back of the garage and threatened him further if he didn’t leave. At that point, Mayer retreated and the mechanics made the changes to the suspension that Hunt had requested.

  But as soon as Mayer left, Hunt knew he was in trouble and likely to be fired if he qualified behind Mass. As he left the pit lane with 20 minutes to go, he couldn’t have been more motivated to succeed.

  Indeed, Hunt had read the situation correctly. A shocked Mayer went to the back of the pits and sat down on an old oil drum. He opened his briefcase and started studying the minutia of the driving contract between the team and Hunt. He fully intended to dismiss Hunt from the team as soon as qualifying was over. He studied the fine print of the contract to see what the financial consequences would be.

  As Hunt left the pit lane for his warm-up lap, he was not under any illusions about what awaited him on his return. He realized that he could not treat Mayer as he had and still expect to remain on the team. He knew that keeping his job depended on him grabbing pole position for the race.

  Hunt gave it all he had, and he went fastest of all on his first flying lap. Lauda was pushed into second place on the grid with only 10 minutes of the session remaining.

  Hunt’s time was 200th of a second better than Lauda’s best. Hunt rolled back into the pits gesticulating wildly at Mayer, who was sitting open-mouthed behind the fencing, not knowing whether to believe his own eyes.

  Lauda was sitting on the Ferrari pit counter. He had not intended to return to the track that day and had been saving his engine and his tires for the race, believing he had done enough to get pole. Now he realized he would have to go out again and do another flying lap. It was an inconvenient development, but he was not worried, as he knew he had not pushed the Ferrari to its limit that weekend.

  As he drove out of the pits, everyone expected Lauda to grab pole back from Hunt, and that’s the way it looked as he sped out—that was until halfway though his fast lap.

  Just at the wrong moment, Lauda’s luck changed. As he approached the Curva do Sol bend, he found the BRM of Ian Ashley in front of him. As he moved to overtake the slower car, the BRM’s 12-cylinder engine blew up in the most spectacular fashion and splashed oil all over the road and smeared Lauda’s visor. Any chance of a faster lap was over, and the world champion found himself second on the grid after being fastest for virtually all the qualifying sessions. Lauda got out of his car in a furious mood and threw down his helmet. He stepped out of his overalls and set off for the BRM pit, whose pit crew he blamed for his misfortune. Halfway there he stopped and turned around, realizing it was just a racing incident and that it could have happened to anyone.

  Hunt’s pole position was made even sweeter by the fact that he had blown off his highly vaunted teammate. He had also put his predecessor, Emerson Fittipaldi, to the sword. Driving in Fittipaldi’s home country, in Fittipaldi’s old car, Hunt had beaten him. All his nemeses—Mayer, Niki Lauda, Fittipaldi, and Mass—had been vanquished in one stroke.

  Although Fittipaldi and Lauda were upset, Jochen Mass was devastated by Hunt’s performance. He had believed he would easily outqualify Hunt and be crowned the team’s number one driver.

  Meanwhile, Teddy Mayer had returned to the McLaren pit after his earlier expulsion and still couldn’t believe what he had just seen. Never before had he witnessed such amazing bravado and experienced such a conflict of emotions within a 20-minute time frame. Having been prepared to fire Hunt the minute he stepped out of the cockpit, Mayer completely forgot about that and was now ecstatic. He embraced Hunt with as much vigor and passion as he had ever shown toward another
man.

  Mayer was most excited because Fittipaldi’s nose had been rubbed in it. The resentment at Fittipaldi’s abrupt departure had been gnawing away at Mayer for weeks. As Hunt recalled: “In front of the Brazilian crowd, it was almost more than Mayer could take. It was not what McLaren had been used to with Emerson. But it was important psychologically, because we immediately had each other’s respect.”

  He said, “It was my first-ever pole, which I was rather pleased about. And it impressed the boys. After that, I was very much number one.” Caldwell and the mechanics were suddenly in awe of their new driver. In that five-minute window, Hunt had established undoubted number one status, ensuring that Mass would not challenge him again.

  The last-minute battle for pole revived local interest in the race and set the turnstiles rattling on race morning. Race day dawned hot and sunny as the 22 cars assembled on the grid. For Niki Lauda, who was used to sitting on the front row of the grid, it was just another race with the only difference being an unfamiliar helmet alongside him. Being beaten by Hunt in qualifying was a minor annoyance, and the two men sat on the front row of the grid glaring at each other.

  But for James Hunt, his first-ever pole position in a Grand Prix was a very big deal indeed. He found he was extremely nervous. He started shaking, and three times had to go round to the back of the garages to vomit. The vomiting was normal before a race, but this time it was exacerbated by the amount of cocaine, alcohol, and nicotine circulating in his body. Aside from illness, Hunt was particularly frightened of burning his clutch on the start line and feared he would make a poor start and let Lauda lead away.

  Hunt’s fears became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that is exactly what happened as Lauda went off ahead of him. Hunt said, “I erred on the side of safety; one thing I didn’t want was to not get to the first corner at all.”

  But it was Clay Regazzoni who outran both of them. He led the opening laps, with Lauda close behind and Hunt third after a very brief challenge from Fittipaldi, which faded as quickly as it had begun.

  It was immediately clear that Lauda was much quicker than Regazzoni, and so he bided his time, knowing it would come. But after seven laps, Lauda suddenly got annoyed and started harrying Regazzoni. They were looking like anything but teammates as they squabbled on the track. On lap nine, Lauda swept past and within one lap opened up a three-and-a-half-second gap, demonstrating to Audetto, who was standing in the pits with his stopwatch, how superior a driver he was.

  Watching how easily Lauda had disposed of Regazzoni, Hunt saw his chance and on the next lap also went past. Regazzoni had overcooked his tires trying to stay in front and quickly lost his right front tire, which had worn to the canvas. He had to pit when the tire finally gave way.

  The race seemed set for a battle royal between Hunt and Lauda, but the contest ended as quickly as it had started when Hunt’s new Cosworth engine let him down. One of the eight fuel injector trumpets fell off, and the cylinder stopped firing altogether. The engine would still have taken him through to the finish if it hadn’t been for the trumpet moving around and eventually dropping into the throttle slides.

  Lauda was then briefly challenged by Jean-Pierre Jarier’s Shadow-Ford car, which was flying and looked set to overtake him. With nine laps to go, Jarier drove the fastest lap of the race. But at that moment, Hunt inadvertently delivered to Lauda a huge favor. Hunt’s throttle jammed wide open and threw him into the catch fencing at high speed. Catch fencing, widely used in that era of Formula One, had many faults; but that day it probably saved Hunt’s life. That, coupled with his skill in spinning the car around, prevented what would have been a major accident. As it was, Hunt was able to get his car out of the fencing with the engine still running, and he drove it back onto the track. But the oil cooler had been ripped off, and it had deposited an oil slick on the track just as Lauda and Jarier were coming around. Lauda’s greater experience and cunning enabled him to navigate his way through without mishap. But Jarier couldn’t; he locked his tires and skidded off into the barrier, crumpling the car and leaving Lauda to cruise to victory.

  Lauda’s win had been heavily aided by the problems of Regazzoni, Hunt, and Jarier, all of whom would most likely have beaten him on the day. But Lauda didn’t see it that way at all and was ecstatic that he had vanquished all his rivals, including Emerson Fittipaldi, who brought his dire Copersucar car in 13th in front of some very disappointed fans. Jochen Mass finished sixth.

  Lauda didn’t care how the victory had been achieved and believed he had taken on all comers and demolished them. But Hunt was brutally honest about his own performance: “I wasn’t quite quick enough; I was about five seconds behind Niki when I had trouble. A trumpet fell off and the engine started misfiring, and then, not content with that, it jumped down the throttle slides, which stuck it open in the middle of a great long corner. I wasn’t man enough to handle that, even though it was only on seven cylinders.”

  After all the drama of qualifying, Hunt was magnanimous in defeat. And any thoughts that Mayer had had of firing him were completely gone. Both men were relieved when the race was over, and discord turned to complete harmony. In post-race chats to journalists, it was all sweetness and light. In fact, Hunt seemed to have completely forgotten all the acrimony that had gone on over the previous three days: “Fortunately we got it all together, and I think everyone—particularly Teddy, John (Hogan), and me—breathed a huge sigh of relief.”

  Alastair Caldwell had also completely changed his tune and now declared how glad he was to have Hunt in the team. He had never imagined that Hunt would be faster than Jochen Mass, and when it happened, he was genuinely stunned. Caldwell famously said, “This unknown bloke came in and blew Mass away. It doesn’t matter if the guy has got number one written on his forehead or tattooed over his whole body, if he’s second fastest, he’s number two—period.”

  The same situation, albeit in an entirely different manner, was manifesting itself in the Ferrari garage. Niki Lauda had carried on where he had left off, and Daniele Audetto had won his first race as Ferrari team manager. It seemed both of them could walk on water, and they temporarily forgot their differences.

  But there was one crucial difference between the McLaren and Ferrari teams as they both packed up to leave for home: While Caldwell, Mayer, and Hunt had genuinely put their differences aside and harbored no rancor, Lauda and Audetto’s rapprochement was only temporary. Audetto was seething that Regazzoni had not won, and Lauda told friends he believed Audetto was a pompous clown.

  In the end, it was the politics that would decide the outcome of the 1976 Formula One world championship—not the drivers, nor the cars, nor the teams.

  CHAPTER 4

  Niki’s Women Problems

  Marlene Replaces Mariella

  Summer 1975

  Sometime in the middle of 1975, Niki Lauda fell out of love with his girlfriend of eight years, Mariella von Reininghaus. The sudden realization that, after all, he would not eventually marry Mariella was the equivalent to a volcanic eruption in his emotions.

  As romantic as the next man but devoid of many of the emotions of normal human beings, Lauda had always struggled with his love life. He was a man whose metaphysical makeup evolved at different, inconsistent speeds over long and undefined periods of his life—sometimes suddenly changing without warning.

  Emotionally he lacked consistency of purpose, which often led him into sudden decisions and diversions that defied logical analysis. It was a trait that followed him throughout his life and at times gave him that special edge that was often the difference between success and failure. When the traits were deployed well, they worked phenomenally well. But when not deployed well, they had the inevitable consequences, which often took years to play out due to the complexity of the thoughts behind them.

  To understand Niki Lauda, it was necessary to know him and to have observed him over a lifetime, so unusual was his emotional makeup. In time, the giants of motor racing, including people suc
h as Enzo Ferrari, Bernie Ecclestone, and Ron Dennis were to run up against that curious concoction of emotions and emerge second best.

  In contrast, James Hunt was a simple man: easy to understand, easy to fathom, and therefore easy to predict. But that could never be said of Niki Lauda.

  The most obvious discrepancy in Lauda’s character was inconsistency. Lauda very often displayed the most inconsistent urges that could possibly be present in a human being. He would strongly criticize and condemn others, sometimes publicly but often in private, and then immediately display the same foibles and failures himself.

  Suffice to say that Lauda’s emotional and intellectual constitution was not the standard off-the-shelf variety. And that all manifested itself in the summer of 1975, when he switched off his fiancée of eight years and flicked to another woman, whom he had met at a party.

  The Lauda/von Reininghaus relationship was almost an institution within Formula One’s tight-knit community. Outside the sport they were one of Europe’s best-known and loved celebrity couples. In the top social salons of continental Europe, they were the top go-to couple.

  Almost everyone regarded their relationship as near perfect. Mariella was an extraordinary woman in every way, striking to look at and owning a personality that was very easy to like. If Europe had then had an eligible woman league table, Mariella would have been at the top.

  The fact that she was also one of the best-connected young women in Austria seemed almost inconsequential. Added to that the fact that she was the daughter of an Austrian brewery millionaire and the product of an enormously wealthy family, she was indeed the perfect woman that Lauda had always sought and seemingly found so early in his life.

  If Mariella had a fault, it was with her sexuality. Outwardly she had sex appeal, but inwardly she was reserved.

  They met when they were both teenagers, and she was his first girlfriend and he her first boyfriend. He was attracted to her smooth beauty and she to his dashing lifestyle. Although he was perpetually broke, he drove a Porsche 911S. She liked his seemingly endless ambition to get on at such a young age and found life around him to be exciting.