Rush to Glory: FORMULA 1 Racing's Greatest Rivalry Page 8

  The engagement was properly announced a week later and a wedding date set for the end of the Formula One season, in October. The roller coaster had started, and there would be no getting off. An engagement party was held at his brother Peter’s apartment in central London.

  Lord Hesketh was delighted and offered to pay for the wedding. He appointed himself organizer of the event and transformed the wedding into one big party for himself and his friends. Although Hunt had known Hesketh for a little over 18 months, he was named as best man.

  The prospect of a wedding had been haunting Hunt since the engagement party. It had also been dominating his thoughts during the closing races of the 1974 season. Hunt was well into having second and third thoughts about the marriage by the time the season ended. According to Gerald Donaldson, he wanted desperately to cut and run and get out of the whole situation but was too scared to do it. Seeing no way out of the wedding, Hunt turned to binge drinking.

  Suzy was Catholic, which dictated a Catholic church, and Hunt converted to Catholicism for the ceremony. The wedding was held at the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, better known as the Brompton Oratory, in Kensington. The grand setting was entirely appropriate for the society wedding of the year. The invitations stressed that nothing short of full morning suits were required. More or less every racing driver of distinction was invited, including Graham Hill, Stirling Moss, Jackie Stewart, John Watson, and Ronnie Peterson. Hesketh arranged an orchestra to play the music.

  Lord Hesketh indulged Hunt through it all. He reassured him at every stage and lectured him on his obligation not to let people down. Hunt was too drunk to argue.

  So James Hunt walked up the aisle to his own wedding hopelessly intoxicated. He himself would later say, “I just couldn’t handle the whole scene, so I went out and got blind, roaring drunk. For four days I went on the most stupendous bender of my life.”

  Afterwards, Lord Hesketh admitted, “I think the truth of the matter is that James had rather changed his mind by the time he got to the church, and he wouldn’t have been the first or last person to have done that and survived.” But the marriage duly went ahead, and somehow Hunt managed to remain upright. How he did it no one knows.

  As for Hunt, he would say afterwards that he remembered little of the event. At the wedding reception, Hesketh supported him when he had to stand up. According to other guests, he was virtually incoherent as he addressed the invitees, and it was all rather embarrassing. Suzy just smiled her way through it all, convinced it would be different now that he was a married man. Given how much he had had to drink that day, the portents were not auspicious.

  The following day, they left for their honeymoon in Antigua, in the Caribbean.

  The new Mrs. Hunt did attend some motor races during 1975 and did her best to be a racing driver’s wife. Suzy admitted she was “bored stiff,” saying to friends, “I literally felt like a spare part. I was just there for the show.”

  Within a few months, Suzy realized that the marriage was not going to work, although she was prepared to give it time. Mostly she led her own life and her husband led his. He became consistently unfaithful and was not particularly good at hiding his infidelities. Hunt recalled later, “It was a matter of clashing lifestyles and personalities. I am very much into racing and doing my own thing, and I move very fast. She wanted a slow pace, a good solid base and a solid relationship. Ironically, these were the very things I married her for in the first place.”

  The couple began to spend more and more time apart. Gerald Donaldson, a Hunt biographer, called the marriage one of “essential incompatibility.”

  But Hunt desperately wanted to please Suzy and was clearly in love with her. But it wasn’t enough; as he said, “If she stayed at home while I rushed around the world, it was boring for her. If she came with me, it was no fun for her. I was always looking over my shoulder to see if she was there, and she was always struggling to keep up with me. It was a heavy deal for both of us.”

  Hunt knew he had to get out of the marriage, and he prayed for a miracle. The miracle he hoped for, quite simply, was that she would meet someone else. Hunt did not want to desert her and was also wary of the money situation. In the case of a divorce, Suzy would have been entitled to a large share of his wealth, which he had moved to Spain to protect. A divorce would have relieved him of at least half of his UK£100,000 (about $240,000 at the time) net worth just as he had started earning good money. He literally couldn’t afford a divorce.

  Meanwhile, Suzy began to feel the same. Facing the possibility that James was not for her and that she had likely married for the wrong reasons, she wanted out as well. Nevertheless, Suzy remained supportive and sympathetic to Hunt’s feelings. But her understanding only heightened his sense of responsibility for her, as he said, “I was very, very anxious not to hurt her. There are nice ways and nasty ways to do things, and I hope I can never be a hurtful person.”

  The marriage may as well have ended there and then, but it dragged on for another eight months as Suzy looked for a new partner. Finally, despairing of the likelihood of a miracle, Hunt offered to buy Suzy a smart apartment in London and to give her an allowance, with a divorce to follow when it suited them. He was prepared to pay heavily to get out of the marriage, but she didn’t need the money and was reluctant to make it official. Suzy was certainly not going to get divorced and be single again—that was not on the menu at all. So they continued to live together in Marbella, although by July 1975 they had for all intents and purposes gone their separate ways. However, publicly, outside the Formula One paddock, no one knew or suspected anything was amiss.

  Hunt tried to explain what had gone wrong: “I thought that marriage was what I wanted and needed to give me a nice stable and quiet home life, but in fact it wasn’t. And the mistake was mine. I really wanted to go racing on my own, and it wasn’t much fun for Suzy to sit at home and wait for me all that time. It was also a terrible hassle for her to come racing because race meetings were probably the most relaxing time in my schedule. The rest of the time, you tend to be leaping on airplanes once a day, and that made it even worse. It’s bad enough organizing one person to get on an airplane; organizing two gets to be twice as much hassle. It got to the point where it was a problem for Suzy to come traveling and a hell of a deal for her to stay at home. It was making life miserable in the extreme for her, and since I felt responsible for her, it was making me miserable too.”

  Meanwhile, Hunt had found a new occasional girlfriend, a young woman named Jane Birbeck, whom he saw when he was in London. But he also continued to meet with a succession of other girls when he was elsewhere. But he was careful to be discreet, as he didn’t want anything in the newspapers that might upset Suzy or the Miller family—or his own family for that matter.

  And that led to Christmas 1975 and the holiday season. Fatefully, both Hunt and Suzy went to Gstaad for Christmas to stay with friends. Gstaad was the place to be at yuletide. At that time of year, it was an absolutely magical place.

  Equally, fate dictated that it was also the venue that Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor chose to spend their Christmas holidays.

  James Hunt’s marital problems were about to be solved.

  CHAPTER 6

  Lauda Sets the Order

  But Hunt Is Now Number One

  South Africa: March 4–6, 1976

  There was a five-week gap between the Brazilian and South African Grand Prix; and in between the races, most drivers returned to Europe, including Lauda to Vienna and Hunt to Marbella. Hunt arrived in Johannesburg very early, in the middle of February, and booked into the Sleepy Hollow Hotel. Hunt was in South Africa early for the same reasons he went to São Paulo early—to have a good time. As in Brazil, he had made many friends in 1973 and 1974 when Alexander Hesketh was splashing money around like it was going out of fashion.

  But as swarms of journalists descended on the hotel wanting to question him about his marriage, he moved out of the Sleepy Hollow and went to
stay at the house of his friend, South African tennis player Abe Siegel.

  At least 50 journalists and photographers traveled to Johannesburg specially to cover the story of Hunt’s estrangement from his wife, Suzy Miller. In itself it was a nonstory, but it was Suzy’s dalliance with the actor Richard Burton that caused all the fuss. The fact that Burton appeared to have dumped Elizabeth Taylor for Suzy made it into a huge story.

  As news of the split finally leaked out, the journalists hounded Hunt wherever he went. The journalists were relentless, wanting to know why Hunt’s wife was in New York with Richard Burton and not in Kyalami with him.

  That week there was no bigger story for the world’s press. As Alastair Caldwell remembered: “With that business of his wife running off with Burton, the whole bloody press world suddenly descended on us in South Africa.” Once again, Teddy Mayer was entirely bemused by Hunt’s antics and his enormous capacity for the opposite sex. Mayer was a reserved character who lived quietly and soberly with his wife, Sally, and enjoyed married life. He couldn’t understand Hunt at all.

  Once news of Hunt’s marriage split was confirmed, South African girls were throwing themselves at him. First he took up with Paddy Norval, a well-known South African film actress. They toured the nightclubs of Johannesburg every night.

  After a week with Siegel, Hunt moved to the Kyalami Ranch, the hotel next door to the Kyalami, where all the Formula One drivers stayed. The facilities were basic by the standards of today, but the setting and the climate were unrivaled. At that time it was a hedonist’s dream: set in rolling grass with a giant swimming pool and surrounded by low-rise motel-type buildings. The drivers liked the fact that different girls were drawn in every day, and casual affairs and one-night stands were the norm. It was a place they could totally relax and enjoy the sunshine. Moreover, it was right by the circuit and they could walk to work. It was where the Formula One circus hung out when there was no racing.

  As soon as he arrived at the Kyalami Ranch, Hunt quickly dumped Norval and was soon cavorting with Carmen Jardin, a beautiful Portuguese girl he had met at the hotel a few days earlier. Jardin accompanied Hunt to the circuit every day, wrapping herself around him at every opportunity for the benefit of photographers.

  Niki Lauda flew in at the beginning of the week with his new fiancée, Marlene Knaus, in tow, and he booked straight into the Kyalami Ranch. It was the first time Lauda was seen in public with Knaus. They kept a very low profile, and hardly anyone noticed them sitting in a dark corner of the hotel’s bar every night. When Lauda was at the track, Marlene stayed at the hotel, and hardly anyone knew who she was. At other times Lauda just sat around the hotel smooching with Marlene, while Hunt was living large with Jardin, an exotic creature whose presence got everyone excited.

  The different approaches of Lauda and Hunt could not have been more contrasting. Lauda was discreet in every way, but Hunt was the complete opposite.

  Meanwhile, at the track there was much drama as Ronnie Peterson resigned his position at the Lotus team, where he had been number one driver, and moved back to drive for his old team, March. Peterson was the highest paid driver in Formula One at $250,000 a year; five times Hunt’s salary. He left after his salary had not been paid when it was due, on January 1, and he had taken umbrage. The financial situation at the Lotus team was really bad. There was no money, and the team was surviving on a wing and a prayer. The global recession had severely affected the entire Lotus group and led to a severe cash shortage across the whole company.

  Peterson’s contract stipulated that he be paid in full on January 1, but instead Chapman had unilaterally imposed a new payment system on Peterson. On the basis that there were 18 scheduled races that year, including non-championship events, Chapman had begun paying Peterson in installments, one-eighteenth of his salary—exactly $13,800.

  But Peterson, who was fed up with team manager Peter Warr anyway, didn’t care about Lotus’s problems and was insulted. He decided to leave rather than to accept the new terms, and he did a deal with Max Mosley to drive for March.

  Peterson figured he didn’t have a lot to lose, as the new Lotus 77 car was uncompetitive and there was no money to develop it. Peterson’s teammate, Mario Andretti, was only contracted on a race-by-race basis, and he declined to drive in South Africa, meaning Lotus had two no-hoper drivers in its cars.

  The other major change in the paddock was the reemergence of the Hesketh team, now owned by its former team manager, Anthony Horsley. Horsley had managed to resurrect the Hesketh team by running the 1975 308 cars, which had been given to him by Alexander Hesketh after the team closed down. Horsley set up a new a business, running them as rent-a-cars for would-be Formula One drivers who could pay a fee. It was purely a moneymaking operation, and Horsley’s Hesketh revival was destined for the back of the grid, as he readily admitted: “We had gone from the front of the grid, from being the glamor boys, to the back of the grid and being forgotten. But, on the other hand, the bank balance went from zero and filled up again.” Horsley was aided by a recent prize money fund increase and the fact that some of the money was allocated retrospectively from the previous season’s performance. The prize money bonus was worth about $70,000 to the team in all, and Horsley exploited it. Hunt was delighted to see Horsley and got a real boost from having his mentor and best friend around again.

  The week of testing prior to the Grand Prix was totally dominated by Lauda and Hunt, with the Ferrari proving the faster all week. The week’s testing proved to be a trial of strength between the two men, and at the end of it, Lauda emerged as the clear victor.

  But as soon as the testing ended and qualifying started, the situation was completely reversed; Hunt was consistently the fastest in all four qualifying sessions. Either there had been a dramatic improvement in the McLaren’s performance between testing and qualifying, which was unlikely, or Alastair Caldwell had been sandbagging Ferrari during testing, a technique with which he was not entirely unfamiliar. Or there was a third possibility: that Lauda began sandbagging Hunt when qualifying started.

  The most likely explanation was that the McLaren team had simply got its act together and had benefited most from the testing. It had turned to focus entirely on Hunt and left Jochen Mass to fend for himself. As the undisputed number one, Hunt began to receive the star treatment. As the team’s focus had automatically shifted to Hunt, the earlier problems had just melted away. Once the car had been modified to suit him physically, all the frustrations he felt went with it. Hunt’s car had been entirely rebuilt to suit him, and there would be no repeat of the Interlagos fiasco. Teddy Mayer was even moved to publicly apologize to Hunt for letting him down in Brazil.

  So Hunt found himself in a perfectly developed and highly competitive car, just as Fittipaldi had left it, and enhanced by the new six-speed gearbox. It was clear that the M23 was a competitive car that had been undermined by the one-off problems in Brazil. With these problems finally put right, the car was ultracompetitive and, on its day, every bit as fast as Lauda’s Ferrari.

  On a personal basis, things were also much improved. The McLaren mechanics got to know Hunt and began to enjoy working for him—not least of all because of the amount of available women he introduced them to. Hunt drew women to the team like a magnet. As Caldwell noted, “We were all as happy as pigs in shit.”

  The team was in an entirely new frame of mind, and the new superiority of McLaren in qualifying undoubtedly benefited from two significant modifications. First, there was a brand-new starter system that Caldwell had invented and was fitted to Hunt’s car just for qualifying. It was a remote system that started the engine with pneumatic power rather than an onboard battery. The weight saving was considerable and undoubtedly aided Hunt in qualifying. The second was the fitting of some plastic skirts to the McLaren’s underside, thereby improving the aerodynamics. Neither modification was carried over into the race due to uncertainties over their legality.

  The Ferrari was unchanged. Lauda’s Ferrari st
arted the weekend in identical specification to Brazil. But in testing, the team tried a De Dion design for the rear suspension, but it proved to be slower and so they reverted back. The De Dion system had been designed for the new 1976 car, the 312T, but the 312T1 was easy to update, and the team sought a short-term advantage.

  Even with all the modifications made to the M23, no one was in any doubt that the Ferrari was, on a long run, the superior car. The M23 was by now a four-year-old design, and the 312T was only a year old. In overcoming that, it was clear for the first time just how accomplished a driver James Hunt was.

  So it was no surprise when Hunt, now totally comfortable with his car, effortlessly took pole position once again alongside Niki Lauda. Jochen Mass put in a superb performance to be third on the grid behind Lauda, and Regazzoni was ninth. The surprise of qualifying was Vittorio Brambilla in the works March. He had been galvanized by the arrival of Ronnie Peterson in his team, and his speed seemed to increase accordingly.

  But even though Hunt was fastest, Lauda had been the star of qualifying by dint of sheer consistency of purpose. The Ferrari was the most stable car on the circuit, and while every other driver had to work hard to get their times, Lauda took it easy and seemed to be controlling the steering wheel with his little finger. But Hunt and Lauda were the only two drivers in it, and no one else had a chance. Equally, no one had any doubt who would win the race.