Rush to Glory: FORMULA 1 Racing's Greatest Rivalry (17 page)

Hunt was ecstatic about beating Lauda and his teammate but afterwards was totally exhausted from having wrestled the McLaren round the difficult Jarama circuit for 75 laps. On the way to the podium, he punched a spectator in pure frustration.

But bigger problems than a wayward spectator lay ahead in post-race scrutineering.

Peter Jowitt, a Farnborough-based scientist, had been employed as a consultant by FOCA as a technical consultant. He worked for the teams, and his brief was to check car dimensions, investigate causes of accidents, and suggest modifications for safety. Jowitt was not a scrutineer and had no official powers at all. But when he measured Hunt’s McLaren-Ford, he noticed that the McLaren was 1.8 centimeters (0.71 inch) too wide across the rear wheels. Jowitt innocently brought the problem to the attention of the Spanish scrutineers, thinking they would merely inform the McLaren team of the error and ask the team to correct it. Jowitt was said to be horrified when they disqualified the car on the basis of his discovery.

Hunt’s celebrations in the Marlboro motor home in the Spanish paddock were curtailed shortly after eight o’clock, when
Daily Express
motoring editor David Benson delivered the bad news. Hunt was relaxing and wearing only a pair of jeans, talking to his teammate, some girls, and his normal retinue of hangers-on. What he heard shocked him, and he immediately grabbed a shirt, shouted over to Teddy Mayer, and ran to the steward’s office in the race control tower.

Benson had somehow sensed trouble and gone to the scrutineers garage purely on a whim. By then it had just been announced in the press room that the stewards had ruled Hunt’s car to be illegal and that he was therefore disqualified. The scrutineers had ruled that the rear tires of Hunt’s M23 extended 1.8 centimeters wider than allowed by the new regulations. After a series of measurements and remeasurements, the McLaren-Ford M23 was deemed undeniably too wide across the rear wheels. The stewards announced Lauda as the new winner of the race. It was the first time the cars had been rigorously checked under the new rules, and the CSI had asked the scrutineers to carefully check the dimensions of each car.

Teddy Mayer argued with the stewards in vain. He told them that such a small discrepancy couldn’t give Hunt’s McLaren any advantage and that the ruling was “unbelievably harsh and unjustified.”

Hunt was distraught, and tears welled in his eyes. He said, “It’s stupid. It does not affect the performance of the car or make it any faster. Not even the Ferrari team protested, and they were the ones who had the most to win.”

Niki Lauda had already left the circuit by helicopter. He was on his way to the airport to fly back to Austria for further medical treatment on his ribs. He learned that he had been declared the winner of the race from air traffic controllers at Salzburg Airport as he was landing his plane. Lauda’s attitude to it was perfectly straightforward: “A rule is a rule. The McLaren was illegal and therefore it should have been disqualified. I am very sorry for James; he drove very well, but the car was not legal. If the same had happened to my Ferrari, I would accept the ruling.”

Teddy Mayer, apoplectic toward the stewards, filed an official protest and muttered something to journalists about a conspiracy by Ferrari. In fact, Hunt’s car had been measured twice in pre-race scrutineering and had been found legal. But there was now no doubt that McLaren was guilty. As Caldwell freely admitted: “We thought we had no worries because our car was exactly the same. Like idiots, we didn’t even bother to measure it—my fault—because as far as I was concerned, the car had been measured and the rule based on it. However, over the winter, Goodyear developed the tires and made them with wider sidewalls. I didn’t realize that the tires had been made this much wider. We got caught out.”

Mayer, caught in a very tricky situation, put out a press release: “The entire McLaren team extends its sympathy to James Hunt.” Stating he would appeal against the severity of the sentence rather than the correctness of the decision, he went on to say it was like being hanged for a parking offense. Mayer maintained that since the minute oversight could have given Hunt no possible advantage, he should at least be able to keep his driver’s points.

After his initial disappointment, Hunt became surprisingly sanguine about the entire affair, although he did call his team’s failure to ensure the car was the correct width “a fantastically sloppy performance.” Hunt said years later, “The point was they’d taken the current widest car in the business and the current longest because they didn’t want them to go much wider, like someone suddenly worked out if you had it twice as wide it would have twice as good road holding; likewise if you made it two yards longer. The point was the McLaren was the widest car in the business at the time. But McLaren didn’t bother to check the width of its car because it had established the standard the previous year when it was all checked. The only problem was we were using slightly different tires, which had a bigger bulge. And that’s the widest point on the car. It was in fact 1.8 centimeters too wide, and that was purely the bulge.”

On May 13, a Spanish tribunal confirmed the disqualification, but Teddy Mayer said that the proceedings were a travesty of justice, as he had not been allowed to take McLaren’s Spanish-speaking lawyer to the hearing. Mayer later described the tone of the tribunal hearings as follows: “The judges said, ‘Do you know the rule about the width of the car?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘And do you realize that your car was wider?’ I said, ‘Yes’ again. And they said, ‘Right, thank you, Mr. Mayer.’” Mayer was the only person called on to give evidence. Mayer launched another appeal to the FIA in Paris about the tribunal’s decision.

Alastair Caldwell simply accepted the blame and admitted there was no doubt the car had been too wide. He had failed to allow for the new design of Goodyear tires.

CHAPTER
11

Ferrari Ascendant, McLaren in Chaos

Ferrari’s Fifth Straight Win

Belgium: May 14–16, 1976

F
errari was in ecstasy and McLaren was in despair after the Spanish Grand Prix. Team manager Alastair Caldwell had been completely surprised and devastated, and he admitted that he had never known a more difficult time in his life. Not only was the position of his team looking precarious, but his own personal credibility was on the line as well.

The normally highly efficient Caldwell was mortified by the turn of events and by James Hunt’s disqualification from the Spanish Grand Prix. His troubled emotional state affected his decision making, and instead of taking time to consider a response and course of action, he reacted by erring on the side of caution and instigating a crash program to ensure the car fully complied with the rules—with no shortcuts.

Caldwell’s extreme was to have dire consequences for the team and for Hunt’s world championship chances. Forgetting that all Formula One cars go fast by being barely legal and by pushing the envelope as far as it will go, his decisions were to cost McLaren and Hunt even more dearly than the forfeited Spanish points.

Back at the McLaren factory in Colnbrook, the repentant Caldwell went on a binge to make his car legal beyond doubt. Caldwell already had a marginally excessive character defect, but he now became utterly and totally obsessed with having a legal car. There was no rationality of thought at all, and he became determined to make the car legally watertight. First he declared that an oil cooler modification he had made earlier in the season was also potentially illegal. The oil coolers had been moved toward the back of the car, but Caldwell ordered them to be moved forward to their original position.

He also ordered the lowering of the rear wing and moved it forward as well for good measure. He then reduced the track of the car by two centimeters. He explained his rationale: “We had a little conference and said, ‘Okay, next race we must be absolutely 100 percent safe, not get caught again. We’ll narrow the car, bring the wing down just on the limit, and put the oil coolers back where they were before, on the back of the car.’” Caldwell achieved 100 percent legality, but at a huge cost to the team and to his number one driver. The changes rendered the car immediately uncompetitive. Assessing the changes, Hunt called his revised car “utterly hopeless”—just how hopeless would become apparent at the upcoming Belgian Grand Prix.

The Belgian Grand Prix that year was held at Zolder on May 16. It was a 2.6-mile tight, featureless, and artificial track with few passing opportunities. It was the sort of track James Hunt despised, entirely different in character from the sweeping Spa-Francorchamps circuit where the Belgian Grand Prix had traditionally been held but which was now excluded from hosting the race for understandable safety reasons.

While McLaren had their technical problems, Ferrari’s troubles were confined to Niki Lauda’s physical condition. He was still in a lot of pain from his broken ribs, and recovery had been hindered greatly by his driving in the Spanish Grand Prix. The two weeks in between had brought no respite at all. For the Belgian Grand Prix, Lauda received a painkilling injection that was supposed to last for four days. It didn’t, so he called in a doctor who gave him electroshock treatment, which deadened the pain. Lauda admitted that the pain was so bad he would not have been able to drive the car that weekend without the treatment.

Ferrari was still using the old-model 312T car as the spare and was relying on serendipity to get them through. As it was, Lauda was forced to use it for part of qualifying after he lost an engine in his regular car. In a bizarre incident, the wire grid covering one of the fuel injector trumpets somehow got inside the engine when it was running and mangled the innards.

Amazingly, with his car in such poor shape, Hunt managed to top the qualifying charts on the first day of practice, ahead of Clay Regazzoni’s Ferrari and Jody Scheckter’s Tyrrell-Ford. But there was good reason for that: Caldwell had not had time to complete all the modifications at the factory and planned to move the oil coolers on the Friday afternoon during the first day of qualifying. There simply had not been time at the McLaren factory for the oil coolers to be moved; hence the arrangements were made to modify them at the track.

So between the morning and afternoon sessions, the mechanics shifted the oil coolers back to their old position below the rear wing. Hunt said, “We put them back virtually where they had been, under the wing, but because the wing had been moved forward, the coolers were now about an inch away from their old position.”

That alteration, along with the combined effect of Caldwell’s other modifications, completely changed the car’s aerodynamic setup. Hunt recalled: “In order to make it narrower, they unnecessarily moved radiators around and things like that. But they hadn’t checked it out and completely ruined the performance of the rear wing. As a result, the aerodynamics of the car overall were hopeless.” The final changes had turned his McLaren-Ford M23 into an ill-handling brute. A journalist standing out on the track described Hunt’s revised car as a “bucking bronco.”

So much so that in the second session, Hunt was ninth fastest, and in the final session, he was eleventh. But he managed to line up on the second row of the grid by virtue of his time in the first session—before the oil coolers had been moved.

Afterwards, Caldwell sought to defend his radical changes: “We had several things on the car which were reasonably dodgy. You couldn’t have oil fittings above a certain width from the center of the car, let’s say 80 centimeters, which meant the oil coolers in front of the rear wheels could be—
could be—
construed as illegal.”

Hunt was deeply depressed about his chances in the race. His only solace was that his chief rival was not having a particularly good time of it either, although the definition of Niki Lauda not having a good time of it was a resounding pole position, with his teammate Clay Regazzoni alongside him on the front row of the grid.

For once, Hunt made a good start off the grid and the flag. He somehow managed to clamber past Regazzoni into second place behind Lauda’s Ferrari. But Lauda quickly built up a huge lead and pulled away from Hunt at the rate of one and a half seconds a lap. Hunt was holding up the rest of the cars, which were queued up behind him. Gradually, Regazzoni, Jacques Laffite in the Ligier, Patrick Depailler, and Scheckter all passed him. He was sixth when his car’s gearbox seized up, and he retired from the race at exactly half-distance.

For Niki Lauda, it became an almost accidental afternoon. For reasons he knew not, he found himself in an early lead dominating the field. He had no idea how he was managing to maintain such a comfortable lead. But 20 laps from the end, he had a reality check when his new Ferrari 312T2 began wildly oversteering, again for no apparent reason. He remembered: “I was lying well out in front when my car suddenly began oversteering 20 laps from the finish.”

With Hunt out of the race, Lauda knew he had time to pit and probably get out again in front after Hunt’s McLaren had held up all the challengers. But just before veering off, he decided to try one more lap, and the car did not get any worse. As he said, “I assumed that the tires or suspension had bought it and was about to head for the pits, but instead I drove carefully for a few laps.” Lauda found the car stayed consistent, and so he decided to carry on. He had a scare in the final few laps when an unknown car laid oil all over three corners.

Lauda easily went on to win from Regazzoni for another Ferrari 1-2. Jacques Laffite came home in third place and Scheckter fourth.