Rush to Glory: FORMULA 1 Racing's Greatest Rivalry (21 page)

CHAPTER
17

Fiasco on Home Ground

An Extraordinary Sunday Afternoon

Brands Hatch: July 16–18, 1976

A
fter the race in France, James Hunt was only 26 points behind Niki Lauda in the world championship. With eight races to go and a potential 72 points to play for, it was game on.

Hunt’s victory in France set the scene for the upcoming British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch as a grudge match between Hunt and Lauda, and between Ferrari and McLaren.

British newspapers were full of inevitable speculation about Hunt’s chances of winning the British Grand Prix. The last English, as opposed to British, driver to win it had been the late Peter Collins, driving a Ferrari in 1958, some 18 years earlier.

The Italian press was also in action, stirring up a campaign of hatred against Hunt among native Italians. Enzo Ferrari kicked off the hate-fueled weekend when he told Italian journalists that the decision to reinstate Hunt into the Spanish Grand Prix results was “a wicked verdict” and that the perfect revenge would be for his cars to trounce McLaren at its home race.

Niki Lauda was hunkered down at home in Vienna, enjoying the long hot summer of 1976 beside his newly completed swimming pool. He planned to do nothing before the race aside from a day’s testing on the private Ferrari test track at Fiorano.

In contrast, James Hunt flew straight to London from Nice for 10 days of nonstop activity before the race. In the past few months, he had become a national celebrity in Britain, and his principal sponsors, Texaco, Vauxhall, and Marlboro, were taking full advantage with a huge program of events planned for him.

He was the star turn at a big televised event at London’s Albert Hall called “Grand Prix Night with the Stars.” The Albert Hall’s private boxes were packed with celebrities in evening dress who had paid UK£500 (approximately $1,200 at the time) for a box principally to get a glimpse of the new British hero. Hunt obliged them by playing the trumpet onstage.

Hunt also drove a Vauxhall in the Texaco Tour of Britain, an informal pro-am rally for road cars driven by celebrity drivers. His codriver was BBC radio presenter Noel Edmonds, and sensationalist newspaper headlines about Hunt and Edmonds accompanied every incident-packed day of the event. In the end, his Vauxhall fell so far behind with all the duo’s mishaps that it had to retire from the event early.

The British public identified with Hunt more than they had with any previous British driver. He was loved because he was different: different because he wore T-shirts and jeans, walked barefoot, chain-smoked cigarettes, and drank lots of beer. His television appearance playing the trumpet also had an enormous impact.

After the rally was over, Hunt returned to his parents’ house in Surrey to rest. As he explained: “I realized I had been living my life up to the red line, and I had drained myself completely. The peace and quiet was like a cocoon to me. I needed my solitude. I needed to wind down totally before cranking myself up to the intense pitch which is vital to a good result in the race.”

Niki Lauda was very anxious before the race. Although he was comfortably ensconced at the top of the world championship points table, he could sense Hunt was on a winning streak. He also knew he was hampered by his own team’s politics; a disaster, he thought, was waiting to happen. He knew he could lose the championship because of his own team, regardless of any opposition from Hunt. Lauda also thought the British officials might try and favor Hunt and McLaren, thereby disadvantaging himself and Ferrari. He was certain that would be the case, with the Italian officials in his favor, when the Italian Grand Prix came around.

To counter that, Lauda got on the telephone to Luca de Montezemolo, the former Ferrari team manager, in Turin and begged him to come to Britain for the weekend to help him out. Surprisingly, Montezemolo agreed to come so long as Lauda would pick him up in his airplane and fly him in. Lauda agreed.

Brands Hatch was packed every day from Thursday to Sunday for the grand prix weekend. The maximum capacity was around 80,000, and it had been years since the race had attracted so many spectators.

The fact that the race was being held at the twisty Brands Hatch track, and not Silverstone, favored Lauda. Brands Hatch was not Hunt’s favorite type of track, and it wasn’t suited to the longer wheelbase McLaren car.

Ferrari prepared for the race the best it could. They built a brand new car for Lauda, called chassis number 28, and held a test session at Fiorano to bed it in. The new car was lighter, as it did not have the internal framework that stiffened the chassis of Lauda’s previous car. The extra stiffening had proved unnecessary. Lauda spent the first morning of qualifying bedding his new car in.

With Montezemolo present, Lauda was transformed from the morose character he had been of late into a happy-go-lucky, fun-loving fellow. Montezemolo stoked controversy by telling journalists that he was present to “guard Ferrari’s interests against local officials.”

The battle for pole was always going to be between the two men. No other driver got a look in. Lauda swapped around between cars and at one point thought his engine was about to blow up. But then he changed his mind and kept to the newer car. Hunt concentrated on his regular car, getting his time up every lap.

On the first day, Hunt squeaked past Lauda for the quickest time, with Ronnie Peterson the next fastest. But on Saturday, as Lauda finally got his new chassis sorted, it was no surprise when he took pole with Hunt second fastest, six-hundredths of a second slower round the 2.6-mile track.

But Lauda’s pole was not such an advantage at Brands, as he was on the wrong side of the front row. Pole meant an inside run to the first corner, a drop-away right-hander. But the track at the start line was slightly banked, and it was possible to slide sideways toward the verge on the slope of the road if the wheels spun at the start. The second spot was in fact a better grid slot. Aware of this, Lauda elected, as was his right, to start from the left-hand slot—the higher side—to get a long angled run into Paddock Bend.

So Hunt was effectively on pole even though he was only second fastest, and some observers felt Hunt had been sandbagging in qualifying because this is what he had wanted all along; he had been playing games with Lauda, who might have been second-guessing which position Hunt would choose. Regazzoni’s Ferrari had been third fastest behind Hunt, with Mario Andretti’s Lotus fourth. The 26-car grid was very competitive, achieving times that were all within three seconds of one another.

Brands Hatch circuit is set in a natural amphitheater and has an atmosphere like no other circuit in the world, but that day it was unparalleled by anything seen in Britain before or since. As race day dawned, the roads were jammed with a capacity crowd trying to get in to see their hero, and anticipation reached fever pitch as fans eagerly awaited the battle between Hunt and Lauda.

The atmosphere was electric as the cars stood on the grid and Hunt waved to the crowd. Unsurprisingly, Hunt made his usual poor start, but Clay Regazzoni made a storming start from the second row and ran straight into his own teammate’s car. As Hunt described it: “Clay had made a super start—a real stormer. He went up on the left of me, sliced back in front of my car and dived at the inside of Niki from way too far back. It was quite ridiculous. Niki was already turning into the corner, and Clay dived in and hit him.”

For a split second, Hunt was elated, as it looked as though Lauda was out already at the hands of his teammate. He remembered: “I was able to enjoy it for, I suppose, half a second because it was wonderful and extremely funny for me to see the two Ferrari drivers take each other off the road. But it quickly became obvious that I was in it too. I got on the brakes because there was no way through, and I was punted up the rear. Then all hell broke loose. I was into Regazzoni’s car, which was sliding backwards, and my rear wheel climbed over his. My car was in the air, flying, and then it crashed down again on its wheels. I didn’t have a chance to be frightened or to realize that I could have been on my head.” The accident had been spectacular, and Hunt described Regazzoni’s driving as “a serious bout of brain fade.”

Although Hunt’s McLaren was launched into the air, it impacted the ground squarely the right way up on its wheels. He kept his engine running, put it into gear, and let out the clutch. The car moved, but it was obvious that the steering and the front suspension were both seriously damaged.

In fact, Hunt’s car was quite badly damaged. As he described: “It launched my car up in the air, and as it came down, it broke the front suspension. I had to limp in at the back of the circuit.”

As he limped through the part of the circuit called Druids Loop, Hunt saw the red flag; the race had been stopped and a restart ordered. He remembered: “I gave a whoop of delight. I thought all my birthdays had come at once. One second, I was despairing of my luck, and now it was all on again. I turned into the back road to the pits, because the car wasn’t steering properly. I abandoned the car and ran down the pit road to tell the lads to come and do something about it.” As he was walking back, a journalist asked him a question about what had happened, and Hunt said: “Forget that. Haven’t got a cigarette, have you, old boy?”

His humor hid the fact that he was in some pain; his right thumb had been hit by the spinning steering wheel while the car was airborne, but this was going to turn out to be the least of his problems.

Amazingly, most of the other drivers had maneuvered safely around the scene of the accident, which was littered with debris. The marshals were quickly in action, and within a minute and a half, the track was totally clear. It also became very clear that the stewards had been premature in stopping the race, since the crashed cars and debris had been swiftly cleared away. With the track cleared, the race need not have been stopped at all.

Daniele Audetto ran over to the control tower when he saw what had happened and went berserk. He alleged that the British stewards had deliberately ordered the race to be stopped in order to give Hunt’s McLaren a chance of restarting.

Alan Henry, the well-known journalist, had a good vantage point that day, and didn’t believe that Hunt was still running when the red flag was shown. As he says: “I think James knew absolutely that he was out of that race, and that he’d actually stopped. He should never have been allowed to restart it, and I think the force of Teddy Mayer, particularly, bullying the stewards got him back in.”

Hunt believed differently and was genuinely unaware that it was against the regulations for him to restart. His initial thought was to switch to his spare car for the restart. But no one was quite sure whether the first race had been completely aborted.

Everyone had an opinion about what would happen next. Most of the team managers and race officials were now congregated in race control in the Brands Hatch tower, directly overlooking the start line.

The rules were unclear about what happened when a lap of a race had not been completed.

As it could have been declared an aborted start, Alastair Caldwell decided to keep his options open. As Hunt’s mechanics descended on his race car to repair it, Caldwell ordered others to get the spare car ready. Hunt recalled: “They didn’t know exactly which car we would be able to run at the restart.” In fact, the McLaren mechanics took the spare car to the grid and put it in position while arguments went on about whether or not it was eligible.

Hunt remembered: “The stewards couldn’t decide what to do because the rule book was unclear, and of course with that, there were also a lot of Formula One team managers with a lot of words to say on the subject. The stewards were confused and the rulebook was confusing, so chaos reigned.”

The rulebook actually stated: “When a red flag is displayed, the race must stop immediately, and if there is a restart to the race, all people who are competing at the time are allowed to restart.”

Caldwell and Mayer knew exactly what they had to do; they had to delay a restart as long as possible. So they deliberately inflamed the argument in the control tower in order to gain their mechanics valuable time to repair Hunt’s car. Every quarter of an hour, Caldwell was running back and forth from the pits to the tower, reporting to Mayer on the situation with the repairs.

The grounds for not allowing Hunt to restart were complex, but the essence was that he had not completed a lap at the time of the accident. He had also entered the pits from the wrong direction, but in reality, in the heat of this situation, no one was going to disqualify him for that.

Hunt’s contention was that he had seen the red flag displayed and had been obeying this instruction by stopping racing immediately. The rival team managers contended that a driver who hasn’t yet completed a lap is not competing. They also firmly stated that Hunt should be disqualified for entering the pits from the wrong direction as, at no time may a car be driven deliberately in the opposite direction during a race. That rule was clear.

Caldwell and Mayer argued that the obvious solution was to declare the first race null and void. For a race to be stopped after 140 meters (459 feet) was unheard of in Formula One racing. But the stewards decided that the race had gone on longer, as Lauda had managed to keep moving and had threaded his car out of trouble after the initial contact from Regazzoni, and that he had been the leader when the race was red-flagged.