JamesHunt

Origins

James Simon Wallis Hunt was born on 29 August 1947 in Belmont, Surrey, England, the second son of stockbroker Wallis Hunt and his wife Sue. The Hunt family was upper-middle-class, with Wallis sending James to Wellington College, the prestigious British public school. Hunt was a strong athlete at Wellington — squash, tennis, cricket — but his academic record was modest, and he left school at eighteen with vague plans to become a doctor before discovering Formula Ford racing in 1967 at age twenty. He sold his Mini Cooper to fund his first season, racing at Brands Hatch and other British circuits with the kind of all-or-nothing commitment that became his trademark. His early career was famously underfunded, and he raced under the nickname "Hunt the Shunt" through Formula Ford 1600 and Formula 3 because of his frequent crashes.

Rise

Hunt's F1 break came when British aristocrat-tycoon Lord Alexander Hesketh signed him for the Hesketh Racing team in 1973. The team was famously eccentric — open-bar paddock hospitality, no sponsor advertising on the cars, Hesketh in his trademark cravat and waistcoat — but the cars built by Harvey Postlethwaite were genuinely competitive. Hunt scored his first F1 podium at the 1973 Dutch Grand Prix and his first win at the 1975 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort. When Hesketh closed at the end of 1975 because Lord Hesketh had spent his fortune, Hunt moved to McLaren for 1976, replacing the just-retired Emerson Fittipaldi.

Championship Years

Hunt's World Championship came in 1976 in the most dramatic season of the decade. The McLaren M23 was competitive but the season's narrative was dominated by the rivalry with Niki Lauda's Ferrari. Lauda's near-fatal crash at the Nürburgring in August created the championship's pivot point — Hunt won races in Lauda's absence, Lauda returned to racing six weeks later still bandaged from facial burns, and the title went to the final race at Fuji in October. Hunt finished third in the rain-affected race that Lauda withdrew from on safety grounds; the third-place finish was enough to clinch the championship by a single point. Hunt's six wins and the manner of the season — the comeback from a midseason deficit, the contrast in styles with Lauda, the rain-affected finale — made the 1976 championship one of the iconic seasons of F1 history. He continued at McLaren for 1977-1978 with diminishing competitiveness as the Lotus 78 ground-effect car redefined the formula, then moved to Wolf for 1979 before retiring midseason at age thirty-one, exhausted and disillusioned with the sport's direction.

Style and Legend

Hunt's driving combined natural pace with aggressive commitment that the McLaren engineers of his era found difficult to optimise — he qualified strongly but used tyres harder than rivals, and his race results often varied widely. His personal style off track was the larger part of his public identity — he raced barefoot, refused to attend many sponsor functions, drank and smoked through race weekends, and arrived at the 1976 Japanese Grand Prix with two black eyes from a paddock fight he had picked the previous evening. His relationships with women were extensively chronicled by the British press; his marriage to Suzy Miller ended when she left him for Richard Burton, an episode that Hunt always treated as more comic than tragic. The rivalry with Lauda — measured Austrian engineer-driver versus playboy English risk-taker — was one of the great character contrasts in F1 history and was made into a successful 2013 film, "Rush," that brought their story to a generation that did not remember 1976.

Beyond Racing

Hunt retired from racing in mid-1979 and moved into a successful career as a BBC television commentator on F1 alongside Murray Walker. The Walker-Hunt commentary partnership through the 1980s was the most distinctive in F1 broadcasting — Walker's enthusiasm meeting Hunt's dry, often acidic and informed analysis. He developed serious financial problems in the late 1980s after divorces and bad business investments, and his health was affected by years of heavy drinking. James Hunt died on 15 June 1993 at age forty-five from a heart attack at his home in Wimbledon, the day after he had proposed to his then-girlfriend Helen Dyson. His 1976 World Championship, ten grand prix wins, and the cultural significance of his rivalry with Lauda secure his place among the most colourful figures of late-1970s F1 — a champion who lived and raced with the abandon that the sport had largely abandoned by the time of his death.