James Hunt and Hesketh: The Unlikely Lads

The foundations were now in place, but it was the trappings that caught the eye at Monaco. F1 was considerably less well-heeled then than it is today, and the sight of this new team in its matching kit, nicknames printed on their backs, sipping champagne served by livened butlers and barely-clad young women, convinced most observers that this was anything but a serious effort. In a sense they were right, because if the Hesketh team took its racing seriously it was under the guise of pretending that all life was a joke. Underneath the gloss though, was a fierce commitment, a determination to prove that it was possible to shake up the po-faced Grand Prix fraternity and to have a bit of fun at the same time. As for the nicknames, Lord Hesketh was known as Le Patron’, Horsley was, of course, ‘Bubbles’, Postlethwaite was ‘the Doc’, and Hunt was ‘Superstar’.

The next appearance was at Paul Ricard for the French GP. It was here that the first of the Doe’s tweaks was unveiled — a towering airbox over the engine. It worked loose and flew from the car mid-race, but Hunt soldiered on to finish sixth and give the team its first World Championship point.

The real breakthrough came two weeks later at Silverstone. It was the team’s ‘home’ race, just down the road from the Hesketh family estate of Easton Neston, near Towcester. In practice Hunt was sensational, lapping two seconds quicker than the works Marches and qualifying 11th on a grid of 28 starters. The race had to be stopped at the end of the first lap when Jody Scheckter launched a multi-car pile-up after spinning wildly at Woodcote. Hunt closed his eyes and drove through the carnage, but the detached rear wing of Scheckter’s McLaren sliced off the Hesketh March’s airbox passing within inches of Hunt’s head. Only 19 cars survived for the restart and after a poor getaway, Hunt, now with a conventional March airbox, more than lived up to his practice form. At one stage he had worked his way up to third place and he finished fourth in a desperately close race, just 3.4sec behind the winner, Peter Revson.

“He said afterwards, and I’m sure he was right, that if he’d had the new airbox he would have won that race,” says Hesketh. “It was giving us something like another 400rpm.”

More chassis and aerodynamic modifications followed and the results continued to impress, but then Superstar relived the bad old days of Hunt the Shunt when he crashed the March in practice at Monza. There were signs, too, of Hunt’s volatile temperament when he clashed furiously with Horsley who refused his driver’s demand for a new March chassis to he flown to Italy for the race. But it was proof— if proof were still needled — of Hunt’s commitment.

The season finished on a high though, when Hunt took second place in the US Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, hounding Ronnie Peterson’s Lotus 72 all the way and finishing only 0.7sec behind. The team had entered only eight of the season’s races, but Hunt finished eighth in the World Championship with 14 points, the only March driver to score.

On lap 28 it stood there no longer. Hunt had pulled off one of the most audacious overtaking moves ever seen at Silverstone, putting two wheels on the grass at the inside of Woodcote as he hammered the Hesketh past the Lotus at some 160mph. There was no catching Superstar after that, and this time there were no mistakes, despite the lack of clutch and the damaged gear lever, which would leave his right hand bruised and raw. Hunt pulled into the pits after taking the chequered flag, flung off his helmet and broke into a full-throated rendition of The Dambusters, which the rest of the team deliriously joined in.

It all became more serious in 1975. Although Le Patron had given the go-ahead to the development of a new car, he was beginning to understand one of the sport’s oldest maxims. If you want to make a small fortune from motor racing, it’s best to start with a big one. There was even talk of what had hitherto been unthinkable that to continue in F1, Hesketh would have to find a sponsor. The economy drive was nowhere more pronounced than at Monaco where the team slept in a hired motor home, driven by Lord Hesketh himself. Of the yacht, helicopter and Rolls-Royce there was no sign. Now the results were needed not just to cock a snook at the F1 establishment, but to pay the team’s wages. A second car was often entered, for a paying driver, of which the most frequent was Alan Jones.

The new car wouldn’t be seen until the tail-end of the season, but the modified 308B, now with sick radiators and a full-width wing running in front of the bluff nose, proved a competitive proposition. Indeed, Hunt finished second in the season-opener in Argentina though he should have won it, a mistake under pressure handing victory to Emerson Fittipaldi’s McLaren. It was a similar tale in the Spanish and British GPs, both of which he led before crashing.

At Zandvoort though, there were no mistakes. It was wet at the start, but noting a glimmer of blue sky in the grey above, Bubbles and Hunt decided to leave the car on dry settings, though like everybody else on the grid they started on wet tyres. As the sky cleared, Hunt dived out of fourth place and into the pits to change to slicks. He was the first to do so and the move was decisive. When Clay Regazzoni in the second Ferrari stopped on lap 14, Hesketh moved into the lead.

Almost immediately Hunt had his mirrors full of Lauda’s Ferrari. There were 60 laps remaining and the Austrian tried everything he knew to shake Hunt into a mistake, while in the Hesketh pits they were praying once more to the Great Chicken in the Sky and keeping everything crossed. And this time their prayers were answered; their luck and Hunt’s nerve held. The Hesketh took the chequered flag by a winning margin of just 1.06sec.

Hunt racked up 33 points that year to finish fourth in the world championship, and the team took the same place in the constructors’ title. But the money had run out.

Britain was in the throes of a severe financial recession which had hit Hesketh’s other business interests hard. The search for a sponsor continued, but one sensed that Le Patron couldn’t really bring himself to give up his cherished independent underdog status. It was also more than possible that there were few companies who wanted to be associated with the wilder aspects of the team’s behaviour. Hunt, in particular, had shown time and again that he didn’t give a stuff about what people thought of his propensity for turning up at formal functions in jeans and T-shirt, or partying late into the night.

At midnight on 14 November 1975 the deadline for finding a sponsor with £300,000 to invest had passed and Lord Hesketh wound up the team.

Hunt, now firmly established as one of the world’s quickest drivers, joined the McLaren team. Twelve months later, he would be World Champion. Postlethwaite went to Wolf, to start work on the car that would take Jody Scheckter to within a whisker of the 1977 world title. Bubbles kept the Hesketh name alive in Grand Prix racing for a couple more sponsor-funded seasons, but there were no results worthy of mention.

It had been brief, but glorious. Looking back today Lord Hesketh sighs and murmurs that it’s hard to believe it was nearly a quarter of a century ago. But there are no regrets. “I’m glad we did it if – only for James. I always felt that he was underestimated as a driver and I’m glad we were able to put him on his way.”