Lauda and Hunt Friends in London, rivals for one title

On the August Bank Holiday Monday of 1971, at Brands Hatch, two young March drivers were arguing over one engine. Niki Lauda drove for the works March team in Formula Two; James Hunt had a third works car for the same race, a Formula Two event outside the championship. Both had had engine trouble in practice, the team had a single spare, and the argument went up to the men who ran March, Max Mosley and Robin Herd. Lauda could not remember, years later, which of them was given it. He liked to think it had been him, he said, because his sponsors were paying the most. By his recollection it was the first race in which the two of them had driven in the same category.

They knew each other already. Lauda had come to London that year for his first season of international Formula Two, and rented a flat near Victoria Station from Mosley; Hunt was in March’s semi-works Formula Three team. Hunt lived in Fulham, Lauda thought, and the two of them went about together socially and became good friends, intense competitors though they both were. Each, Lauda said, was a rebel in his way, with a family set against his racing. Lauda’s grandfather, he said, used his business contacts to keep sponsors away from him.

When they first met is not settled.¹ In 1998 Lauda put it in 1971, and could not say whether they had raced each other in Formula Three the year before; in 2005 he dated their friendship to Formula Two in 1972. The story, often repeated, that they shared a flat is not in his account. Hunt’s son Freddie said in 2019 that he thought they had; Lauda’s own account puts them in different parts of London.

On the track Lauda watched a driver he expected to have to beat. He remembered Hunt overdriving an uncompetitive Formula Three March and crashing often, and coming back each time: he called him incredibly resilient, and dismissed the nickname the crashes earned him as nonsense. Late in the summer of 1972, in Formula Two at Oulton Park, Ronnie Peterson won and Lauda was 2nd; Hunt, driving a March a year older than theirs, had been ahead of them both at half-distance.

Off the track Hunt was the one with the reputation. He was always surrounded, Lauda said, by beautiful girls, and his circle included Mike Hailwood. Lauda was always portrayed as the more serious of the two, but he insisted that they all knew how to let their hair down, and that some of what they got up to was not for a family magazine. Told the story that he partied while Lauda was in bed by ten, Hunt was having none of it: “What?!? Me and Niki: we had a lot of bad behaviour together” (attributed). Lauda, told of it, agreed that they had been young and had had fun; the difference, he said, was that on Friday and Saturday nights he really had gone to bed early, and Hunt had not.

Formula One, 1973–⁠1975

Hunt came into Formula One in 1973, when Lauda was already in his second full season. That year Lauda went to BRM, and Hunt to the Hesketh team, at first in a March. The first World Championship race they both started was at Monaco on 3 June 1973, where Lauda ran 3rd in the BRM until his gearbox failed, and Hunt finished 9th. Lauda had already scored his first points, with 5th place at Zolder, but it was Hunt who finished ahead in all six of the races they both started, from Monaco to Watkins Glen in October, where Hunt was 2nd and the BRM’s fuel pump failed.

In 1974 Lauda was at Scuderia Ferrari and won his first two Grands Prix, and the count turned: he finished ahead nine times and Hunt six. In 1975, the year of Lauda’s first title, it ran nine to five his way. Twice that year, though, Hunt took the fight to him. In the BRDC International Trophy at Silverstone, outside the championship, Hunt’s Hesketh led Lauda’s new Ferrari 312T until it broke, and Lauda won. At Zandvoort on 22 June there was no mechanical failure to decide it. Lauda had pole and set the fastest lap, but Hunt won his first Grand Prix by 1.06 seconds, and Lauda conceded afterwards that he had settled for the points. Hunt’s success, he said, had taken him through a psychological barrier.

Lauda was champion that year with 64.5 points; Hunt, 4th, had 33. Then Emerson Fittipaldi’s late decision to leave McLaren for his family’s team opened a seat there, and Hunt took it for 1976.

1976

Lauda began the year as champion, with No. 1 on the Ferrari, and he won the first two races from 2nd on the grid, with Hunt’s McLaren on pole each time. In Brazil Hunt had taken pole by 0.02 seconds and retired; at Kyalami Lauda held him off by 1.3 seconds with a slow puncture. At Long Beach Lauda was 2nd to his team-⁠mate, Clay Regazzoni, and Hunt crashed.

Shortly before the Spanish Grand Prix a tractor rolled on Lauda at his home near Salzburg and broke his ribs; accounts differ on how many. At Jarama on 2 May he started from the front row in the new Ferrari 312T2 and led until Hunt passed him on lap 32. As he described the moment, Hunt came up the inside at the last second and he had to steer out of the way: “the pain was terrible, like a knife” (attributed). He finished 2nd. That evening Hunt was disqualified, his McLaren found to be too wide, by 1.8 centimetres in the usual account, and Lauda was declared the winner; on 5 July the FIA Court of Appeal in Paris gave the race back to Hunt and fined McLaren US$3,000. Lauda remembered how that verdict went down at Ferrari: “He was reinstated to the win on appeal, which all of us at Ferrari felt was a bit off because either the car was legal or it wasn’t.”

Before that verdict came, Lauda had pulled away. At Zolder and Monaco he took pole and won, and Hunt retired; in Sweden Lauda was 3rd and Hunt 5th. At Paul Ricard Lauda’s engine failed while he led, and Hunt won. Of the first nine races, as the results finally stood, Lauda won five.

Brands Hatch

At Brands Hatch on 18 July Lauda took pole. A first-corner tangle between the two Ferraris put Hunt’s McLaren in the air and stopped the race; after a long argument, with the crowd on Hunt’s side, he took the restart in his repaired car, passed Lauda, whose gear-change was failing him, on lap 45, and won. Ferrari, with others, protested; the stewards turned it down, and Ferrari appealed.

The two teams were at war that summer, and said so in public. Der Spiegel described two camps watching each other’s every move, and Lauda spoke bitterly of McLaren’s head, Teddy Mayer. When the appeal was heard in Paris, by Goodwood’s account, Lauda was there, his head still bandaged, and McLaren’s team manager, Alastair Caldwell, wondered aloud whether the bandages were hiding real blood.

The bandages were from the Nürburgring. On 1 August, on the second lap of the German Grand Prix, Lauda crashed and his Ferrari caught fire; several of the drivers who had stopped pulled him out, with a marshal’s help. He was given the last rites. Hunt won the restarted race. Ferrari did not go to the Austrian Grand Prix, and Hunt won again at Zandvoort, two races that Lauda missed. He was back for the Italian Grand Prix at Monza on 12 September, and finished 4th; Hunt spun off. The return is told in Monza and Fuji.

Mosport and Watkins Glen

Late in September the FIA Court of Appeal gave Ferrari what it asked: Hunt was disqualified from Brands Hatch, and the win was Lauda’s.² Lauda, in 1998, remembered it as coming much later in the season. The two appeals of the year, Jarama’s and Brands Hatch’s, cancelled each other out, 9 points kept by Hunt in Spain and 9 taken away in Britain; but after the verdict Lauda’s lead was 17 points, 64 to 47, with Mosport, Watkins Glen and Fuji to come. Hunt, by his own account, heard the verdict on the Tuesday before the Canadian Grand Prix at Mosport, and for once the friendship broke:

When I got to the circuit, the press were winding it up, going to Niki and saying, ‘James said this’, then coming to me, and saying, ‘Niki said that…’ For a few hours we hated each other, but on Friday we talked it through, got in our cars and life carried on as usual…

Hunt told the story another way too, in which they settled it with a handshake after the race; when they made it up is one of the details on which accounts differ.³ John Hogan, a sponsor’s man who knew them both, walked into the hotel dining room at Bowmanville that weekend to find them at opposite ends of it, each waving him over to his table. Hunt won the race. Lauda, his car weaving late in the race, backed off and finished 8th.

A week later at Watkins Glen they were in adjoining rooms at the hotel. Hunt told Nigel Roebuck what happened on the morning of the race:

Niki and I had adjoining rooms in the hotel, with a connecting door. Early on race morning he came stomping over to my bed, already in his overalls, and announced, ‘Today I vill vin ze Vorld Championship!’ Whether he was being funny or trying to psyche me out, I don’t know, but I just dissolved into helpless laughter…

The accent is Hunt’s joke. Hunt won again, Lauda was 3rd, and Ferrari took the constructors’ championship. Lauda went to the last race 68 points to Hunt’s 65.

Fuji, 24 October 1976

At Fuji the rain was torrential. The drivers met, the start was delayed, and the race was run. Lauda came into the pits at the end of the second lap and stopped, judging the conditions too dangerous; Hunt drove on and finished 3rd, enough to be champion by 1 point. Lauda had already left for the airport, and there the face of the local Ferrari importer told him the result. How the day unfolded, and the arguments about it, are in Monza and Fuji.

Hunt, at the end of that race, said that he felt sorry for Lauda and fully understood his decision, and that he had wanted the title and felt he deserved it; but Lauda had deserved it too, he said, and he wished they could have shared it. Lauda never accepted that he had lost it there. He had missed two races and retired from a third. In 1998 he said: “Some people said that I had taken a calculated gamble that James would not finish the race that day, but that was bullshit. I’d do the same again today.”

He was generous about the season, too. In 2016 he said that the Ferrari had slowed down after the summer while McLaren developed its car, and that Hunt had performed outstandingly: “He was really quick. No question. At the time, the best.” After the season, when others wrote Lauda off, Hunt spoke up for him in public, and Lauda went to a tribute day for Hunt at Brands Hatch, he said, to show the doubters how good their friendship really was.

What Rush made up

In 2013 the story of their year became a film. Rush was written by Peter Morgan and directed by Ron Howard, and its Lauda was Daniel Brühl, its Hunt Chris Hemsworth. Its premise was that the two men hated each other. Nigel Roebuck wrote that they had always been friends; Lauda said the same; and the only break that either of them ever described is the few hours at Mosport. Hunt’s son Freddie, in 2019, put it simply:

The reality was they were far closer friends than what was portrayed in the movie… They were very good friends - I think they even shared a flat together at one point during their F3 days.

The screenplay, Richard Williams wrote in The Guardian after Lauda’s death, needed a duel of opposites, though Lauda, in Williams’s account, liked a good time hardly less than Hunt did. One scene has Hunt beating up a journalist who had asked Lauda about his face. The question itself was asked: late in 1976 a journalist from an American news magazine put it to Lauda, and Roebuck heard the answer: “For me, no… For you maybe it’s a problem – you can see me…” No account of the time has Hunt hitting anyone.

In 2016 Lauda still remembered what Hunt had said at Fuji. They had trusted each other, he said; Hunt would never push you off the road, which mattered in those days. As for the film, he put it at 80 per cent correct, with a bit of Hollywood.

The film itself, and the books written about the two of them, are in Books and films; what it did for his fame is in Legacy.

After 1976

In 1977 Lauda won his second title, and Hunt was 5th. Lauda knew when Hunt had been at his best: “I would say that James drove the last few races of 1976 – and the first of 1977 – about as well as at any other time in his career.” That year Lauda finished ahead eight times and Hunt six; in 1978, with Lauda at Brabham and Hunt still at McLaren, it was 11 to 4, one race level, when both went out at the start at Zolder.

In 1979 Hunt drove for Wolf. Monaco on 27 May was his last race: he retired from it, and then from racing, for good. Lauda made the same decision four months later, in practice at Montreal; that story is in The retirements. When Lauda came back to racing in 1982, Hunt was in the commentary box for the BBC. He gave him an easy ride, Lauda said, at least.

Only much later did Lauda learn of Hunt’s troubles, and he admired the way his friend dealt with them:

It was only much later I heard he’d had problems with depression, drink and drugs, but he surmounted all these troubles through sheer self-control and determination … What can you say about a man like this dying of a heart attack at such a young age?

James Hunt was born on 29 August 1947 and died of a heart attack on 15 June 1993, at 45. In seven seasons they had started 86 Grands Prix together.