1976: Hunt 'wins' controversial British GP

From the grassy hillside at Surtees, from the towering new stands at Clearways and Clark, from the embankments around Paddock and Druids, from under the trees out along Hawthorn Bend and Derek Minter straight and Westfield and Dingle Dell and Stirling's, swelled the most eerie groan of disapproval. It was a cacophony of individual boos and hisses and jeers that gradually all welded into one tone, a deep drone of derision, and was finally supplanted by a steady slow Clap - Clap - Clap of scores of thousands of pairs of hands. The effect was overwhelming, and gladdening. It was the loud voice of the motor racing public, heard at long, long last; We don't give a stuff for your petty rules and regulations, we've come here to see a race and we want to see it.

And they saw it. James, who had been punted through the air at the first corner of the first lap of the first 'heat', who had started to drive on around the lap after all the others had disappeared, but whose front steering was too badly bent to make that sensible and who had stopped behind the pits, and who was ruled ineligible for further participation on the basis of some obscure RAC procedure taking effect upon the presentation of a red flag, was finally allowed to take up his rightful second-fastest place on the reformed grid. Seventy-six new laps later, he was spraying champagne over the heads of his public. The man who had won two GPs in two days the last time out, who had nearly lost 'twice' today, had made the World Championship something very nearly meaningful again. It turned out to be a fine day.



The Grand Prix circus, which is still mainly British, came home to race bringing with it a palpable sense of rejuvenation. Ferrari, seemingly invincible, had gone down to defeat twice running; now, with the second half of the season beginning in the John Player GP at familiar old Brands Hatch, there was real hope for a keen race and a result that would keep the World Championship open. A loss by Niki Lauda would still mean, probably, that something had gone wrong - but his flawed recent record gave the public the sporting chance of an unexpected result.

SEFAC Ferrari prepared every defence possible. For Lauda, there was a brand new car, chassis 028, completed on the Monday and run in briefly, at Fiorano. For the team, there was a special reappearance by a former manager, Luca Montezemolo, who was happy to tell anyone who asked that his reason for coming was to guard Ferrari's interests against the local officials!

The new machine was in substance and feel, according to the driver, identical to its older sisters; the one difference was that, like 027 being used by Clay Regazzoni, the monocoque had been built purely of folded sheets of alloy without the internal structure of rectangular-section steel tubing of earlier tubs. The first morning of practice was spent sorting out minor new-car problems, "The gear shift, and things like that," as Lauda reported. In the afternoon he climbed in "ready to go now." His whole mood was bouncy and mischievous, a young man feeling healthy and rested and confident of new success - success very nearly achieved.

Up until the last few moments the quickest car had been the March of Ronnie Peterson, but then, on his last lap, the Ferrari Champion pulled out a time fourteen-hundredths of a second quicker. It would have served for pole had not the Marlboro McLaren of James Hunt been eleven-hundredths quicker still.

During the untimed Saturday morning session, Lauda got stuck in to finding some ultimate speed. He rolled into his pits at one stage and said that his engine was going off, it didn't feel strong enough, he wanted to try the spare car (026). A few laps in that, though, proved there wasn't anything wrong with his own engine after all and he went back to it. In the final hour, after adjusting his chassis for the current conditions of warmth and oiliness, and waiting resignedly for a chance at a clear lap amidst a crowd of drivers all looking for the same thing, he reached a time of 1m19.35 or 118.57 mph - quicker by a third of a second than his own pole position of two years earlier, when the track was slightly faster and neither wings nor tyres were as restricted as nowadays.

He came into his pit at the end of that and climbed out and took off his helmet. "That's it, that's as fast as I can go," said the computer side of his personality, and he finished with the day twenty minutes earlier than his fellows.

By common acclaim it was the McLaren chassis that alone of the V8s matched the Ferrari for handling, looking smooth and steady over the worst of the Brands kinks and bumps, and when it was all over and James Hunt was second on the grid by a margin of six-hundredths of a second he was without complaint. "I did have a lot of trouble getting a clear lap in when I was ready, in fact I only did get the one and I made a bit of a mess of that one at Clearways. But it's going very well." On the very eve of the announcement of the M26, the M23 was back up at the front of all the non-Ferrari designs.

So the front row of the JPGP grid showed it was again a two-car GP, but a glance at the next several rows showed it was by a very small margin. The first ten cars were all grouped a second apart.

Mario Andretti's third grid place was a great achievement, coming especially welcome here "at home". "When you do a good fast lap it never feels fast, it just feels right," said a relaxed and visibly on-form Mario. Once again, although he started out practice with the newest JPS "14", he gave it up due to trouble. Not big trouble, just something electrical, but he selected the original "11" for the rest of the meeting. "The new one feels good, it feels all new and put together right and nice, ya know what I mean? But it doesn't do ya any good to keep jumpin' around." So it was the third car that went to Gunnar Nilsson late in practice, when his "12" continued its saga of transmission failures. The "14" carried the only major Lotus mod for the meeting, relocation of its oil cooler to the nose cone, Shadow-style; this gave better cooling, tidier rear airflow, and somewhat increased front downforce. After more electrical trouble on Saturday afternoon, Gunnar finally got some clean laps in during the last ten minutes and put the machine onto 14th grid place.

The Elf six-wheeler Tyrrell of Patrick Depailler came out fifth best on the grid, after an earlier bogus time was revised, while being 0.16s slower put Jody Scheckter three positions farther down. Jody's practice was handicapped by throwing the car away on Friday afternoon at Dingle Dell, "The one where I always lose it here!" The damage to Project 34/3 wasn't severe, just the rear knocked about, and the Tyrrell mechanics had it good as new by the next morning. Jody had to finish the Friday with faithful but nearly forgotten 007/6, and it was interesting that he was a bit over 1.5-secs slower in it than Patrick was in his 34 during the same session.

The 34s were fitted with something stronger in the way of front suspension links following Jody's Ricard breakage, while his car also sported a new windscreen graced with newly enlarged "windows", so the public had a fine, if fleeting, view of his hands nursing the steering and gear-lever. Both the blue cars were coming down Paddock Hill at a spectacular angle, tails well out but obviously well under control. "It's good, it's quite good," said Scheckter, "although it doesn't feel especially fast..."

Qualifying sixth was Chris Amon, back at home in his Ensign with its smart Citibank livery for this race. "No, my back's healed up nicely, thank you, but the trouble is I haven't been able to do anything and I'm not fit again. I'm going to be running out of puff after about five laps!" He went on to say he thought his grid place could have been better by half a second's worth, at least, "but I didn't get it together somehow. We put on a new set of tyres that weren't any good, and between the oil on the road at one stage and the traffic I couldn't seem to get any clear laps. Also we still can't stop the inside back wheel picking up and spinning at Clearways. I'd like to try the Weismanndiff that Andretti's using, I think I could just about match his time..."

A noticeably lively Ronnie Peterson summed the competitiveness of practice. "I thought I was going to be quickest on Friday, and then on the last lap I was third - and the next day I'm seventh!" The March looking very smooth, it did have a critical last-minute problem, the oil pressure light coming on in the corners late on Saturday so Ronnie stopped caning the engine. With Arturo Merzario and Vittorio Brambilla right behind on the next row the March organization looked set for a good British GP. Only Hans Stuck looked out of it, by a second in lap times, his chassis mysteriously held back by an understeer not present in its sisters.

Eleventh quickest was John Watson in the Citibank Penske PC4. This was another chassis that looked to be handling very well, and it was being driven with special vigour, but the times were a bit off. It turned out to be largely a matter of too few laps. A driveshaft boot split in Practice One, a second delayed things in Two, on Saturday morning John came in to report a new vibration whenever he used the clutch pedal, and in the Final a change of clutch turned out not to have cured it. He managed only about a dozen flying laps by the end and during them the gearbox itself was spraying out oil because, apparently, something was making it pressurise internally. "All we've had time to do really is adjust the rear wing. The car feels good, but I wish I'd got in more time."

The Gitanes Ligier-Matra No.2 now fitted out to his measurements rather than Jarier's, Jacques Laffite used it during practice, until it broke its rear suspension mountings - a weld cracked at a tube carrying one of the bottom parallel links. Then he finished practice in the previously un-sorted spare car. Matra's lack of performance at Ricard had been traced on the bench to a set of new induction and exhaust tracts robbing more power than they gave, so it was back to normal at Brands. "The car feels quite good, I need only more time." As for future prospects, Jacques was able to describe what he'd like in the next model. "She wants only to have the engine mounted lower to the ground, about three centimetres, and also a new shape in the side of the body, more low, for the air onto the wing, you know? But really, she is very good now."

The pair of Martini Brabhams were side by side on the eighth row, a somewhat disappointing result of a practice during which both cars gave trouble with gearbox selection (still six-speeders) and engine pickup. There was also a troublesome understeer - not the only team reporting that - a condition not alleviated by Carlos Pace having the use of a brand new car, No.4, which, thanks to painstaking construction using lighter gauges and more titanium, was about 5kg lighter.

Brett Lunger was the quickest of the three Surtees drivers. "It's fun to drive, it does what you want it to do," enthused the back-on-form American, "and I like being back on a real circuit for a change!" Alan Jones was a bit less happy about his older car, but the man who really picked up late in practice by going to an outwardly identical set of tyres that turned out to give him four seconds was Henri Pescarolo.

On the bottoms of the Shadows an aerodynamic experiment was tried in the form of rows of bristle brushes hanging down to the road to stop air going underneath. Other teams have recently been adopting various designs of semi-rigid glass fibre or plastic sheets to do the same job. The brushes could not be proved to be a success, and were removed. Both DN5s were set up on long wheelbase, and during practice their front tracks were set three inches narrower to give better front tyre bite and cure an initial understeer.

Beyond a pause to change a gearbox in Jean Pierre Jarier's car, neither Shadow gave much trouble, but as at other circuits this year the handicap was simply lack of grip. Tom Pryce qualified a not very encouraging 20th for this race, on the circuit where he'd won a year and a bit earlier. Having to operate without a major sponsor to pay for detail development has that visible an effect on a car's performance.

The Copersucar Fittipaldi had been developed, new suspension geometry having been adopted at both ends since Ricard. At the rear this was an extreme change, a massive hoist in the roll centre, and it was such a success in creating traction where none existed before that it completely destroyed the front "You remember-two races ago we had to disconnect the front bar completely? Now we've got the biggest, solidest one we can find and we still can't adjust it stiffly enough.' Back to the drawing board, says Richard Divila cheerfully.

"We're operating on the Shakespeare principle: if we have a million drawing boards set up and have a million monkeys drawing for a million years, we'll eventually design the ideal suspension. Here, look at this picture of all the different wings we've tried this year. Eleven of them."

Bob Evans was back at F1 work, and happy he was at it, too. His driving of the RAM Brabham was handicapped by brakes that kept overheating a little, and by his spinning off a couple of times, but at the end of practice he had 22nd grid place and was glad to have "Blown the cobwebs away now. There's more to come, I'm sure; what we'd like to be able to do is get the back to stick better. These wing alterations have made a big difference to this car, I think." Tuning assistance for the meeting by ex-BRM designer Mike Pilbeam helped the team, too, although not enough for Lella Lombardi to make the field.

Both Harald Ertl and Guy Edwards qualified, both happy with the way their private Heskeths were going in the conditions. They made up the 24th and 25th grid spots, out of the total of 30 drivers who actually practised.

Mike Wilds in his private DN3 Shadow was not allowed to practise at all during the first session, for reasons he was never quite able to pin down; he was, of course, entered as one of the two "reserve" entries (the other never turned up at all.) On Friday afternoon he was able to make progress tuning the car for the long circuit, but progress was stopped the next day by, first, a lack of sparks and then by a failure of the lower front engine mounts which dropped the car in the middle at Hawthorn's in the final session. "We wanted to get the power down to the road, but that wasn't what we had in mind at all!" Mike tried to joke about it...

Once again Jacky Ickx couldn't make his Williams go fast enough to qualify; once again he said there was no mechanical reason beyond the chassis just not performing well. "Despite a track narrowed several inches, it oversteers everywhere, it does not turn in, it has no grip ..."

Divina Galicia had a few spins in her private Surtees and also lost time with first a broken driveshaft and then a broken drive pinion gear. But she wasn't at all downhearted about not making the field. "Look, let's face it, I was only a publicity stunt anyway. I mean, I only started driving 18 months ago! I have no business out there in a GP - not yet. But you know, it's been a fantastic experience just trying, I've learned so much. I'm still high from it."



They're not heroes and gods after all, they're just highly strung men, and in such a super-close atmosphere it must be inevitable that something will touch occasionally.

Lauda, exercising his pole man's prerogative, chose to start from the left, uphill side of the grid. That put Regazzoni on the downhill side, and when the Brands Hatch starting light system flashed he proved that a good pair of feet on the pedals beat a slower pair regardless of the side. Both Ferraris were ahead of Hunt on the run up to Paddock Bend. So far a good Ferrari day, but then Regga stepped that few inches too far. Trying to tuck up on the inside to the apex he touched Niki. The leader's car snapped viciously sideways, the follower's spun smartly right around. All the rest of the 24 starters found a wide red blockade across their bows, spinning wildly and spewing nasty green-tinted coolant from ruptured side pipes.

James almost made it round the outside, but back wheels touched and the McLaren went aloft, up with all four wheels into the air, floating almost lazily with the motion of a surfboard in a "wipeout." Down it came again nearly on its side, striking left front wheels first, and chancing not to go all the way over onto James's head. Most of the following pack somehow got through untouched, although the Ensign may have touched the McLaren, and the Ligier-Matra piled in afterward solidly. From both sides of the track the bone dry Kentish chalk dust plumed up, flints flew, cars strewed themselves every which way...

It cannot be wrong to err on the side of caution, and the senior Safety Observer on the scene made the decision that the track was unsafe for a second racing lap. At the startline the red flag came out, so that Lauda came flying round at the head of a race consisting of Patrick Depailler and Mario Andretti, he found it wasn't a race at all. Everyone backed off, after the first six, stopped on the spot.

Those who had stopped had gotten going again, including Regazzoni and Amon but excluding only Lafitte. Hunt, too, turned round and set off, still upright on his wheels although one of them was steering most oddly. Rounding Druids, he said later that he could see the race was being stopped, and when he got down to the road behind the pits he switched off and parked rather than drag his left front tyre round another couple of miles of roadway.

It took something near 15-minutes of steady sweeping and checking before the Paddock Bend marshals felt the track was clear enough for a restart. That there was to be a restart from a grid should have been clear, for no actual racing lap had been completed; when the red flag goes out all scoring reverts to the end of the previous lap - it was that rule in this event at Silverstone last year gave positions second, third, fourth and fifth to drivers who had crashed.

Someone, however, found another rule that probably had seemed good and sensible at the time of its conception - no driver may re-start unless his car had completed the red flag lap.
That seemed to eliminate James Hunt, Clay Regazzoni and Jacques Laffite.

Well, sir. You should've heard the crowd when that was announced! D'you think of the Brits as quiet, well-mannered, stiff-upper-lip-sorts of people? The roar of their disapproval, rising from 77,000 throats, turned the Kentish skies an even deeper blue.

The half hour that ensued has no real place in motor racing history, but it was certainly revealing of the passions that drive men to outlet in sport. Rules there must, probably, be to control those passions, but when a rule turns out to have an unpopular effect - whew! If spectators could ever organize in their aggregate millions, form the kind of practical action groups that have made for the improvement in the lots of most of the rival groups on the inside of the fences (only the mechanics come to mind as non-organized losers-out), you would see such a change in the shape of motor racing as to make your head swim! But to the stewards must go a rose: it must have taken real courage to announce the Hunt exclusion and stick with it, knowing it would be necessary to get through that crowd before midnight...

It was about 50 minutes after the initial incident that it all began to simmer down. All that while the Kiwi lads had rebuilt Hunt's front end, new steering link because it was needed and new rocker just in case, and got it back out through the thousands of bystanding legs onto its front row grid place again. Similarly moved to action, Ferrari and Ligier got their spare cars warmed and rolled out for Regazzoni and Laffite. There they were, on the grid. Your move, stewards.

Somewhere in the official mind there evidently dawned a two-fold solution. James had, most likely, still been moving at the moment the red flag was displayed; call him still mobile and let him back into the race. As for the other two, let's get on about the event and sort it out afterward.

We'll all get home alive tonight, anyway.

The second John Player Grand Prix of 1976 was pretty good for a while. James made it a better start this time and fed into place over Paddock Hill right behind Niki. Regga behaved himself with third place, Chris was fourth, and the rest all poured around more or less in good order, until toward the back some kind of tangle developed between Evans, apparently, and Edwards and maybe somebody else. Guy came off worst, driving the Penthouse girl onto the grass at the apex very much the sorrier. Up at Druids more of a shunt developed as Peterson and Depailler surprised each other; somehow out of that Stuck came off worst and parked with rear suspension bent.

Two starts, two corners, lots of action. Good, this motor racing at the top level.

It went dull for a while, then. All there was to watch was a pair of high speed chains of Grand Prix cars being driven flat out, weaving and jerking and sliding and roaring, carrying on like rabid wolves trying to sink infected teeth into each other; not much of a spectacle (by comparison) at all. Lauda's red wolf very slowly was gaining on Hunt's red-and-white one, while Regazzoni wasn't going to be able to do anything about that but he could stay in third place. Gone from threatening position immediately, sadly enough, was Amon, whose engine pulled sluggishly and who couldn't prevent several people blowing right by even on the first lap. Scheckter thus found himself fourth, with Brambilla and Peterson looking to sink their teeth in his tail. Then came Amon, Watson, Merzario passing Nilsson, and the rest in a second vicious pack.

Andretti ought to have been in on all this, right you are. Well, he took about three laps to get in at all. His engine refused to start up on the grid! A change of spark box finally got it going and he charged off at the back. "It was goin' great, too, I was walkin' all over 'em out there." But the engine went bad again; when the mechanics got to it later they discovered that the plugs were all wet.

Mass's second start was no more fruitful; it fried his clutch and he slipped sadly in to retire. Amon wasn't going to make it either. The fading engine finally went bang altogether, due to losing all its water from a hose clamp that must have been damaged in the first shunt.

You get the picture: a one-by-one deterioration of the field until the ravening hoards of wolves were mostly pups with bleeding gums. Pescarolo: fuel pressure gone below the level required to keep the engine running. Brambilla: in for a change of "rolling" left front tyre, then retirement with left front suspension pickup point broken. Evans: gearbox failure. Laffite: identical failure at the rear as on the newer car in practice. Regazzoni: oil pressure right down to nothing.

There was an official sigh of relief committed to paper upon the last two men's retirement: the question of their exclusion no longer arises....

Merzario had performed like a star, gaining lost ground and pulling upon the leading group; when Peterson pulled off into the pits for a change of left front tyre of his own, Arturo was left as fastest March man and he was in fact hounding Scheckter. Then one of his wing endplates began to tear away and his advance eased, but he held on for a long while until one of his driveshafts broke loose at both ends and vanished quite away.

Peterson's stop was followed by another, as his replacement front tyre blistered rapidly too. Third one seemed to be made of sterner stuff, but then his ignition started playing up. Or it may have been the ignition, although two further stops failed to reveal the cure, and Ronnie struggled around sounding ever more gravely until it quit entirely.

Don't close the list yet. Add Reutemann, who was slowly losing oil from a split in the tank and whose struggles with bad brakes came to a merciful, if expensive, end from it. Depailler's toils with bent steering were eased with a blow-up too. What was a bigger pity was Lunger going out, for he'd been driving very keenly and was closing up rapidly on team-mate Jones when he suddenly lost all drive through the transmission. (Brett parked near an ambulance and appeared to commit himself to medical care, but he was merely begging a drink - he perspires so profusely that he finishes a race soaking wet).

Add Nilsson to the retirement list and you have the end of it simultaneously with the biggest disappointment, for it was Gunnar in his JPS staying just ahead of Tom Pryce in the Shadow that made the longest dice of the race. Both young men fighting their cars. Gunnar with handling that started poorly but improved as the fuel lightened, although heavy steering never did lighten; Tom with his engine gradually going off at high revs so that, fearing a deranged valve mechanism, he started limiting himself to 9600 rpm. Both of them ultimately came under attack from John Watson's Penske, and Pryce succumbed, but how Nilsson would have fared is lost to history because a piston brought him to the sidelines first.

So 10 were left running of the 26 - or 28, counting spares used this day. Last on the road after a miserable race, down 1000 revs like Pryce and like Nilsson suffering from heavy steering ("The front tyres grip so badly you must put on very much front wing, which makes it impossible to steer.") was J. P. Jarier. Next up was Carlos Pace, who made two stops to replace "rolling" left front tyres. Eighth was Harald Ertl, whose brakes were fading toward the end but who was about the only man left who had no serious complaints to make!

Victory of a kind on a day like this. Emerson Fittipaldi came in out of the points by one place, two laps down; he too had wound his front wings up tight and was - can you believe it of him? - exhausted from the heavy steering at the end. It was his brother Wilson who, smelling the chance of points, joined two other team managers in putting in a protest about the winner.

Alan Jones, his brakes erratic from early on but otherwise going well; Pryce, nursing his engine; Watson, recovered brilliantly from an early shunt with Merzario and a resultant pit stop for a new nose cone, recovered as well from a later spin, driving with engine stuttering raggedly from an electrical fault but driving nonetheless with such spark he was voted the Etienne Aigner award; Jody Scheckter whose rear suspension had commenced to lean because of another broken rear beam; all stood to move up a place were James Hunt to be excluded.

James Hunt. How could you invent a character and script his career with as much literary drama as the real fellow. Join us now as this week's soap opera finds him trading off fastest laps with the World Champion. The gap between them has been fairly regular, at around half a dozen seconds. We're coming up to half distance how, and they're both into the 1m 20's. Back at lap 28, Niki did 20.43. Lap 35 and James does 20.38, and at lap 38, halfway, he improves to 20.35. Three laps later and Niki has it back at 19.91; another three and James shaves that to 19.82.

What's happening to the gap is even better: it's shrinking. Quite suddenly Lauda has lost ground, Hunt is nosing up behind, the crowd is going wild. At 45 laps, having made a couple of feints, James Hunt shoots up into Druids on the inside ("I just shut my eyes and went!") and slips into the apex first. The eruption of waving arms by tens of thousands precedes him like a bow wave all the way down through the bends around South Bank. He drives steadily away, leaves the Ferrari for dirt, wins the Grand Prix - yer first actual Englishman to win the British Grand Prix since Peter Collins in 1958. Hey, great stuff.

"If something went wrong with Niki's car it must have gone wrong with it after I overtook him!" Cheers, laughs, grand showbiz. Shake up the champagne and spray it all around.

Niki, horsing around on the rostrum with the best of them, reports that indeed he did have trouble and from quite early on. His gear selection was seizing up unpredictably, so when he went for third he couldn't be sure of getting fifth or first; he compromised and stayed in fourth and relied on the Ferrari torque curve to keep his lap times up. By the closing stages he was paying attention to signals about Scheckter's whereabouts, but the six-wheeler was in enough trouble of its own, one back wheel leaning as at Zolder.

Had the race ended at that it would have been a nice day's sport, but of course it hasn't been a sport for years and Ferrari, Tyrrell and Fittipaldi all found their fifty quid each for protest money. They reckoned Hunt should not have restarted as had been announced by the officials to begin with.

You and I might think this leaves a sour taste on the savour of the day, but amidst all the political wrangling and arm waving there was a little aside that perhaps gives us an insight into the real quality of the thing. It is all competition, after all. Listen:

"Eh, hang on a minute," said someone to one of the several Ferrari managers. "A couple of hours ago you were saying that Regga ought to be allowed to restart in the spare car, it was the right thing to do, no way he should be kept out - how is it that you now are protesting James for the same thing???"

The answer is accompanied by a quick flicker of a Latin smile. "It's my job."