Remembering James Hunt

That evening I had been flying back from Montreal, and by the next morning James was gone. Like anyone else who knew him, I was stunned by the news, and in the afternoon hurriedly wrote the obituary for last week's magazine. It wasn't until the Wednesday morning I attended finally to the answering machine.

It was a typical message from James: 'Just calling for a gossip.' Like Keke Rosberg, he loved nothing better, and I fear to contemplate the amount of time and money I have spent on the phone to the pair of them down the years.

In fact, not a second, or cent, was wasted. Last week I expected a call from Keke, and it duly came. He and James had always got along well, and the shock was apparent in his voice. I seemed to have similar conversations all week long: there were a lot of people feeling a lot of grief, and wanting to talk about it.

James had not been in Canada, he and Murray Walker commentating as usual, but from a BBC studio in London, with a monitor before them. This has always been the case at some of the farther-flung Grands Prix, and I have long thought it testimony to their skill and professionalism that it was undetectable to the viewer.

Murray, if asked, could make a Party Political Broadcast sound stimulating, I have no doubt. This is his great gift, and his breathless style was wonderfully complemented by James's dry, languid, delivery.

James had come to love racing a great deal, but it wasn't always so. While he was actually doing it, he told me not long ago, he didn't really like it very much. He retired young, a few months short of his 32nd birthday, and I once asked if he had ever regretted it.

'No,' he replied, 'because I was getting scared of hurting myself. I don't think that would have happened if I had been in a car that could win, because that's the way I am: in a competitive situation, everything else goes out of my head. But I didn't have that for my last couple of years, and I was never the type to get pleasure from simply being a racing driver.

'Driving a racing car, when you've got the ability, is like riding a bike. You don't get worse at it. It's only your head that moves around, right?'

Racing drivers, James concluded, slow down because they lose motivation, for whatever reason. He could never understand, though, how or why their degree of bravery should decrease. 'In my book, driving at ten-tenths is no more dangerous than at seven-tenths - all it means, after all, is that you're going 2-3mph slower at any given point on a circuit. And, frankly, an accident at 167mph isn't going to be any better than one at 170. For me, driving at the limit didn't change the risk. Whenever I made mistakes on my own, it was when I wasn't trying - I wasn't concentrating hard enough. So it was always more likely I'd shunt in an uncompetitive car.'

Since his retirement, the drivers James had most admired were Senna and Prost. Not only did he consider them the two best, he also had consummate admiration for their staying power. 'To run at the front in Grand Prix racing - and to stay there - is mentally exhausting. The brain gets tired before the body does.'

A pause. 'I mean, you've only got to look at some of the geriatrics tooling around nowadays to see who's got tired brains...'

That was what made James a gem of a commentator. The mahogany voice helped, of course, but he was never bland, never followed party lines. A great performance from a driver or team received due tribute, a poor one stinging rebuke.

Like all journalists, admitted or not, he had his likes and dislikes, and sometimes rattled a cage or two with his observations. On these occasions, when confronted by the object of his criticism, he would fight his corner vigorously, but unfailingly with good humour. James took his journalism very seriously, and would fiddle endlessly with his weekly newspaper column before committing it to the page.

I didn't much like him in his racing days, thinking him boorish and spiky, but looking back now, probably I allowed my opinion of him to be coloured by a distaste for some of the self-important twerps who hung about him, seeking celebrity by association. They disappeared from the scene, mercifully, when James gave up driving.

When I think of him now, and in the future, I will picture him in two settings. First, there will be the memory of that lovely house in Wimbledon, with the old Mercedes and A35 van outside, the soppy Alsatian, foul-mouthed parrot and bare-footed owner within.

Second, any circuit press room will bring him to mind. Times without number, a dull stint at the keyboard was relieved by James's arrival. A grin was the expression most natural to him, and, like most of us, he was quite incapable of keeping a good story to himself. If he spoke quietly, at the same time glancing over his shoulder, you knew something choice was on its way. He had a horror of folk who take themselves too seriously, and would tell tales against them with particular relish.

For all his irreverence, however, his laid-back way, he could be intensely serious when the moment demanded. A naturally dignified man himself, he demanded dignity for his sport, and was appalled when he felt it compromised by certain individuals.

Most of all, though, what I liked about James was that he was so much his own man. Thanks to the tabloids, it became public knowledge that he was broke, his once considerable wealth dissipated by a series of bad investments through the '80s. His friends knew, anyway, for he never sought to hide it, speaking with cheerful equanimity of his 'reduced circumstances'. His downs were never betrayed by his behaviour; in the recent past, indeed, he seemed happier than ever.

On Grand Prix days we will not hear James's voice again, and we will miss that humour, that incisiveness. But please know, too, what a very fine man this was.