James Hunt - Gerald Donaldson

...present.

James Hunt, for those who still have youth on their side, was one of Britain's most famous and talked-about sports stars of the 1970s. He was good looking, rude, charming, aggressive, troubled, big-hearted and controversial, but he was also one of the most brave and naturally brilliant racing drivers this country has ever produced, certainly one of the fastest. He was also the first British racing driver to feature as much ...
...who spent long hours interviewing James Hunt, as well as his family, friends, and professional rivals. Donaldson's book was originally to have been a full-on collaboration with Hunt, a collaboration that would not only have looked deeply into Hunt's career but would also have attempted to present as honest a record as possible of Hunt's thoughts, feelings, and conclusions on motor racing, life, and love. However, the subject's untimely death in 1993 ... more

If, as someone once said, sports merely reflect their times then Formula 1 motor racing must use a very big mirror. Much of what makes up our shiny world of non-judgemental wonder is inherent in the Grand Prix circus: corporate sloganeering, an insatiable appetite for money, absolute faith in the black arts of PR, jaw-dropping technology, a morbid obsession with safety, and, last but not least, youthful well-scrubbed participants who are never likely to express an opinion that is in any way personal or controversial for fear of offending somebody or everybody. Formula 1 is now slick, sparkling, politically correct and dull. Somewhere along the way the soul of the sport has been lost, or perhaps just sold.

So it's just as well that past times were a whole lot different to now. The 1970s were in many ways the antithesis of the neurotic noughties. The 70s were politically turbulent, gaudy, vulgar and very difficult, but they were also energetic, abrasive and exciting years, years when things could get done without the need to jump through an assault course of hoops and people could tell others what they really thought of them (within reason) without inviting an immediate thumping by the passive-aggressive heavies of political correctness. Formula 1 in the 70s was as much a reflection of its time as it is now: it was loud, grubby, slightly chaotic, brash and very very dangerous. It also necessarily produced driving stars that were cut from a somewhat rougher cloth than that from which derives many of our sweet-young-things of the present.

James Hunt, for those who still have youth on their side, was one of Britain's most famous and talked-about sports stars of the 1970s. He was good looking, rude, charming, aggressive, troubled, big-hearted and controversial, but he was also one of the most brave and naturally brilliant racing drivers this country has ever produced, certainly one of the fastest. He was also the first British racing driver to feature as much on the front pages of the tabloids as on the back, and wherever he went during his Formula 1 years he was pursued as zealously by slavering reporters eager for a scoop or a quote as he was by leggy blonds eager to share his bed, singly or in groups. But behind the public image of a boozy, chain-smoking, fast-living Hooray Henry, what was the man really like? In Gerald Donaldson's biography we find that 'Hunt the Shunt' was not only very different to the talented, death-defying lout portrayed by the media; he was also a whole lot more complex and sympathetic.

Gerald Donaldson is a Canadian motorsports journalist who spent long hours interviewing James Hunt, as well as his family, friends, and professional rivals. Donaldson's book was originally to have been a full-on collaboration with Hunt, a collaboration that would not only have looked deeply into Hunt's career but would also have attempted to present as honest a record as possible of Hunt's thoughts, feelings, and conclusions on motor racing, life, and love. However, the subject's untimely death in 1993 at the age of just 45 necessitated a rethink by the author. James Hunt: The Biography was the result. The book is a synthesis of all the interviews and Donaldson's own observations of Formula 1 in general and Hunt's place in it in particular.

The book runs through Hunt's life in chronological fashion: from a leafy suburban upbringing in Surrey; through the various levels of a motor-racing career that would ultimately see him crowned Formula 1 World Champion in 1976; and onwards to a post-racing career as a plain-speaking Grand Prix commentator for the BBC. The story throughout is a combination of standard biography and psycho-analytical study. The author paints a vivid and dramatic picture of the brazen and often brutal Grand Prix world that Hunt inhabited, but he also layers the narrative with sober and delicately-weighed insights into just what made the complex and contradictory Hunt tick. It's all very skilfully and interestingly done.

As a freelance North American journalist in the 1970s, the author found it difficult to gain entry into the exclusive Eurocentric club that the more seasoned Grand Prix journalists had created for themselves and soon realised that clarity and honesty were vital if his work was to be taken seriously. These virtues are evident in this book. There is never any point when reading it that we question his motives or impartiality. Donaldson was simply a man fascinated by his extraordinary subject and keen to understand him.

And what a subject James Hunt was. Above all, he was a man of stark contradictions. He was single-minded and competitive to an extreme degree yet he always conceded defeat graciously (if not immediately); his temper was explosive, especially when the adrenalin was coursing through his veins during a race, yet he always went out of his way to publicly make up for his indiscretions; his sexual appetites (and conquests) were legendary yet he yearned more than anything for a quiet life with the right woman (his tragedy was that he found her just a year before his death); he smoked and drank to excess yet was one of the finest squash players of his day and a consummate runner; and he competed aggressively and enthusiastically in one of the most dangerous sports available to him despite shaking uncontrollably and puking from fear and nerves before every race. Hunt was undoubtedly an enigma.

Although the book examines the whole of Hunt's life, it focuses most intently on his racing career and I found myself impatiently reading on through his conventional childhood in order to reach the 'days of thunder'. Hunt was as single-minded in his youth as he was later in life and when at the age of 18 he decided he wanted to be a racing driver there was little that was going to deter him from succeeding in such a career, not even a complete lack of money. Hunt started with nothing, not a penny, and it's testament to his determination that he forged a reputation on the track by scrounging drives here and there and making the most of his opportunities until he began to attract attention. Several years living an itinerant life as a jobbing Formula 3 driver around Europe paid off when he got involved with the eccentric (read 'bonkers') Hesketh racing team in the early 1970s, a team that would be his passport into the rarefied and glamorous world of Formula 1.

And it's in his evocative portrayal of the sexy, loud and murderous world of 70s Grand Prix racing that the author excels himself. From Hunt's first Grand Prix victory at Zandvoort in Holland in 1975, through the now-legendary 1976 season when he drove his McLaren to third place in the pouring rain in Japan to win the World Championship by just one point from his arch rival Niki Lauda, all the way through to 1979 when he quit the sport completely despite having only driven for five full seasons (and being offered $1 million by McLaren's sponsors to drive for the team in 1980), the narrative is tense and exciting and often gives us a driver's-eye view of the road ahead. Yet at no time does the author get carried away with the circus before him. He instead remains firmly focused on his subject, reasoning as the years pass under his pen about why James Hunt was how he was and behaved as he did.

In some ways this is a sad book, a record of an extraordinary life that was driven as much by frustration and disappointment as it was by ambition and the fuel of success. In reading about a complex private man, an archetypical loner significantly at odd with the cartoonish public persona that so attracted the eager-to-please hangers-on, we can't help but feel that Hunt was always destined to be a fish out of water, wilfully misunderstood by those who weren't interested in Hunt the man but only in 'Hunt the Shunt', who was far better copy. When after being crowned Formula 1 World Champion his behaviour was condemned for being boorish and outrageous by his more venerable sporting contemporaries - 'behaviour not befitting a World Champion', as it was pompously put - Hunt's response was that he simply behaved as the public wanted him to behave and if such behaviour ultimately offended then that was simply down to the public's fickleness and hypocrisy. James Hunt was, more than anything else, a brutally honest man and such men always frighten the mob, who's perennial response is knee-jerk condemnation (some things never change).

Yet despite the sadness of this story, it begins and ends on a high. There is an interesting foreword by Murray Walker - who not only watched Hunt's driving career but later shared BBC commentary duties with him in the 80s and early 90s - where he readily admits to being originally repelled by Hunt, only for his repulsion to quickly fade once he began to see behind Hunt's brazen facade to the intelligent, funny and warm man beyond. Such feelings are shared in the epilogue, which is a record of the 1993 memorial service for Hunt where person after person gives testimony to feelings that underwent the very same volte-face as those of Murray Walker. James Hunt made enemies throughout his career but he died with none.

Gerald Donaldson's biography is a meticulous study of a sporting enigma, yet at just 300 pages in length it is a neat and concise study, beautifully written and convincingly argued. The book doesn't spare James Hunt's reputation for one moment; it readily portrays a man who was often given to boorish, selfish and unacceptable behaviour. Yet it also shows us the man who was invisible to the public and in doing so explains to a great extent why Hunt behaved as he did. We see an individual who was part national-hero / part anarchist, a conflicted individual who loathed hypocrisy as much as he did convention. The book essentially describes a shy person who struggled ferociously to realise an ambition, only to find that the fruits of success tasted bitter. For the rest of his life Hunt struggled to find contentment, suffering badly from depression along the way, and it was somewhat ironic that when he discovered just what it was that could deliver such contentment it turned out to be something that had been there at the very start of his journey: a quiet life.

This is a book that will interest people whether they are interested in motor racing or not. It certainly paints a dazzling and vivid picture of the exciting and blood-curdling Grand Prix arena of the 1970s, but it can also be read as an interesting and intelligent study of the perils of celebrity and of the rise, fall, and rise again of one sporting celebrity in particular. The book also shows, perhaps inadvertently, how bare-faced honesty, as typified by the likes of James Hunt, is so difficult to reconcile with a system where image is everything and substance is taboo, a system that began in the 1970s and is now so deeply embedded as to be accepted without thought or question. James Hunt was a unique sporting superstar whose like we will probably never see again. What a great pity that is.

 

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