On one occasion, his team had to distract a race official while Hunt had his way with the poor guy's girlfriend in an ambulance behind him. Stories of his racetrack dalliances remain the stuff of legend, and he was said to have slept with at least 5,000 women. If he looked like a Seventies rock star, he had the retinue of sycophantic hangers-on and groupies to back it up. He was charming, but could be highly volatile. Hugely fit despite a considerable cigarette habit (supercharged with cocaine, tempered with cannabis) and a fondness for booze, Hunt was so tormented by fear of failure that he had a pre-race vomiting ritual and would pace around the garage like a caged animal. It led to even greater tabloid ubiquity, not least when Hunt arrived in New York for a showdown with her and was greeted by several hundred journalists. By the start of the 1976 season, he was estranged from his model wife, Suzy Miller, who had been wooed by the actor Richard Burton after the movie star spotted her by a ski lift in Gstaad. Hunt's personal life was also in turmoil. He was, to put it mildly, unconventional." The late, great Barry Sheene remembered it this way: "I hated wearing formal clothes too, but I loved going somewhere with James because he always made me look well-dressed!" "Wearing a pair of shoes was a fairly normal request, but not to James. "In those days, the sponsors usually paid the drivers' retainers and in return they expected a certain order of events," Hogan remembers. It was an awkward match, not because Hunt was greedy but because he balked at a contractual clause that demanded he wore a suit to sponsor functions. He was a tabloid and chat-show staple by now, motor racing's beautiful bad boy, the golden-haired god who had put a rocket under that year's Formula One world championship.īut when double world champion Emerson Fittipaldi suddenly deserted McLaren, Hunt found himself drafted into the team for 1976 as a last-ditch replacement, thanks to the efforts of his friend John Hogan, racing sponsorship manager at Philip Morris, whose Marlboro brand backed McLaren. Almost 80,000 spectators had gathered at the Kent circuit and it was Hunt they had come to see. Punk was simmering on the streets of London, and James Hunt - like his flamboyant GP bike-racing friend Barry Sheene - had established his own brand of anarchy. The British Grand Prix was held at Brands Hatch on 18 July in that famously long, hot summer. It's a story about two of sport's greatest natural rivals, James Hunt and Niki Lauda, men who approached their personal and professional lives in dramatically different ways, seeking triumph and battling personal tragedy along the way, in an era when death was still a stark reality in Formula One. The production will visit various other British circuits, and the racing scenes in Rush are rendered with breathtaking verisimilitude. Tomorrow, it will transmogrify into a track in the shadow of Japan's Mount Fuji.
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