James Hunt was born in 1947 into a stockbroker’s family in Surrey and grew up at the kind of public school that expected him to become a doctor. He raced instead, crashed so often in the junior categories that the press called him “Hunt the Shunt”, and was picked up by Lord Hesketh, an aristocrat who ran a Formula One team as a very expensive party.
The party worked. In 1975 Hunt won the Dutch Grand Prix for Hesketh, holding off Niki Lauda’s Ferrari. When Hesketh ran out of money, Hunt was hired by McLaren for 1976, almost by accident, after Emerson Fittipaldi left.
That season became a legend. Lauda built a big lead, then was nearly killed at the Nürburgring; Hunt closed the gap while Lauda recovered, and the championship went to the last race, in Japan, in torrential rain. Lauda withdrew. Hunt, delayed by a puncture, fought back to third place and won the title by a single point — and did not believe it until someone showed him the results.
He was never as fast again. He left Formula One in the middle of 1979, still only thirty-one, and became the BBC’s co-commentator alongside Murray Walker — a partnership built on Hunt’s blunt, often savage opinions and the pair’s visible dislike of each other, which audiences adored.
He died of a heart attack in June 1993, at forty-five, having given up drinking and the parties some years before. The film Rush, about his season with Lauda, brought him back to a generation that never saw him race.
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