If Lewis is trying to be the new James Hunt, he is failing miserably (2024)

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• Monday will be the 40th anniversary of Hunt winning the world title
• English sport's most extravagant playboy beat his great rival, Niki Lauda
• Click here for more F1 news, features and points tables

At the Royal Automobile Club on Monday night, the friends and family of James Hunt will celebrate the biggest race of his life.

It will be precisely 40 years ago, in blinding spray in the foothills of Mount Fuji, that English sport’s most extravagant playboy beat his great rival, Niki Lauda, to the Formula One title. As Hunt wrote on the front page of the next day’s Daily Mail: ‘By all the laws of humanity I should not be motor racing champion of the world.’

It was really too dangerous to drive in that Japanese Grand Prix. To do so was almost to demand to die. It was also the first race to be televised live by satellite in the middle of the European night. Those are just a couple of reasons why the end of the 1976 championship still evokes emotions all these anniversaries later.

Below the chandeliers in the RAC’s Pall Mall clubhouse will be a living reminder of Hunt. Freddie Alexander Hunt, James’s 29-year-old son, is the spitting image of his father. The long blond hair and the free spirit.

Freddie — Fearless Fred was his boyhood nickname — was once a professional polo player and pest controller. He is a fisherman, hunter and reptile lover. He is also an endurance racing driver, having competed in European Nascar this year.

He reveres his father’s memory and cannot see anyone in modern Formula One living up to his excesses.

Heavens, on the weekend Hunt won the world title in Fuji, there was a queue of British Airways stewardesses outside his hotel room.

There is a faint chance that this season’s Formula One title could yet go down to the wire, as in 1976. Lewis Hamilton is 33 points adrift of Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg with four races to go. But does Freddie Hunt think the drivers are as exciting as in his father’s time?

Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen, Freddie acknowledges, has his hedonistic moments. But what about Hamilton, Britain’s triple world champion? He has spoken of his love of drinking and carousing, has been pictured being twerked in a Barbados parade and seems to court controversy on and off the track.

‘Lewis like dad?’ says Freddie, laughing. ‘I can’t see any likeness at all. He might try to be, but if so he’s failing miserably. He is incredibly quick, but I am struggling a bit with his personality. I don’t dislike him, but he doesn’t captivate me.

‘Kimi gives it a good go, but nobody can get close to being like dad, can they? He was a one-off.

‘The closest to him in sport now is Ronnie O’Sullivan. Do you remember when he potted the pink to get a 146 rather than the black because he thought the prize-money for a maximum break was not enough?

‘But, no, you can’t be like dad nowadays.

‘What the general public know about him through the media is pretty close to what he was like. But I think it was a bit sugar-coated.

‘In those days journalists were kind to the people they wrote about. Dad was actually a little more wild, a bit worse behaved than was reported.

‘I don’t mean while he was racing, but when the racing was over he’d let his hair down. Imagine all the naughtiness you have heard about him and double it.’

Freddie is in the process of buying a three-bedroom house with garden in Wiltshire because he cannot afford a nice pad in Chelsea. He is grappling with the usual angst of a racing driver, struggling for the budget to succeed in the Le Mans Series.

Freddie was nearly six when his father died and he remembers clearly the moment his mother sat him and his elder brother Tom down in their garden and told them: ‘Dadda’s gone to Heaven.’

Hunt was 45. Freddie sports a tattoo of his father’s signature on his back and gobbles up any information he can about his life and times. ‘We never spoke about motor racing, or if we did I can’t remember it,’ says Freddie, who recollects more vividly the ‘rain of crap’ from the budgerigars James kept.

So they never spoke of that day in Fuji, when Hunt had to finish third or higher to pip Niki Lauda to the title. Only a few months earlier the Austrian had been pulled out of his blazing Ferrari seconds before he would have died at the Nurburgring.

His scalp had been stitched back together with skin from his thighs. But this bravest of men refused to drive on that rain-lashed day, pulling in after a lap, muttering ‘insanity’ at the danger posed by the conditions.

Hunt drove on. ‘He won the title by the skin of his teeth,’ says Freddie. ‘Mario Andretti got to the end on one set of tyres. And dad could have. But he refused to cool his tyres and one burst. He had to come in. It made it more spectacular than was needed.’

Hunt sank half a can of beer after being told, to his astonishment, he had finished third and won the title. He then threw it up over the feet of Japanese television crew who moved in to capture his elation.

Freddie reflects: ‘It was dad’s lifestyle that killed him. I can be like him. But, frankly, I’d like to see my 50th birthday. Maybe even my 60th.’

James would now be 69.

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