James Hunt: The Shunt

Fuji Speedway, Japan. October 24, 1976. Rain hammered the tarmac so hard you couldn't see three car lengths ahead. Mount Fuji had vanished behind a wall of grey. The air tasted of jet fuel and wet rubber. Somewhere in that chaos, a tall blonde Englishman with golden hair plastered to his forehead, a man who had vomited from nerves just hours earlier, was fighting for everything. He needed to finish in the top three. His rival, the Austrian who had crawled out of a burning car two months ago with his face half-melted, had already pulled into the pits and walked away. Too dangerous, Lauda said. I value my life more than a championship. James Hunt kept driving. Tires shredding. Visibility zero. And when it was over, when he crossed the line in third place, soaked and shaking, he was Formula 1 World Champion by a single point.

That moment, raw and impossible and real, is the distilled essence of James Hunt. A man who lived as though the clock was always running out. Because, as it turned out, it was.

The Boy From Belmont Who Chose Gasoline Over Medicine

James Simon Wallis Hunt was born on August 29, 1947, in Belmont, Surrey, England. His father Wallis was a London stockbroker. His mother Sue raised six children in an upper-middle-class home that valued propriety, discipline, and sensible career paths. James rejected all of it. He was, by every account, rebellious from the start: hyperactive, contrary, persistently difficult. He attended Wellington College, one of England's most prestigious boarding schools, where he taught himself tennis and squash to near-professional standard. He was accepted to study medicine and could have become a surgeon. His parents had £5,000 set aside for medical school.

Then, just before his eighteenth birthday, a friend took him to a motor race at Silverstone. "It was instant commitment," Hunt later said. "Motor racing was something impossibly remote, but here was something within reach of a mere mortal." Medical school was forgotten. He asked his parents for half the tuition money to buy a car instead. They said no.

So he dug roads. He stacked shelves at a supermarket. He drove delivery vans. He bought a wrecked Mini and spent two years rebuilding it. His first attempt at scrutineering failed because the driver's seat was a lawn chair bolted to the floor. When he finally started racing in Formula Ford, the crashes came fast and spectacular. At Oulton Park, his car sailed off the track and sank in a lake (he might have drowned had he been wearing the seatbelts he couldn't afford). In Formula Three, the accidents grew bigger. The paddock gave him a nickname that rhymed and stuck: Hunt the Shunt.

What they didn't see, what nobody wanted to talk about, was the fear. In the garage before every race, Hunt vomited. On the starting grid, his hands shook so violently the whole car vibrated. He admitted it openly: "I was sick with tremendous nerve pressure. If I crunched my car, I was out of money." This was a man who appeared utterly fearless and was, in fact, terrified every single time he climbed in. That tension, the bravado wrapped around genuine dread, is what made him magnetic. He was not performing courage. He was overcoming its opposite.

Champagne In The Pits & Rolls-Royces At The Paddock

In 1972, Hunt's career appeared finished. He had been sacked by the March Formula Three team and was unemployed. Then he met Lord Alexander Hesketh, a 22-year-old aristocrat who had inherited a 3,200-acre estate and decided the best use of his fortune was to go motor racing. They were introduced, famously, in a portable lavatory at a circuit in Belgium.

Hesketh Racing became one of the most gloriously eccentric operations in Formula 1 history. They arrived at races in Rolls-Royce Corniches. Liveried butlers served champagne in the pits regardless of results. At Monaco, Lord Hesketh chartered a 162-foot yacht stocked with beautiful women and vintage bubbly. A grand piano sat at the back of the pit lane for singalongs. Their mascot was a teddy bear. They ran without a single commercial sponsor because Lord Hesketh considered advertising vulgar. It was Formula 1 as a San Martini reverie: unhurried, extravagant, entirely unconcerned with what anyone else thought.

And they were fast. Hunt took podiums in his rookie 1973 season. By 1975, driving the team's own Hesketh 308, he beat Niki Lauda's dominant Ferrari to win the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort. Both driver and team finished fourth in the championship. But the money ran out. Lord Hesketh announced he could no longer afford to produce "the next British World Champion." Hunt was unemployed again.

Salvation arrived when Emerson Fittipaldi shocked the paddock by leaving McLaren. Hunt was signed for $200,000, making him one of the cheapest world champions in history. His McLaren contract included a clause requiring drivers to wear "a blazer, shirt and tie." Hunt refused. He showed up to cocktail parties in torn jeans, bare feet, and a tattered sweatshirt, shaking hands with VIPs and charming every one of them.

1976: The Greatest Season Ever Raced

The 1976 championship between Hunt and Lauda remains the most dramatic in Formula 1 history. It had everything: controversy, near-death, political scandal, and a conclusion so improbable that Hollywood waited nearly four decades to believe it was real.

Hunt started strong, claiming pole position in Brazil, but Lauda built an enormous early lead by winning five of the first six races. Then came the controversies. Hunt won in Spain but was disqualified because his McLaren was 1.8 centimeters too wide (later reinstated on appeal). He won the British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch before a delirious home crowd, only to be stripped of the victory months later for using a spare car after a first-lap crash and red flag.

Then, on August 1, 1976, the season fractured. At the terrifying Nürburgring Nordschleife (Jackie Stewart's "Green Hell"), Lauda's Ferrari snapped sideways on the second lap, hit an embankment, and exploded into flames. He was trapped in the inferno for nearly a minute. Arturo Merzario pulled him out. Lauda was given the last rites at the hospital. His face was burned beyond recognition. Toxic fumes had scorched his lungs and poisoned his blood.

Hunt won the restarted race. But he took no pleasure in it.

Forty-two days later, Lauda returned. At Monza, his facial burns still raw, blood-soaked bandages visible beneath a specially adapted helmet, he qualified fifth and finished fourth. Jackie Stewart called it "the most courageous thing I've ever witnessed in sport." The crowd at Monza rose in silent standing ovation.

Hunt clawed back. He won in the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States, setting up the final race in Japan with Lauda leading by just three points. Then came Fuji. The rain. Lauda's withdrawal. Hunt's puncture. His desperate fight back through the field. Third place. One point. World Champion.

"I wanted to win the championship and I felt I deserved it," Hunt said afterward. "But I also felt Niki deserved to win, and I just wish we could have shared it."

Barefoot In A World of Blazers

James Hunt's personal style was not calculated. It was simply who he was. And that is precisely why it endures.

He stood six-foot-one with golden, tousled hair that fell across his forehead like he had just stepped off a beach in Marbella (which, frequently, he had). He raced barefoot. He wore his racing overalls unzipped to the waist with a patch reading "Sex: Breakfast of Champions" sewn onto the chest. Off track, his uniform was torn blue jeans, open-collar shirts, sheepskin jackets, and battered T-shirts. He lived in the sun. He radiated a kind of warm, careless physicality that was unprecedented in the buttoned-up world of 1970s motorsport.

As Stirling Moss put it: "If you looked like James Hunt, what would you have done?"

His timeless style was rooted in refusal. He refused the blazer clause. He refused formality. He turned up barefoot to the British Embassy in Tokyo. He walked into Mayfair restaurants with his German Shepherd, Oscar, and sat the dog up at the table beside him. He carried a portable stereo blasting Beethoven. He was, improbably, both a hedonist and an intellectual, a man who could discuss Schubert and then disappear with a stewardess.

This is the kind of iconic style that doesn't come from a stylist. It comes from self-knowledge. Hunt dressed the way he lived: directly, sensually, without apology. His was a curated closet built on instinct rather than instruction, the kind of Spring style that looks effortless because it is. The 1970s style he embodied (denim, warm leather, open collars, sun-bleached linen) keeps cycling back through mens style and womens style precisely because it was never really "fashion." It was attitude.

When Ron Howard's 2013 film Rush brought Hunt's story to a new generation, Gucci Creative Director Frida Giannini personally designed Chris Hemsworth's wardrobe. She described Hunt's look as "full of animal sensuality," calling the 1970s "the most glamorous era of racing." Salvatore Ferragamo dressed Daniel Brühl as Lauda. The film didn't just retell the rivalry; it reignited interest in the entire aesthetic. Belstaff launched a James Hunt capsule collection. Piloti created limited-edition driving shoes in his racing colors. His image remains so commercially potent that the James Hunt Estate now runs a full luxury lifestyle licensing program.

The Voice In The Booth, & The Silence That Followed

Hunt retired from racing mid-season in 1979, at Monaco, having lost his motivation after the death of his friend Ronnie Peterson at Monza. He deliberately broke his driveshaft to end his final race. He was 31 years old with 10 Grand Prix victories.

His second career as a BBC commentator alongside Murray Walker lasted 13 years and became, in its own way, equally legendary. Walker was excitable, breathless, prone to errors. Hunt was calm, dry, brutally honest. He called drivers "pig ignorant" on live television. He once responded to a pundit's analysis with a flat "All I can say to that is bullshit." Together they became one of the most beloved broadcasting duos in sports history. Hunt's last commentary was the 1993 Canadian Grand Prix, just two days before the end.

His personal life was turbulent. He married model Suzy Miller in 1974; she left him for Richard Burton within two years. (Hunt's response: "Relax, Richard. You've done me a wonderful turn by taking on the most alarming expense account in the country.") He married Sarah Lomax in 1983. They had two sons, Tom and Freddie, before divorcing in 1989. He lost money through Lloyd's of London. He drove an old Austin A35 van. He cycled 40 miles a day around London because he couldn't afford petrol.

But something was changing. He had met Helen Dyson, an artist 18 years younger who knew nothing of his fame. He stopped drinking. He stopped smoking. He got fit. He was, by every account, finally at peace.

On the evening of June 14, 1993, he telephoned Helen in the Greek islands and proposed. She said yes. Hours later, in the early morning of June 15, 1993, James Hunt died of a heart attack at his home in Wimbledon. He was 45 years old.

Niki Lauda's response was simple: "He was the most charismatic personality who's ever been in Formula One."

Why Hunt Still Has A Voice

There is a word for what James Hunt had, and it isn't "style" exactly, though his style was extraordinary. It is presence. The quality of being entirely, unapologetically in the room. Of savoring the moment with such intensity that everyone around you feels it too.

He was not polished. He was not curated in the conventional sense. But he understood something that most people spend a lifetime missing: that luxury is not about acquisition. It is about attention. The way light hits a glass of something cold. The weight of a well-made jacket on your shoulders. The decision to drive barefoot because it feels better, because the pedals talk to you through the soles of your feet, because the raw sensation of the thing matters more than the appearance of the thing.

That philosophy, living with fierce, sensory intention, is at the heart of what San Martini celebrates. Not excess for its own sake, but the deliberate choice to make ordinary moments extraordinary. Hunt at the wheel of a Hesketh 308 with champagne corks on the garage floor. Hunt barefoot on a sun-warmed pit lane in the south of France. Hunt with his dog at a linen-draped table in Mayfair, Beethoven playing, not caring one bit about the dress code.

This is what a life looks like when it is honest. Not precious. Not performative. Just alive.

James Hunt burned through 45 years the way most people wouldn't dare burn through an afternoon. He was flawed, anxious, generous, reckless, brilliant, and gone far too soon. But the image he left, the golden hair and the open collar and the absolute refusal to be anyone other than himself, that image is permanent. It doesn't date. It doesn't need a revival. It simply is.

Pour something worth savoring. Take your shoes off. It's Martini Time.

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