Why Hunt and Hesketh was the ultimate pairing | Thank Frankel it’s Friday | GRR
Have you seen the helmet-camera footage of 57-year-old and (briefly) former F1 driver Jean-Denis Delatraz driving the ex-James Hunt Hesketh 308 at the Monaco Historic Grand Prix last weekend? If not it’s a pretty good way of losing a couple of minutes of your time, not because he tears through the pack – though his start is pretty blinding – or sideways everywhere – though he does get armfuls of oversteer at Saint Devote at the end of his first lap – but because it provides such an incredible view of what it is like to drive such a car. The way the camera is mounted, the quality of the footage and the presence of all those cars from the same era within the close confines of the streets of the Principality really do put you as close to being in the driver’s seat as you could reasonably hope to expect.
So what more can I offer from a shed in the Welsh borders armed only with a laptop? Well, by lucky hap, I have actually sat where Delatraz was sitting and driven a Hesketh myself, albeit at Donington rather than Monaco. So perhaps there is an additional insight into this most enigmatic of 1970s Formula 1 cars I am able to add.
You will of course recall that Hesketh was the oft-ridiculed team of former British public school boys who tried to break into Formula 1 in the middle of that decade. Ridiculed, that is, until they started winning. With James Hunt as their one and only driver, it was often they who ended up making their critics look ridiculous, such as when James won the Daily Express BRDC International Trophy at Silverstone in 1974, and the Dutch Grand Prix the following year.
Perhaps the most remarkable think about the Hesketh car was just how unremarkable it really was. To do that well on such a shoestring budget (the 1974 season cost it around £200,000 including the cost of designing the car), you’d expect they’d found some genius way to exploit the rules better than anyone else, using the engineering talent they had to make up for the money they did not.
On the contrary, Harvey Postlethwaite’s machine was extremely conventional and nothing like the radical designs that Lotus in particular were producing at that time. Like most cars on the grid it had a Cosworth DFV engine and a Hewland gearbox. Suspension came from double wishbones at the front with March uprights and Jack Knight steering. At the back there was a system involving parallel lower links, a single upper link and radius rods. Postlethwaite’s bodywork was neat and clean with an adjustable front splitter and a distinctive tall and thin airbox developed from an idea trialled successfully on the March.
In a booklet called ‘The Heavily Censored History of Hesketh Racing’ published by Hesketh in 1974 just as the rest of the world thought Hesketh had only just got going, Harvey spoke of the car. “What really matters about a racing car is the overall concept, the detail design is relatively unimportant. We had to make a car that was conceptually good but reliable, so we had to be fairly conventional… The overall concept was of a small, narrow track, very aerodynamic type of racing car rather than perhaps a McLaren or Lotus type of racing car.”
There was no secret to its success: it was just a thoughtfully laid out, fluently finessed but otherwise straightforward racing car that was driven by a man with a win or crash trying mentality. That was really all there appeared to be about it.
I think there was something else however. When I drove it even though it was on quite old tyres, I was surprised by how confident I felt in the car. It was comfortable, because it was designed to fit the 6ft 2in Hunt frame and I think he just felt really at home in it. Even I felt happy when it started to move about and when I look of footage of James driving it, the car just seems to suit his flamboyant balls-to-the-wall style. It was a machine in which he could express himself fully, drive beyond the limit and from which he could extract 100 per cent of its potential. Or perhaps a tiny bit more. And it was that, I believe, that really made the difference.
Images courtesy of Motorsport Images.