Hunt Wins, Then He Doesn’t
Caldwell Messes Up in Spain
Spain: April 30–May 2, 1976
The Spanish Grand Prix, held over the first weekend of May, was the first race of the new European season and it was being held at the Jarama circuit, just outside Madrid. By the fourth round of the 1976 world championship, James Hunt had made himself familiar to everyone and was the center of attention in the Formula One paddock. As a front-runner, he attracted far more attention in the paddock than the reigning world champion, who was increasingly being regarded as a curmudgeon. And certainly Hunt was responsible for a lot of that.
Although Lauda and Hunt were firm friends, Lauda resented the challenge on the tracks. With his qualifying performances, many media people regarded Hunt as the faster driver, and that rankled Lauda more than he cared to admit.
Both Hunt and Lauda, aside from their own personal battle, found they had renewed troubles with their teammates.
Jochen Mass was ready to reassert himself in Spain. He had won the race the previous year and believed himself a Spanish expert. It was also the anniversary of his first (and only) Grand Prix win, and he was determined to reestablish himself in the team by winning the race. There was added needle, as Mass was actually leading Hunt in the world championship; Mass was fourth in the championship with seven points, while Hunt was only fifth with six points. While Hunt had been getting up pole positions and making the front running in the opening races, Mass had actually scored more points: from a sixth place in Brazil, a third in South Africa, and a fifth in Long Beach.
With that in his head, Mass was entirely confident that he would beat Hunt at Jarama. It set the scene for some real aggravation between the teammates, especially as it had been previously established that whoever achieved a lead on points early in the season would be regarded as number one driver and would then be backed up by the other driver for the world championship. Hunt was worried that Mass might want to enforce that provision, even though he was clearly the quicker driver. Going down to Madrid, there is no doubt that Mass saw the race as his chance to regain team leadership with a win.
Mass was wrestling with his own ego and internal demons. He was all psyched up and had plenty of difficulty trying to understand how Hunt possibly could be faster than him in equal cars. He eventually came to the conclusion that his car, the McLaren-Ford M23 chassis number 6, must be the reason. So he told Alastair Caldwell that he wanted to make the team’s spare car, M23 chassis number 9, his regular race car. Caldwell reluctantly agreed and modified it to suit Mass, thereby starting the fairly big job of adapting Mass’s old car to Hunt’s specification as the spare.
Hunt observed all this with a mischievous manner and was determined to teach the German a lesson he wouldn’t forget at Jarama; he wanted to end the inter-team rivalry once and for all.
Lauda’s problems with his teammates were eerily similar. Regazzoni, boosted by his Long Beach win, strutted up and down the paddock and pouted like an overstuffed peacock, seemingly aided and abetted by Daniele Audetto, who was now openly showing his preference for the Swiss driver and his disapproval of Lauda’s attitude.
Lauda also believed that Audetto had briefed Italian journalists unfavorably after his tractor accident at home. Audetto apparently informed the media that he expected Regazzoni to beat Lauda again in Jarama. Lauda also believed, without any evidence, that Audetto had poisoned Enzo Ferrari’s mind against him.
For his part, Lauda was openly contemptuous of Audetto and his continual preening. He didn’t like the way he lauded it over the Ferrari team or the way he showed his apparent contempt for his number one driver. Lauda believed that Audetto thought he was socially beneath him, and treated him as such. Lauda also didn’t care much for Audetto’s well-heeled, statuesque, and beautiful wife, Delphine. He questioned why she attended races at all. He thought she distracted her husband while he was supposed to be at work.
For Ferrari the 1976 Spanish Grand Prix was a very important race, as it marked the debut of designer Mauro Forghieri’s brand-new car, the 312T2. It was the second in a series of 312T cars. There would eventually be three models of the 312T series, spanning five highly successful seasons.
Lauda, with plenty of testing under his belt, had the new car working well straightaway. Interestingly, the car was introduced without the De Dion design suspension for which it had been designed. Lauda had thoroughly tested it and found it neither slower nor faster, and it was therefore abandoned after Ferrari had spent a great deal of money developing it. Lauda shrugged when asked about it, saying, “The De Dion was good, but it was not better.” With time on its side, Ferrari arrived with new models for both Lauda and Regazzoni to drive. But there was no spare car.
The Spanish Grand Prix also marked the date for a series of regulatory changes, which were bizarrely due to come into force two-thirds through the race weekend, on May 1. The new regulations changed the permitted dimensions for oil coolers and tanks, rear-wing endplates, and airboxes. Rollover hoop regulations were also tightened. The existing cars were legal for qualifying but not for the race.
The new Ferrari had been built for the new regulations, and its debut was timed deliberately to coincide with the race. The two McLaren race cars, chassis 8 and 9, had to be modified to suit. But the spare car, chassis 5, was kept in old specifications, as it could be used legally for the two qualifying days.
In addition to modifying the cars to suit the new regulations, McLaren designer Gordon Coppuck had been messing around with the cars’ wheelbases and had added as much as 5 centimeters (1.97 inches), despite the overall length of the car remaining the same. The purpose was apparently to improve airflow over the rear wing.
But it was the new regulations specifying the maximum length and width of the cars that would cause the most controversy. These regulation changes had taken place at the beginning of the season and, up until then, had not really been enforced. At the start of 1976, the CSI, the sport’s governing body, had become concerned that cars were getting wider and longer and going faster with more downforce and were thereby becoming more dangerous. To counter that, a revised set of measurement regulations aimed at keeping cars within specified limits and simplifying the technical regulations was agreed upon.
To establish the maximum allowable width, CSI officials measured the widest car—the McLaren-Ford M23—and declared it the limit. Likewise, the longest car was measured and its length written in as the maximum for all cars. Alastair Caldwell remembers it very clearly: “Our car had been measured by the authorities at the Nürburgring in 1975 as the widest. They said, ‘Okay, we’ll make that the maximum width for 1976.’ We said, ‘Come on, mate, give us a centimeter,’ and they replied, ‘Okay, your car measured 2.9; we’ll make the rule 2.10.’ In 1976 the rule came in.”
The new Ferrari was built within these limits, but McLaren didn’t bother to change or even measure their car, arguing that since it was the benchmark, it couldn’t be illegal under the new rules. What Alastair Caldwell hadn’t realized, or hadn’t focused on, was that the new Goodyear tires bulged out more than they had in the past. Technically, the extra bulge made the McLarens illegal—but no one at the team spotted it.
Officials of the sporting division of the CSI were rigorous in inspecting the cars at Jarama. The CSI sent three of its top officials to Spain in the shape of France’s Jabby Crombac, Kirt Schildt of Switzerland, and Baron de Knyff from Holland.
The three men had plenty to think about, as the Spanish Grand Prix marked the introduction of the first six-wheeled car in Formula One. The new six-wheeled Tyrrell-Ford car was to be driven by Patrick Depailler. The six-wheeler had been designed specifically with the new regulations in mind.
As qualifying began, Niki Lauda found his cracked ribs extremely uncomfortable in the car and was well below his best. However, he was spurred on by the thought of Regazzoni and Audetto. So as not to give them any encouragement or satisfaction, Lauda, with his physiotherapist Willie Dungl in close attendance, pretended he was unaffected, saying, “It’s a problem, sure. I don’t feel any pain where it’s broken, because the doctors have killed the nerve, but it does hurt a little bit above and below there. It hurts mostly when I am sliding the car and when I stop the slide. Your side pushes against the side of the seat then, of course. Also, I can feel the ends of the broken ribs grinding against each other. It must be slowing me down a little bit, sure, but I don’t know how much.”
The situation could not have been more different for James Hunt. His weekend began well, and he was fastest straightaway. As the weekend wore on, Lauda swapped the top-qualifying slot with Hunt. Perhaps more important for both of them, in every session and throughout the weekend, Lauda was quicker than Regazzoni and Hunt was quicker than Mass.
The new regulations had done their job and slowed down the cars. None of the drivers approached their times of the previous year, and Hunt’s eventual pole time was slower than the qualifying record of two years earlier. His pole-winning lap, Hunt’s third pole in four races, was three-tenths of a second faster than Lauda in the Ferrari beside him. Mass was third, and the two McLarens sandwiched Lauda’s Ferrari on the starting grid.
Race day dawned with sunny and clear weather, typical in Spain in early May. The start was delayed while King Juan Carlos, a keen Formula One fan, arrived with his family in his helicopter.
Hunt, fearful of his clutch, was slow to get away from the start, while Lauda, high on painkillers, stormed into the lead for the first 31 laps as Hunt was again beaten off the line.
But Lauda could feel his broken, jagged rib-ends grinding together under the G-forces in hard cornering, and as the painkillers wore off, he found it increasingly difficult to control the car. Hunt was content to play a waiting game, knowing that Lauda’s ribs simply wouldn’t let him continue at that pace for the entire race. Hunt said later, “Niki was motoring hard at the start, and I was able to tuck in behind quite comfortably. I couldn’t do anything about passing him; it was just a case of waiting until his ribs started to hurt and I’d be able to nip through.” And so it proved, as Hunt went past on lap 32, followed by Mass a few laps later. Mass’s engine failed with a few laps to go, and Hunt crossed the line to take his first Grand Prix victory for McLaren. Lauda crawled in for second place, 31 seconds behind and in absolute agony.
Hunt was ecstatic about beating Lauda and his teammate but afterwards was totally exhausted from having wrestled the McLaren round the difficult Jarama circuit for 75 laps. On the way to the podium, he punched a spectator in pure frustration.
But bigger problems than a wayward spectator lay ahead in post-race scrutineering.
Peter Jowitt, a Farnborough-based scientist, had been employed as a consultant by FOCA as a technical consultant. He worked for the teams, and his brief was to check car dimensions, investigate causes of accidents, and suggest modifications for safety. Jowitt was not a scrutineer and had no official powers at all. But when he measured Hunt’s McLaren-Ford, he noticed that the McLaren was 1.8 centimeters (0.71 inch) too wide across the rear wheels. Jowitt innocently brought the problem to the attention of the Spanish scrutineers, thinking they would merely inform the McLaren team of the error and ask the team to correct it. Jowitt was said to be horrified when they disqualified the car on the basis of his discovery.
Hunt’s celebrations in the Marlboro motor home in the Spanish paddock were curtailed shortly after eight o’clock, when Daily Express motoring editor David Benson delivered the bad news. Hunt was relaxing and wearing only a pair of jeans, talking to his teammate, some girls, and his normal retinue of hangers-on. What he heard shocked him, and he immediately grabbed a shirt, shouted over to Teddy Mayer, and ran to the steward’s office in the race control tower.
Benson had somehow sensed trouble and gone to the scrutineers garage purely on a whim. By then it had just been announced in the press room that the stewards had ruled Hunt’s car to be illegal and that he was therefore disqualified. The scrutineers had ruled that the rear tires of Hunt’s M23 extended 1.8 centimeters wider than allowed by the new regulations. After a series of measurements and remeasurements, the McLaren-Ford M23 was deemed undeniably too wide across the rear wheels. The stewards announced Lauda as the new winner of the race. It was the first time the cars had been rigorously checked under the new rules, and the CSI had asked the scrutineers to carefully check the dimensions of each car.
Teddy Mayer argued with the stewards in vain. He told them that such a small discrepancy couldn’t give Hunt’s McLaren any advantage and that the ruling was “unbelievably harsh and unjustified.”
Hunt was distraught, and tears welled in his eyes. He said, “It’s stupid. It does not affect the performance of the car or make it any faster. Not even the Ferrari team protested, and they were the ones who had the most to win.”
Niki Lauda had already left the circuit by helicopter. He was on his way to the airport to fly back to Austria for further medical treatment on his ribs. He learned that he had been declared the winner of the race from air traffic controllers at Salzburg Airport as he was landing his plane. Lauda’s attitude to it was perfectly straightforward: “A rule is a rule. The McLaren was illegal and therefore it should have been disqualified. I am very sorry for James; he drove very well, but the car was not legal. If the same had happened to my Ferrari, I would accept the ruling.”
Teddy Mayer, apoplectic toward the stewards, filed an official protest and muttered something to journalists about a conspiracy by Ferrari. In fact, Hunt’s car had been measured twice in pre-race scrutineering and had been found legal. But there was now no doubt that McLaren was guilty. As Caldwell freely admitted: “We thought we had no worries because our car was exactly the same. Like idiots, we didn’t even bother to measure it—my fault—because as far as I was concerned, the car had been measured and the rule based on it. However, over the winter, Goodyear developed the tires and made them with wider sidewalls. I didn’t realize that the tires had been made this much wider. We got caught out.”
Mayer, caught in a very tricky situation, put out a press release: “The entire McLaren team extends its sympathy to James Hunt.” Stating he would appeal against the severity of the sentence rather than the correctness of the decision, he went on to say it was like being hanged for a parking offense. Mayer maintained that since the minute oversight could have given Hunt no possible advantage, he should at least be able to keep his driver’s points.
After his initial disappointment, Hunt became surprisingly sanguine about the entire affair, although he did call his team’s failure to ensure the car was the correct width “a fantastically sloppy performance.” Hunt said years later, “The point was they’d taken the current widest car in the business and the current longest because they didn’t want them to go much wider, like someone suddenly worked out if you had it twice as wide it would have twice as good road holding; likewise if you made it two yards longer. The point was the McLaren was the widest car in the business at the time. But McLaren didn’t bother to check the width of its car because it had established the standard the previous year when it was all checked. The only problem was we were using slightly different tires, which had a bigger bulge. And that’s the widest point on the car. It was in fact 1.8 centimeters too wide, and that was purely the bulge.”
On May 13, a Spanish tribunal confirmed the disqualification, but Teddy Mayer said that the proceedings were a travesty of justice, as he had not been allowed to take McLaren’s Spanish-speaking lawyer to the hearing. Mayer later described the tone of the tribunal hearings as follows: “The judges said, ‘Do you know the rule about the width of the car?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘And do you realize that your car was wider?’ I said, ‘Yes’ again. And they said, ‘Right, thank you, Mr. Mayer.’” Mayer was the only person called on to give evidence. Mayer launched another appeal to the FIA in Paris about the tribunal’s decision.
Alastair Caldwell simply accepted the blame and admitted there was no doubt the car had been too wide. He had failed to allow for the new design of Goodyear tires.