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Aug. 29th, 2013 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
czeriJames Hunt's 66th birthday would have been today. I have to admit I've been feeling like crying a lot today, which is ridiculous, and yet I can't help it. There were a bunch of tributes for James posted on Tumblr with great quotes and pictures, so I'm doing one too.
Short interview after the British Grand Prix in 1976 with James being James and bumming a cigarette off journalists interviewing him:
Quotes from http://www.ten-tenths.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63237:
Murray Walker: “And Prost’s car is on fire as he goes into the swimming pool!”
James Hunt: “Well, that should put it out, then.”
"Berger's car is on fire!"
"No Murray, that's his rainlight." One of the most famous Hunt corrections of all.
"Piquet has got no motivation whatsoever. He's only in F1, to keep his 45 metre yacht afloat, and his helicopter in petrol." A classic Hunt put-down.
"No hurry for the Williams team, just very important to not make a mistake. And that's absolutely fine...(matter of fact) Oh, and he's lost a wheel." Hunt not bothered that Mansell's championship dream is up in smoke.
Some interesting facts about James Hunt I’ve found in “Hunt the Shunt”:
1) "He was good at virtually every sport on the curriculum, and exceptionally good at any sport that demanded high levels of energy or good hand-eye coordination. (…) He could easily have been a world class competitor at tennis, squash or golf had he decided that motor racing was not for him. Can there ever have been a man in the history of sport who was genuinely good enough to play at the top of such varied sports? Well if there was, I don’t know of him.”
2) "He became rather an accomplished trumpet player and often played solo at public events." As per his music teacher, Nigel Davidson: "If James had decided to give trumpet playing the single-minded concentration that he lavished on his sporting activities, I have no doubt that he could have become a professional, perhaps a virtuoso, trumpeter.”
3) "Before he discovered racing, he planned a career breeding budgies and reckoned he could earn a good living at it. (…) 20 years later, the budgerigars made a comeback at his house in Wimbledon. (…) Eventually, James had some 140 budgerigars in his garden, said to be worth nearly UK£60,000.”
4) "Seven times in his career, Hunt had accidents that should have killed him. In fact, all seven were more likely to have killed him than not. The fact that he survived them was, each time, a miracle in itself. (…) No other driver of the time has defied such odds. (…) Strangely enough, the most grievous injury Hunt had ever received in a car was in a road accident, in which he had a head-on collision in his Mini road car whilst returning from a race at Brands Hatch. It was the only time he ever ended up in hospital from something he had done in a car.”
5) "No top sportsman has ever consumed as much alcohol or smoked as many cigarettes as Hunt, neither before nor since. He did both to excess. After his Formula Ford days he began smoking between 40 and 60 cigarettes a day for most of his life and, although he said he did not drink in the few days before a race, this was often not true.”
And here's James presenting the proper way of wearing racing overalls:
And look, he taught Niki how to do it too:
R.I.P.
Short interview after the British Grand Prix in 1976 with James being James and bumming a cigarette off journalists interviewing him:
Quotes from http://www.ten-tenths.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63237:
Murray Walker: “And Prost’s car is on fire as he goes into the swimming pool!”
James Hunt: “Well, that should put it out, then.”
"Berger's car is on fire!"
"No Murray, that's his rainlight." One of the most famous Hunt corrections of all.
"Piquet has got no motivation whatsoever. He's only in F1, to keep his 45 metre yacht afloat, and his helicopter in petrol." A classic Hunt put-down.
"No hurry for the Williams team, just very important to not make a mistake. And that's absolutely fine...(matter of fact) Oh, and he's lost a wheel." Hunt not bothered that Mansell's championship dream is up in smoke.
Some interesting facts about James Hunt I’ve found in “Hunt the Shunt”:
1) "He was good at virtually every sport on the curriculum, and exceptionally good at any sport that demanded high levels of energy or good hand-eye coordination. (…) He could easily have been a world class competitor at tennis, squash or golf had he decided that motor racing was not for him. Can there ever have been a man in the history of sport who was genuinely good enough to play at the top of such varied sports? Well if there was, I don’t know of him.”
2) "He became rather an accomplished trumpet player and often played solo at public events." As per his music teacher, Nigel Davidson: "If James had decided to give trumpet playing the single-minded concentration that he lavished on his sporting activities, I have no doubt that he could have become a professional, perhaps a virtuoso, trumpeter.”
3) "Before he discovered racing, he planned a career breeding budgies and reckoned he could earn a good living at it. (…) 20 years later, the budgerigars made a comeback at his house in Wimbledon. (…) Eventually, James had some 140 budgerigars in his garden, said to be worth nearly UK£60,000.”
4) "Seven times in his career, Hunt had accidents that should have killed him. In fact, all seven were more likely to have killed him than not. The fact that he survived them was, each time, a miracle in itself. (…) No other driver of the time has defied such odds. (…) Strangely enough, the most grievous injury Hunt had ever received in a car was in a road accident, in which he had a head-on collision in his Mini road car whilst returning from a race at Brands Hatch. It was the only time he ever ended up in hospital from something he had done in a car.”
5) "No top sportsman has ever consumed as much alcohol or smoked as many cigarettes as Hunt, neither before nor since. He did both to excess. After his Formula Ford days he began smoking between 40 and 60 cigarettes a day for most of his life and, although he said he did not drink in the few days before a race, this was often not true.”
And here's James presenting the proper way of wearing racing overalls:
And look, he taught Niki how to do it too:
R.I.P.
