1,000 Greatest Drivers: James Hunt
It's unfortunate that he's better known for his persona than his driving.
I sometimes feel like a charlatan when writing about Formula 1 drivers because I admit I have watched far fewer F1 races than I should have in order to do this right. I didn’t really grow up with it because although I did watch a bunch of F1 races in 1997 (including the infamous finale) as a kid when it was on ESPN, F1’s American coverage switched to the SPEED Channel for 1998, a channel I could never come close to affording and I believe it wasn’t even available in my area at the time, so I did not grow up with the habit. Instead, I grew up as a NASCAR fan primarily and an IndyCar fan secondarily, and that has still lingered. Even now, I still find myself probably overrating the domestic American drivers and downgrading F1 drivers too much, and despite how much I have learned since especially due to my various teammate models, I’m constantly worried I will never do the F1 drivers justice considering I still find myself arguing all the time with people who act like Carlos Sainz, Jr. and Oscar Piastri are better drivers than Scott McLaughlin. That seems wrong to me (I find Piastri extremely overrated right now but he’ll probably become great eventually), but it still could be my lack of early exposure to F1 and growing up with the more exciting but less fair American series that causes me to not have the respect I should. It’s even worse for a driver like Hunt who has eclipsed mere F1 fame to become a pop culture celebrity. I’ve never even watched Rush, so I’m worried I won’t do him justice.
Having said that, I do think I did Hunt justice here and I really think it’s unfortunate that it seems like his genuinely underrated career has seemingly been overshadowed by his playboy persona, his media-friendly image, and his announcing career. I think he was probably better than a lot of the F1 champions who are conventionally rated higher, but that whole era of F1 was a mess because the cars were so even it was almost impossible for anybody to sustain dominance for more than two years. Lauda and Hunt were really the only ones who seemed capable of doing it between 1975 and the Prost/Senna era. Even though I started work on this a little earlier than I do most days, I ended up finishing a little later because I wanted to go through my model and calculate the teammate ratings for each F1 year from 1973-1978. I have ratings for all seasons since 1979, but I didn’t go back to do most of the years prior to that and I was curious which season(s) Hunt would lead in my model. I’m not surprised he led in 1976 because he outperformed Mass by a larger margin than Lauda outperformed Regazzoni, but Lauda was still better. Since I have not announced it publicly yet, I will tell you that the highest-rated F1 driver of 1973 was Carlos Reutemann, 1974 was perhaps surprisingly Jean-Pierre Beltoise, 1975 was Ronnie Peterson, and then Hunt, Lauda, and Andretti (the three champions) for the next three years. I have not done any seasons prior to 1973 yet, so it’s possible this streak of eleven different drivers leading my model in eleven years will extend even longer (in fact, I think it will). When I have calculated those previous years, I will edit this accordingly.
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