James Hunt’s greatest Formula 1 rivalry has already been captured on film – but his most personal was saved for radio.
The 1976 F1 champion battled for position on and off track after forming an all-star commentary double act with icon Murray Walker.
Walker, who covered more than 350 Grand Prix races during his career, remains to many the greatest sports commentator.
Having joined his father Graham in the commentary box back in 1949, the Brummie took the F1 voiceover reins from 1978 until he retired.
As a result, Walker was more than a little put out when he was told that he would be joined in the booth with Brit driver Hunt.
He told talkSPORT’s ‘My Sporting Life’ in 2012: “I was extremely put out when James was appointed to the commentary team in 1980 because I had been doing Formula One alone for the BBC for 2 years.
“And I thought I’d been doing it all right. And when Jonathan Martin, the head of SPORT, said to me, ‘there’s going to be two commentators in future, Murray, you’re going to be one and James Hunt is going to be the other’, my immediate reaction was, ‘James Hunt?’
“What does he know about broadcasting? He’s a racing driver, and anyway, I don’t like him.”
Murray was quizzed by talkSPORT host Danny Kelly on why he didn’t initially like the Playboy hell-racer who had ignited Brit interest in F1.
He continued: “James, well, I’ll give you the shortest possible answer I can. James was, could be rude, arrogant, overbearing; he drank too much, he smoked too much, he was on drugs all the time.
“There was an extremely nice, decent, honest, friendly, enormously bright chap living inside him.
“But success probably had gone to his head; he was a very emotional chap.
“I was old enough to be his father, we were totally different to each other temperamentally. I liked things that he didn’t and vice versa.
“And somehow, this peculiar mixture seemed to work well in the commentary box.”
Having retired from driving in 1979, Hunt rocked up to only his second joint-appearance with Walker in Monaco with one foot in plaster following a skiing injury and the other minus a shoe, before consuming two bottles of rosé during the broadcast.
Yet the two soon became F1’s famous commentary double act, with the boyishly enthusiastic ultra-professional Walker proving the perfect foil for the slick and boldly opinionated Hunt.
Asked how long it took for the pair to gel, Walker continued: “Yeah, I don’t know, I can’t put a time spell on it, but probably a couple of years, I should think.
“I mean, I used to stand up to do my commentaries always. I was bouncing around on the balls of my feet because I got excited, and I was pointing at the screen and shouting into the microphone.
“James used to sit alongside me, and we shared one microphone.
“Now, if you can imagine two people, all with fairly well-developed egos, being in a commentary box to talk to the public about the sport they loved with only one microphone to do so, and you always knew, you didn’t think, you knew that anything that you wanted to say was much more important, relevant, entertaining, and instructive than what the other bloke wanted to say, and vice versa.
“So neither of us would be particularly anxious to give the microphone to the other one.”
Walker did admit that there was one exception to that rule, and that involved any compliments paid to one of his co-star’s old rivals.
Before the release of the Lewis Hamilton-produced F1 movie, Hunt’s tussles with Niki Lauda were Hollywood’s most famous motorsport film with Rush.
The biopic chiefly focused on the 1976 season, which meant Hunt’s hatred of Riccardo Patrese, which stemmed from a 1978 crash at Monza that claimed the life of his close friend Ronnie Peterson, wasn’t featured.
Walker told talkSPORT’s ‘My Sporting Life’: “There’s no such thing as a dull Formula 1 race, as far as I’m concerned.
“There can be processional ones, but there is always something exciting to talk about, if you know where to look.
“If we had a processional race, I always knew that I only had to say something complimentary about Riccardo Patrese – who James loathed and despised – and James would gesture for the microphone and I would give it to him.
“Then he would pour vitriol and bile onto him.
“But over the years, we learned to accommodate each other. And I wouldn’t have said the less pleasant things about James that I’ve just said, had it not been for the fact that we fairly rapidly grew together, respected each other, and worked well together.
“It was a very, very sad day when, at the age of 45, James died.”
‘Hunt the Shunt’ died from a heart attack in June 1993, with Walker seeing his commentary partner for the final time the night before.
He recalled: “I remember it vividly.
“We did the Canadian Grand Prix together, and this was at a time when, unknown to the general public, we weren’t actually at a lot of the races, the long-haul ones, because the BBC didn’t want to pay the money to send us to the other side of the world.
“We would do it from a studio in Shepherd’s Bush – And James was on very hard times after he’d retired. He’d had several businesses which had gone belly up.
“He’d taken a colossal bashing. He was a partner at Lloyd’s, and that had taken him to the cleaners.
“He was going through a very expressive and messy divorce. And he didn’t have a car [having swapped his Mercedes for a push-bike]. Well, he had an Austin A30 van on cross-ply tires, which he used very seldom.
“He cycled everywhere. And he cycled from Wimbledon to Shepherd’s Bush. We did the commentary together.
“He went home. The next morning, my wife phoned me and she said, Brace yourself, I’ve got some bad news.
“My mother was 96 at the time, and I said, ‘Oh God, is it mother?’ And she said, ‘No, James has died’, and I said, ‘James who?’
“And she said, ‘James Hunt’. And I said, ‘I was with him last night.’ As though being with him last night meant he couldn’t possibly be dead now, which is quite ludicrous.
“He just had a massive heart attack at 45. James had been burning the candle at both ends and in the middle for years. And I think it just caught up with him.”
Nearly two decades on from Hunt’s passing, Walker was asked if he understood the levels to which their on-screen relationship is held.
He finished: “Well, it’s very nice if that’s the case. And I look back on those years as being mint years in my career.”
