'It was the day Niki Lauda almost died. Who remembers a frightened James Hunt’s brilliant win?'

On August 1, 1976, a smidgen more than 50 years ago therefore, Formula 1 staged what has become over the past half-century one of the most dissected and mythologised grands prix in the history of the F1 world championship. Mention the 1976 German Grand Prix to people who know anything about F1 history and, quite rightly, they will regale you with stories of a scarlet Ferrari engulfed in flames, of desperate drivers hauling a stricken rival from an inferno, and of the extraordinary resilience that would carry Niki Lauda back into an F1 cockpit just six weeks later, despite painful head and face burns still raw beneath his helmet and balaclava.

Yet the consequence of such towering drama is that another remarkable achievement, unfolding simultaneously and requiring courage of a different order, has been quietly pushed into the shadows. The race winner at Nürburgring Nordschleife that day was James Hunt – and, although we F1 historians have not forgotten that fact, we have never perhaps focused properly on the manner of it. Fifty years on, it is worth doing precisely that now, for Hunt’s drive that afternoon on the most fearsome of all F1 circuits deserves to stand not merely as a race won while another driver was beginning a fight for his life, but as one of the outstanding performances of his career.

Moreover, there is an extra irony at the heart of Hunt’s victory that deepens the more one examines it, because he did not like Nürburgring one little bit. He did not find it only demanding and difficult – although it was and is both those things – for he liked it even less because he regarded it as fundamentally and indefensibly dangerous. On that point he was hardly an outlier. The 1976-spec Nürburgring stretched for 14.19 miles (22.84km) through Germany’s Eifel mountains, plunging through forests, cresting blind hills, diving into valleys, and threading together more than 170 corners in a giant rollercoaster of a layout that could punish even microscopic mistakes with calamitous consequences. The barriers were woefully inadequate, the medical access painfully slow, and the marshals spread impossibly thin across an enormous landscape. Calling the old Nürburgring formidable barely did its challenge justice. It was magnificent, yes, but in a state-of-the-art single-seater, even 50 years ago, it was also diabolical.

Hunt was not alone in reaching that conclusion. Lauda, whose analytical approach to racing rarely allowed sentiment to cloud judgment, agreed with him. Indeed it was Lauda who had done more than anyone to try to persuade his fellow drivers to boycott the 1976 German Grand Prix, arguing forcefully and logically – as was his way – that Nürburgring had become unsuitable for contemporary F1. A driver vote was duly held, but the majority chose to grin and bear it and go ahead with the race. As a result in 1976 the German Grand Prix would be run where it had almost always been run: at the ‘green hell’.

Bearing all that in mind, it was both remarkable and impressive that, when qualifying had been concluded, the two drivers who had most openly derided the circuit’s unfitness for F1 purpose were also the two who had mastered it better than anyone else. Hunt procured pole position with a brilliant lap of 7min 6.5sec, and Lauda joined him on the front row with a gutsy effort just 0.9sec slower (ie, very little in percentage terms, given the unusual length of the lap). No-one else was close.

The presence of that pairing atop the time sheets says something profound not only about talent but also about courage. It is one thing for an F1 driver to attack a circuit he likes and trusts, but it is quite another for him to tackle with equal belligerence a racetrack that he genuinely fears – a long and undulating ribbon of road that he believes ought not to be hosting an F1 race at all – and still deliver a lap of breathtaking exertion.

There is a common misconception that bravery is the absence of fear, but soldiers, adventurers, explorers, mountaineers, pugilists, and race drivers (among others) have always known otherwise. On the contrary, fear is important data: it is the instinctive recognition of danger. The truly brave refuse to permit that recognition to dilute their commitment, and the bravest of all are often those most acutely aware of the risks they are taking. Hunt, who was often portrayed in the media as a frivolous playboy, understood danger very well – for, behind the tabloid caricature of a champagne-swilling, chain-smoking, bird-pulling hedonist lay an intensely intelligent and ambitious competitor who understood risk with crystalline clarity. “I’m frightened, I don’t mind telling you, and I’m glad to see the finish line every lap,” he admitted after securing the 1976 Nürburgring pole. There speaks not a fearless man but a brave one.

Race morning dawned beneath uncertain skies, the capricious Nürburgring once again displaying the meteorological unpredictability for which it had become notorious. The track was damp, the air heavy with lingering moisture, and, just before they drove to the grid, every driver bar one concluded that wet-weather tyres were the sensible choice. The solitary dissenter was Hunt’s McLaren team-mate Jochen Mass, who opted for slicks. It was an inspired gamble, although perhaps ‘gamble’ is the wrong word. Born in the small town of Dorfen, Bavaria, Mass would often predict German weather as instinctively as experienced sailors understand tides – and indeed he had been a merchant seaman in a past life – and no-one at Nürburgring in 1976 had driven the Nordschleife more often than he had. Experience sometimes dispenses intel that radar and barometer cannot.

During the immense opening lap, as 26 cars disappeared into the forests surrounding the Eifel mountains, it gradually became apparent that the rain had stopped and the circuit was now largely dry. Once the field had completed its first 14-mile tour, every driver who had started on wets headed for the pits to exchange them for slicks. Mass simply drove past – and, as a result, by the end of lap two he was half a minute clear of everyone else, his local knowledge having translated itself into an apparently insuperable advantage. A Mass win suddenly looked not merely possible but highly probable, crafted through cunning rather than pace, although his rivals could hardly begrudge him the prospect.

Then came the accident. Lauda’s Ferrari left the road at Bergwerk, struck the barriers, burst into flames, and rebounded into the path of Brett Lunger’s Surtees. Lunger, Guy Edwards (Hesketh), Harald Ertl (Hesketh also), and Arturo Merzario (Wolf-Williams) all stopped, without hesitation, and ran towards the blazing car. Together they dragged Lauda from an inferno that seemed determined not to relinquish him. The race was stopped.

No-one yet knew the full extent of Lauda’s injuries, but everyone understood that they were very serious. For the journalists gathered in the paddock and pitlane there were haunting details that conveyed the gravity of the situation more eloquently than any official bulletin ever could. My old and much missed friend Alan Henry, one of the finest reporters in the 102-year history of Motor Sport, once told me that when Edwards, Ertl, Lunger, and Merzario had returned to the pits, Lauda’s blood could be seen in splattered stains on their race suits. It was a dreadful and unforgettable sight, said AH, and one that stripped away the glamorous veneer so often attached to F1 and revealed instead its raw and uncompromising reality.

There were consequences beyond the obvious medical emergency. Mass’s cleverly earned advantage had vanished with the red flags. Chris Amon – a brilliant driver and by 1976 among the most experienced still-active racers anywhere in the world, having started out in an Austin A40 Special in his native New Zealand in the late 1950s – decided that he had seen enough, and his Ensign duly remained in the pits for the restart. No-one sensible thought less of him for that decision then, and no-one should now.

When the race resumed, now on a bone-dry circuit, Hunt launched his McLaren perfectly, he put the hammer down with astonishing ferocity, and by the end of the opening restart lap he had forged a 9.1sec lead. Carlos Pace’s Brabham headed the pursuit, followed by Jody Scheckter’s Tyrrell, Clay Regazzoni’s Ferrari, Gunnar Nilsson’s Lotus, and Vittorio Brambilla’s March. Poor Mass found himself only ninth.

What happened next was not spectacular in the conventional sense. There were no wheel-banging dices, no frantic exchanges of position, and no dazzling overtaking manoeuvres around Nürburgring’s endless switchback of twists and turns. Instead Hunt simply drove away. By lap 10 he was 21.7sec clear of Scheckter, who had relieved Pace of second place, and four laps later, when the chequered flag finally appeared, the margin had grown to 27.7sec. Hunt had dominated the restarted race with almost disdainful authority.

Yet authority, disdainful or otherwise, should not be mistaken for ease. Imagine the psychological burden resting on Hunt’s shoulders that afternoon. He had already admitted publicly that Nürburgring terrified him. Now he had to race on it in the knowledge that the one circuit he regarded as truly evil had gravely injured the man with whom he was locked in battle for the F1 drivers’ world championship. Every blind crest, every yump, every compression, and every patch of unevenly repaired asphalt carried fresh emotional weight. Every corner reminded him of precisely the danger that he had felt as keenly as the rival whom it had sent to intensive care. A below-par performance might have been understandable – perhaps even expected. Instead he delivered 14 laps of rapid and immaculate precision.

Yet, because the race is remembered primarily for Lauda’s accident, Hunt’s victory has been reduced to little more than a footnote, as though he won only because fate intervened. That interpretation does him a profound injustice. He had earned pole position; he had been one of two drivers operating on a level beyond everyone else throughout the weekend; he had responded faultlessly to the restart; and, having done that, he had disappeared into the distance. None of those achievements depended on Lauda’s misfortune. They were the products of talent, judgment, discipline, courage, and immense mental strength.

Perhaps, too, there is something revealing in Hunt’s own earthy vocabulary. He was never especially interested in polishing his language into elegant aphorisms. He preferred plain speaking, often with an Anglo-Saxon flourish. Driving at Nürburgring as he did that afternoon, knowing what he knew and feeling what he felt, required what he would almost certainly have described as “big balls” – an expression he used often. Crude? Yes. Accurate? Undoubtedly. Bravery in motor sport is rarely theatrical.