Freddie Hunt: 'Dad partied hard, but he treated everyone with the same respect'

Freddie Hunt knows what you’re going to say. Yes, the spitting image. Yeah, it’s a bit spooky – sometimes his mother would look as if she’d seen a ghost. And yep, it’s mostly the hair, but also the good looks, the rakish manner, the clipped accent. Like father, like son…  

“Every time I go to a race track, I hear all about how much I look like him, how much I act like him,” he says. “I can see the resemblance, but it was only when I saw myself on camera that I realised how similar our mannerisms are.”

Of all the qualities, the wavy blonde bob is the clincher. Hunt Jr runs a hand through it.

“I grew it when I was about 17,” he adds, “deciding it suited me. My compromise was to have the parting on the opposite side to dad.” A volley of laughter. “That was my effort to try and be a bit different.”

“Dad” is, of course, Formula One legend James Hunt, who spent six years in the 1970s as the most glamorous and exciting figure in a sport already inherently glamorous and exciting (in those days, at least), winning the 1976 world drivers’ championship before retiring three years later. He died from a heart attack in 1993, aged 45.

Freddie is 34 and the younger of Hunt’s two sons with his second wife, Sarah Lomax. He may be a dead ringer for his father, and a racing driver too (his team finished second in the Le Mans Cup this season), but there are plenty of differences. For one, he’s calling from the smallholding on the Isle of Bute he bought 18 months ago.

“I’ve got pigs, chickens, guinea fowl, turkeys, peacocks, ducks. Oh and a sheep. I’m almost self-sufficient,” he says.

A petrolhead but committed environmentalist (he thinks fossil fuels should be banned for transport but allowed for recreation), Freddie has a girlfriend, fellow racing driver Aimee Watts. When he moved from Wiltshire he knew nobody on the island, nothing about building work and spent 12 months without heating or electricity.

I wonder why he’d do that to himself.

“I’ll show you why,” he says, shakily picking up his laptop and walking across the room to his front door, which he kicks open to reveal a beautiful green and pleasant glen, filled with gambolling animals and clear air. “Because I can stand at my door and shout ‘C---!’ as loud as I want and nobody is around to hear me.”

It’s a vista Freddie shows off in a new episode of Amazon Prime’s Car & Country, a mix of Top Gear and travel show that he’ll be dropping in on occasionally.

“I really enjoyed doing that, it was a lot of fun. The next episodes we’ll be going to India and there are conversations about doing things in Saudi Arabia or in Italy. So we’ll do that as soon as we can fit it in, really.”

The middle of nowhere is about the only place he can stay still for long. Monte Carlo, he mutters, is not his scene. “I don’t like cities, I try to get out as quickly as possible.”

The first two years of Freddie’s life were spent in Wimbledon, south-west London, before his parents divorced in 1989, after six years married. Freddie and his elder brother, Tom, moved with their mother to a country cottage in Sussex. They would travel to London at weekends to visit their father, who soon started another relationship.

Freddie has “absolutely no recollection” of those first couple of years, and in fact sums up his early childhood as “pretty s-----”. Which turns out to be an understatement.

“I often forget this, but I was physically handicapped – until I had an operation to remove my adenoids, for the first two or three years I was mostly deaf, which affected my balance. I was a dribbling mess and constantly crashing into things.”

After the operation, he came home and asked what that noise was. “It was birds singing, I hadn’t heard it before.” A pause. “So yeah, that, then Dad dying, then school was absolute Japanese POW camp to me…”

James Hunt died when Freddie was five. Recalling that day, he goes quiet and stares into the distance. “Mum took us down to the bottom of the garden and told us she had some news. Then everybody started to worry because I didn’t really react for quite a while – a good few months. Then it all hit me and things went a bit pear-shaped, mentally.”

Did he get the support he needed?

“Yes and no,” he says, his voice cracking. “The trouble was, kids are b------s at schools. If you’re the target, which I was, it’s an absolutely miserable existence.”

He was picked on for his father dying? “Not because of that, just because of who I am, because I’d never grass them up. And they cottoned on to this: ‘If we hit Freddie, we’re not going to get in trouble.’”

Most of the bullying was mental rather than physical.

“It was just unpleasantness, being alienated. But that’s equally if not more painful. I saw various counsellors and they probably did me worse [damage], because the other kids would know I was off to see a counsellor once a week.”

He attended five private schools in as many years before finishing with a stint at the local state school in Midhurst, West Sussex. At the time he was a promising polo player: “Mum and I decided to spend that money on horses instead.”

Through all this, Freddie had “absolutely no idea” of who his father was, beyond being a famous racing driver. He’s since relished learning about him – even if the legend of the fast-living, hard-partying, free-loving playboy is braided with artistic licence.

“I learnt to brush aside the not unjust but exaggerated aspect of his life partying. Dad did party very hard, but this ‘slept with 5000 women’ number that [biographer] Tom Rubython plucked out is complete b------. Just do the maths on it,” he says. “But I hear nice stories, he would treat anybody with the same amount of respect, whether it’s the dustman or the King.”

Does he have a favourite tale?

“Probably one about him leaving a golf course once, when a lady leaving at the same time couldn’t get her car started. She recognised Dad and went over to ask if he could help. Dad said ‘Oh, I’ve no idea how to fix a car, I’m just a driver…’ but he called the AA for her and then had sandwiches and tea while waiting with her until the recovery truck came.”

Freddie is now firm friends with Mathias Lauda, the racing driver son of Niki, James Hunt’s Austrian rival during the testy 1976 season. Together they have made a documentary, Hunt vs Lauda: The Next Generation, rekindling the competition.

“He’s a really lovely guy, which is lucky because if he was an a--- it would have been difficult,” Freddie says. “[1976] was just a very romantic season for the spectators, wasn’t it? I can see Mathias’s mannerisms are very much like his father’s as well. So is his attitude towards life and business…”

Freddie has his father’s signature tattooed on his back and used to have the same “Sex: Breakfast of Champions” patch sewn into his racing overalls. He has little desire to emulate the same excesses, however.

“I did a lot of partying when I was younger, but it’s self-destructive, isn’t it? Good fun in the moment, but alcohol is a really toxic poison. I still can’t get my head around how it’s legal, as it makes you feel s--- and do stupid things when you’re drunk.”

Lomax was “the best mother ever, really”, but suffered “from her own demons – the inability to give herself a pat on the back and ,as a result, not feeling happy”. She died from breast cancer in 2014. Tom and Charlie, a half-brother from Lomax’s later relationship, both now live in the South and work in property.

They are a close family, but there’s cruelly few of them. “Dad’s three other brothers all died as well. So I’ve really got to look after my health because the Hunt male life expectancy isn’t very high at the moment…” Freddie says, with a dark chortle.

“The thing that would bother me most about dying early would be leaving the loved ones behind. The pain I’ve experienced, I wouldn’t want them to. But going myself? Not too bothered, it would be a rest. I’m looking forward to the afterlife. I’m gambling on it being a lot easier than here…”

He would like children (“no more than two, it should be banned to have more”), and to make enough money to buy a full farm and rewild it.

To fund that, though, he needs to keep winning motor races. The goal is to win the Le Mans 24 hour race in 2026, to mark 50 years since his father’s championship win. It’s ambitious, he concedes, “but I think that’s a pretty good story, don’t you?”

I do. And if anybody can achieve it, it’s probably a Hunt.

Car & Country: Rush is now available on Amazon Prime. Hunt vs Lauda: The Next Generation will be available on DVD and digital download from November 28