James Hunt was a maverick, tall and blond with Golden Boy looks and public school manners, who could charm the birds from the trees but more often used his talents to charm the pants from the birds. He got so keyed up while racing that he was often sick beforehand, and could be punchy afterwards when the adrenalin was still flowing.

He and fellow racer Dave Morgan crashed while fighting for Formula Three victory at Crystal Palace in 1970, and as they stepped from the wreckage, Hunt felled him with a blow. At Fuji in 1976, in the very moment of his greatest triumph as he clinched the world championship by a single point by finishing third after a late pit stop, he wanted to hit McLaren team principal Teddy Mayer, believing he had lost the title because his team mistimed the crucial tyre stop. A year later, in Canada, he punched a marshal after crashing while trying to avoid teammate Jochen Mass.

In his championship year, Hunt saddled himself with a retinue of sycophants, and offended many by wearing jeans and a T-shirt at black-tie dinners. One of his favourite shirts bore the legend: “Sex - the breakfast of champions.” Another: “If you think my girlfriend can fight, you should see her box . . . ” His career declined. He would win only three more grands prix, all of them in 1977. When he crashed inexplicably in the 1978 British Grand Prix, it was whispered that he was driving under the influence of drugs. He smoked grass like it was going out of fashion. “I like it, it relaxes me,” he admitted, mixing the habit with a craving for nicotine that accounted for 60 cigarettes a day.

Formula One remains a serious business for focused professionals. There is no room, one might imagine, for such irresponsible behaviour as Hunt’s from the men behind the wheel as they tuck themselves up in bed almost before nightfall on the evening before a race. It wasn’t always like that. Go back to the 1950s and there was a generation of competitors racing in a very different world. The horror of the second world war was only just starting to recede. There was a feeling of liberation and empowerment, with competitors feeling they had the right to risk their lives. Barely a decade earlier, many would have been fighting for their country at the behest of others. If they should now opt to pursue risk and danger on their own terms, that was their privilege. It was small wonder that some of them also chose to burn the candle at both ends.

They were not all hell-raisers. Juan Manuel Fangio remained focused and serious as he headed for his five titles, while Stir-ling Moss took a leaf out of the Argentinian’s book and the supremely talented Tony Brooks cloaked his driving genius in a self-effacing modesty that endures to this day. But Mike Hawthorn, who would become Britain’s first world champion in 1958, had a character cut from different cloth. Hawthorn knew how to enjoy life. Stories from his early days - possibly apocryphal - tell of him cruising round his native Farnham after a night in the pub, attempting to dislodge cyclists with the aid of a plank of wood. Then there was the time at Reims in 1958 when Moss thought the weather had changed. “I was standing beneath a tree outside the pub at Thillois, where we all tended to stay, when I felt moisture and assumed it had started to rain,” he recalled. It was only when he looked up that he spied Hawthorn poised precariously in the tree, urinating on him.

At the end of the 1958 season, when Hawthorn beat Moss by a point to become champion and the man to succeed the great Fangio, Moss had won four races to Hawthorn’s single triumph. Moss admitted that he spent a lot of time analysing his feelings and coming to terms with his frustration. After that, the world title would never be quite so important to him. His outlook began to mellow.

“My attitude did change,” Moss confessed, “because I really believed that year that I ought to be the champion. I felt I had the ability, and yet I didn’t win. And it was against Mike, who was a good friend although we were competitors. I felt I could beat Mike, and he beat me by a point. And then I thought, ‘Well, Mike drinks and he runs around and he does everything that I would like to do. What the hell, I’m going to go out and enjoy myself’.

“I’d always smoked a bit, not that much, but it wasn’t really smoking I took up after 1958 and it wasn’t drinking either. But I did cut down on my strictness as far as ‘crumpet’ and that sort of thing was concerned . . . ”

Moss laughs when you ask him if chasing after the fair sex made him any faster. “Well, I did fairly well after that, just as well as I’d done before, so there we are!” The most aristocratic of the 1950s motor racingplayboys was Alfonso de Portago, the 17th Marquis de Portago and Count of Mejorada, a larger-than-life Spanish nobleman whose dramatic character cast a giant shadow far longer than his modest tally of five grands prix might have suggested. “Fon” was an all-round sportsman of dazzling versatility. He rode in the Grand National twice and was France’s champion amateur jockey three times. He was a crack shot, an Olympic-class swimmer, an accomplished polo player and broke the Cresta Run record while demonstrating his bobsleigh skills for the Spanish team he had created for the 1956 Winter Olympics. He and his wife lived in a mansion on the exclusive Avenue Foch in Paris. Men such as De Portago rarely make old bones. In 1957 he and his co-driver, Ed Nelson, were killed, together with 10 spectators, when their Ferrari crashed towards the end of the Mille Miglia, a 1,000-mile dash across Italy. De Portago’s death brought about the end of the legendary road race. His passing was yet another reminder that this generation of F1 drivers lived in an era when, although sex may have still been safe, motor racing remained relentlessly dangerous. People today may find it impossible to believe the high spirits and wildly extrovert behaviour that characterised much of the off-track behaviour in the 1950s and 1960s. It may have had its roots in the fact that the business of racing an F1 car in those days was so perilous that most competitors were still on an adrenalin “high” for hours after they climbed out of the cockpit.

Foremost among the hell-raisers in the early 1960s was a doughty Scottish fighter called Robert McGregor Innes Ireland. The hard-driving, hard-drinking Ireland was probably too sociable to make the most of his considerable talent. He was a fearless but fair competitor whose sheer speed, and the fragility of his machinery, often led him beyond the brink. Driving for Colin Chapman’s Team Lotus early in the decade, he produced some brilliant performances. Most notable was his 1961 US Grand Prix victory.

The stories of Ireland’s derring-do off the tracks have become part of the folklore of motor racing. After his win at Solitude, the story goes, he got so plastered that he ended up on the roof of a local hotel, firing a pistol into the air, before bursting open the hotel bar after it had closed and then thumping the host when he tried to calm everybody down. The organisers of the German Grand Prix at the Nurburgring – due to be run a fortnight after the Solitude fixture – announced they were not going to allow him to compete. In the end, the episode was forgotten and Ireland was allowed to enter.

Then there was the time that he “demonstrated” a 6.3litre Mercedes at Mallory Park, only to roll it into scrap. It was the property of Mercedes-Benz UK, whose representative was less than amused when Ireland climbed, only slightly sheepishly, from the wreckage. Legend has it that he then collected his black Labrador, Seal, who had also gone along for the ride, and removed his shotgun from the boot with commendable sang-froid.

Later, Ireland served as president of the British Racing Drivers’ Club. In 1992, it held a lunch to honour Nigel Mansell’s world championship but Ireland always had his enthusiasm for Mansell under firm control. Asked why, at this auspicious moment, he had chosen to wear tartan trousers instead of the full kilt, he responded cheerfully: “I only wear that on special occasions, lad!”

By the 1970s, the F1 community had developed in two distinct social directions. On the one hand there was Jackie Stewart, striking the corporate, squeaky-clean note not only as a triple world champion but also a one-man million-dollar promotional industry. On the other, there were Mike Hailwood and Hunt, both blessed with natural talent but both so laid-back they were almost horizontal – and social hell-raisers on a truly superhuman scale.

It may have been imagination that Hunt threw an empty whisky bottle out of an 18th-floor window of São Paulo’s Othon Palace hotel in 1972, when we were all out in Brazil for the Torneio winter F2 series, but almost certainly it wasn’t. Between them, Hunt and Hailwood’s insatiable appetite for the gentler sex cut a lurid swathe through the admittedly frisky – and unimaginably beautiful – postteenage female community of that throbbing Brazilian metropolis back then.

Yet Hunt was also highly strung and, by 1978, with his world championship success two years behind him, he was awakening to the dangers of the sport. It was accepted that he would throw up just before the start of a grand prix, but those close to him that season were even more worried about his drinking, smoking and use of drugs.

All this also came at a time when the McLaren M26 was running towards the end of its competitive life. He seemed to be going to pieces and his contract would not be renewed at the end of the year. He drove a few races for Walter Wolf the following year before calling it a day after Monaco, convinced that without a winning car the game was no longer worth the risk. Later he become a television commentator of note, though at Spa-Francorchamps in 1988 he celebrated his 40th birthday in some style, bedding two girls he had picked up and failing to make the BBC commentary booth on time. An embarrassed executive excused him on the grounds of a “gastric complaint”.

Hunt always lived on the edge. His first marriage, to model Suzy Miller, foundered as she went off with actor Richard Burton. A long-term relationship with supermodel Jane Birbeck also failed. His second marriage, to Sarah Lomax, went the same way. There were countless other women in the interim periods. But just as his self-destructive streak threatened to ruin him, he met waitress and artist Helen Dyson, and suddenly he changed. He gave up smoking and drinking, and after weeks of agonising finally released within himself something he had kept pent up all his life. He wrote to Helen to tell her that for the first time he was allowing himself not only to accept the love of another, but to reciprocate. He proposed the day before he died, on June 15, 1993, of a massive heart attack. Typically, his will left provision for his friends to have “a bloody great party”.

One might be forgiven for thinking that Hunt was the last of the F1 playboys and to a certain degree that was true. Jacques Ville-neuve had his moments, as did fellow maverick Eddie Irvine. Good-looking, fun-loving and with an irreverent attitude to life, the Ulsterman was a breath of fresh air in the paddock. He was never a yes-man and always spoke his mind. Nothing stopped him from chasing girls. “I’ve had so many women that I suppose you have to consider them an important part of my life,” he told F1 Opus executive editor Jane Nottage when she ghosted his autobiography . “I do try and make it pretty clear what my intentions are, and they’re certainly not honourable. I’ve always said I don’t want to get married, so the girls know that isn’t on the agenda. It’s the kind of sport where a wife and family can make you lose your edge.”

In the new millennium, Jenson Button had the goodies and the trappings when he first arrived in F1, and things such as the proximity of his hired yacht to the paddock in Monaco in 2001 caused a brief furore about his supposedly louche lifestyle. But although Button liked his toys too, he was no James Hunt in the playboy stakes. Perhaps the unlikely alliance between McLaren drivers Ayrton Senna and Gerhard Berger came closest to Hunt’s friendship with Niki Lauda in terms of mutual personal esteem, even if their currency involved practical jokes rather than boozing and womanising.

Berger’s sense of fun involved complex tricks concealed behind a mien of unconcerned nonchalance. He somehow got hold of Senna’s passport and replaced his ID photograph with a picture of nude male buttocks, causing his hapless teammate huge embarrassment when he arrived in Argen-tina. Senna counter-attacked at the next race by getting the key to Berger’s hotel room, filling the bath and piling all his clothes into it. The next morning at breakfast, to Senna’s frustration, Berger didn’t mention it.

The two men loved each other’s company, proving perhaps that old adage that opposites do attract.

“We pushed each other really hard, but he was so quick you couldn’t believe it,” said Berger. “I started the first race of my McLaren career on pole, so I thought, ‘This is okay, this guy can be beaten’. After that I hardly ever saw which way he’d gone.

“If Ayrton hadn’t been killed in 1994, F1 would have entered probably its dullest period ever. He’d have been on pole position all the time, won every race for years and taken four more world championships with Williams through to the end of 1997.

“We were the about same age and he was a great guy. I wouldn’t have missed racing with him for the world. He taught me how to be a professional and I like to think I taught him how to laugh.”

Amen to that.

How Hunt and Hailwood became Formula One’s Terrible Twins

JAMES HUNT was tutored in the sport’s wilder side by Mike 'the Bike' Hailwood. Hailwood loved parties and having fun with ladies, and once arrived only moments before a race at Brands Hatch still hung over from the night before in London. He was late because neither he nor his cohorts could remember where they had left their car. His influence on Hunt was immediately noticed by Ian Phillips, a journalist covering Formula Two, at São Paulo in 1972: ‘We had a party in my room which saw us drain everything in the mini-bar, before somebody thought it would be a jolly good prank to empty everything out the window. We were on the 13th floor. Somehow all my bedding seemed to go, too. That somebody was James. Unfortunately some passer-by got cut on the ankle by flying glass; how they worked out that all this stuff had come from my bedroom, I just don’t know. Of course, it was me who opened the door to the manager, who brought my bedding back! At the time it was just a matter of, “Children, behave yourselves!” But a week or so later, when James took it upon himself to empty waste paper baskets full of water over people entering the hotel, they started getting annoyed. Again the blame came on me, and by the time I had been arrested endless charges had been trumped up. The man responsible was one James Hunt, but he just sat there with this “it couldn’t possibly be me, sir!” look. He left me in the lurch, really. I ended up with two days in jail and a deportation order, and James ended up with an invitation to play in the Brazilian Open Golf Championship...’