He didn’t like fuss. Inured by an upbringing devoid of shows of emotion – taskmaster father Clive had won a VC in WWII due to a fearsome and sustained mix of cold calculation and hot-blooded savagery – Denny Hulme’s grizzly demeanour led to his being nicknamed ‘The Bear’.
He, too, was the strong-silent type. When roomie and fellow New Zealand Driver to Europe hopeful George Lawton – reckoned the more promising of the pair – died in his arms at Roskilde Ring in September 1960, Hulme, though shocked, contested the remaining three heats of that Formula 2 Danish Grand Prix.
The following weekend he made his Formula 1 debut in the Cooper originally allocated to Lawton, finishing fifth in Snetterton’s Lombank Trophy.
He was pressing on – as he would 10 years later.
Mentor and team-mate: Bruce McLaren with Hulme
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News of compatriot, friend and team boss Bruce McLaren’s fatal testing crash at Goodwood in early June 1970 was shattering. Bruce had been a mentor of Hulme’s since meeting him off the train in London in 1960 and loaning him a Morris Minor.
Denny was inconsolable. Wife Greeta had never seen him like this. Might he retire?
Instead Greeta, a nurse, continued to bandage hands badly burned during a practice at Indianapolis – Hulme had leapt clear while still turning 70mph – so that he might help hold together a team threatening to splinter in the aftermath of its founder’s death.
Hulme won that season’s Can-Am title – a vital morale boost and financial shot in the arm – despite obvious physical and mental pain.
He was at his best in those muscular ‘Big Banger’ sports cars. ‘Replacement’ team-mate Peter Gethin could stay with him for the first 100 miles or so but thereafter only admire Hulme’s accuracy and relentless stamina.
After the tragedy of Goodwood in ’70, Hulme went on to win the Can Am title for Bruce McLaren Racing
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But the man who had won a 1960 Formula Junior race on the bogglingly dangerous Pescara road circuit had, however, by now seen and suffered enough to begin driving within himself. His growing young family had also caused a reboot/rethink.
Hulme grew warier of racing in the rain – and in Formula 1 required the cards to fall favourably for him to turn it on: Kyalami 1972, Anderstorp 1973 and Buenos Aires 1974.
And when in early 1974 he had arrived at the grisly scene of former McLaren team-mate Peter Revson’s fatal testing accident with Shadow at Kyalami – a circuit where Hulme had so often shone – he decided that enough was enough.
He kept counsel, of course, saw out the season with his beloved McLaren and slipped unobtrusively through the side door when his engine failed at Watkins Glen in October.
This least glamorous of the world champions was younger than he looked – a balding 38 – at the time.
A loyal lieutenant, he had from 1962 learned his craft in the suitably Trappist atmosphere of all-go-no-show Brabham, initially as a mechanic on the production car side of Jack’s burgeoning empire, then as an official driver in formulae Junior and 2, all the time preparing his own racing cars.
His talent was being carefully nurtured while in turn he showed great patience given his instant successes – including winning the Formula 2 category of the BRDC International Trophy – of 1960.
His relationship with Jack Brabham was respectful. Any pecking order went unsaid.
Having scored the first win for a Brabham – at the snowy 1962 Boxing Day meeting at Brands Hatch – eventually he was given his F1 chance in 1965, finishing fourth at his second attempt at the daunting Clermont-Ferrand circuit.
Hulme leads Graham Hill at Monaco in ’67, his championship-winning year
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He would score four podium finishes as sturdy support to world champion-elect Brabham in 1966 – roles reprised as they swept the F2 board that same season – and in 1967 added breakthrough Grand Prix wins at iconic Monaco and Nürburgring to his admired consistency to beat Brabham to the title.
Hulme then switched entirely to McLaren having already contested a Can-Am championship with it.
“Once he was gone, I missed him,” says Nick Goozée. “I think I can say without appearing too arrogant that we were emotionally close. A week after he became world champion, Denny had been Best Man at my wedding.
From the archive
“So when the opportunity arose to work on his car at McLaren, I took it. But I was a fish out of water there, plus Denny was spending a lot less time in the workshop; McLaren was much more organised in terms of mechanics and assistance at tracks.
“At Brabham, Denny had been an employee and received a brown weekly pay packet at Friday lunchtime just like the rest of us. He started at 8am, picked me up on the way to work and dropped me off on the way home.”
Goozée would return to Brabham within months to help build its monocoque BT33.
“[Designer] Ron Tauranac and Jack had taken me on [in June 1963] very much as ‘the lad’ and basically handed me over to Denny as a completely useless public schoolboy. He was a very complex person and probably they thought that if I could survive him…
“Every time I did something stupid or didn’t pay attention to what he asked for – something that occurred on several occasions – he would tell me in no uncertain terms.
“Yet on the other side he was the kindest. I was in lodgings – my parents had moved to The States – and he allowed me to move in with him in his little flat in Surbiton for three months before Greeta came across [from New Zealand].
“I started to travel with him to the UK races as a pusher/shover/polisher. But when we got back to the factory he would begin teaching me the basics of maintaining a racing car.
Hulme washes down his car in 1964...
...in pictures taken by Nick Goozée
“Racing in those days was a very harsh environment and he sheltered me until I had learned enough to be able to stand on my own two feet.
“He treated me as his little brother.
“If it hadn’t been for Denny I can say with surety that I would not have had my career in motorsport.
“When the opportunity to join Penske came along, he said, ‘Leave it with me’. He spoke to Roger at a Can-Am race and the rest is history.”
Goozée joined Penske Cars UK in 1974, became its MD in 1983 and oversaw its operation in Poole until its 2009 closure.
“A very solid driver, Denny didn’t have silly accidents or get involved with those of others.
“Being a racing driver back then was a parlous lifestyle – like being a Spitfire pilot – and the margin for error was very small. Because of that, and rightly so, Denny was impatient with incompetence.
“Like Jack, he was very sympathetic to his car, knew how to drive around a problem and was perfectly capable of fixing it. He didn’t come in waving his arms and shouting. If his car was capable, he was on a good day capable of beating anybody.
“But we didn’t analyse things. He would come back [from Le Mans in 1966 after finishing second co-driving Ken Miles in a Ford MkII] and get straight back into it.
Hulme and Miles at Le Mans in 1966
Bernard Cahier/Getty Images
“Though I did benefit when he finished fourth at Indy [as 1967’s Rookie of Year]. One of his prizes was a steak for every day of the year; whenever my wife and I babysat for him there would be one waiting for us: an enormous treat in those days.
“Denny was very insular. When he wasn’t driving he occupied himself with the build of his very modernistic house in St George’s Hill, near Weybridge. He loved that job. I would go over there and make cement for it and things like that.
“He knew a lot of people in racing but apart from his biographer Eoin Young, Phil Kerr [his team manager at Brabham and McLaren] and Bruce he did not have many close friends, and considering his personal losses and rather taciturn manner it was probably safer that way.
“Though he would be in good form whenever fellow Antipodean drivers Frank Gardner or Paul Hawkins came to Brabham, which was often. Total comedians, the whole workshop would stop to listen to them.
“Denny didn’t say much but he was a great giggler.”
Hulme would be driving for his mate Gardner’s team when the end came.
He had returned to the tracks in the early 1980s in touring cars – and later trucks! – and in 1986, co-driving a Rover with Jeff Allam, won his fourth RAC Tourist Trophy 18 years after his third.
In 1992 – 30 years ago yesterday – Hulme was sharing a BMW M3 Evo with Paul Morris at Bathurst when he radioed in to say that his vision was blurred. Raining heavily, it was assumed that this was the problem’s cause.
But on lap 33 the car veered left and clipped the wall lining Conrod Straight. The damage was slight and Hulme brought the car to rest on the opposite side of the track. Somehow.
There had been warning signs: indigestion, shortness of breath.
In truth, he had never recovered – how could he? – from the death of his 21-year-old son Martin in a diving accident on Christmas Day 1988.
Hulme had split from Greeta in the grievous aftermath and was back living with his mother. He was reportedly beset by financial worries, too.
Sister Anita, present that momentous first day in London as well as at that fateful last at Bathurst, knew in her gut: heart attack.
She expected her tough older brother to survive. That he didn’t – reportedly Hulme was dead before the marshal opened the door – confirmed her belief that his heart had been broken.
