Happy Birthday Hesketh 308
50th Commemorative T Shirt

On Christmas Day 1973 the serenity of Lord Hesketh’s Easton Neston estate was shattered by the ear-splitting sound of a DFV F1 engine being fired up. Pheasants panicked and took to flight, morning coffee was spilt, the Butler dropped his tray, the Gamekeeper’s Dog hid under the table and two baubles fell from the Christmas tree.

Outside the old stable block, now converted into engineering workshops, Lord Hesketh, Bubbles Horsley and Harvey Postlethwaite start to grin as exhaust smoke billows into the cold, morning air. Their creation was taking it’s first breath. Oh what a sound that must have been, and on Christmas day as well. What better present could one have?

This of course is the Hesketh 308. It’s the day when Hesketh Racing dispensed with having to hire F1 cars or trying to modify one to compete at the top level of Formula 1. They wanted to give James Hunt the best chance of mixing it with the ace drivers of the day.

And so here they were, the little team from Towcester, standing on the precipice of a new beginning. Had they bitten off more than they could chew, would it turn out to be a disaster, had they made a terrible mistake?

These brave young men were just about to find out.

To read more about Hesketh Racing visit the Official Website

The Biggest Little Race Team in the World

There is no better example of an ‘Against all odds’ story than the 1974 Hesketh Racing Formula 1 team. With the maverick James Hunt at the wheel of the fabled Hesketh 308 F1 car and the extravegent, 23 year old Lord Hesketh at the helm, ‘The biggest little racing team in the world’, captured the public’s imagination.

Scorned by the established teams who considered them a bunch of playboy amateurs with no place in the sport, Hesketh Racing audaciously challenged the big guns in their own back yard, and won.

If you are going to be involved in one of the most demanding, most expensive and most dangerous sports in the world, you might as well have as much fun as you can doing it. The team arrived by Rolls-Royce, hired yachts for Monaco and had a Grand Piano in the back of Pitlane for sing songs with friends and celebrities. Champagne flowed in abundance at Hesketh Racing.