Denny Hulme was dubbed ‘The Bear’, a gruff façade of a reputation that he was happy to hide behind. It really depended on which type of bear that you saw him as. Some of the motor sports press took him as a grizzly, not there was a lot of Paddington and Pooh about the happy-go-lucky Hulme, who grew up the son of a Victoria Cross winner in the little New Zealand country village of Pongakawa and learned to drive in the lorries of his father’s transport business.

Denis Clive Hulme won the 1967 F1 World Championship for Brabham, and the CanAm title for McLaren in 1968. Denny-he was only Denis when he was in trouble-would win the CanAm crown again in 1970, but it was a summer that proved his amazing inner strengths, that there was a hero in there behind the ragged grin and tittering laugh.

He was testing the first Indianapolis McLaren in May when the fuel breather cap popped open and methanol blew back onto the Offy’s red-hot turbocharger. The shimmering whoomph of heat gave Denny only seconds to escape. His visor welded to his helmet and his flameproof overalls where starting to char. The leather of his gloves where shrinking his hands into painful claws as he battled with the buckle of his harness. He thought he had slowed the car down to a crawl but guessed it was probably still doing 70mph when he went over the side. The rescue truck sped past him, chasing the burning car without realizing that the driver on the track was still on fire. Bruce and the other team members visited him in hospital each day. The burns were serious and there was the unspoken chance that he would lose some fingers on his left hand. When he had recovered enough to race again, he wore dressings under his gauntlets. The skin on his fingers was so tender that he sometimes sliced it opening a newspaper. Bruce was terribly concerned at his team-mate’s condition in the hospital, their closeness in times of trouble showing through as clearly as it had when they traveled together between races like a couple of kids.

When Bruce was killed at Goodwood three weeks later, Denny, who had taken the pain of his burns without a tear, broke down in grief. But it was he who rallied the team in those dark days, urging them to stay together and win again for Bruce. He was their strength. Their new leader. It was the other side of Hulme.

His father Clive had been awarded his VC for valour during WW2 in Crete, fighting what amounted to a private war as an anti-sniper sniper in the mountains, picking off the enemy one at a time. He was a tough old guy in his later years, amazing with his skills as a water and oil diviner. Denny would mirror his dad in his retirement after he quit Formula 1 at the end of the 1974 season, with graying, curling, thinning hair.

Clive Hulme told a story of noticing a strange smell while young Denny was welding in the workshops of the family trucking business and realized that Denny was standing barefoot on a glowing welding spark and hadn’t noticed. All Kiwi country kids went barefoot and, when Denny arrived to race in Britain in 1960, the establishment was mildly amazed to learn that he raced his Cooper in bare feet because he claimed he could get a better feel of the pedals.

You pronounced Hulme as ‘Hume’ at your peril. Clive Hulme had told his family: “Never let them knock the ’L’ out of Hulme.” It was always ‘Hullm’.

Denny was born in 1936 and went from school to the family business. His first sporting car was an MG TF that he drove in a few hill climbs and then, in 1958, he graduated to an MGA. The racing bug had bitten and, two years later, Denny was winning in a 2-litre Cooper and earning the Driver to Europe award that he shared with George Lawton. This was the same scholarship that had launched Bruce McLaren two years earlier. This overseas season started tragically when Lawton was killed in a race on the Danish Roskildering.

McLaren and Hulme had met at the 1960 scholarship awards ceremony in New Zealand and, when Denny arrived in Britain, Bruce loaned him his Morris Minor for transport while he built his own Formula Junior Cooper in the Cooper workshops, the traditional method for any young driver who wanted his car delivered on time.

Denny won at Salerno and Pescara, but these wins where small beer in New Zealand where the newspapers were full of Bruce McLaren winning GP'S. Hulme hired a 2.5-litre Cooper from Reg Parnell for the pre-Tasman races in New Zealand in early 1961 and won the National Gold Star title. There were those who felt Denny would follow Bruce into Formula 1 that season but there were others who realized that the Hulme transience-the belief that driving ability, not diplomacy, should get you to the top-would not sit well with the establishment. A diplomat Denny was not and this certainly cost him dear during those fallow seasons in the early ‘60s when he worked as a mechanic in Jack Brabham’s customer garage, waiting for the opportunity that eventually came in 1963 with a works Brabham drive in Formula Junior.

I toured the 1961 Formula Junior-series with Denny, towing hid Cooper-Ford on a trailer behind a Mk1 For Zodiac around the crowded European season from Karlskoga in Sweden, south to Messina in Sicily. The Zodiac had the rear seats removed and the space crammed with spare parts and petrol cans. Denny used to fuel the racing car after each event and then fill six five-gallon cans to get to the next race, courtesy of his modest fuel contract. Hulme’s race management was a fairly free-hand arrangement. We unloaded at Monza only to find that Denny hadn’t entered for that race-he had entered for the FJ race at Rheims as a support event for the Grand Prix on the same weekend. We loaded up and set off for an overnight thrash up through France, eventually waiting at dawn for a French petrol station to open while Denny scratched through a shoebox full of every denomination of European coin to get enough francs for fuel.

The only map we had was a huge folded one of Western Europe, since Denny reasoned it was easier only to have one map than a map for each country. We got what must have been the last fleapit hotel room in Rheims and, on the Sunday morning as we were leaving the room, a guy in Dunlop blues was coming out of the room next door. I asked Denny who it was. “Dunno,” he said. “Never seen him before.” Not many people had. It was Giancarlo Baghetti, who would win for Ferrari that afternoon and then fade back into obscurity.

Jack Brabham won the World Championship in 1966 and team-mate and supposedly number two driver Hulme won it in 1967, before leaving to join the man who loaned him his Morris Minor seven years before. During his championship season, Denny won at Monaco and at the Nurburgring coincidentally the two GPs won by Stirling Moss when he was clearly out powered by the Ferraris in 1961, the two races that demanded precise skill.

His fame took time to gather. When Monaco clerk of the course Louise Chiron was shepherding Hulme to the royal box after his win, he whispered to Denny: “By the way, monsieur, what is your name?” Fame was not what Denny was doing it for. When he won the championship in Mexico at the end of the 1967 season, having finished third, he was photographed on the rostrum with race winner Jimmy Clark and he joked that he didn’t mind being the champion if Jimmy would do the public appearances.

Denny knew his limitations compared with Bruce: “Bruce used to like meeting people. He managed to cope, even when they were asking the most ridiculous questions, whereas my natural reaction was to think ‘What a bunch of idiots we’ve got here’, and either tell them so or not talk to them at all. But that’s just the way I am. Bruce could spend the whole night entertaining people and this is how he made lots of friends. He was the same with the press. He always had the time to talk to them. I’ve never been able to do that. For certain people in the press, yes, but for most of them, no. There’s probably only half a dozen that I can sit down and talk to, but the rest of them, I feel they should do their homework and find out what it’s all about.”

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s I was working with the McLaren team sponsors and traveling with Denny on the weekly Atlantic flights shuttling him back and forth-a CanAm or Indycar race one weekend and a Grand Prix in Europe the next. I watched classic Hulme ‘Bear’ performance when the Canadian TV was shooting an hour-long documentary on the Gulf-McLaren team. Opening interviews were scheduled before the race at Mosport. Peter Revson was all smoothness and style. The crew was pleased but not a little nervous. They knew the Hulme reputation and he was next. Denny huffed down the steps of the gulf motor home and the interviewer took his position with the microphone. I stood behind the soundman. I never did find out what the first question was but I heard the reply. So did the soundman! He flinched inside his headphones and Denny was staring straight at me and saying: “Eoin, tell this **** to stop asking such stupid ****ing questions!” and with that he stumped back into the motor home, slamming the door.

I thought the interviewer was going to burst into tears. It was worse even than they had imagined. It was certainly worse than I had imagined. I saw my new job coming to an early, grinding halt. I went into the motor home to find Denny slumped in an armchair, giggling-that titter with his tongue between his teeth was his trademark. I said: “Denis,” because he was in trouble, “what are you doing? You’re ruining this documentary!” He looked almost surprise. “Aw c’mon… I was just getting their attention!” And with that he ambled out, threw his big arm around the interviewer’s shoulders and settled down to a long, friendly chat that made great footage when it aired later in the season.

The McLaren duo made the CanAm series their own-another race, another win, more megabuck prize money and another good time. They thoroughly enjoyed everything about CanAm. One night we were staying at Seibkins Hotel as Elkhart Lake and I remember getting back late to the big three-bedded room we were sharing. It was pitch dark and I was tiptoeing in so as not to wake the drivers the night before the race. I was startled when I was hissed to be quiet-and realized Bruce and Denny were peeking out the window, shaking with silent glee as they watched a lothario pleasuring his lady on the verandah outside, unaware of his silent audience!

One weekend they qualified comfortably fastest with times they figured wouldn’t be beaten-and then went water skiing the next day. Denny did not regard fitness as a necessity: “It’s difficult to say how fit you’ve got to be. You don’t have to front up and run a four-minute mile-it’s more important to be able to pace yourself, to know your own capacity and make it last the race. If you’re strong from the waist up, especially the shoulders, arms and neck muscles, you’re able to concentrate better.”

Denny was interesting when he analyzed the difference in driving style between Bruce and himself and the way this translated into different results in different areas: “Bruce was quicker than me in CanAm and I sort of knew he was going to be quicker. He would set his car up the way he wanted and he was very smooth. He liked CanAm racing. It was his one big thing and it made a world of difference. He was the hardest guy to beat in a CanAm car and yet he could put the same amount of effort into a Grand Prix car and get nothing like the same results, I think one of the reasons for this was because he was so smooth. If you throw a CanAm car around you lose time, whereas the only way to go quick in a Grand Prix car is to start hurling it around and really set it up for fast corners. I don’t think Bruce liked doing this.”

Racing wasn’t the same for Denny after Bruce. He could still win-and did so in the South African GP in 1972, Sweden in 1973 and Argentina in 1974-but the shine was going. He was one of the first drivers on the scene of Peter Revson’s fatal crash, testing at Kyalami before the 1974 race, and was another reason for his hanging up the helmet at the end of the season. He moved back to New Zealand with his wife and family to enjoy retirement in the sun, but he soon became restless and dabbled in truck racing and touring cars. His son Martin was killed tragically in a lake accident and Denny was devastated. They had been more like brothers, off-roading on motorcycles and traveling together.

In 1992 Denny was racing a BMW M3 in a 1000km race at Bathurst, a classic enduro on the mountain circuit, beamed live on TV all over Australia and New Zealand. The cameras were on the Hulme BMW as it veered to a halt at the side of the track and angled against the guardrail as though he had recognized a problem. Or perhaps run out of fuel. But Denny was dead. At the age of 56 he had suffered a heart attack at the wheel. The Bear was gone.