KEY POINTS:
When New Zealand established a sporting hall of fame, its only world Formula One champion, Denny Hulme, wasn't included in the inaugural members.
Television rubbed salt in the wound by having Hulme accept the induction of his former team-mate Bruce McLaren.
The snub was a hangover from the
days before television hit its stride and newspapers weren't quite sure whether motor-racing really counted as sport.
So some of New Zealand's glory days on the world sporting stage were sometimes more appreciated in Europe and the United States than back home.
Hulme's world championship in 1967 earned him the title of New Zealand Sportsman of the Year, but it is only now that a biography worthy of his exploits has been published.
Who better than Eoin Young to take on the task. He was an original employee of the McLaren team and worked with Hulme to produce personal reports of his racing in Formula One and the American CanAm series for British magazines.
The resulting book often reads more like an autobiography than a biography, as Hulme's racy reports of his exploits paint a vivid picture of an era of motorsport before big money squeezed out individuality.
It was a time when drivers raced as often as they could in a variety of cars, thinking nothing of competing in different classes over the same weekend or commuting over the Atlantic to pilot the mighty CanAm monsters when there was a gap in the Formula One schedule.
McLarens dominated CanAm racing before and after Bruce McLaren's death and Hulme rated the series one of his happiest experiences on and off the track.
Hulme would hardly have suited the modern era of jockey-sized drivers with super-sized PR departments. As Young writes: "Denny was an enigma, a composite person who built an image of himself as a taciturn individual and enjoyed his nickname of 'The Bear'
"He could be a grizzly or a Pooh, entirely depending on his mood. He had a way with women that totally belied his bluff manner among men."
The son of war hero Clive Hulme, who won a Victoria Cross for his bravery in World War II, Hulme competed at a time when deaths were not uncommon but nobody dwelt on them.
He was criticised for a ruthless approach in accidents back home involving Laurence Brownlie and Kent Baigent. In contrast, he never got over the accidental drowning of his 21-year-old son, Martin, at a family picnic on Lake Rotoiti when the Hulmes had returned to live in New Zealand.
Young has handed the task of covering the period from 1976 to Hulme's death of a heart attack at Bathurst in 1992 at the age of 56 to Michael Clark, an Auckland car enthusiast. The restless former world champion drove touring cars and trucks and earned a new generation of fans.
Hulme raced in 112 Grand Prix in 10 years of Formula One. He won eight, set seven fastest laps, yet started only one Grand Prix from pole position. He was rookie of the year at the Indianapolis 500 in 1967, won two CanAm championships and scored 22 victories in McLaren CanAm cars.
Forty years ago in his world championship year, he won the Monaco and German Grand Prix and was on the podium in six other rounds. His assessment?
"To get the title in what was only my second full year of Grand Prix racing doesn't necessarily mean I'm the best driver in the world. What it does mean is that I have managed to be consistently quick, to pick up a lot of placings and win a couple of Grand Prix with a reliable car."
Hulme finally gets his due.
* HarperCollins $49.99
