James Hunt is/was my Hero. It was rumoured that often when he raced, he was still pissed from the party the night before and had only got 3 hours sleep.
Some of the best driving I saw last year was the GP Masters. Intrestingly enough, I believe the out of the first six drivers, none had actually ever won a F1 race. But the driving was competitive and there was plenty of overtaking and place swapping. Personally I think this was down to all the cars being basically the same - teams could make tweaks to the set up. So a lot of it was down to driver's skill and not how much money was thrown at R&D.