In Grand Prix racing, Phillippe had penned the Lotus 72, the elegant Cosworth-powered black beauty known as the John Player Special, that was as fast as it was easy on the eyes and brought World Championships to Team Lotus in 19.īy the early 1970's, Jones and his business partner, Vel Miletich, had formed a broad-based race team called "Vel's Parnelli Jones Racing" and one of their cars, a "VPJ Colt" called the "Johnny Lightning Special" won the Indy 500 in 19, driven by Al Unser Sr. Indeed, had Jim Clark not been killed at Hockenheim in April 1968, Jones and Clark were to be matched as teammates in the 1968 Indianapolis 500 in a twin turbines team run as a joint venture by STP and Team Lotus.ĭuring the Lotus turbine project, Jones got to know the work of one of Chapman's designers, Maurice Phillippe, a brilliant English aerodynamicist, who had designed the wedge-shaped Indianapolis turbine cars, the Lotus 56. And yet it happened because of the strange confluence of people he met during his career at another famous racetrack - the Indianapolis Motor Speedway - where Parnelli Jones won the 1963 Indianapolis 500 in a front-engined Offy roadster, narrowly beating back the challenge from the rear-engined Lotus-Ford driven by his Scottish rival, Jim Clark.Īlthough representing a completely different racing tradition, oval track racer Jones had a lot of respect for Team Lotus and the "funny cars" Clark and Colin Chapman brought to Indianapolis that ultimately revolutionized Indycar racing. Parnelli Jones probably never dreamed when he was racing hot rods and jalopies in local race meets as a youth in Torrance, California that sleek Grand Prix cars bearing his name would someday challenge the best that Europe had to offer on racetracks around the world with glamorous-sounding names like Monaco, Buenos Aires, Anderstorp, Kyalami, Montjuich Park, Nurburgring, Monza and Zandvoort.
In a two-part feature, Thomas O'Keefe looks at the reasons for this anomaly in his in-depth history of the last team, and the characters behind it, from those shores to competitively take the challenge to the Europeans. Formula One is the pinnacle of motor racing worldwide, and yet no North American team has successfully competed in the championship for decades.
0 kommentar(er)
