His first marriage ended in divorce and some friends blamed racing. J. Funk and J. L. The pressures of racing and designing the car took their toll on Donohue. It is strangely rewarding in a way I never thought racing would be for me, personally. Among the most impressive cars in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum is the beautiful blue and yellow No. The driver of the Honda was killed. Sometimes, I would leave early and take my own car to the airport because I didnt want to put up with him. But he always had good equipment, too. The highlight of his entire career was winning the . (Photo: Bob DOlivo / The Enthusiast Network via Getty Images). He was so gentlemanly, he was boring. Le cavalier du diable : Toutes les informations de diffusion, les bandes-annonces, les photos et rediffusions de Le cavalier du diable avec Tl 7 Jours His retirement was short-lived, however, as he was lured back to full-time competitive driving by Penske when he formed a Formula One team, Penske Cars Ltd, to compete in the final two events of the 1974 Formula One World Championship, and to continue competing in 1975 with the new Penske PC1. "Donohue is no angel out there on the track Parnelli Jones", "Donohue, on the Way Out, Views Things From Top; Calendar of Motor Sports", "1965 Sebring 12-Hour Grand Prix of Endurance Race Profile", "1966 24 Hours of Le Mans Results and Competitors", "1967 24 Hours of Le Mans Results and Competitors", "Mark Donohue Named '500' Rookie of Year", "Mark Donohue set Indy speed record in 1972", "1973 Winston Western 500: Donohue Dominates", "Hall of Fame Members (Mark Donohue Jr.)", "Mark Donohue, Sports Cars, Class of 1990", Mark Donohue's IROC and NASCAR stats at racing-reference.info, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mark_Donohue&oldid=1136103335, Brown University School of Engineering alumni, International Motorsports Hall of Fame inductees, SCCA National Championship Runoffs winners, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from September 2012, Articles with unsourced statements from April 2010, Articles with unsourced statements from June 2014, Pages using small with an empty input parameter, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, run as the Daytona 3 Hour Continental (196263), 24 Hours of Daytona (196671/ 1973/ 1975present), This page was last edited on 28 January 2023, at 19:22. In everything he droveeven an Elva Courier and a Cobra, cars he didnt develophe still won. The setup he designed for his car didnt have as much speed as teammate Gary Bettenhausens setup. He took the lot to Lime Rock, Conn., and finished fourth in a sports car race. [2][6], Donohue won the SCCA national championship in an Elva Courier in 1961. Ford had developed a new GT, the Mark IV. In fact, Mark often wasnt the engineer at all. He would greet those who didnt know him with a smile, but he was so focused and obsessed with making the race car go fast, he was distant. Mark Donohue (1937-1975), pictured here with wife Eden and nicknamed "Captain Nice", was an American race driver who is probably best known as the driver of the 1500+ bhp Can-Am Penske Porsche 917-30 and as the 1972 Indianapolis 500 winner in a Team Penske-entered McLaren.Sadly, he perished in an accident during practice for the 1975 Austrian Formula One Grand Prix. So in a televised interview after the incident, race driver Mark Donohue told the story of his horrific practice crash at Road Atlanta with carefully chosen words. We think we've made a major discovery. He was so key in the operation when he was there its something we had to rebuild. 12 and current Alltel decals) at the fall Rockingham, North Carolina, race. Donohue was obsessed with finding any possible advantage through engineering -- and loopholes in the rules. Mark told me, Sometimes you just have to get it done., That was my take, too, says Michael Argetsinger, who has just written a riveting biography called Mark Donohue: Technical Excellence at Speed (David Bull Publishing, $39.95). Racing was Donohues obsession. We brought some technology. When Penske Racing took delivery of a Ferrari 512M, for instance, they immediately fabricated a bigger rear wing. In the 1971 Indianapolis 500, Donohue started second and led 52 of the first 66 laps before breaking a gearbox. Complete Canadian-American Challenge Cup results, Inskip Family History & Competition Engineering staff. [2], At Hansgen's funeral, Roger Penske spoke to Donohue about driving for him. Seeing it in real life when you come into the museum here, I know one thing -- I fit in it really well. During their enormous success in Trans-Am, Penske and Donohue would begin to experiment with their Camaros. Forgot password? It was an epic stomping; he led over 361 miles that day, and in perusing the finishing order Bobby Unser finished fourth while West Series drivers Ray Elder, Jimmy Insolo, Jack McCoy and Richard White, all of whom made regular stops at Riverside, finished third, fifth, sixth and eighth, respectively it was clear this was a race decided by the interlopers, the kind of race we no longer see in modern-day NASCAR, where drivers have been cross-trained and educated on technology and data to the point each race contains 38 different versions of the Donohue prototype. Penske's new Penske Racing complex in Mooresville, North Carolina is decorated with various murals of Donohue and his racing cars, most notably the AMC stock car and the various Porsche prototypes that Donohue drove through his career. The trip to the airport was like the Mille Miglia. We had a polished yellow tile floor in our garage in Gasoline Alley and took everything out at night and cleaned the floor. The key factors behind F1s Premier League-style managerial revolving door, The tangible steps Alpine has taken to meeting its humble F1 2023 targets, The tangible steps Alpine has taken to meeting its humble F1 2023 targets 1968 would be a banner year for Donohue in the Trans-Am series, as he successfully defended his 12 Hours of Sebring victory by partnering with Craig Fisher and driving his Penske Chevrolet Camaro to victory. He did it through sheer force of will. He was the thinking man's driver, maybe because, unlike most of his rivals, he had an Ivy League education and maybe because looking at that cherubic face, which was several years younger than his racescarred body, there was no other way to explain how this kid was winning. Airport would have sent a stock Camaro flopping around. He turned his last race, the first International Race of Champions finalin which top driver from all forms of racing competed into an easy victory Feb. 15, 1974, and then concentrated on his new duties as president of Penske Racing. It meant immediate surgery. The original Penske Racing team included Penske, Donohue, chief mechanic and crew chief Karl Kainhofer. Please try again. You never saw him in an argument with anybody. During his stay at Griffith Mark drove the Griffith-owned Shelby 289 Cobra making his mark on the SCCA circuit. Except I knew it wouldnt last, recalls Penske Racings timer/scorer Judy Stropus. In lieu of flowers, the family has requested that all memorial donations be sent to the Auto Racing Fraternity Foundation, 13539 Northern Boulevard, Flushing, Queens. He was helped by Emerson Fittipaldi, Bob Evans and Hans-Joachim Stuck, who arrived to the scene of the accident and parked their cars. If he didnt test a car before a race, he didnt have his Peanuts security blanket and would fret that his edge was lost.. But his thinking man's approach to racing, while successful on the track, was difficult off. In 1961, Donohue bought the Elva and battled with another young racing star, Peter Revson, for the SCCA divisional championship. He won the Can Am championship in 197, the TransAm title in 1968, 1969 and 1971. They won the race, finished third overall, and went on to win 10 out of 13 races that year. We used to clean our garage out every night, and that was something people didnt understand.. A full season of racing for the 1975 Formula One season was planned. Riverside was over 2.6 miles long and the duration of the race 500 miles meant this particular event was more of an endurance contest. This remains the last time a ringer captured a win in a Cup Series road course race, but the victory took on a far greater meaning in hindsight. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Today, he works for Porsche Cars North America as client relationship manager. Acid-dipping car bodies was prevalent with competing Trans-Am teams also. The book documents his career from his first races to his final full season of racing the year before he was killed. Back to Victory Lane, Every Indy 500 Winner from the Dawn of Time, In search of Team Penske racing legend Mark Donohue. Mark Donohue racked in 59 career wins for Team Penske in several different series. The driver must accept the risks involved, which I did and I spent my time in the hispital as a result., See the article in its original context from. Police have not yet released his identity. The supposition is that a support post from one of the advertising signs caught Donohue's helmet. He was just that way. Mark Donohue was an enigma. On his second lap he approached the Vst-Hgel very fast right-hander at the end of the main straight when, at about 162 mi/h (260 km/h), a rear tyre of his March 751-Ford Cosworth suddenly blew up. A bad week or the dark horse from F1 testing? Both Olvey and Trammell got their start in trackside medical response in similar fashion: Answering a bulletin board call for med students to help out at the Indianapolis 500 - Olvey in about 1969, Trammell in 1972. On August 9, 1975, Donohue drove the 917-30 to a world closed-course speed record at the Talladega Superspeedway in Talladega, Alabama. Search instead in Creative? August 19, 1975 in Graz, Styria, Austria (car accident) Birth Name: Mark Neary Donohue Jr. Mini Bio (1) Mark Donohue was born on March 18, 1937 in Haddon Township, New Jersey, USA. Donohues degree from Brown in Mechanical Engineering got him a job designing filters for air conditioners -- not quite what he had in mind. Donohue is probably best known as the driver of the 1500+ bhp "Can-Am Killer" Porsche 917-30 and as the winner of the Indianapolis 500 in 1972. Choose a Username Available! Instructions on how to reset your password have been sent to your email. He could drive a car in the 24-hour race at Daytona, a Trans-Am Car, an Indy car and a NASCAR car. He was a winner at the 24 Hours of Daytona and in stock cars. He did it at Talladega, Ala., in the turbocharged Porsche he drove to the 1973 CanAm title. It comes up quickly and, at more than 90 degrees, is the slowest corner on this course. 66 McLaren/Offenhauser that Mark Donohue drove to win the 1972 Indy 500. By 1973, the "Captain Nice" nickname he had earned earlier in his career was being supplanted by the nickname "Dark Monohue". Oops! Mark returned [a year later] because he realized he wasnt good at anything else. This was not merely a celebrity autobiography, but a detailed, step-by-step record of the engineering approach he took to getting the absolutely highest performance from every car he drove, always looking for that elusive "unfair advantage". We started with a Lola 4-wheel drive, and in 1971 we got a McLaren. The Ferrari lived up to none of Marks calculations, and he was devastated, Bedard recalls. And given enough time just one more year, maybe he wouldve become Americas first world champion.. And Mark Donohue couldn't live with retirement. Stay close to the outside curbing, brake hard, and turn in . They discovered that using a drag racing trick of dipping a car in an acid bath would eat away small amounts of metal, which in turn made the car incrementally lighter, and allowed it to be driven faster. For Donohue, there was little time to grieve, as his own Le Mans debut was looming. Had there been a Drivers' Championship in place at the time, he would have won three of them (his last in 1971) while driving Camaros in 1968 and 1969, and an AMC Javelin in 1971, all for Roger Penske Racing. Brian Redman drove it once in 1974, and that was it for the car as far as Penske campaigning it. At the Austrian Grand Prix, Donohue's career, along with Roger Penske's Formula One aspirations, took a tragic turn. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. They were embarrassed, and like the streak of success following the 71 Indianapolis 500, they returned to Riverside in 1973 with a heavy chip on their shoulders. Continuing the practice of reducing weight allowed them to place weights of certain sizes strategically in specific locations within the car, thus helping to balance the car while being driven on the limit. On August 9, 1975, Donohue drove the 91730 to a world closed-course speed record at the Talladega Superspeedway in Talladega, Alabama. In 1974, he quit driving and became president of Penske Racing. Mark Donohue and Roger Penske had planned an hard assault to the 1975 Formula 1 Championship, but the season soon turned out to be difficult. That sense of realism often hits Mark Donohues son. Watts.) Its made me realize its an honor to be his son. It became official last September. Mark Donohue spent many late nights in the bungaloo in front of the original Penske garage in Newtown Square, Pa. Marks wife, Sue, raised young David and his older brother Michael. It would have been really fun to watch the two of them because they are so much alike. After the Arab oil embargo in 1973, it led the SCCA, IMSA and other race series to impose fuel limitations on motor sport racing as a whole, which hampered the performance of the 917/30, making it uncompetitive in the Can-Am series. It was August 9, 1975. Painkillers affected his memory, and he began drinking heavily to deal with the pain. There were victories in stockcar racing against Richard Petty, Bobby Allison and the other Southern drivers; in the TransAm series, where three times he captured the season title competing against the best sedans the Detroit factories could produce; in the 24 hours of Daytona, against the best international sports cars endurance pilots, and in the initital Pocono 500 in 1971 against A. J. Foyt, Bobby and Al Unser, Mario Andretti and the other stars from the United States Auto Club championship circuit. Not that Donohues career or his one win in NASCAR needed validation, but IROC has long crystallized what fans thought of the talent in drivers who never outwardly succeeded in the Cup Series. I could see what was coming, he said. who retired from one of the greatest careers in auto racing history at age 36, unretired at 37 and died Tuesday night at 38 of brain injuries suffered in a crash before the Austrian. And my wife gave me permission, so when something like that happens you have to go. Your message has been sent. What controls the frontline in the latest F1 design tech battles, Why Autosport is changing how it ranks F1 drivers from 2023 onwards, Why Autosport is changing how it ranks F1 drivers from 2023 onwards The two drivers disagreed on many aspects of racing and car setup, but as a team were able to muster a fourth-place finish in the endurance classic.[13]. An investigation determined tire failure caused Donohues fatal crash, and the family won a $12 million settlement. Donohue co-drove in the No. Every time David Donohue sees that car, he sees his father. His lone NASCAR race win was just part of his narrative, but that victory another hurdle in auto racing cleared in partnership with Penske helped ignite a flame thats lasted over 50 years across different genres of the sport and in turn elevated the quality and intelligence of American racing. Mark Donohue's Fatal Crash - sterreichring 1975 (42 years ago) Humphrey The Auto Racing Fan 1989 2.38K subscribers Subscribe 54 Save 13K views 5 years ago Notice Age-restricted video. [11] Earlier that year, co-driving with Hansgen, Donohue finished third at the 24 Hours of Daytona and second at the 12 Hours of Sebring. So they fiddled with it in non-meaningful ways, then Mark went back out. He gained 11.5 secondsthe quickest Ferrari in the field and fourth overall.
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