It has been a pretty long time since the last American team won a Formula 1 World Championship race. Indeed, if you were born the day that happened, you would now be coming up to your 42nd birthday.
We all hope that Gene Haas’s team will get up to speed, but secretly we want to see other big guns joining the fight: Penske, Andretti, Ganassi, Hendrick or Gibbs. It is not very likely in the the short term, but you never know. The last time Penske was involved in F1, it was a rather unusual programme…
It was all John Lambert’s fault. He was an British engineer, who designed and even drove racing cars, but his speciality was manufacturing them. He had worked with designer Len Terry at Team Lotus and then went off to Santa Ana in California, where he helped Dan Gurney get his Eagle production up to speed. Then Lambert returned to Britain and decided to set up his own business, to manufacture racing cars. He needed a low-rent facility and, just as Team Lotus had moved up to Norfolk in 1966, and the new March team would soon set up shop in rural Bicester, Lambert found a nice cheap place to rent – on the Creekmore Industrial Estate, on the outskirts of Poole in Dorset.
Dorset is beautiful. It boasts beautiful hills and beaches. The weather is good, the countryside verdant and the towns quaint. It is the land of Thomas Hardy, but Bournemouth (which was then in Hampshire) was a place where old folks went to live out their retirement years. Adjacent Poole was a charming old town with a working port and a large harbour, celebrated as place to go sailing. A lot of the residents were older folk, but not quite as wealthy (in that era) as those in Bournemouth. The one exciting thing about Poole was that it was – discreetly – the home of the Royal Marine commando amphibious training school and the base from where the secret elite Special Boat Service used to operate. Times have changed, the commandos have departed and Poole has become rather fancy, particularly down in the Sandbanks district.
Thanks to John Lambert, Poole would also become a quiet centre of motor racing expertise. Len Terry’s Transatlantic Automotive Consultants, based in Hastings, closed down soon after Lambert opened his business and Terry moved along the coast to Poole and joined Lambert in a new venture, which they called Design Auto.
It was 1967 and they were immediately commissioned to design and produce the M2 Mirage for John Wyer’s J.W. Automotive Engineering Ltd (JWA) – with funding from Gulf Oil. This new 3-litre Group 6 sports car class, powered by a BRM V12 engine, was not a huge success, but it established the business and Terry and Lambert then decided to try their hand at Formula 5000. Design Auto did the design work and they started a new company called Leda Cars to manufacture and sell the cars. It was not a great success and in 1970 Leda was quietly merged into the Malaya Garage Group.
In 1971 New Zealander Graham McRae was enjoying much success in Formula 5000. He won the Tasman Series in a McLaren and went to Europe to compete in the series there. He did a deal to have Leda look after his car and this led to an agreement for him to use a Leda chassis in 1972. That winter the Leda-Chevrolet won McRae another Tasman title and then it was back to Europe, where McRae found support from insurance broker John Heynes to acquire Leda and transform it into McRae Cars Ltd. The Oil Crisis then hit racing and after 18 months McRae put the business up for sale and Roger Penske bought it.
Penske sent his Porsche CanAm team manager Heinz Hofer to head operations and Geoff Ferris was hired to design a Formula 1 car with Karl Kainhofer, Penske’s engine builder, joining the team later. The Poole-built Penske PC1 was ready for the last two races of the World Championship in 1974, with Mark Donohue doing the driving and backing from First National City Travellers Checks, a very prestigious US bank, which was looking to use Formula 1 to expand its business around the world.
In 1975 the team continued to develop the PC1 with Donohue driving, but then switched to a less troublesome March 751. Then in Austria Donohue suffered a tyre failure and crashed heavily, suffering head injuries that led to his death a couple of days later. It was a shocking blow, but the team kept moving, hiring Ulsterman John Watson and building a new PC4 for the 1976. That summer, a year after Donohue’s death “Wattie” won the Austrian Grand Prix. Despite the promise shown, Penske was a businessman and opted to shut down the operation at the end of the year, selling the equipment to German industrialist Günter Schmid for his new ATS team. One can only wonder what might have happened if Penske had gone on, but he was never a dreamer – and is a billionaire as a result.
His Indycar team was based in Reading, Pennsylvania, and he argued that the 2,500 miles to California, where many components had to be sourced, was not much different to the 3,500 miles from Reading to Poole, which also gave him access to the specialised skills of Britain’s motorsport cluster. He kept the Poole operation going and the first Penske Indycar – the PC5 – was built there in 1977. Penske chassis built in Poole went on to win 82 Indycar races and seven Indy 500s. The arrangements continued until 1999 when the PC27B became the last car to be produced in England. The team switched to Reynard chassis in 2000, although Penske kept the factory busy until 2006., when it was shut down and the facility sold.
joeblogsf1 
Didnt a Moto GP team move in?
There a sub-con engineering company in there now. I went round the factory quite a few years ago (maybe 10) not long after that company moved in and half the factory including what was the Penske drawing office was still as it must of been the day Penske moved out.
That’s all gone now as has “low cost” factory rents in Dorset….
I recall first becoming aware of the Penske operation in Poole as a teenager from reading news stories in Autosport magazine. My initial reaction was, “Poole? There must be a Poole in the USA”, then the penny dropped, the factory WAS in Dorset, England.
Thoroughly enjoying your facts post Joe, certainly filling in for the lack of motorsport other than WRC at this time of year. Thank you.
Thank you Jo, as always an article that provides great insight. Having started with Penske the day the first PC1 was sent to the USA I was part of that tiny group at Creekmoor but was unaware of the background prior to McRae selling Roger the facility. When Team Penske won the Austrian GP there were only a total of 12 staff for the entire manufacturing and race team. Penske finished fifth in the Word Championship, beating Brabham, and would have beaten Lotus for fourth had the gearbox not failed whilst fighting Hunt for the lead at the Dutch GP.
The reason Roger stopped racing in F1 was because his business empire in the USA was growing.When I started with the organisation in ’74 Roger had approx 100 employees in the USA and UK with a turnover of approx £100M. When I retired in 2009 after having sold the Penske Cars assets the Corporation (which includes the racing Teams) was over 46,000 employees worldwide with a turnover of over $19Billion. In the early days RP travelled by Commercial airlines and he just did not have the time to attend the Grand Prix so he decided to focus upon Indy cars. Today Team Penske, now located in a Million sq ft facility in Mooresville NC, operates four teams in the USA and one in Australia. Between them they have 85 races on their calendar and Roger will attend over 70% of them, often two races in a day if Day/Night applies. His Corporate Jets (5) are amongst the most used in the USA.
To add a little more detail to the achievements of Penske Cars, Poole, between 1974 to 2006 they designed, built or developed cars for Team Penske that won 12 Championships, 13 Indy 500 victories and won 111 races. The Championship s and Indy 500 wins do include the PC 19 built for Team Patrick and driven by Emerson Fittipaldi before he joined Penske.
Roger was very pragmatic. His sole purpose to go racing was to win and through those victories grow his businesses …the largest Car dealerships in the USA (and now the UK), Penske Truck Leasing etc…., and if we at Penske Cars were not getting the job done he would purchase a car from the manufacturer who was beating us. Very hard to take at the time, but we very quickly turned this to an advantage. In the case of the March 751 this quickly became the PC3, and in 1984 we used the March chassis, in 2000-2 the Reynard. In all cases after the initial purchase of a complete car thereafter only the Tub was used, whilst everything else on the cars (Transmission, bodywork, wings, suspension etc) was developed and produced by Penske Cars. Therefore it is not unreasonable to take the credit for the victories as the cars bore little resemblance to the original. Eventually it was no longer cost effective to design/build cars for Team Penske as the one make Indy car series restricted any development or manufacture of parts.
Looking ahead there appears to be very little attraction for Roger Penske to return to F1 although we did flirt with, and cos, the idea in the late 90s. Now that he has an IMSA Team with the Honda Accura Daytona Prototype cars Roger may be able to fulfil a desire to one day return to Le Mans!
Where did Nigel Bennett fit in ?
Nigel Bennett joined Penske Cars in 1987 when they were struggling to produce a competitive car and designed the PC17 through PC26 cars – that is five Indy 500 winners and three CART championship winners in a nine season span. He “retired” at the end of 1996 but kept a toe in racing by acting as a consultant for G-Force while also designing sailing yachts. He is still in great form. He and Nick Goozee were the key guys at Penske Cars during CART’s golden period.
Very interesting insight there, thanks Nick.
The Captain’s interests now extend to New Zealand and Australia as well these days, for those of Joe’s readers who were not aware.
Nick, no intention of nit-picking your neatly-detailed, informative post but being detail-oriented myself (and not having read all the other responses to Joe’s latest as I’m way behind catching up on his flurry of posts) in 2018 Team Penske — using your list and ASSuming you meant RP’s IndyCar, IMSA Prototype, NASCAR Cup, NASCAR Xfinity & Supercar programs — has no less than 116 worldwide races on their schedules… Obviously I’m not gonna speculate on what percentage he’ll attend but I can pleasantly confirm the guy seems to be everywhere — both literally and figuratively
Didn’t that win in Austria cost John Watson his beard?
It did indeed cost Wattie his beard, Mr Larrington, and on the day after that Austrian GP the newly-appointed editor of Autosport, Quentin Spurring, had the presence of mind to send a photographer (David ‘Muggsie’ Winter, I think) to get a shot of the freshly-shaven victor for Thursday’s edition of the magazine. Scoop!
‘The Captain’ had a thing about beards, and had asked Wattie to cut it off when they agreed terms. The gentlemanly compromise was that it would go when Penske had a car that was quick enough to win a GP. Honour was thus served on both sides. It was quite a revelation, too, because Wattie and the beard had been together since he had started his career in an Austin-Healey Sprite on those murderously dangerous road circuits in his native Ulster, and nobody outside his family had any idea of what the fizzog looked like without the whiskers.
I had first met Wattie, even before I joined Motoring News in March 1968, when we were introduced by my soon-to-be-boss Andrew Marriott. As readers of GP+ will know, Wattie used to bunk down in various flats in north London which A.R.M. and I shared as our careers progressed. He kept a military-style camp bed behind our sofa.
As a consequence of the friendship that had developed, I became a big Wattie fan and even felt I had a bit of a share in his success. Thus it was that later in the week of the Austrian victory I invited myself down to his home in Bognor Regis to conduct an interview for ‘Motor’ magazine.
After the chat, I was invited to listen to some music on my chum’s impressive hi-fi set-up. He was already a man of impeccable tastes (including food, wine and jazz), so I guessed I was in for something good as he flipped through his collection of LPs (ask your dad). He picked out some of the work of Steely Dan, a duo of iconoclastic musicians who cunningly disguised their fanatical jazz chops by using guitars and vocals which masqueraded as rock ‘n roll.
To this day, hardly any trip in the car goes by without me slipping something by the Dan into my CD player. The compositions are irresistible and the performances perfection. I’m hoping someone will play them at my funeral. Sigh …
Mike
I witnessed that Austrian GP as a callow 20 year old on my first big overseas trip from Australia which included the British and German GPs that was quite a race even if Ferrari didn’t show. My one regret of that weekend is that while I was able to get a table to myself at the same restaurant as a number of the F1 teams used along with such notables as Denis Jenkinson and Alan Henry I was too shy to introduce myself to them. Nevertheless it was interesting to hear a certain high profile individual discussing the merits of a certain Austrian driver who would sign for his team just over 12 months later !!! Mike by the way do you know the story behind the Steely Dan name. I agree great music
Though you might not wish anyone to ask what Steely Dan were named after!
Come on, we’re all grownups here. The two musical geniuses who founded the band were Donald Fagen and Walter Becker (RIP) and they first got together as students at Bard University in upper New York state, where they listened to a lot of jazz and read disruptive literature.
One of their favourite authors was William S Burroughs, whose (almost unreadable) novel ‘Naked Lunch’ features a giant steam-powered strap-on dildo which went by the name of ‘Steely Dan III of Yokohama.’
When asked by a record company executive for the name of their band, Fagen and Becker mischievously offered ‘Steely Dan.’ Regrettably, none of this has anything to do with Penske, Wattie or motor racing. But you did ask …
Wattie recently did a podcast for MotorSport magazine in which he suggested that he was looking for an excuse to get rid of the beard anyway. He did say that Roger didn’t recognise him at breakfast the next morning.
Hamworthy Engineering was established in Poole in 1914 and continues to this day to design and build specialised combustion equipment there. I imagine that much Hamworthy expertise found its way directly or indirectly into the various Poole based motor racing activities you describe.
I was going to suggest a “Fascinating F1 Fact” on Nick Goozee´s racing life, one time, but seems like he just left the building!
Penske does seem to be a remarkable man who creates great loyalty in people.
With all these familiar place names, had Reading been instead in Berks UK one could have been looking for a Renault connection, as their UK HQ was then in Rose Kiln Lane. (It later moved to Western Avenue W3, then to Swindon with a unique architectural configuration and the biggest (back then) auto-crane system in Europe. Parts of a James Bond film were shot in the warehouse) The building drew visiting sudents of architeecture for many years)
3500 miles from Reading to Poole? Well, that explains my last train journey.
“Beast: The Top Secret Ilmor-Penske…” is a great read from both a motorsports point of view that is full of trivia (Concorde flights to get parts over on a daily basis), but also from a business point of view. What was “The Captain” doing on the night of the victory? Calling up all of the key people and thanking them for their work. How did he convince the suppliers to pull out all the stops? By paying the bills on or before schedule and having such a close relationship that they’d kept the champagne corks hanging from the ceiling from previous celebrations, he didn’t need to convince them.
Small correction. The Royal Marines still have a base in Poole (called RM Poole) and the SBS is still based there.
I don’t think so. I did look it up and they are based in Devon along with the amphibious training base.
The Sea Cadets Corps, which has an affiliation to the Royal Marines, has a base in Poole but I think that is all that’s active now.
I went to Poole in my school days. Learned how to do amphibious landings, did that assault courses and shot in their shooting range that used film and some kind of rubber screen which closed up after a bullet had passed through. Before the age of laser technology!
I can’t say why I know, but SBS are definitely based in Poole – in Hamworthy Barracks. Its not a secret.
I can’t find anywhere on line that says they’re based in Plymouth…..
Maybe the Poole thing is a hoax – but I don’t think so.
Who said anything about Plymouth?
Sorry – meant Devon.
Must have been recently that they moved to Devon but the very worthy RNLI are headquartered there.
Shouldn’t Shadow be considered an American team?
Very interesting, but you left me with the question of HOW did Bournemouth get moved out of Hampshire?
Don’t know but it did!
It happened in 1974. Poole/Bournemouth/Christchurch are 3 towns that make one large conurbation. Poole always been in Dorset while Bournemouth and Christchurch were historically always in Hampshire.
It was decided to move Bournemouth and Christchurch into Dorset. Partly as Dorset had no large urban areas and also having the 3 towns in the same county would help with administration of them.
I am also sure the desire was to turn the 3 towns into a large city of nearly half a million people but those debates are still going on 44 years later.
When they realigned the counties, maybe 40 odd years ago creating one or two new ones, Avon and the imaginatively named West Midlands etc the boundary was moved from between Bournemouth and Poole to its present position so my birth certificate gives some foreign countries a few questions.
I really appreciate that someone like Nick Goozee is able to contribute his thoughts to (yet) another well-thought out and well researched article.
(Although one does suspect that for Mr. Joe, the research was done long ago and it is merely just “memory” that he taps into when sharing this kind of great read!)
i am proud to have been a friend of Len Terry for over 30 years. at one time i had 5 of his cars in my garage. 2 MK4 terriers (formula Junior), a MK6 (sports racer), a Mk2 (1172 car now used on the road), LT25 Leda F5000. other than that i previously raced a Lotus 17 (basically a Terry car) and i had at one time 2/3 of the Leda LT20. with 5 of Terry’s creations in my garage at one time i was certainly the world’s largest collector of Len Terry cars. i still have the Mk2 for road use.
to the 1975 Austrian GP, a very sad day when Mark was killed, i was there as a journalist/photographer
There are a lot of those big ants on Brownsea Island. That’s a little off topic, I know.
Site of my first job in F1, as go-fer and tea boy on the Penske F1 team in 1975. Great to see Nick Goozee weighing in. Gordon Kirby’s wonderful biography of Karl Kainhofer, ‘Penske’s Maestro’, was published last year and is a great read.
Wow, you sure get some heavy hitters here Joe!!!!!! Thanks to all of you for the amazing stories and fascinating history lessons.
I was at the 1982 Detroit GP, having gotten my brother, a well known DJ in Seattle, to wrangle press passes for me. I was in the press area when a British gent asked me who I favored. ‘John Watson’ was my immediate reply. A sharp look of dismissal was projected at this Yank, but Watson proceeded to put on a great show, much to my enjoyment. I believe even Lauda was impressed.
2006 was also the year shut down its Pennsylvania race shop, ironically because of a massive flood in that area. Because of the NASCAR operations in Mooresville, North Carolina (Charlotte area), Penske decided the entire race operations would move solely to Mooresville. Today, Penske’s Mooresville factory holds three NASCAR teams, three INDYCAR teams, and two IMSA DPi teams.
When RP first bought the land next to the Schuykill river in Reading PA in the early 70s it was under flood water, so he got it at a knock down price. Penske lore has it that Roger and his Chief Engineer Don Cox were on the Penn Street bridge looking down at the land, and Penske was all excited. Cox was saying “…but Roger, it’s under water!”. RP would have none of it: “It’s a hundred year flood! It’s not going to happen again”. Ironically the flood which finished off the old race shop happened just weeks before the team was due to move to Mooresville (the Porsche ALMS team had already moved). Team members were at a wedding reception when they heard of the impending flood, and rushed to the ‘shop to lift as much as they could out of harm’s way, but the damage was substantial and the building was basically wrecked.
As an addendum to Jo’s excellent insight and Nigel Beresford’s valuable additions there is one un-sung hero in the history of Penske Cars and that is Designer Geoff Ferris, pathologically shy and humble to a fault he was almost single handedly responsible for the cars that won a Grand Prix, 6 USAC Championships, 2 Indy 500s and 32 race wins.
Long before the advent of CadCam Geoff drew almost every part of the cars between PC1 to PC12, and without the aid of a wind tunnel, until a very basic model was produced for the PC11, he created all the body shapes for some iconic cars, specifically the PC4, PC6 and PC10. He, together with John Barnard and Colin Chapman pioneered group effects, often having to resort to the crudest of processes, but almost without exception his cars were beautiful. Apart from being the Chief Designer for nearly ten years Geoff attended every test and every race for in those days there were no such thing as a ‘Race Engineer’. Geoff worked directly with Mark Donohue, John Watson, Tom Sneva, Rick Mears, Bobby and Al Unser and Mario Andretti. he was also responsible for the PC 5 that was the first car to break the 200mph lap at Indianapolis in 1977. From 1980 to 1993 Geoff was also general Manager of Penske Cars.
When replaced by Alan Jenkins in 1985 (through sheer fatigue) Geoff continued as Senior Designer, also working with Nigel Bennett, and single handedly (working with Xtrac) he designed all the Penske gearboxes from PC15 to PC26. He retired in 2002.
Geoff receives very little recognition or acknowledgement for his amazing achievements, certainly one of the great race car designers pre computer age.
I was at the Austrian GP that year on a Page and Moy tour lead by the indefatigable Linsey Swainston, her first racing tour. Despite it being hot and sunny back home, Austria had turned out wet for the most part but race day was glorious. I was actually disappointed by Wattie’s win as I was rooting for the Lotus of Gunnar Nilsson but did win some beers on the sweep we had on the tour coach. I’ve still got some photos of the day in a draw somewhere. Roger is just incredible. He has so much energy and drive and enthusiasm for racing and it doesn’t seem to diminish as he gets older. When working as Gil de Ferran’s engine engineer we were in Roger’s coach talking through pre-race strategy. As usual, he had TVs on showing coverage of the NASCAR race his cars were running in and Roger stopped the meeting to rewind so we all could see an passing move he liked. And it was his car being passed! He just appreciated the manoeuver.
The mechanics were a happy bunch when they got that first Reynard. Mainly because they got all the parts in one go and on-time! The advantages of buying rather than building your car.
Very interesting read about the history of the Penke factory at Hamworthy. RP is a share holder of Ilmor who produced The Beast and now produce the very succesful Indycar V6 twin turbo for Chevrolet.
Saw Nick Gozee on stage at the Tivoli with Murray Walker, Tom Watson, and man from Maclaren whose name escapes me.On stage werw a Maclaren f1 car and Penske indy car.Worked on building their first unit at creekmoor,they then movedto upton.Also built their unit,had a conducted tour when finished,great screcy.Seem to remember one of the racing managers was killed on Chichester, by pass.
I worked for a small grinding company PPG Grinding on the Upton Ind’ estate just down the road from Penske’s and did all of their components that needed grinding ie; selector rods, axles even down to a mod’ to the wheel nut socket. Also remember helping with the surface grinding to refurbish the stainless steel letters to Roger Penske,s boat. Always felt quite proud when the team did well knowing I’d played a small part.