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American interest in F1 teams around 1973/74


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#1 Nathan

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Posted 27 December 2014 - 04:02

American F1 teams are rare, why did three pop up in 1973 and 1974?

 

Shadow (as a US constructor) 3 seasons (1973-1975)

Parnelli 3 seasons (1974-1976)

Penske 3 seasons (1974-1976)



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#2 Rob29

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Posted 27 December 2014 - 08:35

Guess there was more interest around that time? Before that there was Scarab & Eagle.Mario Andetti was world chanp in 1978.USA allo only country to have 3 WCGPs in one season(1982)



#3 arttidesco

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Posted 27 December 2014 - 09:58

As I remember it the 1974 Eagle 74A was also conceived as a dual purpose Formula One / F5000 design, but there were no takers.

 

Maybe Nichols, Penske and Parnelli unwittingly egged each other on.



#4 Allen Brown

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Posted 27 December 2014 - 13:26

I have wondered the same thing.  Both Nichols and VPJ (Parnelli) were egged on by their sponsors so one factor may have been US companies looking to get more International exposure via F1. 

 

The influence of McLaren is also worth exploring.  McLaren had dominated Can-Am (where Nichols was coming from) for years and their M16 design was a huge leap forward in Indy thinking (where Penske and VPJ were coming from).  Maybe finally overcoming McLaren in those two arenas made those teams think they could also beat them in F1. 

 

Although all three teams had sponsor-friendly American drivers to lead their F1 efforts, they were otherwise quite British.  Penske hired a British designer and took over an existing race car factory in Poole.  Shadow hired a British team manager, British driver and British designer and set up in Northampton.  VPJ already had two British designers and ran their F1 team from Norfolk but were the only team to build their car in the US, in Torrance where they had already built three generations of Indy cars.  Engines and transmission were also British of course. 

 

So if you see Penske and Shadow as American F1 teams, you have to ask whether Brabham was then an Australian F1 team and McLaren a New Zealand F1 team. 



#5 HistoryFan

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Posted 27 December 2014 - 13:40

I think when F1 would be much cheaper than now there would be more racing teams from America. F1 was cheap in the 70s.



#6 Rob Miller

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Posted 27 December 2014 - 17:41

Back in the early 1970's you could build an F1 car in your garage. :clap:



#7 RA Historian

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Posted 27 December 2014 - 18:13


 

So if you see Penske and Shadow as American F1 teams, you have to ask whether Brabham was then an Australian F1 team and McLaren a New Zealand F1 team. 

Oh boy, this could start an argument in some circles!



#8 Lee Nicolle

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Posted 27 December 2014 - 22:32

Oh boy, this could start an argument in some circles!

Black Jack did use Aussie developed engines though the cars were built in England. McLaren was a Kiwi based in the UK. Though it appears an international cast working there.



#9 ensign14

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Posted 27 December 2014 - 22:48

There was also Francis McNamara, who built an F3 car a few years before, and was involved in Andretti's March 701, but it seems Interpol stopped his racing activities.  Although as an ex-serviceman who had been sent to Germany he was not the archetypal American entrant.



#10 Jack-the-Lad

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Posted 27 December 2014 - 23:03

Oh boy, this could start an argument in some circles!

I think national identification of F1 teams has been more typically associated with the  country of the  ownership rather than the management or the location of the actual works.  Doubtless someone will come up with some exceptions, but that seems to have been the historical norm. 


Edited by Jack-the-Lad, 27 December 2014 - 23:03.


#11 kayemod

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Posted 27 December 2014 - 23:28

I think national identification of F1 teams has been more typically associated with the country of the  ownership rather than the management or the location of the actual works.  Doubtless someone will come up with some exceptions, but that seems to have been the historical norm. 

 

If you dig deep enough, that's probably somewhere like Lichtenstein these days, with the kind of sums involved. I wonder why we never hear their national anthem after the races though.



#12 Slurp1955

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Posted 28 December 2014 - 05:08

If you dig deep enough, that's probably somewhere like Lichtenstein these days, with the kind of sums involved. I wonder why we never hear their national anthem after the races though.


We do to some degree. They use the same tune as our own British dirge actually, but with the German lyrics "Oben am jungen Rhein"

#13 Rob29

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Posted 28 December 2014 - 08:00

We do to some degree. They use the same tune as our own British dirge actually, but with the German lyrics "Oben am jungen Rhein"

You learn something new here every day! When did a Lichtnstein driver last win a race?



#14 Slurp1955

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Posted 28 December 2014 - 08:10

You learn something new here every day! When did a Lichtnstein driver last win a race?


November 23rd, Abu Dhabi.... Lewis von Hamilton

#15 Tim Murray

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Posted 28 December 2014 - 08:39

When did a Lichtnstein driver last win a race?

Manfred Schurti won a BMW Procar race at AVUS in 1980 - I don't know if there's anything more recent. Rikki von Opel won several F3 races and, as Ensign 14 has pointed out in other threads, if he'd ever won a Grand Prix driving for Ensign or Brabham they would have had to play the same anthem twice on the podium, once as the Liechtenstein anthem for him, and again as the British anthem for the constructor.

#16 BRG

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Posted 28 December 2014 - 11:19

I think national identification of F1 teams has been more typically associated with the  country of the  ownership rather than the management or the location of the actual works.  Doubtless someone will come up with some exceptions, but that seems to have been the historical norm. 

It's not been totally consistent, I think.  No-one considered Walter Wolf Racing as Canadian, whilst no-one considered Penske as British (despite the chassis and engine being built in UK).  And then there was Matra in the Tyrrell days - where they French or British?

 

But in general, we don't consider that Toyota's F1 team was German, or BMW's Swiss, or that Renault's or Honda's teams were British. 



#17 john winfield

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Posted 28 December 2014 - 11:33

It's not been totally consistent, I think.  No-one considered Walter Wolf Racing as Canadian, whilst no-one considered Penske as British (despite the chassis and engine being built in UK).  And then there was Matra in the Tyrrell days - where they French or British?

 

But in general, we don't consider that Toyota's F1 team was German, or BMW's Swiss, or that Renault's or Honda's teams were British. 

I'm not sure but, at the time, I think I did consider Walter Wolf's team as Canadian, even with all the British involvement: Frank W, Peter W etc., but I appreciate your point about inconsistency

Concening Renault in the 2000s, I have a friend who works at Enstone.  I think he and colleagues coped with all the team/ownership/ management changes by thinking of themselves as 'Team Enstone', regardless of the name on the entry list!



#18 Slurp1955

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Posted 28 December 2014 - 15:53

I always thought of Wolf as Canadian, not least because Walter Wolf put Maple Leaf flags on the superb livery of his cars, even the three Lamborghini Countaches he commissioned for road use.

Edited by Slurp1955, 29 December 2014 - 13:06.


#19 D28

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Posted 28 December 2014 - 17:41

Reading the very informative The Unfair Advantage by Mark Donohue, gives a perceptive look into the cars and racing personalities of the era. His comments on his 1971 F1 debut with a McLaren at the Canadian GP give a good summation of the ambivalence most American racers had for F1 at the time. Roger Penske leased a McLaren M19 for the final 2 races and Donohue finished 3rd at Mosport ahead of Denis Hulme in the other car. This temped him to approach Teddy Mayer as to what a driver could expect to earn from a future works drive. The answer of about $100,000 surprised him and caused him to reflect on why he should drop all his other lucrative racing to relocate to Europe for the unknown circumstances of F1 racing. (He considered the Mosport win in the rain as somewhat a fluke). Penske and Donohue earned several 100,000 dollars in 1 day at Indy in 1972. The same comment was expressed by Parnelli Jones when he was offered a F1 tryout by (I believe Colin Chapman). The return on investment and commitment was just not great enough for US teams and sponsors.  The exception to the rule here is Mario Andretti, but he caught the F1 racing bug in his first dozen or so years in Italy. Even he tried to balance USAC and F1 racing in most seasons and was successful in 1978 only with a full commitment to F1.

 

Roger Penske comes across in the book as someone utterly uninterested in racing for 2nd place or worse, he and Donohue were only interested in winning; to trundle around in F1 just to be in the show made no sense to them. I think the same may be said of Vel Miletich and Parnelli Jones. While most of the American teams could have been modestly competitive eventually,  the goal of winning 1 of the titles was just too far down the road for their outlook.



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#20 kayemod

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Posted 28 December 2014 - 19:54

 

 

Roger Penske comes across in the book as someone utterly uninterested in racing for 2nd place or worse, he and Donohue were only interested in winning; to trundle around in F1 just to be in the show made no sense to them. I think the same may be said of Vel Miletich and Parnelli Jones. While most of the American teams could have been modestly competitive eventually,  the goal of winning 1 of the titles was just too far down the road for their outlook.

 

Doesn't this sum up the American attitude, "if we can't win and beat everyone else, we don't want to play"? No matter what the finance behind them, any US effort was going to have to start at the bottom and hopefully, work their way up. Roger Penske was astute enough to realise this, coming out on top is far from easy and it takes time and sustained effort. I'm sure RP could work all this out for himself, given which it's somewhat surprising that he did eventually have a low-key one-car attempt at F1, which apart from one slightly lucky win, didn't really achieve a great deal. It wasn't easy, there were no guarantees of success, and there were easier pickings back home. The impression I got at the time was that the way in which Bruce & Denny cleaned up in CanAm, beating them at what they thought was their own game, shocked the US racing establishment to the core. Of course, Penske won in CanAm in the end, mightily impressively at that, but they needed a lot of European assistance from Porsche to do it.



#21 D28

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Posted 28 December 2014 - 21:13

Doesn't this sum up the American attitude, "if we can't win and beat everyone else, we don't want to play"? No matter what the finance behind them, any US effort was going to have to start at the bottom and hopefully, work their way up. Roger Penske was astute enough to realise this, coming out on top is far from easy and it takes time and sustained effort. I'm sure RP could work all this out for himself, given which it's somewhat surprising that he did eventually have a low-key one-car attempt at F1, which apart from one slightly lucky win, didn't really achieve a great deal. It wasn't easy, there were no guarantees of success, and there were easier pickings back home. The impression I got at the time was that the way in which Bruce & Denny cleaned up in CanAm, beating them at what they thought was their own game, shocked the US racing establishment to the core. Of course, Penske won in CanAm in the end, mightily impressively at that, but they needed a lot of European assistance from Porsche to do it.

Not to be quite so harsh, I would say the people discussed here just did not see F1 and a WC as the ultimate racing goal; public recognition and commercial interests in the US just did not resonate with F1 success. See Phil Hill's experience as an example.

One really has to obsess to want to do F1 and these racers just didn't.

 

Incidently,  the chapter on the Porsche 917-10 and 30 claims a huge amount of development was carried out by Donohue in the Penske shops and in Germany; probably fair to say it was a very successful joint effort.



#22 ensign14

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Posted 28 December 2014 - 21:40

Doesn't this sum up the American attitude, "if we can't win and beat everyone else, we don't want to play"? No matter what the finance behind them, any US effort was going to have to start at the bottom and hopefully, work their way up. Roger Penske was astute enough to realise this, coming out on top is far from easy and it takes time and sustained effort.

 

Well, Penske had done that in F1, and built his way to a Grand Prix winner within a couple of years.  Donohue's book may have come across in a certain way because Donohue - like Phil Hill came across in the Nolan book - seems to have been extremely modest about his achievements, preferring to credit everyone else's hard work in giving him the best equipment.


Edited by ensign14, 28 December 2014 - 21:41.


#23 PCC

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Posted 28 December 2014 - 22:39

Doesn't this sum up the American attitude, "if we can't win and beat everyone else, we don't want to play"?

Do you think that's a uniquely American attitude? Or is it the attitude of anyone successful who ventures into 'foreign' territory? Do you think Chapman and Clark would have kept coming back to Indianapolis if the Lotus had turned out to be a mid-field runner?



#24 kayemod

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Posted 28 December 2014 - 22:51

Not to be quite so harsh, I would say the people discussed here just did not see F1 and a WC as the ultimate racing goal; public recognition and commercial interests in the US just did not resonate with F1 success. See Phil Hill's experience as an example.

One really has to obsess to want to do F1 and these racers just didn't.

 

Incidently,  the chapter on the Porsche 917-10 and 30 claims a huge amount of development was carried out by Donohue in the Penske shops and in Germany; probably fair to say it was a very successful joint effort.

 

I wouldn't disagree with most of that, I was stirring things up by being deliberately provocative, but I do believe there was a good deal of truth in what I posted. Ensign's comment about Penske "building their way to a Grand Prix winner" needs some qualification though, a single rather lucky win, and how many Europeans did they have to employ in order to do that? It wasn't exactly an all-American effort. I'm not decrying the US in any way, given time they're capable of almost anything, but they've never achieved a lot of racing success away from their home ground, and I'm not sure they ever will. Maybe it really is down to what D28 suggested, a simple lack of obsession.