RACER’s Favorite Racecars series continues with IndyCar’s president of operations and competition.
Derrick Walker was chief mechanic for the Brabham Formula 1 team from 1970 to ’75, before moving to Penske in ’76. When Roger Penske withdrew his team from F1, Walker stayed on with Penske Cars in Poole in the UK for three years, before crossing the Atlantic to become Team Penske’s vp of racing for 10 seasons.
When Porsche’s Indy car team lost its talisman, Al Holbert, in a plane crash in 1989, Walker became team manager, and when the German marque quit at the end of 1990, Derrick bought the assets and formed Walker Racing.
Down the years, the luminaries he employed included Gil de Ferran, Willy T. Ribbs, Christian Fittipaldi, Scott Goodyear, Bryan Herta, Robby Gordon, Alex Tagliani, Will Power, Simon Pagenaud, Sarah Fisher and Mike Groff.
As well as running the Falken Tire Porsche sportscar team, Walker was team manager for Ed Carpenter Racing, before taking his current role in IndyCar last year.
Derrick sent us 10 submissions for his favorite racecars….well, make that 10 + 1, the extra car being his own 1965 Lotus 7 (RIGHT) that he’s restoring during his non-existent spare time.
Walker’s 10 “proper” choices come from an era in which he first became fascinated by the sport, and then include cars he actually got a chance to work on…
TOP An Austin-Healey Sprite, but not as most of us know it. Several streamlined-bodied versions were built with alloy panels, and despite being blessed with just 110hp, could reputedly hit 150mph on the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans. Here in ’63, the Sprite 1100 of John Whitmore and Bob Olthoff is seen ahead of the Ferrari 250 GTO that eventually finished second. LAT photo
BELOW The Lotus 33, says Walker, is just a personal favorite. A development of the Lotus 25 which took Jimmy Clark to the 1963 Formula 1 World Championship, the 33 made its debut in the middle of the ’64 season, where it’s seen here at Zeltweg. Initially it wasn’t reliable, but by ’65, Clark won six of the 10 races and earned his second title. He missed the Monaco Grand Prix, though: he was at Indianapolis winning the “500”… LAT photo
TOP When Jimmy Clark first tried the Maurice Philippe-designed Lotus 56, he declared, “I’ve just driven the car that will win the Indy 500.” He was so nearly right. The 56 was powered by a modified version of the gas turbine unit first seen at the Brickyard in 1967 in the STP-Paxton Turbocar, which came just a few miles short of delivering Parnelli Jones his second “500” victory. For 1968, USAC penalized the turbine units to better equate them to conventional engines (you thought Balance of Performance regulations were new?) but the Lotus 56 compensated for the reduced power with extremely reduced frontal area compared with the Jones’ “Silent Sam” of a year earlier.
Sadly, Clark wouldn’t get to race the car as he was killed in a Formula 2 race at Hockenheim in April, and in May, more tragedy struck the Lotus team when Jimmy’s replacement, Mike Spence, hit the wall at the Speedway during practice with the 56. Joe Leonard (pictured), Graham Hill and Art Pollard lined up the remaining three Lotus 56s in first, second and 11th, and Leonard was leading when on the 191st of the 200 laps, a fuel pump shaft failed. IMS photo
BELOW Lotus owner Colin Chapman was rarely a man to let things lie, so when turbine engines were outlawed by USAC, he developed the Lotus 56 into the 56B for Formula 1 application. Had every 1971 race been run in the wet, it might have been a success: as in its Indy car form, the 56B was four-wheel-drive and in wet practice for a non-championship F1 race at Brands Hatch (pictured) lead driver Emerson Fittipaldi was way faster than the opposition. But at a time when F1 cars did not refuel, the weight of an entire race-worth of fuel rendered the 56B uncompetitive. Its one World Championship start came at Monza, when Emmo drove home eighth. LAT photo
TOP Well, Walker wasn’t going to get any argument from this author for selecting the lovely Ferrari 512S, but Derrick’s reasons go beyond the aesthetic: he worked on one at the Ferrari factory. Outpointed in the record books by Porsche’s 908s and 917s, the 512 also lives in the shadow of its successor, the 312PB which Jacky Ickx and Mario Andretti frequently drove to glory in 1972. But Andretti (512S) and Mark Donohue in a Penske-run 512M have also helped ensure this beauty got recognition for more than just its looks. Pictured is Jackie Oliver at Brands Hatch in 1970. LAT photo
BELOW Following the huge success of the McLaren M6A of 1967, which won five of the six races that year, the McLaren M8 continued this kind of dominance over the next four years, in A, B, D and F spec. In fact, of the 43 Can-Am races run from the start of ’67 to the end of ’71, a McLaren car won 38 of them! Bruce McLaren won the championship in ’67 and ’69, teammate Denny Hulme took honors in ’68 and ’70 and, following the death of Bruce, his replacement Peter Revson won the ’71 championship. Pictured is Hulme heading to victory at Watkins Glen in 1970, driving the M8D. Derrick Walker fell in love with McLaren’s gorgeous M8s while employed by Trojan-Tauranac Racing, a technical partner of McLaren. LAT photo
TOP While the Gold Leaf colors of 1970 and ’71 may not be to everyone’s tastes, the actual lines of the Lotus 72 were never purer than in 1970, when Jochen Rindt drove it to four consecutive victories and became champion, albeit posthumously. Walker has chosen it because “I was working at Brabham at the time, and this Lotus just moved the game on, overninght,” he says. “Suddenly, every other car was obsolete. I mean, we just couldn’t beat it except by reliability, so I should have hated the very sight of a Lotus 72! but actually I couldn’t help loving the way it looked. A real masterpiece, I think.” In this picture, Rindt was making the car’s World Championship debut in Spain, and although the result was a DNF, he eventually appreciated that the car would become unstoppable… LAT photo
BELOW With Ron Tauranac having taken over the Brabham squad from Sir Jack at the end of 1969, Brabham became a little more Lotus-like in that the man running the team was also the chief designer. The Brabham BT33 of 1970 had been very much rooted in the Lotus 49 style – cigar tube with wings attached – but the Brabham BT34 of 1971 was a far more ambitious project in response to the Lotus 72. The reason for its characteristic “Lobster-claw” front wings was that they contained the radiators, while between them was an adjustable front wing.
“The BT34 wasn’t a very good car,” says Walker, “and it only scored a few points for us but it was very weird and interesting to work on and there was only one built. Graham Hill scored his final F1 win in it [the non-championship International Trophy at Silverstone in ’71] and then Carlos Reutemann drove it in his first-ever Grand Prix [Argentina ’72] and put it on pole position in front of Peron! That was a day to remember.…”
Pictured is Hill in the BT34 in the ’71 Race of Champions at Brands Hatch. LAT photo
ABOVE Gordon Murray’s Brabham BT44 design was a modified version of the BT42 of 1973, but whereas the earlier car had strung several points finishes together without ever being a pace-setter, the BT44 had more lows but substantially higher highs, with Carlos Reutemann (pictured) putting together three wins in 1974. The last, at Watkins Glen, was particularly sweet as it was part of a Brabham 1-2, with Carlos Pace following him past the checkered flag. The sharply sloped sidepods were very advanced for the era, and Murray even experimented with ground effects with this car and its follow-up, the BT44B which would score two more wins for the team in ’75. “Clean cars, nice lines and Gordon was always a forward-thinker,” says Walker. “I worked on several of these and whenever I stood back and looked at one, I’d realize that old Gordon [Murray] wasn’t just a smart designer: he also had a good eye for art.” LAT photo
BELOW It was very typical of Roger Penske that when his PC1 Formula 1 car wasn’t working in 1975, he switched to the March 751. It was a move he wasn’t afraid of making in the ’80s and ’90s in Indy car racing in any year when his home-grown cars weren’t up to the job. Sadly, the ’75 season was marred by the death of RP’s close friend and long-time driver Mark Donohue when a tire let go at the Osterreichring, but the team soldiered on into ’76, with John Watson as driver.
Geoff Ferris penned the PC3 which initially improved the team’s form, “Wattie” qualifiying third and finishing fifth in South Africa. But it was Ferris’ elegant Penske PC4 that really brought the breakthrough, with Watson scoring podium finishes at Paul Ricard and Brands Hatch, followed by a win at – of all places – the Osterreichring.
Penske withdrew from Formula 1 at year’s end, having enjoyed and endured the ultimate in both pleasure and pain in just two seasons of grand prix racing. LAT photo
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