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[h=1]Bob Riley memoir: A book worth the look[/h]

When Bob Riley was growing up in Lafayette, La., he built his first race cars out of junkyards for dirt ovals and only dreamed of racing in Daytona Beach. He first learned about the stock cars racing on the beach from newsreels at the movie house as a teenager. “There was no way I had enough money to go to Daytona,” recalled Riley.
Bob Riley

Now aged 85, Riley’s dreams of racing at Daytona have long since come true. Cars designed by Riley have scored 18 overall and class victories in the Rolex 24. Among those launching the new era of DPi prototypes when this year’s 55[SUP]th[/SUP] Rolex gets the green flag are two new Riley designs – the factory-backed Mazda RT24-P and a Riley Mk. 30 entered by VisitFlorida Racing.


The breakthrough design for Riley was the Coyote driven by A.J. Foyt to his fourth victory in the Indy 500 in 1977. But his first production race car, a Formula Vee, was produced 1965 and won four SCCA National Championships. Over the past five decades, Riley’s cars have been dominant forces in Indy car racing, IMSA and the SCCA’s Trans-Am Series. Working for Crew Chief Larry McReynolds, Riley helped engineer the chassis that carried Davey Allison and Dale Earnhardt, Sr. to victories in the Daytona 500.


Is Riley concerned about his new prototypes going the distance? Yes. And he’s no different than the other designers at Dallara, Onroak or ORCEA – the constructors of the Cadillac, Nissan and ORECA LMP2. They’re all worried about introducing new cars in such a demanding race.
“For many years I thought it should be the 24 minutes of Daytona,” said Riley of his early efforts that came to mechanical woe. (The first Rolex victory by a Riley design came in 1985 with a Roush Racing Mustang.)


This will not be the first prototype introduced by Riley at Daytona. His first Riley Daytona Prototype design, raced by the teams of Chip Ganassi and Wayne Taylor in 2005, did not have windshield wipers – on a weekend where rain was a fixture. “We had not installed wipers,” said Riley. “And wouldn’t you know it? It rained.” The Riley DP later broke Porsche’s record for consecutive victories at Daytona with nine straight.


Riley’s memoir, The Art of Race Car Design, tells the story behind his decades of racing and how a stint in the Air Force introduced him to road racing in Europe and an engineering degree from LSU got him started as a designer.

Early in his career, he worked on the Saturn rockets in New Orleans that eventually took men to the moon and later worked for the Ford Motor Company. There is more information on the book at www.jingrambooks.com, the website of his co-author and longtime racing journalist Jonathan Ingram.