From the archive: Robin Miller on Parnelli Jones

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emailBy Robin Miller | June 5, 2024 9:36 AM ET

Of Parnelli Jones’s many, many fans, few were bigger than the late Robin Miller, who famously named him among his ‘Mount Rushmore’ alongside A.J. Foyt, Bobby Unser and Dan Gurney. Jones died on June 4 at the age of 90, and as we salute Jones’s life and extraordinary career, it seems fitting to give Miller the final word on one of the all-time greats.

Winning Indianapolis one time and five other Champ Car races in eight years are hardly Hall of Fame statistics, but numbers never did justice to Rufus Parnelli Jones. The 1963 Indy 500 winner is regarded as one of the best and most versatile drivers ever – by rivals, chief mechanics and just about anyone lucky enough to watch him in a midget sprinter, roadster, dirt car, sports car, stock car, Trans Am or at Baja.

He won in every category except Formula 1, where he never competed but turned down Colin Chapman’s offer to be the team’s B driver. Rufus thrived and survived in open wheel racing’s deadliest era, and never spent one night in the hospital. In his seven starts at Indianapolis, he led 492 laps and could have easily won five of them with a little bit of luck. A.J. Watson said he was the best that ever drove at Indy and Jones’ performances make a pretty good argument.

He’s one of those legends that don’t need a last name: A.J., Mario and Parnelli.

 

IndyCar: Robin Miller on Parnelli Jones

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Winning Indianapolis one time and five other Champ Car races in eight years are hardly Hall of Fame statistics but numbers never did justice to Rufus Parnelli Jones. …

 

@doctorgarbonzo2525

Parnelli, pretty much retired from driving, He got nearly a $100,000 to drive the 1967 STP Turbine for Granatelli, On the 1st lap After passing Pole sitter Mario Andretti in the Back stretch, Mario gave him the Finger,

 

Parnelli Jones, 2024

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emailBy David Malsher-Lopez | June 4, 2024 6:04 PM ET

One of the toughest, fastest, most determined and versatile drivers to ever grace motorsport has left us, aged 90. Rufus Parnell Jones, born in Texarkana, Ark., in 1933, died of natural causes on June 4, in Torrance, Calif., the city where he had lived since he was seven years old.

How significant a figure was the man we knew as Parnelli Jones? The late, great Robin Miller said it best: U.S. motorsport’s Mount Rushmore would feature A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, Dan Gurney and Parnelli. And there’s little point in disputing that because he was right.

Parnelli signified speed. Just as overenthusiastic drivers in the U.K. in the ’60s would be asked by admonishing police officers, “Who do you think you are? Stirling Moss?” so traffic cops on this side of the Atlantic would compare a speeding driver unfavorably with Parnelli Jones. And inevitably, there came the fateful day when the man himself was stopped, and he was able to reply, “As a matter of fact, I am Parnelli Jones.” That would become the title of his excellent biography with journalist Bones Bourcier.

Yet the “Jones” part became superfluous: he was among those elite sports stars – Nuvolari, Pele, Kobe, Shaq, Fangio – who required only one name for everyone to know the subject of the conversation. There was only one Parnelli.

How he attained this unusual (unique?) name is tortuous, but has its roots in the not uncommon desire for a young driver to fudge his age. Jones’ mother had named him Rufus Parnell after a local judge whom she respected, but the name Rufus Jones would have been rare enough to ring a bell with potential visitors to his local track in Gardena, just five miles from Torrance. It would therefore have been easy for officials to trace his age and learn he was 17 – a year younger than the legal age to compete.

What to do? A high school friend, Billy Calder, came up with the solution. He had nicknamed him “Parnellie,” fusing his middle name with the first name of Nellie, a girl who was rather keen on our handsome hero, and one day Billy painted “Parnellie” on the door of Jones’s 1934 Ford jalopy. The final “e” was eventually dropped; the remainder stuck. Billy couldn’t have imagined that his friend’s memorable new alias would go on to become an iconic name.
Parnelli got his start in local bullrings and never lost his enthusiasm, or success, on short tracks.

In jalopies, Jones was a badass, scoring around 100 wins across SoCal, and he was more than ready to progress to NASCAR’s Pacific Coast Late Model Series, where he accrued 15 wins. In fact, West Coast stockers alone would eventually bring him 22 triumphs, and this form brought him to the attention of team owner Vel Miletich in 1956. Together they decided to enter NASCAR Cup at Darlington Raceway in 1958, and despite starting 44th, Parnelli managed to lead a couple of laps before suffering engine failure.

Progressing to IMCA sprint cars for 1959, Jones made an impression with fifth in the championship despite missing several rounds in the first half of the season. The aggression required in such powerful open-wheelers suited his style, although in truth, he could be quick in anything, either by taming a car’s manners to follow his will or by adapting his inputs to suit the car. The net result was that he won the USAC Midwest Sprint Car title in 1960, and followed it up with USAC’s National title in ’61 and ’62. In fact, he was simply brilliant in sprint cars, eventually ending his career with 25 Feature wins to go with his 25 triumphs in midgets.

By then, he had joined the Indy (Champ) car fray and in his ninth race at the top level, at California State Fairgrounds in Sacramento in 1960, he snagged a runner-up finish. But that was just the gravy: it was his simultaneous Midwest Sprint Car crown that had caught the eye of promoter J.C. Agajanian, who became desperate to get this phenomenon on the grid at Indy. Aggie’s judgment and anticipation of greatness proved faultless.

Only a year earlier, Jim Hurtubise had – as a rookie – set the Brickyard’s new one-lap benchmark of 149.601mph during a four-lap qualifying run that made him the fastest in the field. (Unfortunately he had achieved this on the fourth day of time trials, so his run made him eligible only for 23rd on the grid.) “Herk” then used this platform like a latter-day John the Baptist, warning anyone who would listen that an even quicker driver would be among them soon, namely, his sprint car rival Parnelli Jones. Hurtubise, like Agajanian, was spot on: P.J. became the man to beat at IMS.

On his Indy 500 debut in ’61 with the Agajanian Willard Battery Watson-Offy, Jones qualified fifth and led 27 laps (figures precisely matched by Fernando Alonso on his debut some 56 years later, incidentally), but he lost a cylinder in the second half of the race, and a piece of metal struck him above the left eye. The blood then ran down from the cut and filled his left goggle, so that every few laps he’d have to empty it. Still, he kept on, crossing the line in 12th. He had done (more than) enough to earn himself Rookie of the Year honors, albeit shared with Bobby Marshman. There would soon be a runner-up finish at fearsome Langhorne, a fifth at Syracuse, another runner-up finish at Sacramento and finally a breakthrough win in Phoenix.

The following year promised much, and a second-place finish at Trenton to open the ’62 Champ Car season seemed like just a warm-up. Come the Month of May, Jones ran a 150.729mph lap, an Indy single-lap record, and when all four of his laps produced an average of 150.370, he not only had a record, he also had pole – a full 1mph faster than even former winner Rodger Ward. Having led laps 1-59 and laps 65-125, however, Jones then lost his brakes, making his pit stops a scuffling, shuffling nightmare, so he would eventually come home a frustrated seventh.

Elsewhere on the IndyCar trail, Jones was always a force to be reckoned with and further runner-up finishes at Milwaukee, Langhorne and Springfield, a third at Langhorne’s second race, top fives at Trenton, Sacramento and Phoenix and a victory at Indianapolis’s State Fairground gave him third in the championship.
After showing what he could do with a bit less bad luck in his first two years at Indy, Jones and Ol’ Calhoun got the job done in 1963.

Thanks to an unhealthy dose of DNFs, in ’63 he would slip to fourth in points, but that almost didn’t matter: he clinched Indy. Having started from pole position again, this time alongside his buddy Hurtubise and another great, Don Branson, Jones led 167 laps but found on race pace his nearest opposition came from the rear-engined Lotus of Indy car rookie but Formula 1 yardstick Jimmy Clark. As has become Indy legend, Jones’ car, Ol’ Calhoun, started weeping oil – no worse

than others, insisted his defenders – due to a crack in the tank, and by the time Lotus founder Colin Chapman had alerted authorities, the car’s oil level had dropped beneath the split. Thus no black flag was deemed necessary, and Clark skittered home some half a minute in arrears.

One who spun and crashed on oil was Eddie Sachs and, assuming it was Jones’s doing, confronted him at the post-race banquet… where he received a bunch of knuckles for his trouble. Clark, by contrast, kept his peace, congratulated his rival, grinned charmingly and vowed to return.

 

Honoring the architect of Rodger Ward's strangest win

Image by Don Cooke; courtesy Dave Nichols/Barcboys.com
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emailBy Robin Miller | July 30, 2019 2:16 PM ET

Ken Brenn is one of the most decorated car owners in open-wheel history, with a career that spans six decades and includes a phone book’s worth of talent behind the wheel.

During his years of owning, towing, wrenching and maintaining midgets, sprints and Indy cars, Brenn won a lot of races with guys like Tony Bettenhausen, Don Branson, Bobby Unser, Pancho Carter, Larry Dickson, Len Duncan, Johnny Coy, Jack Turner, Jiggs Peters, Bruce Walkup and Jimmy Caruthers. He also gave Mark Donohue his first-ever ride in a rear-engine midget.

For the next three nights Kyle Larson, will wheel a midget for Keith Kunz honoring the 92-year-old Brenn as part of USAC’s Pennsylvania Midget Week. But one of the best chapters of this New Jersey native’s career came compliments of Rodger Ward in a very unlikely pairing that produced a very unlikely victory.

In July of 1959 a race was staged at Lime Rock Park which, according to the wonderful story written by Brock Yates for Car & Driver in 1999, was supposed to elevate the status of sports cars and road racing. Instead of running for trophies, there was to be a sizeable cash purse in hopes of attracting name drivers instead of doctors and lawyers. And it did, as Mexico’s heroes Pedro and Ricardo Rodriguez were entered, along with Indy 500 stars Duane Carter and Bettenhausen. But Brenn had no plans to run until he got a phone call.

“I came home one night and my wife Dottie told me that Rodger Ward had called,” said Brenn, who was in the business of building roads to feed his racing habit. “Well, he’d just won Indy and was a big star, and he didn’t know me from Adam. I didn’t believe her, so I didn’t call him back right away. Besides, I couldn’t afford to hire a guy like Ward, he’d want too much money.”

Well, they finally connected, and Ward revealed he was to get $2,000 in appearance fees so he suggested splitting that with Brenn and taking 40 percent of what he won in the race. A deal was made and they finally met just before Ward strapped in for the first practice session. “He was right at the track record in just a few laps,” recalled Brenn, who attends the IndyCar race at Pocono every year.

Oh yeah, one small detail that needs to be pointed out. Ward was driving a Kurtis-Kraft midget with an Offenhauser engine and a standard in-and-out gearbox against the Aston Martins, Ferraris and Maseratis.
Image by Don Cooke; courtesy Dave Nichols/Barcboys.com

After Ward broke John Fitch’s track record and won the pole position, the captain of the Maserati team, Rex Wingate, congratulated Brenn and then predicted his car wouldn’t be around at the end because the track would kill their brakes. The program called for a pair of 20-lap heats followed by a 60-lapper.

“Rodger cooled it in the first one and finished third and then we won the second heat and we changed brakes after each race,” continued Brenn, who still possess a fantastic memory and looks as good as he thinks. “We had to load it up with fuel for the main event, so we dropped back at the start while we burned off some fuel.”

But when Ward passed an Aston Martin on the outside to take the lead a third of way into the finale, he immediately began pulling away.

“Tony Bettenhausen had got out of the car he was supposed to drive because it was a dog, so he was running our pit board,” said Brenn, chuckling at the memory of the USAC national champion volunteering for that job. “Rodger had a five or six second lead but Tony kept putting up one second, and I kept asking him why. He said ‘because Ward is lazy and we don’t want him relaxing too much.’”

When the checkered flag fell, the Indy champ and his mighty midget had dusted the field and humbled the sports cars on their own turf.

“Ward had a Champ Car race the next day so he had a helicopter waiting on him, and after we shook hands he told me he’d just keep all the deal money and I could have all the purse,” said Brenn. “Well, it was $4,900, and that was a haul in 1959.”

The 6-foot trophy that supposedly went to the winning team had vanished shortly after the victory celebration, so Brenn tracked it down. “A few Mexicans were taking it apart and loading it into a box, and I yelled at them that it belonged to me,” he said. “They said ‘No, this is Pedro’s (Rodriguez) trophy, he was supposed to win and if he doesn’t get it, nobody does.’

“So I didn’t get the trophy, but I got one of the most satisfying wins of my life and a damn good payday. No midget race ever paid like that.”
__________________

 

RRDC Legends: Bobby Rahal on his 1986 Indy 500 win

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emailBy RACER Staff | June 19, 2024 10:00 AM ET

While SAFEisFAST.com — the online resource for young racers produced by the Road Racing Drivers Club — regularly offers advice from current drivers, it also wants to provide the input of some of the RRDC’s long-standing members. That’s the aim of the new “RRDC Legends” video series, where RRDC members will share stories from their careers and offer their guidance for today’s young drivers. First up, Bobby Rahal recalls his 1986 Indianapolis 500 victory, his relationship with Jim Trueman and how he overcame the urge to quit racing despite the ups and downs of his career.
Bobby Rahal, SafeIsFast, Industry, IndyCar, Videos

 

Rocky Moran 1950-2024

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emailBy Marshall Pruett | September 25, 2024 2:02 PM ET

He drove for Dan Gurney. He drove for A.J. Foyt. He nearly won his first IndyCar race. He helped All American Racers and Toyota win their first Rolex 24 At Daytona. And he was loved throughout the sport.

Rocky Moran died last weekend after an extended battle with cancer, and with his passing, a fountain of warmth and positivity has been lost. Prodigious talent, as well.

“I’m sorry to hear that about Rocky,” A.J. Foyt told RACER. “He drove for me in a couple of 500s and ran good. When I got hurt at Charlotte, I asked him to drive my car at Laguna Seca. He was a solid driver and just a super guy.”

At 6-foot-3, the Southern Californian towered over most people, but his steady outpouring of kindness and supportive words put folks at ease. Along with his wife Kayla, the Morans made an impact at the many teams where he drove, as bringing baked goods to share with the crew was just one of the ways they made friends and family in the paddock.

Making his amateur debut in 1971, Moran raced extensively on the West Coast and in a range of open-wheelers and sports cars before stepping up to bigger nationwide series like Trans Am, Can-Am, and IMSA throughout the rest of the decade.

Having grown up near Dan Gurney’s All American Racers shop in Santa Ana, Calif., Moran idolized the “Big Eagle” and dreamt of driving for his hero. He’d get his big break in 1981 when Gurney nominated Moran to wheel the famed No. 48 “Pepsi Challenger” Eagle-Chevrolet at the Watkins Glen CART IndyCar Series race.

Qualifying a remarkable seventh within the 24-car field, Moran charged to first and led 21 laps, controlling the race until a problematic final pit stop left him without enough fuel to make it to the finish line. Despite the setback and disappointment at losing a clear shot at winning on his IndyCar debut, Moran was credited with sixth in the No. 48 entry as Rick Mears scored the victory.

After his near miss in his IndyCar debut with AAR, Moran had to make do with less-competitive equipment at Gohr Racing, where he drove a Buick-powered March. Motorsport Images

A few years spent mostly away from the cockpit was resolved in 1985 when Moran got his second chance in IndyCar with the storied Leader Card Racing team where he placed an encouraging 15th at his home race in Long Beach. And with AAR’s move into IMSA with Toyota in the GTO class in 1986, Moran received the honor of a lifetime when he was hired by Gurney as a factory driver within the program.

Dovetailing with his duties in the Toyota Celica, Moran partook in eight IndyCar races with the modest Gohr Racing outfit and returned in 1987 to place 13th at Long Beach and miss out on his first attempt to qualify for the Indianapolis 500 with Salt Walther’s diminutive team.

 

Moran impressed boss A.J. Foyt with his efforts at Indy in 1988 and ’89. IMS Photo

One IMSA GTO race with AAR in January of 1988 — as the team readied a new GTP program for Toyota that would arrive in 1989 — meant Moran was locked in on his busiest season of IndyCar to date, starting with a stellar run to sixth at Long Beach for Gohr in an old car. He’d do eight more races for Gohr, but the big development for Moran in 1988 came when Foyt — impressed by his showings in lesser equipment — put him in one of his cars for the Indy 500.

Starting two rows behind Foyt in 28th, Moran took the No. 48 home to 16th — an engine failure prevented a better placing — and he earned a return invitation from the IndyCar legend for 1989 in a Curb Racing-entered Foyt machine. He’d start 28th again and improve to 14th, and when Foyt was injured and sidelined in a heavy crash during practice for the NASCAR race in Charlotte late in the season, “Super Tex” called Moran and asked him to step in and pilot his legendary No. 14 car at Laguna Seca.


In between IndyCar outings, Moran, was reunited with All American Racers, driving its Eagle HF-90 Toyota in 1991 IMSA GTP events. William Murenbeeld/Motorsport Images

In his Indy 500 and IndyCar swansong, a return to Gohr in 1990 saw Moran claim 33rd in time trials with another old car and finish 25th after the motor expired. He’d make a few more attempts to qualify for Indy through 1994, but the run with Gohr — just his 23rd IndyCar race over a 10-year span — was his last.

But Moran wasn’t done in the sport. As AAR’s GTP program evolved from its early prototypes into the unleashing of the all-conquering Eagle Mk III in 1991, Moran was entrusted to race its predecessor, the HF-90, with teammate Willy T. Ribbs — earning a podium at Portland — as the Mark III came online in the middle of the year.

Promoted to the new chassis in the endurance races for 1992, Moran partnered with PJ Jones and Mark Dismore to finish fourth at Daytona, and the following year, the trio made history for AAR and Toyota by taking the overall win at the Rolex 24 At Daytona. His farewell outing came at the next enduro at the 12 Hours of Sebring where he and Jones took the Mk III to third.
Teaming with P. J. Jones, Mark Dismore and Juan Manuel Fangio II. Moran claimed third at Daytona in 1993 in the Eagle Toyota Mk III, a car his son would get an emotional turn in many years later at historic races, William Murenbeeld/Motorsport Images

“Great teammate who I trusted,” Ribbs said. “I am truly sad. I will miss him.”

With his professional driving career complete, Moran turned his attention to supporting his son, Rocky Jr., whose rise up the karting ranks to junior open-wheel racing in the 1990s continued into the 2000s as he won races in the Toyota Atlantic Championship and earned a pair of fifth places in the standings.

Outings in Indy Lights and stock cars and sports cars followed before he pursued other interests, and thanks to an unexpected opportunity presented by Dale Coyne in 2015, Moran Jr. was able to make his IndyCar debut at Long Beach and impressed — despite having no testing time — in practice on Friday and again Saturday morning until a crash and a broken thumb ruled him out for the rest of the weekend.

Despite missing the chance to add to the legacy of fathers and sons to have raced in IndyCar, the elder Moran was beaming with pride throughout the event, a place where he’d burnished his name decades prior. Both were common sights at historic races in Monterey in recent years as Moran Jr. got a chance to drive one of the fearsome Eagle Mk IIIs once helmed by his dad.
The look on Moran’s face when his son strapped into the car for the first time and pulled away was priceless, one of love and fulfillment.