USAC, CART and Champ Car history Options

[Herbert]

I#m looking for some information about Dale Coynes self-built ChampCar with which he competed in 1985. I'm also looking for some pictures of the car.

[Rainer Nyberg]

I have never previously heard of any such car. The Dale Coyne website states that the DC-1 was ran during '86.

I know nothing more...
But maybe somebody can fill out the blanks.

[Herbert]

Sorry, my mistake!
I meant the 1986 car!!! I should be more carefull with what I'm writing.

[ghinzani]

Something tells me it was based on the Lola t-800 he had been running previously. I beleive when he eventually ditched the chevy v8's he claimed they had become anchors for his boat!

[fines]

Sorry, just the statistics:

Apr 6, Phoenix: DNS, too slow
Apr 13, Long Beach: 23rd, fire, 5 of 95 laps
Jun 15, Portland: 21st, engine, 3 of 104 laps
Jun 29, Meadowlands: DNS, too slow
Jul 6, Cleveland: 12th, half shaft, 63 of 88 laps
Jul 20, Toronto: DNS, too slow
Aug 2, Michigan: DNS, too slow
Aug 17, Pocono: 26th, engine, 5 of 200 laps
Aug 31, Mid-Ohio: 23rd, rear wing, 18 of 84 laps
Sep 7, Montréal: 12th, flagged, 193 of 225 laps
Sep 28, Michigan: DNS, too slow
Oct 4, Road America: 17th, flagged, 42 of 50 laps
Oct 12, Laguna Seca: DNS, ?
Oct 19, Phoenix: DNS, too slow
Nov 9, Miami: 25th, withdrawn (handling), 14 of 112 laps

[theunions]

Originally posted by fines
Sep 7, Montréal: 12th, flagged, 193 of 225 laps

You mean Sanair (St. Pie), right?

[fines]

Originally posted by theunions


You mean Sanair (St. Pie), right?

Yes. I was going by race names, so for Phoenix read Cashion, for Meadowlands East Rutherford, for Michigan Brooklyn, for Pocono Long Pond, for Mid-Ohio Lexington, for Road America Elkhart Lake, for Laguna Seca Monterey, and for Montréal Saint Pie indeed.

[theunions]

I KNOW I have a shot of it in a magazine somewhere...but from memory it was a graphically bland yellow car with little or no sponsorship, some blue/red/possibly brown stripes and #19 in black serif numerals instead of Coyne's traditional Helvetica.

[ghinzani]

And based on a t-800 Lola? If so we have the Art Merzario of CART !

[Rob G]

Originally posted by ghinzani
And based on a t-800 Lola? If so we have the Art Merzario of CART !

Except that Dale is three times Arturo's size.

[Herbert]

I just read in the CART-Yearbook of 1988 that a team called GF Racing tried to qualify with a March 85C for some races. It was managed by Calos Franca and the drivers were some guys called Giupponi Franca and Jose Carlos Romano. I've never heard of that team or the drivers. So what is the story behind it?

[Amazin]

They're Brazilians, I can't quite remember the story.

[Herbert]

Anyone who has more information? Which races did the team enter?

[Mischa Bijenhof]

"GF Racing is a partnership between Carlos Franca and Chris Berube. Carlos, originally from Brazil, is a Vehicle Concept Manager at General Motors who also runs a Formula Continental and Formula Atlantic with the SCCA. With a long history of motorsports involvement stretching back to the 1970s, he has raced everything from go-carts to Formula Atlantic cars. Carlos purchased the No. 50 car new from a Saturn retailer in 1994 and drove it as his streetcar prior to its conversion to a race car. Carlos and Chris will be sharing in the car's development. "

source: http://www.rockauto.com/Newsletter/03.htm

no info on the drivers though...

[ensign14]

Had a look in the Phil Harms data at Motorsport.com but could not find any reference to this team in 1988, or its drivers at all.

[Pete Stanley]

Herbert, have you tried TrackForum's Nostalgia forum? Someone over there might know.

[Pikachu Racing]

There are few CART drivers I have no idea on their past and what are they doing now at this moment. These drivers were from early 90s. Anyone help figure "where did he come from" and "where is he now" category?

Tony De Tommaso - qualified 92 Laguna Seca

Franco Scapini - qualified at 91 Surfer's Paradise

Nicola Marozzo - qualified 3 races out of 5 in 91 and 92

Brian Bonner - first time I heard him when he qualified Indy and wrecking during the race. He did race few times in the series.

Vinicio Salmi - qualified in 5 races. My memory of him spinning at Toronto in the no. 42 car.

Jay Hill - biggest "Who?" Appeared once at 92 Detroit in no. 28 Coke car. Other than the leaders of Tracy, Andretti, Rahal, he got probably got more airtime on TV for being slow. His Coke car appear on the screen in glimpses from lapping or going into the corner.

[David Hyland]

According to Richie Jenkins' Where Are They Now?, Brian Bonner is "Still racing, albeit sporadically, in stock & midget cars".

[e34fanatic]

How about Tero Palmroth from Finland? He`s last start was in Laguna Seca 1992. He qualified for four Indy500 races between 1989-1992. Otherwise he raced sporadically and did not achieve very much.

[ensign14]

Scapini was a perennial DNQer in late 1980s F3000, although I seem to remember him at the Birmingham Superprix starting way behind everyone else for some reason. He was officially named as the Life test driver, which sounds to me like money for nothing. Think he still does sports cars.

What did Hideshi Matsuda do other than Indy?

[Mallory Dan]

Originally posted by ensign14
Scapini was a perennial DNQer in late 1980s F3000, although I seem to remember him at the Birmingham Superprix starting way behind everyone else for some reason. He was officially named as the Life test driver, which sounds to me like money for nothing. Think he still does sports cars.

What did Hideshi Matsuda do other than Indy?

Nico Marozzo shared the wonderful Jean-Pierre Frey's Lancia LC2 Group C1 car in 1988 on occasin. From memory he was even slower than JPF, so I guess he must have paid well for his ride...

[ensign14]

Frey also had a CART one-off for Euromotorsports which ended in tears and a case where Frey unsuccessfully sued Antonio 'Not Enzo' Ferrari - he had waited too long...

Looking at Frey's F3000 efforts, I get the feeling that I could have jogged around quicker. Maybe I am being unfair, I guess a team called Dollop cannot have been that brillo.

[Mallory Dan]

Ensign, agreed re JPF, what the heck did "Dollop" mean, or translate from ?

Speaking of such do you remember Dominique Delestre, back marker for a while in 3000, then suddenly had 2 3rd places at the end of the 88 season, against a v good field. What 'tweaks' did he have on the car all of a sudden I wonder...

[Gert]

May I add Hubert Stromberger, who raced at Elkhart Lake in 1995?
That was his only start.

I' had never heard of him before, and never heard again of him, afterwards.

[Twin Window]

Ian Ashley did a (or a couple) of CART races towards the end of the 80s; I was surprised to see him at Miami in '87 (or '88) when I was there with Tommy. Rupert Keegan did a couple around that time too, IIRC.

And while on the subject, another of my buddies was entered by a total of four (might have been five, actually) CART teams during '84. Can anyone guess who that was?

Twinny

[2F-001]

A touch off-thread, but...
I always remember Delestre as more of a journeyman (however short a journey) than a perrenial backmarker but perhaps my memory is being selective.
Didn't he end up co-running a fairly successful team? I forget which one.

I gather he came from the town of Nancy, because the press (in the UK) regularly referred to him as "Nancy-boy DominiqueDalestre". Whether they were trying to 'out' some personal predelictions they had unearthed or it was just a silly joke, it seemed a bit cheap to me at the time.

My chief memory of seeing him race comes from Silverstone, a mid-eighties F3000 race (International Trophy meeting?) run in terribly wet conditions. We were sitting high up in the startline/exit of Woodcote stands, actually above most of the spray which obscured almost everything. I sat dumbstruck as he powered out of Woodcote, (keeping over to the left as a squabbling bunch came through lapping him on the inside), into a wall of spray from the preceding cars having just seconds before seen Thierry Tassin coasting slowly through on the racing line, evidently looking for a spot to pull off before his car came to a halt. Next, there was loads of fibreglass and a wheel or three flying high into the air. I believe both were injured.

I heard a report, later, that at the point of impact Tassin, anxious to bale out of his dead car as soon as poss was standing up on the seat, bending down to steer with one hand - still on the racing line - so that he could jump out as soon as the car was on the grass up towards the bridge.Although it must be pretty scary to be sitting in a dead car, on the track, but hidden in spray, it seems such a bizarre act for someone that experienced I am reluctant to relate this as anything other than hearsay.

I do recall that the race, having already been stopped in its opening laps and restarted as a two-parter, was stopped again and not restarted. It looked terrible but I don't either were too badly hurt.

[Jeremy Jackson]

Yeah, that was the 1986 International Trophy - I was in that grandstand too, but a little bit lower down than you!

I actually left after that accident, as I pretty well assumed a fatal injury, and so I was convinced there wouldn't be a re-start...

I heard more or less the same thing, that Tassin was halfway out of the cockpit awaiting his opportunity to bale out. Seemed so unlikely that someone's of Tassin's experience would do something like that...

[Disco Stu]

Originally posted by Pikachu Racing
Jay Hill - biggest "Who?" Appeared once at 92 Detroit in no. 28 Coke car. Other than the leaders of Tracy, Andretti, Rahal, he got probably got more airtime on TV for being slow. His Coke car appear on the screen in glimpses from lapping or going into the corner.

I had the same question when I was there for practice, fortunately I got an answer! At the time I was racing a lot at Waterford Hills, near Detroit, and a lot of the workers for the Detroit Grand Prix were also Waterford workers. When I asked my dad aloud who the heck Jay Hill was, one of the workers I knew wandered over and gave me the details. Hill had gotten his start racing Sports 2000 cars at Waterford. From there he went on to the North American Pro Series, which was a low-level pro series for S2000 cars, where he won the championship one year. I don't believe he ran anything other than that. Not sure if they had the bigger Olds engines in the cars when he ran, but even if they did it's still a huge jump from that to a Champ Car. The Coke sponsorship came from the family, they owned a bottling plant. "Poor little rich kid" was the phrase the worker used to describe him. So he took that money, went to TEAMKAR, which was a really, really, really bad team, and got out there for his home race. Dog slow, but at least he was out there I guess.

Brian Bonner raced in IMSA Camel Lights, the step below the GTP cars. Pretty good driver, though not great. Wasn't in the same class as Parker Johnstone who dominated.

Don't know what Hideshi Matsuda ran before he came over, but I do remember that he came to Indy as an announcer or pit reporter for Japanese TV, then came back the next year as a driver.

[ghinzani]

Originally posted by Twin Window
Ian Ashley did a (or a couple) of CART races towards the end of the 80s; I was surprised to see him at Miami in '87 (or '88) when I was there with Tommy. Rupert Keegan did a couple around that time too, IIRC.

And while on the subject, another of my buddies was entered by a total of four (might have been five, actually) CART teams during '84. Can anyone guess who that was?

Twinny

Kenny Acheson? if so tell us about the team with the new lola for indy that turned out to be an 81 eagle.

If not how about Michael Roe?

[theunions]

Originally posted by Twin Window
And while on the subject, another of my buddies was entered by a total of four (might have been five, actually) CART teams during '84. Can anyone guess who that was?

I'm guessing this is a Brit who made no other CART appearances outside this season...Acheson (even though he only made one start at the Meadowlands)???

And is Frey still in prison?

[theunions]

Originally posted by ghinzani
If not how about Michael Roe?

Roe didn't show up until the following year.

[ghinzani]

Originally posted by ghinzani


Kenny Acheson? if so tell us about the team with the new lola for indy that turned out to be an 81 eagle.

If not how about Michael Roe?

Or Thackwell?

[Nanni Dietrich]

Franco Scapini, Vinicio Salmi, Nicola Marozzo and Tony De Tommaso drove in Italian F. 3 Championship in the 80s, not good results... perhaps Scapini and Salmi some 1 or 2 points...
Scapini and Salmi also in European F. 3 Championship.

De Tommaso drove absolutely in Italian F. 2000 Championship only (a sort of national F. 3 - B).

Scapini and Marozzo now are instructors in some school-of-driving.

I remember Nicola Marozzo from Calabria, driving in 1986 a Dallara for Forti-Corse team (great Team, do you remember the Forti F. 1? ); before his adventure in America he drove also in some Italian rally.

I don't know any other news...

[ghinzani]

Originally posted by Mallory Dan
Ensign, agreed re JPF, what the heck did "Dollop" mean, or translate from ?

Speaking of such do you remember Dominique Delestre, back marker for a while in 3000, then suddenly had 2 3rd places at the end of the 88 season, against a v good field. What 'tweaks' did he have on the car all of a sudden I wonder...

Dollop were a construction firm I heard.

[Twin Window]

Originally posted by ghinzani

Kenny Acheson?

Originally posted by theunions

I'm guessing this is a Brit who made no other CART appearances outside this season...Acheson

Correct, you two!

Originally posted by ghinzani

... if so, tell us about the team with the new lola for indy that turned out to be an 81 eagle.

I'd been on a whistle stop US tour, involving almost a state per day, for about three weeks ending up in Long Beach. It was a 'mates' visit really (but GPI had just started covering CART, so I could justify it!). Tommy was in the SVee race, and I offered KA to share my room when he arrived the next day. I picked him up at LAX, slung his stuff in the room and headed off for a meeting with Bill Hall on the Queen Mary. Amazingly, it was KA's first visit to the US!

Hall seemed an okay sort of bloke, and the meeting went well - or so we thought. KA was to get a new Lola for... actually, I forget now which race it was to be, but it was pre-Indy I'm fairly sure. That weekend we spent a fair bit of time lurking around the Haas pit so he could see as much as possible of Mario's example, and whenever the coast was clear I'd be sent over the wall (as my pass was better than his) to take shots of the inside of the cockpit in order for KA to accostomise himself with his forthcoming 'office'.

Aside from that, we had some riotous times off-track with Tommy, Willy T, Mike Rosen and others (Arie came out with us one night, I think). Willy T hadn't met Tommy before, and said to me in a quiet moment out of his earshot that he'd never been upstaged like that before! Oh, and on the Sunday I was in the loo in the hotel in the middle of the track when Willy T staggered in, covered in dirt and his treasured specially tailored Bud Racing jacket torn to bits. He'd just had a fight in the pit lane...! Racing-wise, it should have been with his big Trans Am rival Scott Pruett ("I'll hate that guy for as long as his asshole points downwards") but it wasn't; it was with some marshals!

Yikes, I get easily sidetracked...

Anyhow, the Lola wasn't ready for [whenever] and so I booked up to be at the Indy 500 with KA for the last ten days. Only when they arrived, they had - like Ghinza says - an '81 Eagle and not the promised Lola...

KA was so shocked, he told me that couldn't get angry straight away. The Eagle arrived with one mechanic, who was not only charged with the mechanical preparation the car but also with putting the number on it. Painted number. And in pink... So, KA flatly refused to sit in it never mind drive it; a couple of other blokes had a go but couldn't get it over 185ish. When I arrived for the last ten days, the car was sitting in a penned-off area where you could have your photo taken in it for a buck! Mind you, KA had to change his opinions of pink on racing cars come Meadowlands...

Emerson Fittipaldi quit the Pepe Romero's WIT team before the New York round, and KA got the drive - in their pink and purple March! Emerson had gone to team running a red March (I can't remember who they were now!) and then he moved on again (to Patrick was it?) and KA replaced him again with the red March chaps. Then, at Laguna (?) KA subbed in the Skoal Bandit car (for Fabi?) but shunted it in practice IMMSMC. The rest of the season was spent talking to all the other outfits resulting in him hooking up with VDS. He spent three months in a hotel room in Texas waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. Until they went bust, that is.

As for Hall Racing, IIRC the Lola did finally arrive and went straight to Sheirsons for Danny Sullivan.

Twinny

[ghinzani]

Thanks Twinny, this is why I love Atlas - that Eagle 81 has been botherin me for ages!! dont spose u recall if it had a chev or a dfx? Also anyone recall the other sould who tried it at Indy? Did Bill Hall go on to ruin, Im sorry run other cars?

Mike Rosen - he wasnt the rich kid who died of an overdose or something? One of the SVEE guys has a foundation set up by his mother for drug addicts or something, remember coming across the site by accident once.

[Twin Window]

I think it was a Chev, but please don't go by me.

Mike had only just got out of some rehab place, and was staying in the penthouse of that hotel in the middle of the track. They had a party in the week before the race, and all Mike did was pester people to help him score some 'Charlie'... During that time, I discovered that Sheena Easton was sunbathing on the roof above us, so I was also pestering folk - for an intro!

Twinny

[Keir]

Ian Ashley!!

We had lunch a number of years ago while he was working out of Teterboro airport in New Jersey.
We talked about the SCCA F440 cars, as we had both driven for the same entrant and had some of the same comments about the cars.

Those F440 cars drove me straight back to my beloved Vees!

......but frankly, I would have raced anything with wheels to have kept going!!

[fullcourseyellow]

Talking about obscure Italians... How about Guido Dacco? Who on earth is he?

I also seem to remember someone called Jeff Wood. Any news?

[Keir]

I met Guido at the Meadowlands GP, he seemed like a nice guy, but i don't know anything about his past racing or what he might be doing now.

Jeff Wood, one of the original Formula Atlantic drivers and very tallented. He got into CART a little late in his carreer and really didn't have the backing to go very far!! Had the IRL been around then, he would have had a far easier time!