“When I'm ahead, and everything is working properly, it's like living in another world . . . I'm going very fast, there's a lot of noise from the engine, and I can feel the cornering and accelerating forces as if I were the car . . . I just seem to be part of a well-oiled machine. That's the sensation that's so thrilling to me – knowing that everything in the system is working exactly as it's supposed to. And the longer I'm away from that, the harder it is to understand or describe it. Most people who have never been in that position will never understand it.” - The Unfair Advantage, Mark Donohue
Quick: Name the last so-called road-course “ringer” to win a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race, under whatever name (Winston, Nextel, etc.) such may have been conducted?
Mark Donohue won at Riverside International Raceway in Riverside, Calif., in the first race of the 1973 NSCS season, during which Daytona International Speedway hosted the schedule’s second race.
Donohue drove the No. 16 Roger Penske-owned American Motors Company Matador to an in-your-face, 138 leading-lap victory (of 191 laps) at a now gone 2.62-mile race track swallowed by Southern California’s population growth.
Spending just 12-minutes shy of five hours in the Matador and covering 500.4 miles, Donohue averaged 104.055 mph in a race having just three full-course cautions lasting a combined 10 laps.
Bobby Allison finished second, one lap down to Donohue.
On Aug. 17, 1975, borne from of a sense of loyalty to Penske nearly two years after he retired then un-retired after the end of the 1973 Can-Am season, Donohue was in Austria for F1’s Austrian Grand Prix at the defunct Österreichring (“Austria arena” or “Austria course”).
About 30 minutes into a 45-minute “special practice” the morning of the F1 race, Donohue’s relatively new March 751 5/Ford Cosworth, which replaced an ill-handling Penske PC-1, took leave of the high-speed, right-hand sweeper named Hella Licht (for German light manufacturer Hella), struck multiple layers of too-narrowly spaced catch fencing which, when successively pressed one into another, became more a launch ramp than speed retarder.
Donohue’s March then carried into nearby turn-perimeter signboards, the driver’s helmet striking a supporting metal upright of one.
The oft-used “head injury” summation of Donohue’s death conjures gruesome images which belie an otherwise apparently uninjured driver that in the accident’s aftermath was alert and conversing with fellow racers Emerson Fittipaldi, Hans Stuck and Mario Andretti.
Soon, though, a headache grew unbearable and Donohue asked for spouse Eden Donohue, who joined him before he was airlifted (no room for Eden; she and Karl Kainhofer used ground transportation) to a Graz, Austria hospital where even a noted neurosurgeon, Fritz Heppner, couldn’t stem the tide which led to the driver’s death two days later on Aug. 19, 1975, at age 38.
Five months shy of his ninth birthday, little David Donohue was oblivious to Penske rushing from a Talladega NASCAR race to Austria or the gravity of his paternal grandfather, Mark Donohue Sr., and maternal grandmother, Carmen White, unexpectedly likewise leaving for Austria – after all, his father had been seriously injured before and recovered.
It’d take years for David Donohue to fully grasp his father’s death, if not the emptiness left behind.
It’d also take a perhaps greater-than-expected effort to fill the racing shoes Mark Donohue left behind, but David Donohue would eventually learn he, too, was most comfortable when “part of a well-oiled machine.”
Although his father in Unfair Advantage wrote of most people’s inability to understand what it was like to become one with a race car, likewise do most people fail to understand what it takes to win a high-level racing championship or, even, a unique race like the Rolex 24 At Daytona, which David Donohue won in 2009 while co-driving a Brumos Racing Porsche-Riley with Darren Law, Buddy Rice and Antonio Garcia.
Donohue had won the 2009 Rolex 24 race pole in record form, covering the 3.56-mile course in 1 minute, 40.540 seconds at an average speed 127.472 mph.
By race end, still more records would fall in a race which went the final hour under the green flag.
- At the wheel for the race’s final segment, Donohue’s winning margin over Juan Pablo Montoya was 0.167 seconds – the closest 1-2 finish in Rolex 24 history.
- Donohue’s total margin of victory – 10.589 seconds – over second- through fourth was also the closest in Rolex 24 history.
- The 52 car-lead changes in the Rolex 24 were second only to the 64 of the 2008 Rolex 24.
- While Donohue and team’s 735 laps set a new record for most completed by a Daytona Prototype in a single race, the team also set the fourth-highest total recorded in the race’s history – despite the race likewise having recorded the greatest number of caution laps (117) in Daytona’s 24-hour race history.
- With its let-it-all-hang-out racing over the race’s final 40-minutes as Montoya tried in vain to speed past Donohue, the 2009 Rolex 24 recorded the closest finish in the history of major international 24-hour motorsports events.
Having a history rich in racing vehicles, series and venues, David Donohue’s Rolex 24 win nevertheless put him in a select league of drivers Mark Donohue had himself entered 40 years earlier at Daytona with car-owner Penske, who in 2009 was among the first to congratulate David Donohue.
Next on Donohue’s 2009 agenda was a capturing his first Rolex Series DP driving championship.
Unshakably a member of the Brumos Racing team that began the 2003 season in earnest with a fall 2002 test at Daytona International Speedway, Donohue, with co-driver Mike Borkowski, would at one point lead the 2003 championship but ultimately finish second, just 8-points shy of winner Terry Borcheller.
Joined by Law for the 2004 season, many expected Donohue to win that year’s championship.
Instead, Donohue, Law and Brumos Racing would first experience nearly five seasons of frustration that at one point for analyses sake saw a complete FABCAR FDSC/03 Daytona Prototype shipped to Porsche’s R&D facility in Weissach, Germany.
The frustration began to ease for Donohue and his Brumos Racing teammates when the then No. 58 Red Bull-sponsored team last raced its final FABCAR (no. 007) chassis at the June 29, 2006 race at Daytona International Speedway, switching to a Riley Technologies MkXI (no. 029) for the following race at Barber Motorsports Park.
Though Donohue, Law and the Red Bull (which nearly everyone at the time used simply to describe the team, so synonymous had the two become) would start and finish 13th at BMP, the pair in the season’s following final-three races recorded straight top-10 finishes – something the team hadn’t done since the 9th race of the 2005 season.
Finishing 14th in DP driving points at the end of 2006, the pair would zoom to sixth by 2007’s close.
Riding a string of seven top-5 finishes – five of which were top-3’s – Donohue and Law rose to fourth in 2008.
Thus, displaying unwavering loyalty despite four, perhaps five years of trial, tribulation and frustration, Donohue finally had the means by which to compete and went into the 2009 Rolex Series season as a genuine championship contender.
Yet, that season had hardly started when the wind filling the driver’s and team’s sails started slowly flagging as a first Grand-Am Technical Bulletin, designed to temper the Porsche-powered DP drive train, hit on Dec. 10, 2008.
Like a heavyweight boxer unable to plant his feet and fight, Donohue after the 2009 Rolex 24 win was knocked and kept off balance by a season-long series of eight rules changes that first sapped the Porsche-powered DPs of their might, then slowly, through Aug. 18, 2009, all but traveled a full circle as the Porsches were largely returned to their pre-2009 state.
It was a crushing, embittering blow to Donohue who with his many connections to racing has long been acutely aware of the difficulty of winning a championship – one he might now not win at all.
Though Penske Racing’s No. 12 Porsche-Riley was certainly likewise affected – it mostly believing the rules changes to be aimed solely at it – Penske drivers Romain Dumas and Timo Bernhard also thrice shot themselves in the feet with Rolex Series race-rule infractions that went entirely unmatched by Donohue and Law.
Between the three Porsche-powered DPs, such likely would’ve provided the telling difference in a 2009 championship eventually won by GAINSCO’s Alex Gurney and Jon Fogarty.
One can only hope the powers that be are appreciative of an undying loyalty, passed from one generation to the next, shown by the Donohues to a team, a series and racing as a whole.
Later,
DC
More can be learned of Mark Donohue’s short but very full life in Michael Argetsinger’s Mark Donohue, Technical Excellence At Speed, published by David Bull Publishing and available at amazon.com
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