Indy Car Owner
In 1972, Vanguard Racing became the first black-owned team to enter a car in the Indianapolis 500, with John Mahler as the driver. Vanguard’s concept was to employ Mahler as a development coach to help prepare Benny Scott for the Indianapolis 500 in subsequent years.
Scott drove Vanguard’s Formula A, in a McLaren M10-A, powered with a 500-horsepower Chevrolet V-8 in the L & M Continental 5000 Championship and Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) events. Scott won the CSCC-SCCA Southern Pacific Division Championship in 1972, outperforming drivers traveling from as far away as Australia to compete.
Vanguard’s board of directors consisted of Paul Jackson, president of Jackson & Sanders Construction Company; Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr., first head of the Peace Corps and former Ambassador to France, who would be the Democratic Party's candidate for Vice President of the United States in 1972; Washington Redskins defensive halfback Brig Owens; and Richard Deutsch, board chairman of Harbor Oil Corporation.
Unfortunately for the team's ambitions, Vanguard’s stockholders were euphoric with John Mahler’s performance at the 1972 Indianapolis 500, and as a result they lost their patience and ambition to groom Benny Scott.
Read more about this topic: Leonard W. Miller
Famous quotes containing the words car and/or owner:
“Fifty years from now, it will not matter what kind of car you drove, what kind of house you lived in, how much you had in your bank account, or what your clothes looked like, But the world may be a little better because you were important in the life of a child.”
—Anonymous. Quoted in The Winning Family, by Louise Hart, ch. 1 (1987)
“An ancient prophecy ... pronounced, That the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it!”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)