Benny Scott - Inaugural Long Beach Grand Prix

Inaugural Long Beach Grand Prix

Brown & Williamson Tobacco was more than pleased with Scott’s development. The company advanced BAR into Formula 5000 racing, competing at the same circuits with legends such as Al Unser, Mario Andretti, David Hobbs, Brian Redman, Jackie Oliver, and Jody Scheckter.

Scott’s most notable race in Formula 5000 was the inaugural Long Beach Grand Prix on September 28, 1975, where he qualified the BAR Lola T332 24th on the grid of the 30 drivers that qualified for the race out of 60 entrants from five countries. Viceroy sponsored Unser and Andretti under Vel’s Parnelli Jones as well. Benny finished 11th in the grand prix, his third race in the 210-mph Lola T332. The Viceroy Parnelli cars expired, due to mechanical failures.

At the end of the 1975 season, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company withdrew their entire auto racing sponsorships around the globe as a result of internal union pressures to curtail promotional dollars. (BAR was unable to replicate the sponsorship.)

Read more about this topic:  Benny Scott

Famous quotes containing the words long, beach and/or grand:

    Croft had an instinctive knowledge of land, sensed the stresses and torsions that had first erupted it, the abrasions of wind and water. The platoon had long ceased to question any direction he took; they knew he would be right as infallibly as sun after darkness or fatigue after a long march.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)

    On the beach at night,
    Stands a child with her father,
    Watching the east, the autumn sky.

    Up through the darkness,
    While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
    Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
    Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

    One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.
    Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)