Home Automotive Reference History The Unfair Advantage

PENSKE & DONOHUE, LOLA-FORD

Lola-Ford (USAQ)
From Chapter 17 of the original edition of Unfair Advantage:

"I was so discouraged over the loss of the race that I couldn"t have cared less about the Lola at that point. As far as I was concerned it had always been a failure, in spite of its second-place finish at Indy in 1970. Mechanically and aerodynamically it was a mess, and the cost of rebuilding the five or six Ford motors we broke was just astronomical. But a lot of our problems were my own fault. With all my other racing development programs during those years—with the Javelin, the Ferrari, and the other Lolas —I just wasn"t organized enough. We weren"t analyzing, we weren"t learning, and we weren"t gaining. We didn"t do a geometry study, we didn"t experiment with wings, we never understood the chassis, and the engines were too complicated for anyone to handle. Then I messed it up more by adding too many coolers and continually changing everything around at random. Even if that car never had an Unfair Advantage, and even if it never won a race, hopefully it was a good example of exactly how we shouldn"t run a racing operation."