Few racing car designers have enjoyed such long and distinguished careers as Bob Riley. The American, who has died 93, was both prolific and successful in multiple disciplines over the course of more than 60 years at the drawing board.
Riley-designed cars won the Indianapolis 500, the United States Auto Club Champ Car title multiple times and just about everything worth winning in North American endurance racing. Repeatedly! His designs triumphed at the Daytona 24 Hour no fewer than 13 times.
It will be for those successes in sportscar racing that Riley will be best remembered, not just for the sheer number of races and championships won, but because the cars that accrued them carried his name. Riley & Scott took a trio of wins at Daytona in with the MkIII World Sports Car in the second half of the 1990s, while Daytona Prototypes known simply as Rileys took a further 10 in the US endurance classic during the Daytona Prototype era between 2005 and 2015, including eight on the bounce.
The MkIII open-top prototype and the family of Riley DP coupes - the MkXI, the MKXX and MkXXVI - (both spaceframe chassis designed together with son Bill) were serial championship winners. Drivers of the former took a total of eight titles on the original IMSA trail (subsequently known Professional Sportscar Racing), in the United States Racing Racing Championship, the American Le Mans Series and the Grand American Road Racing Series. The line of DPs took the Grand Am crown nine times.
“Just about everything I drove designed by Bob was incredible,” says Wayne Taylor, who won Daytona with both the MkIII and the MkXI, as well as the IMSA and Grand-Am titles with each car. “With a Riley chassis I knew that I was going to be in a position to win races and championships.
“Bob understood what was required for racing on the rough tracks in North America; he understood that you need mechanical grip. His cars were always easy to drive. That was always the big thing about a Riley.
“He played a massive role in my career going all the way back to the Intrepid GTP I raced at the start of the 1990s. I have a lot to thank him for.”
Riley’s successes in single-seaters came as a hired hand. He started working for US racing legend AJ Foyt for the 1971 season, designing the Coyote with which his employer took third place at Indy that year. An evolution of the car Riley conceived for ’73 would give Foyt his fourth and final victory at the Brickyard in 1977.
By then, Riley had moved over to work for Pat Patrick. He would design a quartet of Wildcats for him, though not before he’d built the first Indycar to bear his name in ’74. There would be another two R&S designs built for the Indy Racing League between 1997 and 2000. Both marques were race winners in their respective series, as was another Coyote, with full ground-effects, built for Foyt in 1981. It sat on the front row at Indy, too.
Many of Riley’s sportscar designed didn’t carry his monicker, either. The Chevrolet-engined Intrepid RM-1, an IMSA race winner in Taylor’s hands in 1991, was an important car the Riley story: it was the first machine father and son designed together and can be considered the roofed forebear of the MkIII. Then there was the first Cadillac Northstar LMP that flew the flag for the General Motors brand at Le Mans in 2000 and again, in a form modified by others, in 2001.
His Ford Mustang GTP - a front-engined prototype that predated the Panoz LMPs of the late 1990s and early 2000s - was a race winner, too. It won first time out in IMSA in 1983, though never again.
Yet Riley was much more than a designer of prototypes and Indycars. His body of work was immense. A string of titles were claimed by his chassis in the Trans-Am silhouette series: 13 drivers claimed overall titles in the Riley-penned tubeframe racers. GT machinery, tubeframe or otherwise, by his hand won North American sportscar titles with Chrysler’s Dodge brand, Oldsmobile and Mazda.
Formula Ford, Super Vee chassis and a Busch Grand National second-tier NASCAR emerged off the Riley drawing board over the years. There was even a Land Speed Record car built for the salt flats of Bonneville.
Riley started out building cars in which to compete himself. The first was a C-Modified Sports Car Club of America contender built in 1959 that followed on from a pair of Triumphs, a TR2 and then a TR3, purchased during a stint in the US Air Force. The tubeframe machine known as a Lynx was powered by a Chevrolet V8 and, he would relate in his autobiography The Art of Race Car Design published in 2015, had more than a hint of of the Jaguar D-type about it.
He began his engineering career working on the Saturn space programme before moving to Ford, which seconded him to Kar Kraft to work on the project that yielded the US manufacturer four straight Le Mans victories in 1966-69. Suspension design was his focus on the Ford MkII and IV. All the while, he was building more Lynx chassis, Vees and FF1600s, in his spare time.
Riley & Scott was established in 1990 with Briton Mark Scott, a former McLaren mechanic who had moved to the USA with Teddy Mayer’s new CART operation set up on his departure from the F1 team. R&S was briefly part of the Reynard Racing Cars empire from 1999, before ownership quickly returned to the Riley family. Riley Technologies was the new name for the company.
A passion for engineering drove Riley to continue designing racing cars into his dotage. Riley never really stopped working: he worked on a new Trans-Am car this decade. Suspension and aerodynamics were his twin specialities: he was experimenting with ground-effect at the same time as that other great innovator, Lotus boss Colin Chapman, in the mid-1970s.
Bob once remarked to this author when already deep into his 80s that he was only working part time these days. In old age, he pointed out, he wasn’t getting to the workshops until until 9:30.
