Oilpressure

The IndyCar world lost a giant last week, yet many newer fans hardly knew who he was. Bob Riley passed away last week at the age of 93. Does that still not ring a bell? How about a mention of Riley & Scott? Does that name jog a few cobwebs out of your memory? Don’t feel bad. I spoke to a few people last week, who I consider pretty hard-core IndyCar fans. They had faint memories of the Riley & Scott IRL chassis, but they couldn’t recall much else about Bob Riley.

In the 1960s, Bob Riley was a mechanical and aeronautical engineer that actually worked on some parts of Project Apollo. Aside from being a young IndyCar fan I the 60s, I was also a space geek. Anyone who had a hand on landing a man on the moon immediately has my respect.

Riley was brought in to help with the suspension of AJ Foyt’s 1967 Coyote that ended up winning the Indianapolis 500 that year. He also helped with the Ford GT that Foyt and Dan Gurney drove to victory bat Le Mans a few weeks later. Riley realized he had found his true calling – developing, and eventually designing and building race cars.

Riley designed and built an all-new Coyote chassis in the early 70s, which Foyt later tweaked and developed himself to win his fourth Indianapolis 500 in 1977. Riley also designed the last Coyote in 1981, before Foyt switched over to the customer March chassis in 1982, like everyone else at the time.

But it was IMSA and Trans Am, where Riley truly made his mark in the early to mid-80s. By 1990, Riley had partnered with Mark Scott to form Riley & Scott. Their cars won multiple sports car championships in the late 90s.

In the late 90s, Riley & Scott designed and built an IndyCar chassis for use in the IRL, to compete against the more established Dallara and g-Force chassis. The car was the most aesthetically pleasing car on IRL race tracks, but that wasn’t a very high bar to clear – but the results were not eye-popping. I recall Eliseo Salazar driving a good-looking R&S chassis (for Riley & Scott Racing) with Reebok sponsorship in the first few races of the 1998 IRL season, before being replaced by Scott Harrington, Andy Michner and Jim Guthrie throughout the remainder of the 1998 season. That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement for Salazar’s resume.

Raul Boesel finished twelfth in the 1999 Indianapolis 500, driving a Riley & Scott Oldsmobile – the only Riley & Scott chassis in the field. In 2000, Hemelgarn Racing went with the Riley & Scott chassis, and Buddy Lazier gave the company their only race win at Phoenix that season. By the Month of May, Lazier could not extract enough speed oiut of the car and they shelved the car in favor of a Dallara. Lazier finished second in the Dallara.

Riley & Scott was bought by Reynard Motorsport in 1999, but was a casualty when Reynard went bankrupt in 2001. By this time, Bob Riley had founded Riley Technologies – along with his son Bill. Riley Technologies thrived in sports cars, and have won seven Rolex 24s.

Bob Riley was inducted earlier this year into the IMSA Hall of Fame, and is also a member of the Motorsport Hall of Fame of America.

In all honesty, I had not thought of Bob Riley or Riley & Scott cars in a couple of decades. I was keenly aware of his ties to Foyt and the later Coyotes, but their lack of success in the early days of the IRL pushed him into the back-burner of my mind. The obscurity of the Riley & Scott IRL chassis is only rivaled by the Falcon chassis that never even turned a wheel. But when I saw the headlines of his passing last week; I thought it was more than worthy of mentioning here.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on October 28, 2024 at 4:01 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.