Rudi Eggenberger 1939-2018

RUDI EGGENBERGER, WHO HAS DIED AGED 79, achieved unprecedented success in the 1980s glory days of the European Touring Car Championship with three different manufacturers. No team owner scored more overall victories in a series that was then known as the ETC.

Eggenberger Motorsport BMWS, Volvos and Fords notched up more than 30 victories, and there were five more in the single edition of the World Touring Car Championship spawned by the ETC for 1987. The Swiss team won drivers’ titles with BMW (1980, ’81 and ’82) and Volvo (’85), and took the WTCC teams’ crown with Ford.

The successes were born of an attention to detail from a boss who was always referred to as “chef” by his mechanics. Eggenberger was a hands-on team boss who had an involvement in every aspect of car development.

“Rudi was an all-rounder,” recalls Steve Soper, who drove Eggenberger Fords from 1986-88. “He machined the parts, bolted the engines together and then ran them on the dyno. He could do everything; he understood how to make a racing car work.”

Charly Lamm, team manager at the BMW Schnitzer squad, says that his perpetual memory of Eggenberger is of an overall-clad engineer working deep inside one of his cars. “He always knew his machinery inside out,” recalls the German. “He was very precise and always on the top of his game.”

Eggenberger was a driver of not immodest ability, but he decided that his talents lay in car preparation. His organisation developed a Group 2-spec BMW 320 for the ETC in the late 1970s and claimed the overall ETC title in ’80 with Helmut Kelleners and Sigi Muller Jr. Further titles followed with Kelleners and Umberto Grano when the team switched to the 635CSI in ’81, and then with the same drivers again in 1982 with the 528i.

Eggenberger was poached by Volvo to run its 240 Turbo in 1985. The team turned an unlikely contender into a winner, with Gianfranco Brancatelli and Thomas Lindstrom taking the title. That success attracted the attention of Ford of Germany, who recruited the Swiss team for ’86 in advance of the arrival of the Sierra RS and RS500 Cosworth for the following season.

The team won the 1989 Spa 24 Hours and was runner-up in the DTM with Klaus Niedzwiedz the same year. Eggenberger subsequently dabbled in single-seaters, ran a short-lived DTM programme for Opel and then returned to the Ford ranks in the STW Super Touring series in Germany in 1994-95.