Obituary: Ricardo Divila
Ricardo Divila did it all: the Brazilian engineer, who has died aged 74, worked across just about every racing discipline over a period of more than 60 years. He may be best known for designing a run of Fittipaldi Formula 1 cars in the 1970s, but his time with the team was just one chapter in the story of an amazing career that stretched from the Maserati 250F to the Nissan Deltawing and beyond.
Divila, who was christened Richard at the behest of his English mother but by law required a Brazilian name on his birth certificate, had further stints in F1 with Ligier, Fondmetal, Minardi and Prost. Yet to many he is best remembered working for Nissan, and for a shorter period Toyota, in Super GT and Formula Nippon in Japan, and for his work at the Le Mans 24 Hours with machinery as diverse as the De Cadenet-lola Group C car and the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO.
He also brought his talents to
Formula Ford, Formula 3, Formula 2, Formula 3000, CART and Indycar,
Super Touring, and sportscar racing in all its diverse forms. And that’s not to forget the 10 years working in Brazil before making it to Europe alongside Emerson Fittipaldi in 1969.
And he did it all with a boundless and infectious enthusiasm that helped him get the most from his drivers. That love of our sport quite often gave him a relentless schedule: it seemed for a while that he lived on aeroplanes in the years that he was active in Japan. But Divila dismissed the idea that he was some kind of workaholic. Rather, he once told this author, he was the “laziest man out there”. It was just that he was “addicted to mechanical porn”. His greatest achievement, he reckoned, was “getting paid to do something I love”.
Divila loved technology. The first Fittipaldi, the FD01 of 1975, was far from the conservative machine that you might have expected from a rookie team trying to design, develop and, crucially, build an F1 car in Brazil. It had pullrod suspension at the front, a rarity at the time, and even employed primitive data-acquisition. Years later, his inquiring mind was piqued by Ben Bowlby’s Deltawing project, and he was thrilled that Nissan brought him in to evaluate the concept for an entry into the ‘Garage 56’ slot at Le Mans in 2012. Three years after that he was equally passionate about the front-wheel-drive Nissan LMP1 and its mechanical hybrid system.
Divila grew up within earshot of the Interlagos circuit in Sao Paulo, and his fascination with all things mechanical drew him to the track. By the age of 12 he was acting as a gofer on an ex-jean Behra Maserati 250F sponsored by a friend of his father’s in the South American Mecanica Continental series.
His other love was aircraft, and he was studying to become an aviation engineer, but his lust for racing proved too much. He neglected his studies in favour of designing a line of cars for Emerson Fittipaldi and his brother Wilson, a Formula Vee known as the Fitti-vee and the Fitti-porsche sportscar among them. They were followed by a twinengined Volkswagen Beetle that was quick enough to run with an Alfa
Romeo T33/2 and a Ford GT40 at the original Jacarepagua circuit in Rio.
Divila ran the ‘Magic Merlyn’ MK11A in which Emerson swept all before him in British Formula Ford in 1969, and worked with Team Fittipaldi Bardahl that fielded both brothers in F2 in the early 1970s. That led to the formation of Fittipaldi Automotive with backing from Copersucar, a cooperative of sugar companies in Brazil. He designed the team’s 1975-76 cars, which carried ‘FD’ nomenclature in deference to his work. The final car before the team folded at the end of 1982 was also a Divila creation. He always referred to it as the FD09 rather than the F9 name by which it is more commonly known.
Divila was a director of Fittipaldi throughout its time in F1 and was hit hard financially when it went out of business. He ended up working for the ADA Engineering team in London after it bought the remnants of the company because he was the only person who could identify the masses of parts. He helped out on its De Cadenet-lola Le Mans racer, affectionately known as the ‘Morris Minor’. An event that he had previously dismissed as a race for old men became a fixture in his diary over the remainder of his career. He was a regular at the 24 Hours with Courage Competition in the 1990s and again with Pescarolo Sport in the 2000s, engineering the car that finished second in 2005. More recently he was placed by Nissan with the Greaves Motorsport and Algarve Pro squads.
Listing all the teams for which he worked after Fittipaldi’s demise isn’t possible in the space available, so varied was Divila’s career, so here are a few of the more offbeat ones. He was technical director of the short-lived PMC squad that fielded cars in Formula 3000 and Formula 3 in 1985. Its campaign in the higher category with a reworked Williams FW08 F1 car was unsuccessful, but the team dominated the early part of the British Formula 3 Championship with Russell Spence before folding.
Divila was involved sporadically in CART in the 1980s and 1990s, with teams such as Patrick Racing and Hemelgarn Racing, but he’d never engineered a car at the Indy 500. He set out to put that right and in 2009 he worked with Alex Tagliani and Conquest Racing. Together they won the rookie award with 11th place.
The early schematics for the unraced FIRST F1 car, which morphed into the W12-engined Life L190, were drawn by Divila. He was always perturbed that he was incorrectly credited with both designs.
Divila was also responsible for giving Adrian Newey his first job in the dying days of Fittipaldi: “He sent in his graduation thesis on a Group C car. I looked at it, and thought this guy knows what he’s talking about.”
Divila had no thoughts of retirement in his seventies. “I’m gonna keep on at it,” he said a couple of years back. “So long as I’m working on interesting technical stuff and winning races, why give up?”