Vince Granatelli 1943-2022
Winning Indycar team owner Vincent Granatelli died last weekend at the age of 78 after contracting pneumonia and then COVID-19.
Granatelli seemed initially destined to live in the shadow of his father, charismatic STP petroleum CEO
Andy Granatelli. Vince started at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1961 as a mechanic on the Novis, and would go on to work on the legendarily unfortunate STP turbine cars. Both the Paxton machine of Parnelli Jones in 1967 and the Lotus 56 of Joe Leonard in 1968 would fail while leading the Indy 500, so he shared the family joy when Mario Andretti nailed
Indy victory in the STP Hawk in 1969.
Granatelli Jr was also involved in the
STP team’s part-time flirtation with Formula 1 in 1970, during which Andretti score a best result of third in the Spanish Grand Prix in a March 701.
The Granatelli family quit racing in 1974, but for 1987 Vince was back. He bought Dan Cotter’s Indycar team, which had found brief success in the early 1980s but had now fallen on hard times, and renamed it Vince Granatelli Racing. He also inherited the impressive Roberto Guerrero, and they won their second race together at Phoenix. They almost won the Indy 500 too, only for a faulty clutch on his final pitstop to cost Guerrero the lead to Al Unser. The Colombian won again at Mid-ohio, but days later a huge shunt while testing at Indianapolis left him in a coma and put him out of action for the remainder of the season, although he still salvaged fourth in the championship.
The next three years were a bust for the team, not helped by a switch to Buick engines. At the end of 1990, Granatelli merged his squad with the now Bob Tezak-owned Doug Shierson Racing and therefore acquired the services of that year’s Indy 500 winner Arie Luyendyk and a contract with Chevrolet. Despite a major fallout between Granatelli and Tezak, Luyendyk drove his Lola-chevy to victory at Phoenix and Nazareth and finished sixth in the championship. Despite this, Granatelli couldn’t find the funding to continue and so shut down the team.