The big interview: David Donohue
Son of legendary Porsche racer Mark, David has carved out his own career in motor racing with Porsche and beyond. Total 911 catches up with the man himself
Son of legendary Porsche racer Mark, David offers insight into his own career and how his father’s success has shaped him
You could be forgiven for assuming race driver David Donohue simply followed his father Mark Donohue into motorsport. Mark had famously won the 1973 Can-am championship in a Porsche 917/30, the inaugural IROC championship in a 911 RSR (plus the Daytona 24 Hours, the Indy 500, and too many other races to list), and was a seriously talented driver/engineer. Similarly David has won Daytona, has a strong association with Porsche and, yes, there’s more than a passing resemblance to his dad. But it wasn’t the fait
accompli the surname might suggest, because Mark Donohue tragically died during practice for the Austrian GP in 1975, aged just 38.
“My dad passed when I was eight years old and I idolised him,” reflects Donohue when we met at Sonoma Raceway in California, ahead of a drive in a 918 Spyder. “Kids want to be a rock star or an astronaut, and I wanted to be a racing driver like my dad, but it didn’t seem a realistic expectation. His passing severed any ties we had with motorsport and my mum was completely set against it. She said in an interview recently that she’d never take my brother [Michael] and I to the racetrack because there was a good chance dad wasn’t coming home.”
Mark’s brilliance on track wasn’t the only thing that had left an impression on his young son, so too did his fondness for Porsches – one of David’s earliest memories is being driven to the shops in a 911, and he purchased a 911 the second he could afford one.
“It was the 1970s 3.0-litre SC, still had the big intake runners; it was a nice car but I was 19 or 20, way overextended on something like that,” he laughs.
Joining the Porsche Club of America provided Donohue’s gateway to racing. It was through the club that Donohue junior got his driver education, and he remembers how he’d be paired with the best instructors because of his dad’s reputation, and that everyone wanted to be part of helping him progress – he tells it modestly and honestly, aware of the privilege if likeably embarrassed of it. Luck or divine intervention, it was on his first track day that Donohue also met Don Cox, race engineer and close personal friend to his dad.
Donohue junior started to reconnect with senior’s past. A little bit of autocross led to track days. The speed started to come. In 1988 the Porsche Club of America awarded him Most Improved Driver. And that 911 became the archetypal bottomless pit. “I kept pumping money in, and eventually it became unstreetable because I liked the track so much!” remembers Donohue. “Then I started to test myself because I was so used to my car and the tracks in the north east – I was fast, but you’re only as fast as the people you’re with, and can you do it when you’re thrown into a completely different situation? So I did the Bondurant School in Phoenix.”
It wasn’t until Donohue was “22 or 23” that he started racing wheel-to-wheel, and didn’t even
tell his mum Sue because “it wouldn’t have gone over too well”. In 1991 he sold the 911 to race a 944 Turbo Cup in the EMRA (Eastern Motor Racing Association) series. “It was the class of the field and I really lucked out because I was managing a local shop that specialised in German cars [Don Galbraith Motoring],” Donohue explains. “I’d leave my car on the trailer after a race, just parked it behind the shop until we got slow and the guys would work on it. I could wrench on it but I wasn’t a pro, so thanks to work I could arrive at the track and go run while everyone else had to wrench on their cars.”
Donohue won every race, taking GT honours and rookie of the year to boot. Stock car races for Dave White in a 944 S2 and NASCAR races followed in 1992, and in 1993 Donohue progressed to the IMSA Bridgestone Supercar Championship, driving a BMW – a championship he won in 1994.
“Pretty much the rest of my career can be traced back to the people I met in Supercar,” remembers Donohue. “I met Hurley Haywood and Bob Snodgrass, who was like the spirit of Brumos Racing [the team funded by Porsche dealership Brumos]. I got to learn more about my dad from Hurley, who’s a great guy, and Bob became my confidant; he was always there, and he said I was going to drive for him someday. So when a Daytona Prototype gig came along, I ended up in that seat because Bob told me I would ten years earlier – you didn’t need a contract with Brumos, they were just really genuine, sincere people.”
Donohue would drive a Brumos Racing Daytona Prototype in every Rolex Sports Car race from
2003 to 2010, but it’s 2009 that stands as the real highlight, when he won the Daytona 24 Hours, 40 years after his dad did the same. That 2009 car was a Riley Daytona Prototype fitted with a Porsche flat six engine, and Donohue co-drove with Buddy Rice, Darren Law and Antonio Garcia.
“It was a great car – it was fast in a straight line and handled fantastic, you could drive it offline and not lose time. We went into that race with the attitude that we’d already won and everyone was there to take it away from us,” remembers Donohue. “Every single person on that team did a little more than they were supposed to; I remember Ali Dunn held the sign over the wall where I was supposed to stop, but she put it a little bit further back than usual – if she hadn’t I’d have had to wait for the 59 car to go before I could leave. Little stuff like that.”
Antonio Garcia went off in the middle of the night, nosing a tyre wall and putting the Brumos Porsche two laps down. “No-one gave up. We made it up by strategically playing the yellows, not pitting when everybody else did,” says Donohue. “But Antonio was a real team player – he was supposed to finish the race, but he radioed in to say he didn’t
think he could go any faster and we were running 3rd. I was next in line, I got in, but the pressure wasn’t so bad – I’d actually had more anxiety just watching it!”
Donohue progressed to 2nd, and after an hour of valiant attempts eventually took the lead from Juan Pablo Montoya by playing the traffic, though Montoya hounded him in the closing stages, and the Brumos looked set to fail at any moment.
“It was like a grenade with the pin already pulled – it just hadn’t blown up yet!” jokes Donohue. “We had a pinhole leak in the radiator, so I was getting low water pressure, high temperatures, then low oil pressure and high oil temperatures. Montoya kept divebombing me under braking, but I was just setting up for the exits, and I knew that if he was dumb enough to keep doing what he was doing, things would never change. Sure enough, they didn’t!”
Donohue took the chequered flag and recalls a phone call a couple of hours after the race, from none other than Norbert Singer. Donohue had already met the legendary Porsche engineer when he’d set a 196mph road-legal record at Talladega in 2005 in a Porsche Carrera GT, to celebrate 30 years since his dad recorded 221mph there in the 917/30. Singer had also been involved with development of the Brumos prototype.
“He’d already done an evaluation of our green lap averages and said all four drivers were within three tenths of a second all race long,” says Donohue. “It just proved that no single person won that race.”
There was more success at the 2013 Daytona 24 Hours, winning the GX class in Napleton Racing’s
Porsche Cayman, and in 2014 Donohue became the US client relationship manager for the 918 Spyder – which was a perfect fit given Donohue’s record in its Carrera GT predecessor.
Today, we’re lucky to follow Donohue around the soaking wet Sonoma track, Donohue in a Panamera, me in a 918 pre-production prototype that the engineers call Meredith. It’s a battle to keep up, and I just manage to catch a slide out of one of the early tight corners at what feels a surprisingly low speed. Donohue has so much speed in reserve that he simply watches me flail at the wheel in his rear-view mirror. “I bet that woke you up!” he laughs when we pit (I blame cold Cup 2s as well as a lack of talent).
Donohue’s 918 Spyder role saw him travelling the US, meeting dealers and customers as Porsche attempted – and eventually succeeded – in selling all 918 models. It would lead to Donohue appearing at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, Colorado, for the first time.
“I met the guys at Porsche Colorado Springs, in particular Joe Brenner, the general manager, and the owner Don Hicks. They’re absolutely nutty in their passion for Porsche and motorsport, they make sure the car’s number is 911 each year and we just became friends. There was also Fred Veitch, kind of the grandfather of the event. He said, ‘We got a car we want to modify and take up’, and I never said no because, you know, usually nothing ever happens,” says Donohue. “I didn’t know a huge amount about the event other than the Unsers ran it well, it had a reputation. Then I watched the video and I thought ‘oh shit, what the hell
did I just agree to?’ I had too much ego to back off! I just dedicated a lot of time to learning the course before I got there and we’ve been pretty successful every time.”
Donohue’s first attempt on the 12.42-mile, 2,862-metre high road course came in 2017, driving a 991.1 Turbo S that began life as a highly specified marketing car for Porsche North America. Two years earlier David Donner had set a production car record when the car was completely stock. For Donohue’s attempt, the car was stripped and modified to around 700bhp – though altitude would rob it of a chunk of that.
“Talk about completely the wrong way of doing it, they ripped it apart to turn it into a racer, you couldn’t do it by spending more money!” he remembers. “But it’s such a pure event and it’s so much fun to drive a mountain road with no restriction – you can go round corners in the wrong lane, it just feels wrong, like the kind of thing you dream about but never actually get to do.”
In that debut year, Donohue blitzed the 156 corners in 9min 49.95sec, 6th overall and 2nd in the Time Attack 1 class. But there was room for improvement, particularly the long gearing of the stock PDK transmission.
He returned in 2018 in a yellow 991.1 GT3 R racecar, again contesting Time Attack 1. “It was chassis 01 – or 9501 – the very first,” recalls Donohue. “The GT3 R was 600 horsepower at sea level, maybe 350 at the summit. It was an independent effort, but Porsche North America helped us with ECU programmes that came from Motorsport, because the engine wouldn’t even start at 6,000ft with the tuning, let alone 9,000ft.
“That car was just hooked up, and even though we ran the suspension low like near normal race height, it was damped really well – that was crucial because there’s permafrost up there and the road’s really wavy and throws you up in the air.” Donohue’s time of 9min 37.15sec put him 6th overall and 1st in class with a new class record too.
Last year, the team found a solution for the
GT3 R’s lack of power at altitude – a highly tuned Turbo engine. “At one point we were making 1,150 horsepower, but we kept blowing engines; we went through four. I think between the builder and the tuner mistakes were being made.” Porsche, he stresses, was not involved!
Ultimately Donohue finished 4th overall and 2nd in the Open class, with a 9min 33.40sec run, and estimates he lost around ten seconds because ice in the water injection (to chill the intake temperature and increase power) froze a throttle body and gave a huge lag in throttle response until it warmed up.
He hopes to return in 2020 with a fresh Turbo Mezger motor prepared by Kelly Moss Racing and slotted in the same GT3 R, budget permitting (“we just need a couple hundred thousand dollars!”). He also thinks Porsche can reclaim the production car record in the new Taycan. “It’d be a double, no a triple whammy,” he realises. “Production car, four door, electric… What do you think of it? I didn’t think I’d like it but I really do.”
45 years since David tragically lost his dad, his enthusiasm suggests the Donohue name will still be topping the time sheets for a while – even if his mum would understandably prefer it didn’t.
“Kids want to be a rock star or an astronaut, and I wanted to be a racing driver like my dad”