The lasting legacy of Reynard’s IndyCar revolution

IndyCar’s duopoly had been briefly upended in 1992 by Galmer winning the Indianapolis 500 with Al Unser Jr and Galles Racing. But following a decision by Rick Galles to cancel the Galmer programme, the old order was restored in 1993. If you wanted to win, you had to have a Lola or a Penske chassis. 

Yet that all changed with Reynard’s arrival in 1994. Six podiums was a modest return from its maiden year, but three of those were wins – including the debut victory that had become the constructor’s calling card. The upstart’s instant impact had longer-term significance too. 

The 1994 season elevated Jacques Villeneuve into a driver who could be considered future world champion potential, returned Michael Andretti to the force of nature he’d been prior to a difficult foray into Formula 1, and set Chip Ganassi Racing on the path to becoming the powerhouse it remains today. Not a bad outcome for a company that just a few years prior had been on the brink of ruin. 

“I had to sell just about everything I had at the time,” company founder Adrian Reynard recalls of the painful aftermath of plans to enter F1 collapsing in 1991. “And I had to rebuild the company. We had to go back to basics.”

With his company winning all but one title since its arrival on the Formula 3000 scene in 1988, Reynard had set his sights on motorsport’s pinnacle and got as far as conducting wind tunnel tests at Imperial College London with a model devised by a design team led by Rory Byrne and Pat Symonds. Everything was in place, including smart new premises at Enstone (later sold to Benetton), aside from a credible engine partner: “I didn’t have enough money, so I had to abandon it.”

This was the prompt for the company to belatedly pursue Indycars, a plan managing director Rick Gorne had long since backed. After a deal to buy March in 1989 that would have involved taking over its Indycar contracts with Porsche and Alfa Romeo “went quite a long way down the road, but fell at one of the final hurdles,” Gorne says the F1 project’s collapse “was my chance to say to Adrian, ‘Let’s just focus on the Indycar, do what we know and try and benefit from that.’”

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Reynard had come close to entering IndyCar previously with a move to buy March that would secure its contracts with Porsche and Alfa Romeo, but this fell through

Photo by: David Hutson / Motorsport Images

Reynard had engaged Carl Haas as its US agent for Formula Fords and Atlantics (these cars even bore an H designation), but the Newman/Haas co-owner wasn’t keen to relinquish his status as Lola’s Indycar importer. Adrian Reynard met with several Indycar team owners while engineering Russell Spence’s Formula Atlantic in 1992, but met an apathetic reception.

“Nobody was interested,” he says. “This was a little manufacturer, thousands of miles away, not established. We didn’t have any credibility.”

That was until he and Gorne sat down with Ganassi. “We connected with Chip, and the rest is history,” says Gorne, who describes him as “the perfect partner for us – he thought the way we did”.

Andretti, the 1991 Indycar champion, was still a big draw despite his dispiriting 1993 with McLaren. Gorne credits Ganassi with his signing, which he says “endorsed what we were doing and got the whole thing established”

It seems difficult to countenance a time when Ganassi wasn’t an Indycar benchmark. He’d become a co-owner at Patrick Racing in 1989 when Emerson Fittipaldi became champion in a customer Penske chassis, then took over the assets and formed his own squad for 1990. Seven podiums followed in the next four years with Eddie Cheever and Arie Luyendyk, but it had yet to win with a Lola.

“His mindset was that he needed to do something different if he was going to take the next step,” says Jimmy Vasser, Ganassi’s first Indycar champion in 1996, and who also raced a Hayhoe Reynard in 1994. “If you were going to beat Newman/Haas and Penske, you had to do something different and that’s why Chip really ponied up for the Reynard.”

Ganassi became a partner in the newly established Reynard North America operation and all the cars were sold in year one. It helped that Reynard no longer had Formula 3 to worry about, after Dallara gatecrashed the market in 1993.

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“It was never in the plan that as soon as we did Indycar we would drop F3, but that’s how it panned out,” Gorne says. “We could have made F3 a continued success, but we would have overstretched ourselves.”

Andretti returned after a difficult 1993 in F1 with a Ganassi team that had yet to win, but the combination got off the mark at the first attempt

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Malcolm Oastler, who had led the design for Reynard’s initial winning exploits in F3000, was entrusted with the project that had as its starting point the unraced Galmer G93 for which Reynard had bought the design. His work was virtually complete by the time Lola’s chief designer Bruce Ashmore arrived, an important sign to teams that Reynard had current expertise from a leading figure.

“He was our insurance,” says Gorne. “Bruce knew the systems and everything regarding uprights, gearboxes, loads, all the intricate technical detail that you needed to know. It was a short-cut.”

Another sign that Reynard was onto something was the identity of the lead driver in Ganassi’s team – his car a quasi-factory entry run by Ashmore that tested all the new parts before they went to customers – while F1 convert Mauricio Gugelmin in the second car was run from separate premises. Andretti, the 1991 Indycar champion, was still a big draw despite his dispiriting 1993 with McLaren. Gorne credits Ganassi with his signing, which he says “endorsed what we were doing and got the whole thing established”.

As was the case when it entered F3000, the squads that first committed to Reynard comprised not regular winners, newcomers or fading forces. Jim Hall’s team, fielding a single car for Teo Fabi run by Oastler, hadn’t won since the 1991 season-opener. Forsythe/Green Racing was a hit in Atlantics with Villeneuve, but Jerry Forsythe’s last Indycar involvement had been in 1985 – though partner Barry Green was a linchpin of the Kraco team that subsequently merged with Galles.

Meanwhile, 1990 title-winning squad Galles had scaled back from running three Lolas to a single Reynard, its third different chassis in as many years. The team’s lone driver, Adrian Fernandez, says the team “was going through internal turmoil”. The Mexican impressed by qualifying fourth for the opening round, but found the year “a little bit of a struggle” despite Reynard’s customer service far exceeding anything he’d experienced before.

“Lola had too many clients,” he says. “Here was more like a VIP treatment. And they were very hands-on in trying to help us.”

Vasser’s Hayhoe team had run a year-old Lola in 1993 and didn’t view throwing his lot in with Reynard as a risk, despite its lack of US racing pedigree. This leap of faith was rewarded with three top-five finishes from the opening four races, although results tailed off after placing fourth at Indianapolis.

“If you were going to go Lola, you were never going to have the works stuff because Carl Haas was the importer and [Newman/Haas] always seemed to have different Lola pieces,” he recalls. “The feeling was you’re never going to get what they get.”

Fernandez credits Reynard with assisting its customers such as his ailing one-car Galles team

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

As well as being keenly honed to be aerodynamically efficient, the 94I was user-friendly and well-received. It surely helped that Ganassi sent some of his most experienced mechanics to help with building up the very first chassis and make suggestions. Gugelmin’s crew chief Grant Weaver recalls “a very open relationship between the race team and the factory on building the cars”. And upon delivery, he discovered “it didn’t take a whole lot to make it go fast” either.

“That thing was so well-sorted already that there were minimal issues,” adds Weaver, a Ganassi mainstay until 2019. “It was easy to turn wrenches on, they designed it so that it was easy to work on. Adrian and his boys did a very nice job. There were some things during the year that towards the next model would make things a little easier, but there weren’t any showstoppers that said, ‘Hey, you’ve got to fix this now.’”

Heading into the maiden race at Surfers Paradise, Reynard exuded quiet confidence that his group could emulate first time successes in FF1600, F3 and F3000.

"I said, ‘Michael, you do know that Reynard has this sort of tradition’, and he said, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, go away'" Adrian Reynard

“We thought everything was in place,” he says. And Gorne agrees there was never any concern that the US market would prove a tough nut to crack: “We had a very vibrant, young design group headed up by Malcolm and we all believed that we would achieve. Failure wasn’t in our vocabulary.”

All the same, Gorne maintains that he didn’t expect to win on the tricky street track. “We were relaxed about it; if it happened, it happened,” he says.

But Reynard admits he couldn’t help himself on the grid and approached Andretti to remind him of what was at stake: “I said, ‘Michael, you do know that Reynard has this sort of tradition’, and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, go away.’ And he brushed me away with his hand!”

Andretti’s victory by 1.2 seconds over Team Penske’s Fittipaldi was a seismic moment, but it wasn’t his last. He also conquered the streets of Toronto, ending the year fourth in points, while top rookie Villeneuve recorded his first win at Road America – where for the first time three Reynards finished in the top five. He’d earlier signalled his prowess with an impressive second place at the Indianapolis 500, where Penske and Unser won with the famous ‘Beast’ engine.

“It was the come-out year for Jacques,” says Gorne. “He’d won races at other levels, in Japan and in Atlantic, but he’d never won a championship. This elevated him and the Reynard product.”

Andretti took his second win at Toronto as Reynard truly took off in IndyCar

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

In 1995 the die was cast. Sticking with Green following the Australian’s split with Forsythe, Villeneuve won the Indy 500 on his way to F1 with Williams. It began a run of Reynard titles that continued into 2001, when Penske successfully defended the crown it had reclaimed only after ditching cars of its own construction.

Along the way was a stretch of four in a row for Ganassi, reaping the rewards not only from an early commitment to Reynard, but in going against the grain by partnering with Honda and Firestone – which became the dominant package from 1996-99. Its winning juggernaut has barely halted since.

Reynard believes that the company’s arrival “changed the rules” for how to win in Indycars. It certainly upended the status quo, and the ramifications are still being felt today.

“They were a great group,” summarises Vasser, who enjoyed the bulk of his success in Reynards. “They did amazing things pretty much out of not a grandiose situation; just a lot of brilliant minds and hard racers.”

Reynard (left) and Gorne's telling contribution to US open wheel racing can still be seen today in Ganassi's continued success

Photo by: Gavin Lawrence

Driving the 94I

Although all its wins came on road and street courses in 1994, this presents a slightly misleading picture of where Reynard’s first Indycar was strongest. Perhaps unexpectedly, given the constructor’s background, the chassis proved stronger on ovals. A pervading understeer trait was helpful on the faster circuits, if not stop-start tracks.

Galles driver Adrian Fernandez confirms: “The car was very strong on all the ovals, it had a very good downforce, it behaved well. The street courses, it was for us struggling the most and I remember the understeer the car had, but it was very strong on ovals.”

Fellow Reynard racer Jimmy Vasser agrees that “we were very uncompetitive on the road courses” in 1994. That said, the Hayhoe Racing man felt the Reynard was “just easier to drive” than Lolas he’d sampled. Fernandez concurs that, compared to the 1993 Lola, “it was a better car, just in terms of feel and downforce, and not so pitch-sensitive”.

It helped too that Reynard teams were willing to collaborate with support from factory engineers, “because we were all learning as we went along”. Vasser recalls: “We all got to Long Beach and it was just horrendous understeer. In that era, the wing angles were set from what the wind tunnel [said], it was something you didn’t really play with.

“But they would come around and say, ‘Look, Mauricio Gugelmin has put all this wing in’ and this other person is doing this. So there was some sharing going on and we were all kind of one team together, finding our way on these new tracks that the car had never been on.”

“Reynard was fantastic if there was a problem,” confirms Gugelmin’s Chip Ganassi Racing crew chief Grant Weaver. “They would get the solution and get it to the teams. Their customer focus was very good.”

Gugelmin's crew chief Weaver praises the 94I as a strong first effort from Reynard

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images