Dear Ben,

A great book, isn’t it? ‘Captain Nice’ was Mark Donohue’s nickname, and indeed he was a very fine fellow. I never got to know him well – there wasn’t time, sadly, given his very brief spell in F1 – but I liked him a lot, not least for his complete unpretentiousness. After the 1975 International Trophy at Silverstone, I ran into him in the paddock, where he was availing himself of an outside tap to clean his black 911. As he leathered the Porsche – “Hell, there’s no point in trying to get out in this traffic…” – we talked through his race.

He had finished sixth, ahead of Alan Jones and Carlos Reutemann. Not too bad, I suggested, but Mark grimaced. It was early days, yes, but the PC1, Roger Penske’s first F1 car, was falling short of his expectations.

To Donohue, there was something almost offensive about a racing car which held out against his experience and touch. In much the same way as Alain Prost, he concluded very early in his career that it was no more than commonsense to hone a car, to have it do as much of the work as possible, and he sought constantly what he and Penske called ‘the unfair advantage’, the phrase adopted as the title of his autobiography.

Born in Summit, New Jersey, in 1937, Mark had no childhood dream of racing, but at the age of 20 he persuaded his father to go halves with him on a new Corvette, and began occasionally to compete.
The hook was in. He left university without any clear idea of what he wanted to do, but he suspected that maybe he could ultimately make a living from racing. “It seemed,” he said, “to be the thing I did best.”

Over time he competed in a variety of unlikely vehicles, graduating by 1963 to a Cobra, and by now other folk were asking him to race their cars. As well as that, he had met Walt Hansgen, and this was to be pivotal in his rise to prominence.

It was a rare friendship between drivers. By the mid-’60s Ford’s sports car racing programme was fully unleashed, and Hansgen, a prominent team member, wanted Donohue as his co-driver. In Dearborn they considered Mark an unproven club racer, but Walt was adamant: no Donohue, no Hansgen.

They capitulated in the end, and named the veteran and his protégé as drivers in a Mkll for the Daytona 24 Hours at the beginning of 1966. “A thousand dollars?” Donohue marvelled. “For one race? I’d have done it for nothing…”

The 7-litre car was way quicker than anything he had driven before, but he and Hansgen finished third, behind two other Fords. Mark, though, felt somehow he didn’t really belong in this elite company, and to some degree, for all the successes that later came his way, that impression stayed with him.

At the Le Mans test weekend in April, Hansgen crashed on the Sunday morning, suffering severe head injuries from which he died a few days later.

While devastated by Hansgen’s death, Donohue had a strictly pragmatic attitude to the risks of racing. “I can’t say I was ever personally concerned about my own safety, perhaps because I’m something of a fatalist – I figure no two accidents are ever quite the same, and even if you’re prepared for every contingency, something else is going to get you some day.”

In 1967 Donohue went to work full-time for Penske, and in the course of his years with Roger, worked with a huge number of cars, in every conceivable avenue of the sport. Looking back now, it is extraordinary to consider just how many cars, and series, they were dealing with at any one time. In 1971, Donohue was driving for Penske in Indycars, sports cars, Formula 5000 and Trans-Am.

In the autumn of ’71, Penske also decided to hire a McLaren M19 for the Canadian and American Grands Prix, and although Donohue was unimpressed with the car, he qualified eighth at Mosport, and finished an extraordinary third, beaten only by Jackie Stewart and Ronnie Peterson.

It was, by any standards, a remarkable F1 debut, but Mark took it lightly. “I was probably lucky it rained,” he shrugged. “In the dry I might have been nowhere.” A typical piece of Donohue self-deprecation.

“Because Mark was always so polite, with this ‘Boy Scout’ image,” said fellow racer Sam Posey, “I was surprised to discover that his regular form of post-race relaxation was to sit in the bar, and have a number of drinks – as if his life were so difficult that he welcomed the chance to blot everything out for a while. The win could be enjoyed on Sunday night, but at dawn on Monday it was back to work. And sometimes he’d drag himself out of bed at five, and drive one of the trucks right back to base in Philadelphia.”

Donohue won Indy in 1972, at the wheel of Penske’s McLaren-Offy M16. A year earlier, he had been walking the race when the gearbox broke, then gone on to win at Pocono and Michigan.

While getting ready for Indy in ’72, Donohue was also travelling back and forth to Europe, working on the Porsche 917/10, which was ultimately developed into one of the most dramatic and efficient racing cars of all time. A huge testing accident at Road Atlanta, brought about by the loss of the rear bodywork, caused him to miss most of the ’72 season, but still – on crutches – he went to the races, helping substitute driver George Follmer to the championship.

In 1973, though, Mark completely dominated the Can-Am season, winning six of the eight races in Porsche’s mind-blowing 917/30, which, at normal ‘race’ boost, developed 1100bhp at 7800rpm, put out 810lb-ft of torque at 6400, and exceeded 240mph on the Mistrale Straight during pre-season testing at Ricard! “I loved that era in racing – the era of the ‘knife fight’ rules…”

At the end of ’73, now aged 36, Donohue announced his retirement as a driver, and was appointed president of Penske Racing. But when, for 1975, Penske decided on an assault on F1, Donohue said he wanted to drive, and Roger agreed. It was not, Mark acknowledged, going to be easy, operating a one-car team in a new series, on unfamiliar circuits: by mid-season, with only a couple of fifth places to show, the team abandoned its own car, and ran a March instead.

I went to the Austrian Grand Prix with Chris Amon, and on race morning dropped him off at the paddock, then went to park the hire car miles away, to miss the post-race traffic. It was quite a walk back, and as I neared the circuit, it was eerily quiet when the warm-up should have been well underway. In the Ensign pit I found Amon, his face grim. “Donohue’s gone over the fence at the Hella-Licht,” he said.

This was a flat-out right-hander at the top of the hill beyond the pit straight, and the March had suffered a left front tyre failure as Mark turned in. The car went over the guardrail, and came to rest, completely destroyed, after striking lead-pipe advertising hoardings.

Initially, Donohue was unconscious, but a doctor’s injection brought him round, and, although he was complaining of severe pains in his head, it seemed like a miraculous deliverance.

Then they carried him across the track, and put him into a helicopter for transportation to hospital in Graz. Nowadays, perhaps, surgery would have been attempted at the circuit, but medical care was primitive in those days before Professor Watkins arrived. Subjecting someone with a head injury to altitude – the Osterreichring was surrounded by mountains – was perhaps not ideal.

The day grew dark, and by race time the atmosphere was Wagnerian, with black skies and sheets of lightning. Shortly before the start, Denny Hulme, then president of the GPDA, whispered something in Amon’s ear. “It’s Mark,” Chris said. “Fractured skull. Just a matter of time.”

Mario Andretti remembered the day. “Mark felt a little out of it in Europe, I think. Just that morning in Austria, we’d been chatting, and he said, ‘You know, the best thing about what you’re doing – F1 and Champ Cars – is that you’re going home tonight, and I have to stay here’.

“I couldn’t believe it when he passed away, because I talked to him after the accident, and although he was in deep shock – he recognised me without recognising me, kind of thing – it didn’t seem like he had injuries that were terminal.”

Two days later, Donohue died. And one year on, at the Osterreichring, John Watson won. It was to be the Penske team’s only Grand Prix victory.