David Walker (born 10 June 1941 in Sydney- died 24 May 2024) is an Australian former racing driver who drove for Lotus in the 1971 and 1972 Formula One World Championships. Info from Wiki
Bio by Stephen Latham
Born in 1941, Australian Dave Walker initially started his professional life as an accountant but after trying hillclimbing he decided to try motor racing. He first moved to the UK in 1962, though returned to Australia, where he raced in the Australian rounds of the Tasman series in 1964-1965 on challenging tracks like Longford and Sandown and later contested Australian National 2.5 with a Lotus 70 in 1971.
Having left England some years before, he returned there to race a Formula 3 Merlyn and established himself in Formula Ford 1600, winning the 1969 Les Leston British FF1600 Championship with a factory Alexis. This led to a works Lotus drive in F3 and he went on to win the 1970 Lombank title.
During this period, while working for the Jim Russell Racing Driver School at Snetterton, he, Doug Morris and Brian Jones drove a Vauxhall Ventora in the 1968 London to Sydney Marathon. The team was keeping up with the leaders until they reached a stage in Iran where D.Morris was severely injured while working under the car. After leaving hospital one and a half days later, although heavily bandaged and braced, they attempted to reach Bombay but as Morris was unable to do any more driving, Dave Walker drove non-stop from Tehran to Bombay, except for a two hour break for sleep. When they arrived they boarded a boat to Australia (72 cars made the journey) and the event restarted in Perth, to drive to Sydney non-stop. Taking 69 hours to cross from west to east, D.Walker drove all but approximately 3 hours of the drive and the team finished in 52nd place (up 17 places from when they joined the ship). They had only dropped 520 points (minutes) on the nearly 4000 km of crossing one of the most rugged rally routes devised, carrying a still severely injured Morris.
Racing in F3 in 1971, with new 1600cc rules introduced for the season, he won the support races at the Monaco GP and the British GP at Silverstone on his way to taking both the Shell and Forward Trust British F3 titles. The year also saw his Grand Prix debut in the Dutch GP at Zandvoort with the gas turbine Lotus 56B-Pratt & Witney. He qualified twenty second on the grid though in the race was running tenth but his promising run ended when he went off track at Tarzan.
He was a full time Lotus driver during 1972 but it was an unhappy season for him, with his best result looking to be at Spain, when he was contesting fifth place with Peter Revson, but ran out of fuel with three laps to go. He and the team parted company before the Italian GP (after testing an Formula 2 car without Colin Chapman’s permission) but there was a return for the US GP at Watkins Glen, though he retired from the race.
Following this, he contested Formula 2 with a DART Racing GRD 273-Ford, taking third at Croix-en-Ternois, fourth at the Trophee Benelle at Imola and fifth at Vila Real. Unfortunately during this time he sustained a broken leg in a road accident in London but recovered to make a number of F2 starts during 1974 plus had drives in F5000 and Formula Atlantic in America, but then retired at the end of 1975.
After retiring, Dave set up a marine charter company in Queensland, Australia.
