Skip Barber

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 16th, 1936, John ‘Skip’ Barber III raced in five Grands Prix though he would become a major player in North American motor racing. Alongside forming the Skip Barber Racing School, which claims Michael Andretti, Hélio Castroneves, Bill Elliott, Jeff Gordon, Tony Kanaan, Juan Pablo Montoya and even Paul Newman among its graduates he also had interests in the Lime Rock circuit and the Barber-Saab Pro-Series.

As a boy, Skip had a passion for cars and started driving at the age of 10, putting thousands of miles on the family car in the alley behind their house-half of which were in reverse as there wasn’t room to turn around. He went on to study at Harvard University then joined the Merchant Marines once out of college. He was introduced to racing in 1958 and the first race he ever saw was the first one he was in; he lapped the field and this was the start of his relationship with Lime Rock. In 1959 he entered a Sports Car Club of America National race at the circuit in an Austin Healey Sprite and finished fifteenth. As with other drivers at that time, his racing would see him sleeping in motel rooms and driving the car to the track. He soon made his mark in the amateur road racing ranks and in the mid-1960s won three SCCA National Championships in a row plus finished third in 1967’s United States Road Racing Championship. He went on to win consecutive Formula Ford National Championships in 1969 and 1970 and his 1970 title also saw him receive the President’s Cup and set 32 different lap records during the year.

His racing during this period saw him with a Turner in 1961 and starting off in SCCA National events although he did not finish at Marlboro he took victory in his next race at Lime Rock in July. He retired from the next round at Bridghehampton but in his two final outings he took further SCCA Divisional race victories at Lime Rock and Marlboro.

There was a busy schedule of National races in 1962 with a Turner Alexander though his first outing was a one off drive in late January with a Turner 950 at Daytona and he finished sixth. Piloting the Alexander, he took victory in the next race at Marlboro and would later achieve two further victories at Cumberland and Lime Rock. His other results included second at Bridgehampton, fifth at Meadowdale, third at Stuttgart, seventh at Road America and Virginia, then second in the final race at Watkins Glen and only suffered two retirements.

He raced a Lotus 23 in the following year and in the five races contested he took two podium finishes at SCCA events at Marlboro and Virginia though ran out of fuel on lap 37 of the 40 lap race at Lime Rock. Contesting a Canadian Sports Car Championship Players 200 at Mosport he was tenth in the first race though retired from the main event after a spin and later did not finish at a US Road Racing Championship Mid-Ohio race due to an axle problem. In further outings with the Lotus 23, he finished second with it at Thompson in 1964 and in the following year raced a Porsche powered 23 at the 500Km Bridgehampton World Sportscar Championship race, though retired from it.

1966 and 1967 saw busier schedules and racing a Brabham BT8 the first year started off with two second place results at Vineland and Virginia SCCA races. In USRRC events he was seventh at Bridgehampton and twelfth in the Watkins Glen GP plus had a third place podium result in a non-championship Labatt 50 Mont Tremblant event with an Autolab entered car. He contested a Trans-Am race at Bryar alongside Peter Lake in a Ford Mustang and they came home sixth though in his final outing with the Brabham he did not qualify for a Can-Am race at Mosport in late September. He was in a McLaren Elva Mark 11 the next year and in USSRC rounds he was ninth, fifth and fourth at Riverside, Laguna Seca and Mid-Ohio, with one retirement at Bridgehampton due to mechanical issues. His best results were two third places at the Road America 500 and then the Watkins Glen Sports Car GP, behind Mark Donohue’s Lola T70 and Sam Posey’s similar McLaren Elva. He contested three Can-Am rounds in September and was seventh at Road America, ninth at Bridgehampton and fifteenth at Mosport. In 1968 he contested a Trans Am race at Bryar and was seventh in a Chevrolet Camaro.

After Formula Ford 1600 was introduced to the United States, big fields quickly appeared for the races and Skip won the first two American FF championships in 1969 and 1970, winning the first with a Caldwell. Ray Caldwell’s Autodynamics racecar manufacturring company was based in Marblehead, Massachusetts and mainly produced Formula Vee and FFord chassis though were also active in the Trans-Am Series, entering Dodge Challengers in the 1970 season. An engineer by training, Ray had already successfully raced a car of his own design on the new Formula Vee series when he decided to form Autodynamics in 1964 and between that year and 1970, they designed and built 1400 race cars, including Formula Vees, Formula Fords, Super Vees, Chevy-powered Formula Cars, street roadsters and Can-Am cars. The Caldwell D-9 was the first Formula Ford chassis, designed for the 1969 season, and Skip was very successful in the class, winning the SCCA North East Division championship with seven victories as well as the National Championship Runoffs. He himself was involved with the company for a time, running the metal shop with an eye for fit and finish.

1969’s SCCA American Road Racing Championships (‘The Runoffs’) was held at Daytona International Speedway over the Thanksgiving weekend in late November but despite taking a last to first victory the weekend was a fraught affair for his team, involving crashes, broken engines and frantic crew activity. After 27 FFords took to the track for qualifying he took pole in the final ten minutes and on his last lap he shut down the D9 and then coasted in for the routine plug check. However later in the evening when crew chief Terry Secker completed his chassis and tyre checks, an engine inspection found a plug was oily and the compression check revealed it was 40 pounds down. Frantic activity followed and a clip had broken which allowed the piston pin to score the cylinder wall. Now they needed to find someone in the Florida area who had a cylinder liner and could install it but neither were to be found in Florida on Friday night of the long holiday weekend. After an hour of phone calls they realised the only hope was back at the Autodynamics factory and thus began a fraught period over 48 hours for Skip and the four mechanics plus Terry’s wife Cindy, who had to take the block to Marplehead. They felt air freight was too risky so she was told to chaperone the 90lb block (as carry-on luggage) and never let it out of her sight, with the flight east from Daytona including stop overs at Jacksonville, Atlanta and Baltimore. One of the engine builders, Doug Fraser, had been located and he travelled in the 50 miles from home to the factory. Although a liner could be found and the block could be prepared there were none of the special pistons. Another racer, Jim Clarke, knew where there were two but they would need to locate his sales manager, Jim Stevens, in Dearborn, Michigan, to unlock the doors. They were able to contact him and Jim sent one piston to Doug Fraser in Boston and to be safe, sent the other, to Daytona Beach. Back at Boston airport, Cindy arrived with the engine block, after nine hours travelling and it was taken by car to Precision Balancing company in Bedford, Massachusetts. Once there, Doug Fraser and Ted Wingate set to work on repairing it and the block was cleaned, rebored, the liner installed and bored, cylinder honed, rod magna fluxed and then sent on its way with Cindy for the long trip back to Florida. The plane arrived back in the evening, with an engine rebuild commencing at 10.30pm and the rebuild completed at 3 am. The on-board starter was pressed at 6am, with the engine working long enough to reassure them it worked and by 8.45am, forty five minutes before the morning warm up started, the car was back at the circuit. After running a warm up lap, Skip was the top qualifier but while running against Jim Clarke, a rod end on the right rear of Clarke’s Caldwell snapped on the banking, pitching his car into the side of Skip’s D9 which slammed the wall backwards at 130mph, spun, then hit the wall again nose first. After spinning down the banking, shedding fibreglass and parts, both drivers were shaken but unhurt other than a few bruised ribs for Skip. However, his car was wrecked but the race was commencing in four hours. Once the wreck was delivered back to the paddock the crew stripped out its engine and began work on putting it into an older chassis, the prototype with which Skip had won nearly a dozen races in 1969. After working over three hours to complete the morning build, a now even more exhausted crew completed this second work in an hour and twenty minutes. Although ready to compete in the race, there were a number of appeals and protests and after an appeals board the stewards declared that ‘it shall be the car-driver combination which qualifies for a starting position.’ The ruling was issued just fifteen minutes before the cars reported to the grid which meant he would have to start at the back of the field.

Once the flag dropped and twenty one cars started the 16 lap race, Skip was up to ninth position by lap 2 and on the third lap was second. Describing the race, he told how “It was a rolling start, with the green flag on the back straight. I held back slightly approaching the flag, got a running start, then leapfrogged one car after another in the draft. On the front straight approaching Turn 1, I was pulling 1000 more revs than I’d ever seen before. And I spent the first few laps just waiting for the engine to blow up!” He and race leader Jim Clarke battled hard against each other, running side by side on the high banking with the pair passing and re-passing. On lap seven, he dived down into the infield and by lap eight he had a clear lead but gear changes were becoming a problem as its shift linkage was slowly coming apart. However Jim Clarke was unable to take advantage of the problem as a battery cable came adrift and his D9 coasted to a stop two laps from the finish. An anxious Skip now had no third gear at all and the second and third runners were gaining but he took the checkered flag with 17 seconds in hand. He and the team celebrated the victory but there was one final twist for the weary mechanics with the mandatory race rule meaning the winning car had to be taken apart to check it complied with the rules (which it did) and the national title, the first FF national championship, was his.

When Skip won regularly, there were a number of people wanting to have the same engines he was using and Doug Fraser said he once joked that if he turned up wearing a helmet with a whirling propeller on the top then the next time out, everyone would have them. He described him as “a smooth and consistent driver, sensitive to small changes and able to report, in a sensible way, how an engine was running. This was helpful for fine-tuning his engines at the track.”

During that time the Italian racing concern Tecno had been dominating European F3 and he approached them to build a pair of FFords in which to contest 1970’s National Championship. Terry Secker travelled to the company to prepare two cars to FFord specification and two F3 cars were adapted and sent back to America and Skip used one car to win the Runoffs in 1970.

Following these championship wins he travelled to Europe and bought a March 711, to replace the 701 he crashed early in the year. His intention was to race back in 1971’s American L&M F5000 series but before shipping the car back to the US he decided to stay in Europe and contest a number of World Championship Grands Prix. He did not qualify in Monaco but although still running at the end at Zandvoort he was not classified (along with H.Pesarolo and Peter Gethin). He also finished sixth (behind J.Ickx, R.Peterson, J.Surtees, H.Ganley and Nanni Galli) in a non-championship Jochen Rindt Trophy race at Hockenheim. Later in the year he entered the North American rounds though did not finish in Canada due to oil pressure problems and was not classified in the US GP. Away from single seaters he raced a Baker Motor Company Lola T212 in the Watkins Glen 6 Hours alongside Pete Harrison, Tom Fraser and Bobby Rinzler though their race ended after 226 laps after a collision with the Vic Elford/Nanni Galli Alfa Romeo T33/2.

He returned to the US and Canadian races again the following year with a Gene Mason Racing March 711 though retired at Mosport due to oil pressure problems and was not classified at Watkins Glen (along with E.Fittipaldi and P.Lovely). After that he raced GT cars and 1974 saw him contest several Camel GT Challenge/IMSA rounds with Bob Hagestad in a Porsche 911 RSR. In 6 Hour events they retired at Watkins Glen and were twenty-ninth at Road Atlanta then forty fourth in the Mid-Ohio 5 Hours. Their best results came in July at the Ontario 4 Hours, where they came home fifth then third at the Mexico 1000Km (in both races the cars ahead of them were similar Porsche RSRs). There were two races in 1975, the first being the Sebring 12 Hours alongside Harry Theodoracopulos with Ippocampos Racing’s Ford Capri, but after qualifying eighth they did not start due to mechanical issues (drive shaft). In August he and B.Hagestad co-drove a Porsche 911 Carrera and finished eighth at the Mid-Ohio 6 Hours.

Unfortunately, finances had often been a hindrance to his career and the high costs involved eventually saw him end his racing in the seventies. Despite ending his racing career, he believed racing was ‘coachable’, in the same way as any other sport at the time. This led him to teaching and in 1975, with two borrowed Lola Formula Fords and four students, he started the Skip Barber School of High Performance Drivin. It was said he financed it with a loan from the bank-which was supposedly for renovating his bathroom! In 1976 it was renamed the Skip Barber Racing School plus he created the Skip Barber Race Series and within a decade the racing school was the largest in America. It has trained more motorsports winners and champions than any other organisation of its kind and since 1983 the school has trained over one-third of all Indy 500 competitors and a quarter of the Nascar Sprint Cup drivers, with professional race drivers and celebrities sending their children there.

He remained active in motor sports as the owner and operator of Lime Rock Park; in the early eighties he bought it with several of his school graduates. A member of the SCCA for over 54 years, mostly with the Mohawk Hudson Region, Skip served as President of the Road Racing Drivers Club and was inducted into the SCCA Hall of Fame in March 2013.