The oldest American race teams are Petty Enterprises and the Wood Bros, both in NASCAR. The Pettys' roots go back to NASCAR’s beginnings in 1949 and the Woods have been in action since 1953. Among the more modern NASCAR teams, the oldest is Richard Childress’ operation, which he started in 1969. Rick Hendrick started his NASCAR team in 1984 and Jack Roush went NASCAR Racing in 1988 after a number of years in IMSA’s GTO category. Roger Penske started his race team in 1966 and Carl Haas started fielding a team around the same time, although the current Newman/Haas team didn’t take shape until 1983. And, AAR aside, there are no American race car builders - unless you count Bob Riley’s company - which have enjoyed long-term, successful lives.
Again, longevity in big-time racing is a rare thing, so it’s both interesting and impressive that Lola and Cosworth share 50th anniversaries in 2008. It’s difficult to put into perspective Lola Cars’ many achievements over the past 50 years since the company’s founding in 1958 by Eric Broadley in a tiny garage in Bromley, Kent, a south-eastern suburb of London.
Lola has been recognised for many years as one of the world’s most successful and enduring production racing car manufacturers. It has constructed race-winning cars for almost every major racing category, including
F1, Indy/Champ Car racing, CanAm, international sportscar racing and many other secondary formulae and categories around the world. Among Lola’s astonishing record of accomplishments are 194 individual Indy/Champ car victories, including three Indy 500s, and numerous CanAm and Formula 5000 wins and championships.
Lola is a rare survivor in a business which tends to feature a steady stream of new names, decade by decade, with most of them falling by the wayside after ten or twenty years.
