Well-known race-team boss Tom Walkinshaw died the morning of Dec. 12 at the age of 64. The Scot endured a long battle with cancer.
Walkinshaw had stints in Formula One as the boss of the Benetton, Ligier and Arrows teams, but he remains best known as the man behind the famous Jaguars that raced in the World Sportscar Championship and IMSA from 1985 to 1993.
Walkinshaw initially was a successful driver in his own right. Although he competed in Formula Three, Formula Two and Formula 5000, he was much more successful in touring cars. He won the Spa 24 Hours in 1981 with a Mazda and in 1984 with a Jaguar XJ-S. Also in 1984, he won the European Touring Car Championship.
He then retired from driving to focus on Tom Walkinshaw Racing, which he launched in the late 1970s. He built the company into a motorsports and engineering empire, most famously finding success with Jaguar.
After the ETCC triumphs, Walkinshaw took the marque into the sports-car big league in 1985. The following year the team switched to the iconic Silk Cut colors, going on to win Le Mans in 1988 and 1990 and both the teams' and drivers' world championships in 1987, 1988 and 1991. Jaguar also had some success in IMSA GTP competition, where it ran in Castrol and then Bud Light livery.
Benetton asked Walkinshaw to run the its F1 team in 1991, and he brought his sports-car designer, Ross Brawn, with him. He also was instrumental in headhunting Michael Schumacher after the German's sensational debut with Jordan at Spa that year.
Walkinshaw continued to run Benetton's engineering department until 1994, when Schumacher won the world championship, though the team's commercial boss Flavio Briatore had a higher public profile and thus received much of the credit. However, the team was embroiled in several controversies that season, and Walkinshaw was ousted as part of the fallout. He ended up running the Briatore-owned Ligier team in 1995.
Plans for Walkinshaw to buy Ligier outright did not come to fruition, and in early 1996, he switched his focus to Arrows, where he initially took a 51-percent ownership stake. He had high hopes of evolving the team and convinced 1996 world champion Damon Hill to join in 1997 after the Brit lost his ride at Williams. Hill came close to winning that year's Hungarian Grand Prix, eventually finishing second. Despite some high-profile sponsors the team eventually ran out of funds and folded in the middle of the 2002 season, in large part because of the high costs of customer engines at that time.
The Tom Walkinshaw Racing empire also collapsed, but Walkinshaw maintained a foothold in engineering and racing, most notably with Holden in Australia.


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