Race Car Design Genius, Hall-of-Famer Bob Riley Dies at 93

Over the course of five decades, Bob Riley’s genius produced some of racing’s most innovative, outrageous and successful race car designs.

With victories including the Le Mans 24-hour, the Indy 500, the Sebring 12-Hour and the Rolex 24 at Daytona, the drivers who wheeled Riley creations comprise a who’s who of racing stars. Riley designs won championships in IndyCar, IMSA, the Grand-Am and the Trans-Am.

Following a fall in his home, Riley died of a heart attack on Thursday at age 93 after a brief hospitalization, according to his son Bill.

Riley preferred a behind-the-scenes role, in part because he recognized how many things could go wrong with a car in a race that were out of his control. But Riley was as prolific as he was persevering. The possibility of failure never fazed him, resulting in more than 70 car designs, starting with his dirt track racers built as a teenager in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Despite his advancing age, Riley continued as a regular in his office at Riley Technologies, which was founded in 2006 and where he worked regularly with son Bill, the co-owner.

“Now that I’m semi-retired,” Bob joked, “I don’t get to the office until 9 a.m.” This year, the company rolled out the Kar-Kraft Mk IV, a supercar described as a continuation of Ford’s 1967 Le Mans winner.

Born in Texas, Riley was inducted into IMSA’s newly established Hall of Fame this year and was honored by the prestigious Road Racing Drivers Club with the Phil Hill Award in 2022.

Bobby Rahal, one of many who piloted Riley cars, presented Riley with his award at the RRDC ceremony in Daytona Beach. “Bob Riley is a wonderful man,” he said, adding, “When I first met Bob I felt really stupid because I thought I knew a lot. I realized talking to Bob I didn't know much at all. He's a class act. He is super-talented and probably under-rated in many respects.”

When A.J. Foyt and Dan Gurney won at Le Mans in 1967, it was on board a Ford Mk IV with a suspension designed at Kar Kraft by a young Riley, soon to be known for his championship-winning Formula Vee kit cars. From there, Riley jumped to the big leagues, drawing cars for A.J. Foyt. His Coyote designed for Foyt in 1973, with its hub centerline front suspension, carried the Texan to a fourth Indy 500 victory in 1977.

Riley made an annual sojourn to Houston to work on Foyt’s cars while employed by Ford. His Lynx Formula Vee design, which captured four SCCA National Championships in the 1970s, resulted from burning the midnight oil in his basement. In 1974, at the age of 42, he left his daily Ford job in Dearborn and Foyt, moving to fulltime racing with the IndyCar team of Pat Patrick, where his Wildcats were credited with being the first to use the underbody to create “ground effects.”

Foyt drove the Coyote of Riley to the IndyCar title in 1975 and Gordon Johncock was at the wheel of a Riley-designed Wildcat when he won the title the following year. Foyt won the title again in 1978 in the Riley-designed Coyote.

In IMSA, his super muscle cars of the 1970s, known as the Kemp Cobra II and the John Greenwood Corvettes, pushed the rulebook boundaries with outlandish bodywork. They preceded the Mustang GTP in 1983, the only front-engine GTP car, which won its first race at Road America. He followed with the Chevy-powered Intrepid, another ground-breaking GTP car co-designed with son Bill.

Including the seminal Riley & Scott Mk III introduced in 1995 during the World Sports Car era and the Daytona Prototypes of the Grand-Am, Riley prototypes won at Daytona and Sebring 15 times. His GT designs fielded by Jack Roush and Protofab triumphed at those two endurance events nine times.

In addition to 24-hour triumphs, James Weaver, Elliott Forbes-Robinson, Butch Leitzinger, Wayne Taylor and Scott Pruett won championships on board Riley prototypes, among others.

Success did not come early for Riley. “Nobody’s ever heard of the 24 minutes of Daytona,” he said of some of his cars’ initial forays that ended in early disaster. “They’ve heard of the Daytona 500 and the Daytona 24-hour, but nobody seems to talk much about the 24 minutes of Daytona.”

Tom Gloy won the Trans-Am championship in 1984 in the Lincoln-Mercury Capri designed at Roush Racing by Riley. That led to a revival of the SCCA’s premier professional series when other designers began using similar approaches to their tube-frame cars that proved fast and reliable. In a partnership with Mark Scott, the Riley & Scott-built Trans-Am cars were a mainstay in the series throughout the 1990s. Drivers behind the wheel of Riley-built cars, including Pruett, Scott Sharp, Jack Baldwin and Wally Dallenbach, Jr., won 14 Trans-Am titles.

Kenny Bernstein’s NASCAR Cup team won its first race at Watkins Glen in 1988 in a Buick with Ricky Rudd at the wheel with a suspension that was a collaboration between Crew Chief Larry McReynolds and Riley, one of the first engineers in the NASCAR garage. When Dale Earnhardt won the Daytona 500 in 1998 with McReynolds as crew chief, Riley contributed to the suspension development as well. McReynolds credited a lot of changes in the NASCAR garage when it came to suspensions to Riley’s influence and teams’ adopting similar approaches.

Riley’s passing signals the end of the individual designer era in American motorsports characterized by the other engineering geniuses such as Bruce McLaren and Jim Hall.