Insight: Bob Tullius' Pivotal Place in Jaguar's Racing History
Remembering Bob Tullius, the trendsetter who took Jaguar back to the 24 Hours of Le Mans...
No Bob Tullius, no Jaguar victories at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1988 and ’90. That’s my theory. It’s why sports car aficionados in Europe as well as those across the Pond in North America should be mourning the death of Tullius last month at the age of 95.
He and his Group 44 team only wrote the opening few pages of the second chapter of Jaguar’s Le Mans story; it was left to Tom Walkinshaw Racing to provide the bulk. But without him the book might well have remained closed and the British manufacturer’s victory tally at the Circuit de la Sarthe stuck on the five it notched up in the 1950s.
Obituaries of Tullius made great play of his 14 SCCA titles, focusing on them before mentioning that it was he and Group 44 that took Jaguar back to Le Mans in 1984. The significance of those titles and the couple notched up in Trans-Am in the 1970s was to give Jaguar the confidence to make a return to sports car racing in the IMSA GT Championship from 1982 and ultimately go on to Le Mans in 1984 with him and his team.
Had Jaguar, part of the state-owned British Leyland automotive conglomerate, not had a long-standing relationship with a highly-successful and ultra-professional team, would it have embarked on a project in the still-new GTP prototype class in the early 1980s? Probably not.
Tullius’s relationship with the British automotive industry stretched all the way back to his earliest days in racing. He was given a Triumph TR4 to race in 1962 on the back of his initial successes with a TR3 — his wife’s car! - by the U.S. importer. Triumph was subsumed into British Leyland Motor Company along with Jaguar as the 1960s drew to a close, which explains why Tullius switched to the E type and then the XJS midway through the ‘70s.
Jaguar Cars Inc. vice president Mike Dale knew he could count on Tullius and his team as he looked for a way to re-invigorate Jaguar as a marque at a time that BL was withdrawing all its other brands, Triumph included, from the North America marketplace. Besides its successes on the race track, Group 44 set new standards for preparation and presentation in North America and probably beyond.