‘The Unfair Advantage’ is the book every race car driver wishes they could write
Breaking down the beauty of Mark Donohue's autobiography.
Welcome back to the DPTJ Book Club! This month, we've been reading one of my favorite racing books of all time: The Unfair Advantage by Mark Donohue (and Paul van Valkenburgh). And, man, is this the kind of book every driver wishes they could write.
Let's get a little context out of the way first. Mark Donohue — born on March 18, 1937 in Summit, New Jersey — was perhaps one of the most widely respected men in the American motorsport scene during the 1960s and 1970s. Donohue graduated from Brown with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in 1959, and two years later, he won the SCCA national championship driving an Elva Courier.
That kicked off a truly impressive career that saw him join forces with former racer turned team owner and business extraordinaire Roger Penske in the mid-1960s. With Team Penske, Donohue put his engineering skills to good use by helping refine a stunning array of cars that competed in everything from NASCAR to Trans Am to Formula 1 to Champ Car to Can-Am to endurance racing. That generally meant Donohue was pulled in a thousand different directions, and he ultimately decided to retire from racing and instead turn to running Penske… until Roger decided to get serious about going to F1 full time and needed a driver/engineer to craft their car.
And if you know Donohue's story, you know that was his undoing. On August 19, 1975, Donohue was killed in an accident during a practice session ahead of the Formula 1 Austrian Grand Prix. But that's not something you're going to hear about in The Unfair Advantage, because, well — it's an autobiography.
When I first read The Unfair Advantage back in 2018, I did so for my Jalopnik Race Car Book Club, and I think my main focus was about how little we learned about Donohue, The Man.
In effect, this book was written by Donohue speaking into a recorder; after that, journalist Paul Van Vulkenburgh transcribed the audio into written word and clarified a few things — but for all intents and purposes, Donohue did a great job telling his own story from his own memory. But you're not going to hear a damn thing about his personal life: His upbringing, his family, how he spent his time away from the race track.
That really stuck out to me on my first read, because the rest of this book is insanely detailed. It's divided into chapters based on the car Donohue was racing at the time, and you'll learn literally everything you could want to know: Why he (or Roger Penske) decided on that car, the intensive refinement process required to make it quick, and the eternal pursuit of the ‘unfair advantage’ — or, that little factor that helped Penske and Donohue stick out from the rest of the field. Sometimes it was as simple as a slick paint job, while other times it involved acid-dipping a car chassis to make it lighter and therefore faster.
Like, I cannot even explain how insanely detailed this book is. Donohue remembers everything. He remembers his first impression of a car, and the step-by-step process he and the team took to making it faster. He remembers exactly what broke in one race, and how the team addressed it (or, in some cases, didn't) before the next event. He walks you through his thought process — why and how he ultimately decided that, say, the spring rate was the ultimate issue. He tells you the nine spring rates he tried, and why they didn't work, so that you understand what actually worked on the 10th try. Somehow, none of this ever gets tedious; reading the book feels like you're standing next to Donohue in the garage, scratching your head, growing more frustrated, and finally feeling the waves of relief that signal you've found a solution to a problem that's been giving you fits.
In reading this book again, I can definitely see why I'd have focused on the lack of disclosure about Donohue's private life back when I was 22. Now that plenty of time has passed, I much better appreciate just how much we learn about this man despite the fact that he's reluctant to give you too many personal details.
I think that's because I have a greater appreciation and understanding of the context now — because when you read The Unfair Advantage, you definitely get the sense that Donohue wants you to believe he's nothing special. He doesn't think he's that great of a racer; he's just uniquely good at engineering a car in such a way as to make it flawless. He doesn't think he's that great of an engineer, either, because his attention is being pulled in a thousand different directions by racing in a thousand different categories.
It's not a faux humble. It's genuine. Donohue is very open about the ways imposter syndrome chased him throughout his life. But what he's not telling you is that he was on the cutting edge of innovation, chasing down answers to questions that no one had ever thought to ask, and doing it in an extremely detailed way that left no discovery to chance. It's like a marathon runner getting down on herself for not being able to find that that extra bit of performance to break a record time after months of training; she can forget that the most of the other folks starting that marathon alongside her haven't agonized over nutrition, oxygen levels, muscle mass, and so much more. They've just turned up with a bit of training, ready to see what happens, because this is just a casual hobby.
If you only know Donohue's side of things, you might be tempted to take him at his word. But when you know that racing in the ‘60s and ‘70s was such a raucous, slapdash affair, it really shines a light on the inner workings of this man's mind. He's giving himself hell for not being Good Enough, when his base level of preparation far exceeds anything his competitors were doing. He was setting a standard of professionalization that really didn't exist.
Now I realize that I don't need to know a ton about Donohue's personal life to feel like I better understand the man he was. He gives you all that information in The Unfair Advantage; it's just up to you, the reader, to place his story within its greater context.
One moment really stuck out to me on this second read-through. After his nasty wreck behind the wheel of the Porsche 917-10 destined to compete in the Can-Am series, Donohue says that he thought he should call his wife; they were divorced by that point, but he thought he should be the one to tell her that he went somersaulting through the air and lived to tell the tale, before she caught wind of it in the media.
I distinctly remember reading this part the first time around and going, “When the hell did he get married?!” — because sure enough, he doesn't dwell on it, nor on the fact that he had two sons, nor on the fact that at some point, he got re-married. I wanted to know more!
And I still do (I just watched Earnhardt, and it was fascinating to hear how their father's distant but grandiose persona impacted the evolution of Dale Earnhardt's children) — but on this second read-through, I get it a little bit more. Donohue's life was racing. He was consumed by it. Family seemed secondary, perhaps because it's much harder to solve a problem in a relationship than it is to solve a problem in a car. The absence of any details on Donohue's personal life tells you everything you need to know.
The Unfair Advantage was first published in 1975, just before Donohue's death. The copy I have is a re-release that came out in 2000, which featured more information and photographs. But the ending is the exact same.
After winning the inaugural International Race of Champions title in 1974, Donohue retired. He sensed that he was being pulled in too many different directions, that he wasn't able to give all of Penske Racing's projects his full effort if he was driving and engineering at the same time. Roger Penske offered him a tidy paycheck to serve as team manager… but he describes the “mental anguish” he felt when he realized he could no longer get behind the wheel himself and sort out a car's problems from the inside.
Then, in 1974, Roger Penske entered Formula 1.
Penske and Donohue had previously tried their hand at F1, back in 1971, for just two races. But Penske was convinced there were new horizons to conquer, and the plan was to ease into the sport in 1974 with the intention of going full-time in 1975.
There was no one better capable of developing a car than Mark Donohue. And so, he un-retired.
The book ends there, just before the F1 adventure truly began in full force. It ends with hope for the future:
I do still have a lot of problems, though. I have to face up to the fact that I'm not going to be winning any races for a while. At one time, winning wasn't the most important thing — it was the only thing. Now I’m in new territory, I'm out of practice, and I'm out of shape. But some good drivers have to lose. I've seen them do it, and it doesn't take them apart. So I'll have to put winning to the back of my mind for a while. I've got a fresh attitude, Roger sees to it that the pressures are reduced, and I think I can cope with it mentally. We will be using our old familiar systems of development and maintenance, and trying to adapt to Formula One as rapidly as possible. Just like in USAC and NASCAR, we'll have to serve an apprenticeship. And hopefully, in a few years, I'll have another story to tell.
We know now that the story came to an end shortly after. Donohue was killed. Penske Racing continued on for another year in F1, took a single victory on the first anniversary of Donohue's death, then folded at the end of the season. Donohue's family sued Penske and Goodyear. One of American motorsport's greatest legends was gone.
That last paragraph is so poignant when you know all of that — but even in the reissues of The Unfair Advantage, those facts go unwritten. It would have been simple to tack on an afterword, to lay these details out in all of their horror.
Yet no one did, and I deeply respect that decision. As a result, The Unfair Advantage remains a story of Mark Donohue's life, told by Mark Donohue. This is the story of his accomplishments, his failures, and his successes. It's his story, the way he wanted it told. So much of the book exists in the contours of context and the unspoken that ending on this note feels truly fitting, an homage to a man who seemed so untouchable for so long.
Later this year, I'll be releasing an episode about the short-lived history of Penske Racing's Formula 1 team and the death of Mark Donohue, laying bare the tragedy. But that's firmly a story for “Deadly Passions, Terrible Joys.” I'm glad it remains separate from The Unfair Advantage.
Next month for the DPTJ Book Club, we'll be reading The Last Lap: The Mysterious Death of Peter Kries by William T. Walker.