One of the toughest, fastest, most determined and versatile drivers to ever grace motorsport has left us, aged 90. Rufus Parnell Jones, born in Texarkana, Ark., in 1933, died of natural causes on June 4, in Torrance, Calif., the city where he had lived since he was seven years old.
How significant a figure was the man we knew as Parnelli Jones? The late, great Robin Miller said it best: U.S. motorsport’s Mount Rushmore would feature A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, Dan Gurney and Parnelli. And there’s little point in disputing that because he was right.
Parnelli signified speed. Just as overenthusiastic drivers in the U.K. in the ’60s would be asked by admonishing police officers, “Who do you think you are? Stirling Moss?” so traffic cops on this side of the Atlantic would compare a speeding driver unfavorably with Parnelli Jones. And inevitably, there came the fateful day when the man himself was stopped, and he was able to reply, “As a matter of fact, I am Parnelli Jones.” That would become the title of his excellent biography with journalist Bones Bourcier.
Yet the “Jones” part became superfluous: he was among those elite sports stars – Nuvolari, Pele, Kobe, Shaq, Fangio – who required only one name for everyone to know the subject of the conversation. There was only one Parnelli.
How he attained this unusual (unique?) name is tortuous, but has its roots in the not uncommon desire for a young driver to fudge his age. Jones’ mother had named him Rufus Parnell after a local judge whom she respected, but the name Rufus Jones would have been rare enough to ring a bell with potential visitors to his local track in Gardena, just five miles from Torrance. It would therefore have been easy for officials to trace his age and learn he was 17 – a year younger than the legal age to compete. What to do? A high school friend, Billy Calder, came up with the solution. He had nicknamed him “Parnellie,” fusing his middle name with the first name of Nellie, a girl who was rather keen on our handsome hero, and one day Billy painted “Parnellie” on the door of Jones’s 1934 Ford jalopy. The final “e” was eventually dropped; the remainder stuck. Billy couldn’t have imagined that his friend’s memorable new alias would go on to become an iconic name.
In jalopies, Jones was a badass, scoring around 100 wins across SoCal, and he was more than ready to progress to NASCAR’s Pacific Coast Late Model Series, where he accrued 15 wins. In fact, West Coast stockers alone would eventually bring him 22 triumphs, and this form brought him to the attention of team owner Vel Miletich in 1956. Together they decided to enter NASCAR Cup at Darlington Raceway in 1958, and despite starting 44th, Parnelli managed to lead a couple of laps before suffering engine failure.
Progressing to IMCA sprint cars for 1959, Jones made an impression with fifth in the championship despite missing several rounds in the first half of the season. The aggression required in such powerful open-wheelers suited his style, although in truth, he could be quick in anything, either by taming a car’s manners to follow his will or by adapting his inputs to suit the car. The net result was that he won the USAC Midwest Sprint Car title in 1960, and followed it up with USAC’s National title in ’61 and ’62. In fact, he was simply brilliant in sprint cars, eventually ending his career with 25 Feature wins to go with his 25 triumphs in midgets.
By then, he had joined the Indy (Champ) car fray and in his ninth race at the top level, at California State Fairgrounds in Sacramento in 1960, he snagged a runner-up finish. But that was just the gravy: it was his simultaneous Midwest Sprint Car crown that had caught the eye of promoter J.C. Agajanian, who became desperate to get this phenomenon on the grid at Indy. Aggie’s judgment and anticipation of greatness proved faultless.
Only a year earlier, Jim Hurtubise had – as a rookie – set the Brickyard’s new one-lap benchmark of 149.601mph during a four-lap qualifying run that made him the fastest in the field. (Unfortunately he had achieved this on the fourth day of time trials, so his run made him eligible only for 23rd on the grid.) “Herk” then used this platform like a latter-day John the Baptist, warning anyone who would listen that an even quicker driver would be among them soon, namely, his sprint car rival Parnelli Jones. Hurtubise, like Agajanian, was spot on: P.J. became the man to beat at IMS.
On his Indy 500 debut in ’61 with the Agajanian Willard Battery Watson-Offy, Jones qualified fifth and led 27 laps (figures precisely matched by Fernando Alonso on his debut some 56 years later, incidentally), but he lost a cylinder in the second half of the race, and a piece of metal struck him above the left eye. The blood then ran down from the cut and filled his left goggle, so that every few laps he’d have to empty it. Still, he kept on, crossing the line in 12th. He had done (more than) enough to earn himself Rookie of the Year honors, albeit shared with Bobby Marshman. There would soon be a runner-up finish at fearsome Langhorne, a fifth at Syracuse, another runner-up finish at Sacramento and finally a breakthrough win in Phoenix.
The following year promised much, and a second-place finish at Trenton to open the ’62 Champ Car season seemed like just a warm-up. Come the Month of May, Jones ran a 150.729mph lap, an Indy single-lap record, and when all four of his laps produced an average of 150.370, he not only had a record, he also had pole – a full 1mph faster than even former winner Rodger Ward. Having led laps 1-59 and laps 65-125, however, Jones then lost his brakes, making his pit stops a scuffling, shuffling nightmare, so he would eventually come home a frustrated seventh.
Elsewhere on the IndyCar trail, Jones was always a force to be reckoned with and further runner-up finishes at Milwaukee, Langhorne and Springfield, a third at Langhorne’s second race, top fives at Trenton, Sacramento and Phoenix and a victory at Indianapolis’s State Fairground gave him third in the championship.
Thanks to an unhealthy dose of DNFs, in ’63 he would slip to fourth in points, but that almost didn’t matter: he clinched Indy. Having started from pole position again, this time alongside his buddy Hurtubise and another great, Don Branson, Jones led 167 laps but found on race pace his nearest opposition came from the rear-engined Lotus of Indy car rookie but Formula 1 yardstick Jimmy Clark. As has become Indy legend, Jones’ car, Ol’ Calhoun, started weeping oil – no worse than others, insisted his defenders – due to a crack in the tank, and by the time Lotus founder Colin Chapman had alerted authorities, the car’s oil level had dropped beneath the split. Thus no black flag was deemed necessary, and Clark skittered home some half a minute in arrears. One who spun and crashed on oil was Eddie Sachs and, assuming it was Jones’s doing, confronted him at the post-race banquet… where he received a bunch of knuckles for his trouble. Clark, by contrast, kept his peace, congratulated his rival, grinned charmingly and vowed to return.