Teddy Mayer

Teddy Mayer: The Lawyer Who Ran McLaren

They called him The Weiner, and he regarded racing drivers as replaceable components — a view he did not much trouble to hide. Under that cold accounting, McLaren won two Formula One world championships, the Indianapolis 500 twice and five consecutive Can-Am titles, all inside a decade, and all after the man whose name was on the cars had been killed testing one. Teddy Mayer was a Cornell-trained lawyer who took over a bereaved race team and turned it into an institution.

Scranton, Cornell, and a Formula Junior Team

Edward Everett Mayer was born on 8 September 1935 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He went to Cornell Law School and, while studying there, got involved with the Rev-Em Formula Junior team, whose drivers included his younger brother Timmy and Peter Revson. It was an unusual sideline for a law student, and it turned out to be the career.

He graduated in 1962 and went to Europe rather than to a firm, joining Bruce McLaren's fledgling Formula One operation in 1963. He and McLaren raced together in the 1964 Tasman Series. Mayer's role was business manager: the man who did the contracts, the money and the arithmetic while other people did the driving.

June 1970

Bruce McLaren died in 1970, and the team he had founded had to decide whether it was a man or an organisation. Mayer, with the engineer Tyler Alexander, made it an organisation. The two of them ran McLaren's Formula One, Can-Am and Indycar programmes simultaneously through the 1970s — three championships in three countries under different rulebooks, a logistical load that broke better-loved teams.

The results arrived. Emerson Fittipaldi took the Formula One drivers' title for McLaren in 1974; James Hunt took it in 1976. Johnny Rutherford won the Indianapolis 500 for the team in 1974 and again in 1976. In Can-Am, McLaren took five successive championships. For a stretch in the middle of that decade there was no more effective racing organisation anywhere.

The Politics

Mayer's other career was governance, and it may have mattered more than the trophies. He co-founded the Formula One Constructors' Association with Bernie Ecclestone — the body that consolidated the teams' commercial bargaining power and permanently changed who got paid what in Grand Prix racing. Later he helped create CART alongside Roger Penske and others, doing the same job for American open-wheel racing. A lawyer who understood that a sport is a set of contracts was a rare thing in a paddock full of engineers and drivers.

His management style was pragmatic to the point of chill. Motor Sport's obituary described him as a no-nonsense and sometimes caustic character with little sympathy for most drivers, whom he viewed as interchangeable. He could be warm about performance rather than people: Rick Mears taking pole drew from him the verdict that it was "just a tremendous performance," which from Mayer counted as an embrace.

Squeezed Out

The late 1970s went badly. McLaren's results declined, and Marlboro — the money — orchestrated a merger with Ron Dennis's Project 4 outfit. Mayer stayed on as joint managing director until 1982, when he sold his shares and left. The team he had held together for twelve years became, under Dennis, something else entirely, and won a great deal more.

He was not finished. He ran the Texaco Star Indycar team, and in 1986 co-founded Haas Lola with Carl Haas to enter Formula One, running Alan Jones and Patrick Tambay; the project folded after the Beatrice sponsorship was swallowed in a corporate acquisition. In the 1990s he joined Penske Racing as vice-chairman, working from Dorset in England, and stayed on in a consultancy until 2007.

He married Sarah Bryant, from whom he was divorced in 1993; their children Tim — named for his brother — and Anne live in the United States. He died in England on 30 January 2009 of complications of Parkinson's disease, aged seventy-three.

Why Teddy Is Called a Genius

The word is used about Mayer for a specific and slightly unfashionable quality: institutional intelligence. He was not an engineer and never designed anything. What he could do was see a racing team as a structure — of contracts, budgets, personnel and rules — and optimise it, which is precisely the skill nobody in motor racing had been trained for in 1970 and everybody needs now.

Two things support the claim. The first is that he kept three championship-winning programmes running at once in three racing categories, under an organisation that had just lost its founder and namesake, and won in all of them. Teams routinely collapse after that kind of death; McLaren instead entered its most successful decade to that point. The second is the FOCA work. Co-founding the constructors' association with Ecclestone, and later helping build CART, meant shaping the commercial architecture of two continents' motorsport rather than merely competing inside it. Very few competitors ever get to edit the rules of the game they are playing.

The counter-case is substantial and should be made. Mayer inherited a team; he did not create one. Bruce McLaren's engineering culture and Tyler Alexander's competence were the substrate he managed, and the championships were won by exceptional drivers in good cars. His judgement failed conspicuously at the end: McLaren's slide in the late 1970s was severe enough that a sponsor, not a board, forced the reorganisation that removed him, and the team's subsequent decade under Ron Dennis suggests the problem had been at the top. His post-McLaren ventures, Haas Lola above all, went nowhere. And a management doctrine that treats drivers as interchangeable parts is a defensible operational stance, not an insight. Call Mayer an outstanding administrator and a genuinely consequential political operator. "Genius" oversells a man whose great gift was that he refused to be sentimental.

Legacy

McLaren is the second-oldest team in Formula One and the one whose first world championships came on Mayer's watch; the organisation that survived Bruce McLaren's death did so largely because Mayer and Alexander insisted it was bigger than its founder. The Formula One Constructors' Association he helped start remade the sport's economics, and CART reorganised American racing. He spent his last twenty years in the sport at Penske, doing what he had always done — the arithmetic behind other people's glory.

Achievements

• Educated at Cornell Law School