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Who is Bill Mitchell?

Who Am I?

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I graduated from CalTech in 1967 with a degree in Mathematics specializing in numerical analysis, or how to perform difficult calculations on a computer. That was followed with a Masters from Stanford University in 1969.

My interest in auto racing began with watching a Can-Am race in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1969. Denny Hulme won in a McLaren over John Surtees in a Chaparral. In 1972 I began serving as a SCCA flagman in the San Francisco Region. I was soon working 20-30 races a year up and down the west coast as well as the SCCA Runoffs at Road Atlanta. In the 80’s I began covering races for the San Francisco Region publication The Wheel. The race reporting soon expanded to Autoweek and Formula magazine. I began following the Trans-Am series as Ford returned to professional motorsports in the mid-80s. This allowed me to meet the engineers and team managers.  Tom Gloy was driving Mustangs. Jack Roush was running a Mercury Capri for Greg Pickett. John Dick was leading the DeAtley Motorsports team of Chevrolet Camaros driven by David Hobbs and Willy T. Ribbs. Dennis Fischer was building the motors.

While covering motorsports I met many tire company representatives. This led to the “Beyond Round and Black” series in Sports Car magazine. This was an award-winning series that allowed tire reps to explain a great deal of tire technology to a wide audience.

When IBM released a personal computer, complete with 5.25” floppy disks holding 360kb of data, I needed a project to learn the new computers. I had heard of “camber curves” and decided to write a program on suspension geometry to learn the new computer. In 1985 I sold the first copy of this program to a local small-bore driver Doug Peterson of CompTech. Doug went on to win several SCCA national championships and then moved into professional racing. Doug and CompTech eventually moved to Indy Cars and now build IRL engines.

With the advent of affordable portable computers data acquisition began to spread and I began work on the Debrief series of programs. This led to spending the 1991 and 1992 seasons with Chip Ganassi’s CART team. The drivers were Eddie Cheever and Arie Luyendyk. The 1993 season was spent with the Roush Racing GTS effort where Tom Kendall returned to racing and won the Driver’s championship. In 1994 Roush and Kendall switched to the Trans-Am series and won three driver’s championships and several manufacturer’s titles from 1994 to 1997. In 1997 the Roush team won eleven consecutive Trans-Am races, but that was the end of factory involvement.

1998 was spent with Huffaker Enineering in the Trans-Am. Bruce Qvale competed for Rookie-of-the-Year. In 1999 I worked with Bruce Barkelew’s RaceWerx team where Brian Simo finished second in the Driver’s Championship and GJ Mennen second in rookie-of-the-year points. In 2000 I worked with Ruhlman Motorsports in the Trans-Am and DSTP in the Formula Atlantic series. The DSTP effort was limited to testing, but Buddy Rice won the Driver’s Championship with five wins in twelve races.

I presented SAE papers at the Motorsports Engineering Conferences in 1998 and 2000. The 1998 papers were “Asymmetric Roll Centers” and “A Method for Data Alignment”. The 2000 paper is “Training Test Drivers with Data Acquisition”. This describes a training project with the Transportation Research Center in Ohio. I still write technical atricles for Racer Magazine in their Tech Trek series.

I have also been a sponsor and judge of the Formula SAE competition for over a decade. The only discounts I offer on my software are to Formula SAE teams.