Drivers

Tim Schenken

Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1943, Schenken started out in racing with an Austin A30 at the Templestowe hillclimb on the outskirts of Melbourne. He was obviously quick and managed to get his hands on a Lotus 18 single-seater in which he began winning events and then titles. In 1965 he decided to head for Britain and was soon making an impression in Formula Ford and then in Formula 3, winning the British titles in both disciplines in 1968.

In 1970 he received the call he had been waiting for and made his F1 debut with Frank Williams. In 1971 he was taken on by Ron Tauranac to race alongside Graham Hill at Brabham. That year he finished on the podium in Austria. At the same time he was racing in Formula 2 events for Ron Dennis's Rondel Racing and finished fourth in the series. This success led to the chance to race sports cars for Ferrari in 1972. At the same time he moved to Surtees, worrying that new Brabham owner Bernie Ecclestone was not going to move the team on. There was no success in F1 but in the Ferrari he won the Buenos Aires and Nurburgring 1000kms races with Ronnie Peterson.

Schenken then took a risk and signed up with Dennis for the planned Rondel F1 team but this failed to appear and he ended up scrambling for a drive with Williams in the Canadian GP. For much of 1974 he raced a Ron Tauranac-designed Trojan F1 car. He ended the year with a one-off drive with Lotus.

Although he continued to drive in sports and touring car races, notably as a member of the Broadspeed Jaguar works team in the 1977 European Touring Car Championship, Schenken decided to go into business as a car constructor, in an alliance with fellow driver Howden Ganley. The Tiga car company built around 400 cars in the years that followed in a wide variety of different racing formulae, including Formula Ford, Formula Atlantic, CanAm and Group C.

The company enjoyed much success in the Sports 2000 category winning a string of victories. During this period Schenken acted as a team owner and a manager in various different categories before selling his shares in 1984 when he returned to Australia to take up the role of director of racing operations with the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport Ltd. Since then he has taken on a multitude of other roles, including race director of the V8 Super Car series, clerk of the course of the Surfers Paradise Champ Car event and Clerk of the Course for the Australian Grand Prix.