Joe Leonard who, like John Surtees, won major championships on two and four wheels, passed away last Thursday at the age of 84 following an extended illness. Leonard, a San Diego native who moved to San Jose, California, as a 16-year-old to chase his racing dream, established himself as one of America’s foremost motorcycle racers by winning AMA Grand National Championships in 1953, 1954, 1956 and 1957, and finishing 2nd in 1955, 1958 and 1959. Realizing, however, that the fun of racing motorcycles had faded since he’d won “everything,” Leonard quit the bikes in 1961 to pursue rides with four wheels.
After first racing modified stock cars on the West Coast, he joined the USAC Stock Car circuit with the help of friend and fellow former bike racer Paul Goldsmith. He became Goldsmith’s teammate in Ray Nichels-run Dodges for the 1964 season, won the race at DuQuoin and finished 5th in the points to earn Rookie of the Year honors.
He made his Indycar debut the day after winning the DuQuoin stock car race, and by the end of the season had claimed a 5th–place finish at Phoenix in a non-front-line car to demonstrate that his skills were definitely transferrable.
For 1965 he was hired by Dan Gurney’s brand-new All American Racers to be AAR’s first driver, and promptly won his and the team’s first Indycar race at Milwaukee that August in a Halibrand-Ford — as AAR built its first Eagles back in California. Over the next several seasons he bounced around between the teams of Gurney, A.J. Foyt and Parnelli Jones, but in May of 1968, a combination of tragic circumstances landed him in one of the Lotus-Turbines for the Indy 500. He promptly qualified the revolutionary car on the pole and led much of the race until a wrong-spec fuel-pump drive shaft failed with just nine laps to go.
By 1970 he’d settled in with the Vel’s Parnelli Jones outfit where, over the course of the next three seasons he would win five more Indycar races — including 500-milers at Ontario and Pocono — and score enough points to claim back-to-back USAC National Championships in ’71 and ’72. That latter year he drove as part of VPJ’s so-called “Super Team” with Al Unser and Mario Andretti, outscoring them both.
A winless ’73 season, as VPJ struggled with its new car, left him 15th in points, and after a nasty crash at Ontario in the spring of ’74 seriously injured his feet and legs, his racing career came to an end when he failed to pass the subsequent USAC physical exam. In recent years he suffered several strokes and needed a couple of heart-bypass surgeries, and was living in a nursing home in San Jose at the time of his death. To his family and his many friends in and out of the sport, Vintage Racecar extends its deepest sympathies.
