THE famed Newman/Haas Racing took 108 Indy/Champ Car wins and eight championship victories – and now some of its most famous cars are set to be snapped up at what is being dubbed the world’s biggest sale of Indy/Champ Cars.
The team that fielded champions the likes of Nigel Mansell, Sebastien Bourdais, Mario and Michael Andretti and Cristiano da Matta, Newman/Haas closed down after the 2011 IndyCar Series season, however a range of its amazing cars and many artifacts that were retained from its history are now going under the hammer.
Over 40 cars and memorabilia items will be auctioned by RM Sotheby’s on October 29 this year and the list of Indy/Champ Cars that are available is indeed impressive.
One of the undoubted highlights is the ‘Red Five’ 1993 Lola-Ford Cosworth driven by Mansell.
The car being auctioned – chassis 05 – took Mansell to his debut IndyCar win on the Gold Coast that year and won three other races on its way to making Mansell the 1993 CART champion just a year after he’d won the Formula 1 World Championship.
A range of Bourdais Champ Car title-winning Lolas are also going under the hammer, including the Frenchman’s 2005 Gold Coast-winning, McDonalds-backed chassis.
There’s also his 2007 Champ Car World Series and Gold Coast-winning Panoz DP01, one of two of those types of chassis – the very last Champ Cars – offered in the auction.
There’s a wide range of ex-Andretti and ex-Christian Fittipaldi Lolas and Swifts from the Champ Car/CART series days, as well as IRL-spec Dallara Hondas from when the team made the move into the series after the closure of Champ Car.
Andretti fans will be well-catered for with half of the cars offered in the auction driven by either Mario and/or Michael from the 1980s and 1990s.
The auction also includes a range of memorabilia, including Champ Car Championship Owner’s trophies, race suits and helmets.
The team was owned by Hollywood star and motorsport enthusiast Paul Newman, who died in 2008, and Carl Haas, who passed away in 2016.
Haas was the long-time exclusive North American distributor of Lola Cars; 25 of the cars in October’s auction are Lola chassis from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.
More information on the auction, including imagery of all of the cars, is available here via the RM Sotheby’s website.
