Another of racing’s good guys left us on December 7, when Bill Scott lost his battle with cancer. The man who one observer called “a damn good driver and a better human being,” essentially ignored his doctorate in geophysics from Yale to let his passion for racing cars dominate his life.
Scott was still a graduate student at Yale when he attended a Formula Vee race at Lime Rock Park in 1964, and was so impressed that he decided he wanted to go racing himself. He bought his own Zink FV, got his competition license, and qualified for the National Championships, where he finished 6th. In 1968 he won both the SCCA’s Formula Vee National Championship in the American Road Race of Champions at Riverside and the European Vee Championship, held at Germany’s legendary Nürburgring.
Scott is probably best known, however, as the first champion of the VW Super Vee series, a title he won with a Royale RP12 in 1971, and duplicated the following year. He subsequently raced in both the Trans-Am and IMSA GT series, and even made a one-off return to Super Vee at Milwaukee in ’77 where he finished 10th.
Scott maintained his connection to the sport not only by driving, but also by running his own team, Bill Scott Racing, and subsequently venturing into the driver-training field as well. In 1979 he purchased West Virginia’s struggling Summit Point Raceway and began turning it into Summit Point Motorsports Park. At the ever-improving facility he conducted not only instruction in driving racecars, but also advanced vehicular training for both private security contractors and various governmental agencies, with a curriculum that provided education in accident avoidance through defensive driving as well as counterterrorism tactics.
He is survived by his wife, Barbara, their five children, and five grandchildren, as well as his sister, JoAnn, to whom we extend our sympathies and condolences.
