Obituary: Teddy Mayer

Teddy Mayer, who has died aged 73, was one of the architects of the early success of the McLaren formula one team. He had a vital management role in its first two world championship titles, with Emerson Fittipaldi in 1974 and James Hunt two years later.

Mayer ran the team for 10 years after the death of the New Zealand-born racing car driver and designer Bruce McLaren in a testing accident at Goodwood in June 1970. Then came the point where the organisation's fading fortunes caused its main sponsor, Philip Morris, to insist that Mayer amalgamate the team with Ron Dennis's emergent Project 4 operation as a condition of retaining the lucrative backing. He finally left McLaren in 1982 after selling his shareholding to Dennis and the team's then technical director John Barnard.

A combative and feisty personality, Mayer became involved in racing mainly to look after the career of his talented brother Tim, two and a half years his junior. Tim was due to join McLaren in the Cooper formula one works team in 1964.

In 1961 Mayer ran a team of formula three Coopers in the US, the drivers being Tim, the US Revlon cosmetics heir Peter Revson (who won two grands prix for McLaren in 1973 during the Mayer regime), and an old friend, Bill Smith. Out of the 16 races they contested, the "Rev-Em" team scored 15 wins, 14 second places and 14 thirds.

Then Tim was killed, practising for a race in Longford, Tasmania, at the start of 1964, driving a specially prepared Cooper-Climax Tasman series car fielded by the new Bruce McLaren motor racing team. Mayer, perhaps as a way of dealing with his grief, abandoned his career as a lawyer and threw in his lot with McLaren to bring some much-needed finance as well as mental dexterity to the management side of the business.

Mayer came from a wealthy Pennsylvanian family. His father was a stockbroker and an uncle, Will Scranton, was state governor in the 1960s. He graduated in law from Cornell University, New York state, but when he and his brother acquired an Austin Healey 100-6 sports car in 1958, the die was cast as their thoughts turned towards motorsport.

When Mayer joined McLaren in 1964 the financial structure of international motor racing was very different. "We paid our top two mechanics, Tyler Alexander and Wally Willmott, £30 a week and we reckoned that was a tremendous amount of money," he recalled. "You've got to remember that there were none of the outside commercial sponsors as we know them today. Virtually all the sponsorship came from oil and tyre companies and most of the negotiations were carried out via the old pals' act. It was as if you waved a magic wand and the finance appeared."

McClaren and Mayer worked well together. The New Zealander's laid-back charm and sunny disposition, his outward tolerance and reservoir of goodwill were a foil to Mayer's somewhat abrupt business style. They were an unlikely team, but a successful one.

After McLaren's death, Mayer steadily built the team into a formula one force, reaching its zenith in the mid-1970s when he first tempted Fittipaldi away from Lotus, for whom he had won his first world championship in 1972, and gave the Brazilian driver the equipment to win his second title two years later.

When Fittipaldi moved again, to join his elder brother Wilson's fledgling Copersucar team in 1975, Mayer pulled a masterstroke by signing Hunt, who went on to take the 1976 championship by a single point from Niki Lauda. The photograph of the furious and distracted Englishman erupting from the cockpit of his McLaren M23 at the Mount Fuji circuit - with Mayer in front of him, holding three fingers aloft to signify he had achieved the third place necessary to win the championship - is a famous formula one image of that decade.

After leaving McLaren, Mayer ran his own Indycar team, Mayer Motor Racing, with his longtime collaborator and fellow American Tyler Alexander, who had been a Rev-Em mechanic and one of the handful of staff with McLaren from the beginning. In 1985 he switched to management, with the shortlived, Ford-backed Beatrice Lola formula one team, after which he ran the British manufacturing base for the famed Penske Indycar team in Poole, Dorset. He remained a consultant with Penske until 2007.

Mayer was divorced from his wife Sally. He is survived by his son Tim, now chief operating officer for the US-based International Motor Sport Association and the American Le Mans series, and his daughter Anne.