David Donohue

You could be forgiven for assuming race driver David Donohue simply followed his father Mark Donohue into motorsport. Mark had famously won the 1973 Can-Am championship in a Porsche 917/30, the inaugural IROC championship in a 911 RSR (plus the Daytona 24 Hours, the Indy 500, and too many other races to list), and was a seriously talented driver/engineer. Similarly David has won Daytona, has a strong association with Porsche and, yes, there’s more than a passing resemblance to his dad. But it wasn’t the fait accompli the surname might suggest, because Mark Donohue tragically died during practice for the Austrian GP in 1975, aged just 38.

“My dad passed when I was eight years old and I idolised him,” reflects Donohue when we met at Sonoma Raceway in California, ahead of a drive in a 918 Spyder. “Kids want to be a rock star or an astronaut, and I wanted to be a racing driver like my dad, but it didn’t seem a realistic expectation. His passing severed any ties we had with motorsport and my mum was completely set against it. She said in an interview recently that she’d never take my brother [Michael] and I to the racetrack because there was a good chance dad wasn’t coming home.”

Mark’s brilliance on track wasn’t the